The Italian Duke's Wife

Right now, though, he had to get away from it before he did something he would regret, he reflected as he strode out into the courtyard and breathed in the clean tang of the evening air, mercifully devoid of Caterina’s heavy, smothering perfume.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE was going to have to give in and do that U-turn she had sworn she would not make, Jodie admitted unhappily to herself. She hadn’t a clue where she was, and the bright moonlight was illuminating a landscape so barren and hostile that she was actually beginning to feel quite unnerved. To one side of her the ground dropped away with dramatic sharpness, and on the other it was broken by various jagged outcroppings of rock.

Up ahead of her she could see where the narrow track widened out to provide a passing place. Determinedly she headed for it, and started to manoeuvre the vehicle so that she could turn round.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, and the back wheels of the hire car began to spin whilst the car itself lurched horribly to one side. Thoroughly alarmed, Jodie put the car in neutral and climbed out, her alarm turning to despair as she saw that one of the rear wheels was stuck fast in a deep rut and looked as though it had a flat tyre.

Now what was she going to do? She certainly couldn’t drive anywhere in it.

She went back to the car, massaging her aching leg as she did so. She was tired, and hungry, and thoroughly miserable. Opening her bag, she reached for her mobile phone, and the wallet in which she had placed all the details of her travel arrangements and car hire.

As she picked up the phone her eyes widened in dismay. Her phone was already on, and by the looks of it there was no signal. Not only that, but when she attempted to dial a number anyway the phone gave an ominous bleep and the display light died. She must have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk? To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to the last village she had passed through what felt like hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She gave a small shiver.

She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the time she had been on this road, but someone must use it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She looked up towards the mountains, and, as though somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards her.

The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.

Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road in front of him.

Caterina had been very clever, working on his grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been here…But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role within the government, unifying different charities and providing hands-on administrative practical help and expertise.

The severity of this particular crisis had meant that he had not even been able to return to Italy for his grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a local place of worship and add his prayers to those of her other mourners.

A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.

The Castillo had come to her through her first husband who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles, had also been the second cousin of her second husband, Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.

He had always been her favourite out of her two grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had been his grandmother he had turned to when his mother had announced that she was marrying her lover—a man Lorenzo detested.

He had never been able to bring himself to forgive his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and their determination to put themselves first whilst laying claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce his father had been taken to spare him the pain of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of course. His feelings had been the last thing on her mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and chosen him above her husband and her son.

The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he saw a car blocking the road and a young woman standing beside it.

Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes, choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support, the moment she had seen the other car.

What kind of madman drove like that down a road like this—and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily, holding on to the door of the car for support as she watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and come towards her.

‘Disgraziata!’ A stream of Italian followed the snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed by him—or by any man—ever again.

‘When you’ve quite finished…’ Jodie interrupted him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. ‘For a start, I’m not Italian. I’m English. And—’

‘English?’ He made it sound as though he had never heard the word before. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you on this road? It is a private road and leads only to the Castillo.’ The questions were thrown at her like so many deadly sharp stiletto knives.

‘I took a wrong turning,’ Jodie defended herself. ‘I was trying to turn round, but a wheel got stuck, and now the tyre is flat.’

She was pale and thin, her eyes huge in the exhausted triangle of her small face, her fair hair scraped back. She looked about sixteen, and an underfed sixteen at that, Lorenzo decided unflatteringly, as he swept her from head to toe with an experienced male glance that took in the droop of her shoulders, the hardly discernible shape of her breasts, the narrowness of her waist and her hips, and the unexpected length of the denim-clad legs attached to such a small frame. Was she wearing heels, or were they really as long as they looked?

‘How old are you?’ he demanded.

How old was she? Why on earth was he asking her that?

‘I’m twenty-six,’ Jodie responded stiffly, tilting her chin as she looked up at him, determined not to be intimidated by him despite the fact that she was already aware that he was so spectacularly good-looking she wanted to run away and hide before he realised how pathetically inferior as a woman she was to him as a man. Automatically, her hand went to her bad leg. It was really hurting her now.

Twenty-six! Lorenzo frowned as he looked down at her hands. No rings. ‘Why are you here on your own?’

Jodie was beginning to feel she had had enough. ‘Because I am on my own. Not that it is any business of yours,’ she informed him.

‘On the contrary, it is very much my business—since you have seen fit to trespass on my land.’

His land? Of course it would be his land; it possessed exactly the same harsh, arrogant inhospitality as he did.

‘And what do you mean, you are on your own?’ she heard him demanding. ‘Surely you have a…a husband, or a lover. A man, a partner, in your life.’

Jodie winced, and then laughed bitterly. He didn’t know about the still tender nerves he was brutalising. ‘I thought I did,’ she agreed angrily, ‘but unfortunately for me he decided he wanted to marry someone else. This—’ she gestured towards the landscape and the car ‘—was supposed to be our honeymoon. But now…’ Just saying the words still hurt, but strangely there was also a savage sense of relief in being able to vent her emotions instead of having to keep them locked inside her for the sake of others, as she had had to do at home.

‘Now what?’ Lorenzo challenged her. ‘Now you are travelling alone and looking for someone to replace him in your bed? The coastal resorts are the best hunting ground for that. Not the mountains.’

Jodie drew in her breath in outraged fury. ‘How dare you say that? I am most certainly not looking for anyone, let alone someone to replace him. In fact, that is the last thing I want to do,’ she found herself adding. ‘I shall never let another man into my life to hurt me. Never. From now on I intend to live by myself and for myself.’ Bold words, but she meant every single one of them!

Lorenzo frowned as he heard in her voice the passionate intensity of her determination.

‘You still want him so much?’

‘No!’ Jodie told him fiercely, without stopping to wonder why he was asking such a personal thing. ‘I don’t want him at all—not now.’

‘So why are you here—running away?’

‘I am not running away! I just don’t want to be there to see him marry someone else,’ she added defensively when she saw the way he was looking at her. ‘Especially when she’s all the things I’m not. Exciting, glamorous, sexy…’ Jodie lifted her hand to her face to rub away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. She had no idea why she was telling this stranger all of this, admitting to him things she had not even admitted to herself before.

‘It is the man who determines whether or not a woman is “sexy”, as you put it,’ Lorenzo decreed dismissively, as caught up in this strangely intimate exchange as Jodie. ‘A skilled lover has it in his power to create a full flowering of even the most tightly closed bud.’

A shock of tingling awareness quivered through her belly as Jodie absorbed the meaning of his astoundingly arrogant statement.

‘Not that many young women are tightly closed buds in this day and age,’ Lorenzo added sardonically, as he watched the colour come and go in the pale face that was so shadowed with tiredness.

‘Modern women have claimed the right to their own sexuality,’ Jodie responded fiercely. ‘They do not—’

‘It does not sound to me as though you have been very effective in claiming yours,’ Lorenzo told her derisively. ‘In fact, if I were to make an assessment of it, I would guess that your experience is extremely limited—otherwise you would not have lost your man to another woman.’

His sheer arrogant machismo both astounded and infuriated her. But she was forced to admit that nonexistent would have been a more accurate estimation of her sexual expertise. Painfully she released the pent-up breath his words had caused her to hold, in shaky relief that he had not added to her existing humiliation by somehow recognising that she was still a virgin. Not by choice, though. All those months in hospital, after the car crash in which her parents had been killed and she had been so badly injured that at one point it had been feared she would not survive, had stolen a large chunk out of her life.

‘Which, presumably, is why you are confusing physical lust with love—a word, an emotion, your sex has laid claim to and downvalued to the extent that is now worthless,’ Lorenzo continued harshly.

‘My sex?’ Jodie took up the challenge immediately, the gold-hued warmth of her eyes heating to an indignant dark amber.

‘Yes, your sex! Do you deny that women have now become as much serial adulterers as they once claimed only men could be? That their reasons for marriage are based on their own selfish and shallow emotions and needs—needs which in their eyes come before the needs of anyone else, even the children they bear?’

The bitterness she could hear in his voice momentarily shocked Jodie into silence. But she rallied quickly to defend her sex, pointing out, ‘If that is your consistent experience of women, then maybe you are the common factor—and the one to blame.’

‘I? So you believe that if a child is abandoned by its mother, it is the child who is at fault? A novel mindset—which only underlines what I have just been saying!’

‘No, that is not what I meant—’ Jodie began.

But it was too late. He was ignoring her words to demand autocratically, ‘What is your name?’

‘Jodie. Jodie Oliver. What is your name?’ she asked equally firmly, not to be outdone.

For the first time since he had stopped his car she sensed a momentary hesitation in him before he said coolly, ‘Lorenzo.’

‘The Magnificent?’ Jodie quipped, and then went bright red as he looked at her.

Il Magnifico. That had always been Gino’s teasing way of addressing him, claiming that it was no wonder he had been so successful when he carried the same name as one of Florence’s most famous Medici rulers.

‘You know the history of the Medici?’ he shot at Jodie.

‘Some of it,’ she said neutrally, suddenly not wanting any more argument with a stranger. She was beginning to feel very tired and weak. ‘Look, I need to get in touch with the car hire firm and tell them about the car, but my mobile isn’t working. Could you possibly…?’ He must surely be going back through the village she had driven through—there was nowhere else to go. If he would take her there she might be able to find a room for the night and telephone the car rental people.

‘Could I possibly what?’ Lorenzo demanded. ‘Help you? Certainly.’ She had just started to sag with relief when he added softly, ‘Provided that you agree to help me.’

Instantly warning signals flashed their messages inside her head, causing her to tense.

‘Help you?’ she repeated cautiously.

‘Yes. I need a wife.’

He was mad. Completely and utterly insane. She was stuck on a deserted road with a madman.

‘You…want me to help you find a wife?’ she managed to ask, as though it were the most natural request in the world.

Lorenzo’s mouth compressed, and he gave her a look of cold derision. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No, I do not want you to help me find a wife. I want you to become my wife,’ he told her coolly.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE was being ridiculous?

‘You want me to be your wife?’ Jodie repeated slowly. ‘I’m sorry, but—’

‘You don’t want to marry—ever. Yes, I know,’ Lorenzo interrupted dismissively. ‘But this would not be an ordinary marriage. I need a wife, and I need one within the next few weeks. I have as little real desire for a wife as you have for a husband—although for different reasons. Therefore it seems to me that you and I could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. I get the wife I need, and you, after we have been married for twelve months, get a divorce and…shall we say one million pounds?’

Jodie blinked and shook her head, not sure that she had actually heard him correctly.

‘You want me to agree to marry you and stay with you for twelve months?’

‘You will be well reimbursed for your time—and it is only your time and your status as my wife that I shall require. Your presence in my bed will not be part of the arrangement.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Jodie told him flatly. ‘I don’t know anything about you, and I—’

‘You know that I am prepared to pay you a million pounds to be my wife. As for the rest…’ He gave an arrogant shrug of his powerful shoulders, and told her, briefly and dismissively, ‘There will be time later for me to explain to you everything you need to know.’

By rights she ought to be scared to death, Jodie decided. But, despite the fact that she was obviously in the presence of a madman, for some reason the main emotion that filled her was not fear but bemusement. Bemusement and a certain sense that fate had listened in to her secret thoughts and decided to take a hand in her life. Here was the opportunity—the man—her pride had ached for…

Was she mad? She surely couldn’t be thinking of accepting his ridiculous proposition?

‘If you want a wife that badly, surely there must be someone—’

‘Many someones,’ Lorenzo stopped her sardonically. ‘Unfortunately they would all want what I do not want to give—it is amazing how easily your sex claims undying love when money and social position are involved.’

‘You mean you would be targeted by fortune-hunters?’ Jodie guessed shrewdly. It was obvious, after all—not just from his car and his clothes, but more betrayingly from his manner—that he was wealthy. ‘Is that why you want to marry me, because a fake marriage will keep them at bay?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Then why?’

‘It’s a condition of my late grandmother’s will that I either marry within a certain time of her death or I forfeit…something that means a great deal to me.’

Jodie’s forehead crinkled into a small frown.

‘But why on earth would she do that? I mean, either she wanted you to inherit whatever it is or she didn’t.’

‘The situation is more complex than that, and involves…other issues. Let us just say that my grandmother was persuaded to do something that she thought was in my best interests by someone who was following their own agenda.’

Jodie waited for him to continue, but instead he reached for her hand. ‘Give me your car keys and—’

She gave a small, determined shake of her head. ‘No.’ If she wasn’t already totally off men for life, this man and his unbelievable arrogance would surely be enough to put her off them, she decided angrily.

But at the same time an insidiously tempting possibility had begun to form inside her head. What if she were to agree, on condition that Lorenzo escorted her to John and Louise’s wedding? With the whole village invited, two extra guests wouldn’t cause any problems…and, yes, she admitted it, there was a part of her that was sore enough and woman enough to want to be there, showing the world and the newly married couple that not only did she not care about their betrayal, but that she had a new partner of her own. Wasn’t there a saying, ‘Living well is the best revenge’? And how much better could a discarded and unwanted fiancée live than by showing off her new, better-looking and far more eligible man? A man, moreover, who desperately wanted to marry her!

She was wrenched out of this mental triumphant return to the scene of her humiliation by Lorenzo’s arrogantly disbelieving voice. ‘No?’

It was ridiculous that she could even contemplate doing something so shallow, and it showed the effect that just a few minutes in the company of a man like Lorenzo was having on her. She was not going to let herself listen to the urgings of her pride. Leaving it and her conscience to wage war on one another with an undignified exchange of inner accusations, she tried to do the sensible thing, and told Lorenzo firmly, ‘Even someone as…as arrogant and used to getting what they want as you seem to be must see that what you’re suggesting just isn’t—’

‘A million isn’t enough? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Her face burned. ‘The money has nothing to do with it.’ The cynical look he gave her at that made her burst out angrily, ‘I can’t be bought. Not by John, and certainly not by you.’

‘John?’

He hadn’t pounced so much as leapt on her small betrayal, and now he was looking at her as she imagined a large sleek cat might look at a mouse it was enjoying tormenting.

But she was not a mouse, and she wasn’t going to be either bullied or tormented by any man ever again.

She lifted her head and told him coolly, ‘My ex-fiancé. He offered me money, too, but he was offering it out of guilt, because he didn’t want to marry me, not as a bribe because he did. He wanted me to be the one to break off our engagement, so that no one could accuse him of dumping me. Obviously you both share the same male mindset. Like you, he thought that he could buy what he wanted, regardless of what I might be feeling.’ Despite her attempt to appear unaffected by what she was revealing, a mixture of sadness and cynicism shadowed her eyes. Her mouth twisted slightly as she added, ‘In a way, I suppose he did me a favour. Knowing that he thought so little of me that he would buy his way out of our relationship made me realise that I was better off without him.’

‘But, despite that, you still want him.’

The unemotional statement made her heart thud nauseatingly inside her chest.

‘No!’ she said quickly. ‘I do not “still want him”.’

‘So why have you run away, if it is not because you are afraid of what you still feel for him?’

‘I have not run away! I’m having a holiday, and when I go back…’ The small involuntary movement that caused her shoulders to droop as she contemplated returning home was more telling that she realised. When she went back—what? She had no job to go back to. Not now. And no home—she had, after all, sold her cottage, and even if she had not done so she doubted that she would have wanted to live there, with all its memories of her false happiness. But she could go back with her head held high and on the arm of a man she could truthfully say was going to become her husband, she reminded herself.

And then what? He had already told her the marriage was only to last twelve months.

Then she would shrug her shoulders and say, as so many others did, that it hadn’t worked out. There was far less shame in that than there was in being labelled as a dumped reject.

‘In twelve months’ time you could go back with a million pounds in your bank account,’ she heard Lorenzo saying, as though he had read her mind.

It was so tempting to give in and agree. And she resented him for putting her in a position where she was tempted. What had she promised herself about never being manipulated by a man again? Gritting her teeth, Jodie pushed herself back from the edge of giving in.

‘If you really want a wife,’ she told him crossly, ‘then why don’t try finding one without using your money? Someone who wants to marry you because she loves you, and believes that in you she has found a man who loves her back, a man she can respect and trust, and…’ She saw the way he was looking at her and shook her head. ‘Oh, what’s the use? Men like you and John are all the same. He only values the kind of woman he can show off, the kind of woman who makes other men envy him, and you only want the kind of woman you can buy so that you can control her and your relationship with her. Well, I am not that kind of woman. And, no, I will not marry you.’

As she turned away from him Lorenzo could feel the anger surging through him. She was refusing him? This…this too-thin nobody of a tourist—a woman who had been rejected publicly by the man who had promised to marry her? Didn’t she realise just what he was offering her or how fortunate she was? Marriage to him would transform her instantly from an unwanted dab of a woman into the wife of someone wealthy enough to buy her ex-fiancé a hundred thousand times over. She would instantly be raised to a social height most women could only dream of, she would be courted by the famous and the rich, and, if she was intelligent enough to capitalise on what he would be giving her when their marriage was over, she could find herself a new husband. Any amount of men would be only too willing to marry the woman who had been selected by a man like him. All she had to do in order to totally transform her life was agree to be his wife.

And yet, instead of recognising her good fortune, she was actually daring to take it upon herself to lecture him! Well, she was no loss to him. She wouldn’t have lasted a day, not even twelve hours once Caterina had got her claws into her, and he was a fool to have wasted his time on her in the first place. He could drive down to the coast and find a dozen women within one hour who would jump at the opportunity she had turned down.