Unfinished Business with the Duke

She needed a strategy before she saw Gio again. A foolproof strategy. If she was going to have any hope of winning a stay of execution for the theatre—and keeping even a small part of her dignity intact.

Issy felt as if she’d travelled back in time as she stepped off the train at the tiny Hampshire station of Hamilton’s Cross and walked down the platform. It was a journey she’d done dozens of times during her childhood and adolescence when her widowed mother Edie had been housekeeper at the Hall.

Seeing her reflection in the glass door of the ticket office—which never seemed to be open then and wasn’t now—Issy congratulated herself on how much her appearance had changed from that dumpy schoolgirl with the fire-engine red hair. The chic emerald silk dress with matching pumps, accented with her favourite chunky necklace and designer sunglasses, looked a good deal more sophisticated than the ill-fitting school uniform, for starters. Teased into a waterfall of corkscrew curls instead of the unruly fuzzball of her childhood, even her vivid red hair now looked more Rita Hayworth than Little Orphan Annie.

The thought gave her a confidence boost as she headed for the newspaper booth which doubled as a mini-cab office. A boost she desperately needed after spending half the night struggling to figure out a workable strategy for her meeting with Gio.

If only she hadn’t told him she detested him!

Unfortunately the strategy she’d settled on—to be businesslike and efficient and not lose her cool—seemed disappointingly vague and far from foolproof as zero hour approached.

She tucked the stray curls behind her ear and gripped the shoulder strap on her satchel-style briefcase. Full of paperwork about the theatre—including details of the loans, financial projections, the stunning reviews from their summer season and her plans for next season—the briefcase put the finishing touch on her smart, savvy career-woman act.

Not that it was an act, per se, she corrected. She was smart and savvy and a career woman—of sorts. Unfortunately she was also a nervous wreck—after a sleepless night spent contemplating all the things that could go wrong today.

Having discarded the idea of informing Gio of her visit beforehand—fairly certain he would refuse to see her—she had surprise on her side. But from what she’d learned about Gio after scouring the internet for information, surprise was about all she had.

The startling revelation that Gio was now a worldrenowned architect, with a reputation for striking and innovative designs and a practice which was one of the most sought-after in Europe, hadn’t helped with her nervous breakdown one bit.

Okay, Gio was definitely rich. That had to be a plus, given the reason why she was here. But the discovery that the wild, reckless boy she had idolised had made such a staggering success of his life had brought with it a strange poignancy which didn’t bode well for their meeting.

And that was without factoring in the way her body had responded to him a week ago. Which, try as she might, she still hadn’t been able to forget.

She was here for one reason and one reason only, and she was not going to lose sight of that fact. No matter what. Or the theatre’s last hope would be dashed for good.

She had to stick to her plan. She would promote the theatre and do her absolute utmost to persuade Gio that investing in a sponsorship would give his company added profile in the British marketplace. If all else failed she’d remind him that he had offered her financial help. But under no circumstances would she let their history—or her hormones—sway her from her goal. No matter what the provocation—or the temptation.

‘Good Lord, is that you, Issy Helligan? Haven’t you grown up!’

Issy beamed a smile at the short, balding man sitting in the mini-cab cubicle. ‘Frank, you’re still here!’ she said, delighted to see a familiar face.

‘That I am,’ the elderly man said bashfully, as his bald patch went a mottled red. ‘How’s your mother these days? Still living in Cornwall?’

‘That’s right, she loves it there,’ Issy replied, grateful for the distraction.

‘Awful shame about the Duke’s passing last summer,’ Frank continued, his smile dying. ‘Son’s back you know. Doing up the Hall. Although he never saw fit to come to the funeral. ’Spect your mother told you that?’

Edie hadn’t, because her mother knew better than to talk to her about Gio after that fateful summer.

But the news that Gio hadn’t bothered to attend his own father’s funeral didn’t surprise Issy. He and his father had always had a miserably dysfunctional relationship, evidenced by the heated arguments and chilly silences she and her mother had witnessed during the summers Gio spent at the Hall.

She’d once romanticised Gio’s troubled teenage years, casting him as a misunderstood bad boy, torn between two parents who hated each other’s guts and used their only child as a battering ram. She’d stopped romanticising Gio’s behaviour a decade ago. And she had no desire to remember that surly, unhappy boy now. It might make her underestimate the man he had become.

‘Actually, I don’t suppose you know whether Gio’s at the Hall today? I came to pay him a visit.’

According to the articles she’d read, Gio lived in Italy, but his office in Florence had told her he was in England. So she’d taken a chance he might be at the Hall.

‘Oh, aye—yes, he’s here,’ said Frank, making Issy’s pulse skitter. ‘Came in yesterday evening by helicopter, no less—or so Milly at the post office says. I took the council planners over to the Hall for a meeting an hour ago.’

‘Could I get a lift too?’ she said quickly, before she lost her nerve.

Frank grinned and grabbed his car keys. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

He bolted the booth and directed her to the battered taxi-cab parked out front.

‘I’ll put your journey out on the house, for old times’ sake,’ he said cheerfully as he opened the door.

Issy tensed as she settled in the back seat.

No way was she going to think about old times. Especially her old times with Gio.

She snapped the seat belt on, determined to wipe every last one of those memories from her consciousness.

But as the car accelerated away from the kerb, and the familiar hedgerows and grass verges sped past on the twenty-minute drive to the Hall, the old times came flooding back regardless.

Chapter Three

Ten Years Earlier

‘I CAN’T believe you’re really going to do it tonight. What if your mum finds out?’

‘Shh, Melly,’ Issy hissed as she craned her neck to check on the younger girls sitting at the front of the school bus. ‘Keep your voice down.’

As upper sixth-formers, they had the coveted back seat all to themselves, but she didn’t want anyone overhearing the conversation. Especially as she didn’t even want to be having this conversation.

When she’d told her best friend about her secret plan to loose her virginity to Giovanni Hamilton two years before, it had been thrilling and exciting. A forbidden topic they could discuss for hours on the long, boring bus ride home every day. And it had had about as much chance of actually happening as Melanie’s equally thrilling and exciting and endlessly discussed plan to lose her virginity to Gary Barlow from Take That.

Gio had been completely unattainable back then. When she’d been fifteen and he’d been nineteen the four years between them had seemed like an eternity.

But it hadn’t always been that way.

When Issy and her mother had first come to live at the Hall, and Gio had appeared that first summer, the two of them had become fast friends and partners in crime. To a nine-year-old tomboy who was used to spending hours on her own in the Hall’s grounds, Gio had been a godsend. A moody, intense thirteen-year-old boy with brown eyes so beautiful they’d made her heart skip, a fascinating command of swear words in both English and Italian, and a quick, creative mind with a talent for thinking up forbidden adventures, Gio had been more captivating than a character from one of Issy’s adventure books.

Best of all, Gio had needed her as much as she’d needed him. Issy had seen the sadness in his eyes when his father shouted at him—which seemed to be all the time—and it had made her stomach hurt. But she’d discovered that if she chatted to him, if she made him laugh, she could take the sad look away.

At fifteen, though, when she’d first formulated her plan to lose her virginity to him, her childhood friendship with Gio had slipped into awkward adolescent yearning.

She’d been gawky and spotty, with a figure her mum had insisted on calling ‘womanly’ but Issy thought was just plain fat, while Gio had been tall, tanned and gorgeous. A modern-day Heathcliff, with the looks of a Roman god and a wildness about him that drew every female within a twenty-mile radius like a magnet.

At nineteen, Gio already had a formidable reputation with women. And one night that summer Issy had seen the evidence for herself.

Creeping down to get a glass of water, she’d heard moaning coming from the darkened dining room. Getting as close as she could without being spotted, she had watched, transfixed, as Gio’s lean, fully-clothed body towered over a mostly naked woman lying on her back on the Duke’s oak table. It had taken Issy a moment to recognise the writhing female as Maya Carrington, a thirty-something divorcée who had arrived for the Duke’s weekend house party that afternoon.

Issy hadn’t been able to look away as Gio’s long, tanned fingers unclipped the front hook of Maya’s black lace push-up bra, then moulded her full breasts. Issy had blushed to the roots of her hair at the socialite’s soft sobs as Gio traced a line with his tongue over her prominent nipples, then nipped at them with his teeth as his hand disappeared between Maya’s thighs.

Issy had dashed back to bed, her glass of water sloshing all over the stairs with her palm pressed against her pyjama bottoms to ease the brutal ache between her legs as her ragged breathing made her heart race.

She’d dreamt about Gio doing the same thing to her that night and for many nights afterwards, always waking up soaked in sweat, her breasts heavy and tender to the touch, her nipples rigid and that same cruel ache between her legs.

But Gio had never stopped treating her like a child. During that last visit two years ago, when he’d paid so much attention to Maya, he’d barely even spoken to her.

Then, the day before, something magical had happened.

He’d appeared at the school gates on his motorbike, looking surly and tense, and told her the school bus had been cancelled and her mother had asked him to give her a lift home. She hadn’t seen Gio in two long years, and the feel of his muscled back pressing into her budding breasts had sent her senses into a blur of rioting hormones. She’d spent today reliving the experience in minute detail for her starstruck classmates, but in reality she’d had to make most of it up, because she’d been so excited she could barely remember a thing.

And then this morning she’d caught him looking at her while he was having breakfast with her and her mother, and just for a second she’d seen the same awareness in those turbulent brown eyes that she had always had in her heart.

She didn’t have a schoolgirl crush on Gio. She loved him. Deeply and completely. And not just because of his exotic male beauty and the fact that all the other girls fancied him too. But because she knew things about him that no one else knew. Unfortunately, her attempts to flirt with him that morning had been ignored.

It was past time to take matters into her own hands.

What if Gio didn’t come back again for another two years? She’d be an old woman of nineteen by then, and he might have got married or something. Tonight she would make him notice her. She would go to his room and get him to do what he’d been doing to Maya Carrington two years ago. Except this time it would be a thousand times more special, because she loved him and Maya hadn’t.

But the last thing she’d wanted to do was discuss her plans with Melanie. It made Issy feel sneaky and juvenile and dishonest. As if she was tricking Gio. When she really wasn’t. She should never have mentioned the motorcycle ride. Because Melly had latched on to the information, put two and two together and unfortunately made four. And now she wouldn’t let the topic drop.

‘What will your mum say?’ Melanie asked in a stage whisper.

‘Nothing. She’s not going to find out,’ she whispered back, pushing aside the little spurt of guilt.

Up till now she’d told her mother everything. Because it had been just the two of them for so long Edie had been a confidante and a friend, as well as her mum. But when Issy had tried to bring up the subject of Gio as casually as possible after breakfast her mother had been surprisingly stern with her.

‘Don’t hassle him. He has more than enough to deal with,’ Edie had said cryptically while she pounded dough. ‘I saw you flirting with him. And, while I understand the lure of someone as dashing and dangerous as Gio Hamilton, I don’t want to see you get hurt when he turns you down.’

The comment had made Issy feel as if she were ten years old again—sheltered and patronised and excluded from all the conversations that mattered—and still trailing after Gio like a lovesick puppy dog.

What did Gio have to deal with? Why wouldn’t anyone tell her? And what made her mum so sure he would turn her down? She wanted to help him. To be there for him. And she wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed by a man who knew how, instead of the awkward boys she’d kissed before.

But everyone treated her as if she was too young and didn’t know her own mind. When she wasn’t. And she did.

She’d wanted to tell her mum that, but had decided not to. Edie had looked so troubled when they’d both heard the shouting match between Gio and his father the night before, coming through the air vent from the library.

‘Do you have protection?’ Melanie continued, still talking in the stupid stage whisper.

‘Yes.’ She’d bought the condoms months ago, just in case Gio visited this summer, and had gone all the way to Middleton to get them, so Mrs Green the pharmacist in Hamilton’s Cross wouldn’t tell her mum.

‘Aren’t you worried that it’ll hurt? Jenny Merrin said it hurt like mad when she did it with Johnny Baxter, and I bet Gio’s…’ Melanie paused for effect. ‘You know…is twice the size. Look how tall he is.’

‘No, of course not,’ she said, starting to get annoyed.

Yes, it would probably hurt a bit, she knew that, but she wasn’t a coward. And if you loved someone you didn’t worry about how big their ‘you know what’ was. She’d read in Cosmo only last week that size didn’t matter.

The bus took the turning into the Hall’s drive and she breathed a sigh of relief. She wanted to get home. There was so much to do before dinnertime. She needed to have a bath and wash her hair, wax her legs, do her nails, try on the three different outfits she had shortlisted for tonight one last time. This was going to be the most important night of her life, and she wanted to look the part. To prove to Gio she wasn’t a babyish tomboy any more, or a gawky, overweight teenager.

She felt the now constant ache between her legs and the tight ball of emotion in her throat and knew she was doing the right thing.

As the bus driver braked, she leapt up. But Melanie grabbed her wrist.

‘I’m so jealous of you,’ Melanie said, her eyes shining with sincerity. ‘He’s so dishy. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’

‘It won’t,’ Issy said.

Gio wouldn’t hurt her—not intentionally—of that much she was certain.

So much had changed in the last few years, but not that. Before she’d fallen in love with him he’d been like a big brother to her. Teasing her and letting her follow him around. Listening to her talk about the father she barely remembered and telling her she shouldn’t care if she didn’t have a dad. That fathers were a pain any way. Things had been difficult, tense between her and Gio since she’d grown up—partly because they weren’t little kids anymore, but mostly because he’d become so distant.

His relationship with his father had got so bad he hardly ever came to visit the Hall any more, and when she did see him now his brooding intensity had become like a shield, demanding that everyone—even her—keep out.

But tonight she would be able to get him back again. That moody, magnetic boy would be her friend again, but more than that he’d be her lover, and he’d know he could tell her anything. And everything would be wonderful.

Issy crept through the darkness. Feeling her way past the kitchen garden wall, she pushed the gate into the orchard. And eased out the breath she’d been holding when the hinge barely creaked. She sucked in air scented with ripe apples and the faint tinge of tobacco.

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