Kitabı oxu: «Bella Rosa Marriages: The Bridesmaid's Secret»

Bella Rosa Marriages
The Bridesmaid’s
Secret
Fiona Harper
The Cowboy’s
Adopted Daughter
Patricia Thayer
Passionate Chef,
Ice Queen Boss
Jennie Adams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Bridesmaid’s Secret

About the Author

As a child, FIONA HARPER was constantly teased for either having her nose in a book or living in a dream world. Things haven’t changed much since then, but at least in writing she’s found a use for her runaway imagination. After studying dance at university, Fiona worked as a dancer, teacher and choreographer before trading in that career for video editing and production. When she became a mother she cut back on her working hours to spend time with her children, and when her littlest one started preschool she found a few spare moments to rediscover an old but not forgotten love—writing.

Fiona lives in London, but her other favourite places to be are the Highlands of scotland and the Kent countryside on a summer’s afternoon. she loves cooking good food and anything cinnamon flavoured. of course, she still can’t keep away from a good book or a good movie—especially romances—but only if she’s stocked up with tissues, because she knows she will need them by the end, be it happy or sad. Her favourite things in the world are her wonderful husband, who has learned to decipher her incoherent ramblings, and her two daughters.

PROLOGUE

NO ONE else must see the contents of this letter, Scarlett! Give it only to Romano.

Her older sister’s words echoed through her head as Scarlett ran through the woods on the outskirts of Monta Correnti, her long dark hair trailing behind her. Jackie would be cross if she knew Scarlett had peeked at the sheets of the scrawled, tear-stained writing, but one corner of the envelope flap had been a little loose and it had been too tempting.

Before she went to the piazza to find Romano and give it to him, she had to show Isabella, her cousin and partner in crime. This was way too big a secret to keep to herself. Although she and Isabella were both the same age, Isabella was the eldest in her family and always seemed to know what to do, how to take charge when anyone needed her.

It was totally different in Scarlett’s family. She was the youngest of the three sisters. The one who was always left out of important discussions because she ‘wouldn’t understand’. She was fed up with it. Just because Jackie was four years older she thought it was okay to boss Scarlett around and make her do her errands, which wasn’t fair. So just this once Scarlett was going to do things her way, to make it fair.

There were too many hushed voices and whispered insults in her family already, and no one would tell her why.

She was heading for a small clearing with a stream running through it at the bottom of the hill. No one else knew about this spot. It was her and Isabella’s secret. They would come here to talk girl-type stuff, when Isabella could get away from looking after her nosey little brothers. They would build camps out of branches and leaves, and make up secret codes and write in their diaries—which they always let each other read. Sometimes they would whisper about Romano Puccini, the best-looking boy in the whole of Monta Correnti.

That was another thing that wasn’t fair!

Just as Scarlett had decided she was old enough to notice boys and develop her first crush, Jackie had got in there first—as always. Jackie had been seeing Romano for weeks and weeks! Behind Mamma’s back as well. Just wait until Isabella found out!

Scarlett’s breaths were coming in light gasps now and the small sigh she let out was hardly noticeable. So Romano only had eyes for bossy old Jackie! Scarlett hated her for it. At least she did when she remembered to.

A flash of pink sundress through the trees told Scarlett that Isabella was in the clearing already. They’d whispered their plans to meet earlier, in the piazza outside their parents’ restaurants.

As Scarlett burst into the clearing Isabella looked up. Her raised eyebrows said it all. What are you in a flap about this time, Scarlett?

Scarlett just slowed to a walk and held the letter out to Isabella, her arm rigid.

Isabella shrugged as she took the envelope and pulled three sheets of paper out of it. But she wasn’t sitting and shrugging and rolling her eyes at Scarlett for long. Once she’d read the first page she was on her feet and joining in the flapping.

After all the exclamations, they stood and stared at each other, guilty smiles on their lips.

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Isabella finally whispered. ‘Jackie and Romano! Really?’

This was the reaction Scarlett had been hoping for. She nodded. She’d hardly believed it herself when she’d read all that mushy stuff Jackie had written to Romano! Okay, some of it hadn’t exactly made sense, but she’d got the general gist. She nodded to Isabella to keep reading.

Isabella didn’t need much encouragement. She quietened down and carried on, stopping every now and then to ask Scarlett to decipher her sister’s handwriting.

When she’d finished she looked up. This time there were no guilty smiles. There was no flapping. The look on Isabella’s face wiped away the giddiness Scarlett had been experiencing and the spinning feeling moved swiftly to her stomach.

‘What are you going to do?’ Isabella asked.

Scarlett frowned. ‘Give the letter to Romano, of course.’

Isabella shook her head. ‘You can’t do that. You need to show this to Aunt Lisa!’

A noise of disbelief forced its way out of Scarlett’s lips. ‘Do you know what Mamma will do if she finds out? Jackie will be in so much trouble!’

Isabella looked at the sheets of paper between her fingers, now looking less than pristine and just a little crumpled. ‘It’s too big a secret.’ The letter made a crinkling noise as she tightened her grip.

Scarlett suddenly had a nasty feeling about this. Isabella wouldn’t, would she? She wouldn’t take the letter to Mamma herself? But then she saw the glint of determination in her cousin’s eyes and knew that Isabella just might take the matter into her own hands.

If that happened, not only would Jackie suffer their mother’s wrath, but Scarlett would be in big trouble herself. Jackie had a temper every bit as fiery as Mamma’s. Scarlett snatched for the letter.

Isabella was fast, though, too used to dealing with a pair of rambunctious younger brothers to be caught off guard, and Scarlett only managed to get a grip on one bit of paper. They pulled at either end of the sheet. Isabella was shouting that Scarlett needed to let go, because she wasn’t going to tell. Just as the words were starting to make sense to Scarlett, as the page was on the verge of ripping in two, Isabella released it. The sheets of pink writing paper and matching envelope flew into the air.

Both girls froze and watched them flutter slowly towards the ground.

Just before it landed in the dirt, one wayward sheet decided to catch its freedom on a gust of air. It started to lift, to twirl, to spin. Suddenly Scarlett was moving, jumping, reaching, trying to snatch it back, but it always seemed to dance out of her fingers just as she was about to get a hold of it.

Now Isabella had finished collecting up the rest of the paper, she was trying to get it too. The wind heaved a sigh and the piece of paper fluttered tantalisingly close. Scarlett jumped for it. Her fingers closed around it.

But then Isabella collided with her and she found herself crashing onto the damp earth of the stream bank. She hit the ground hard and every last bit of air evacuated from her lungs, and she momentarily lost the ability to control her muscles. The page saw its chance and eased itself out of her hand and into the waiting stream.

Isabella started to cry, but all Scarlett could do was watch it float away, the ink turning the paper a watery blue, before it disappeared beneath the surface.

She pulled herself up and brushed the dirt off her front. ‘Stop it!’ she yelled at Isabella, who was sobbing. And before she could dampen the rest of the pages with her silly crying, Scarlett pulled them from Isabella’s fist and tried to smooth them out.

‘Page three is missing! Page three!’ She glanced back towards the stream, her face alive with panic.

Oh, why couldn’t it have been page two, with all the love-struck gushing and rambling? Romano would never have noticed. But it had been page three—the one with the really big secret.

‘What are we going to do?’ Isabella said quietly, dragging a hand over her eyes to dry her tears. More threatened to fall, but she sniffed them away.

Scarlett shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

The icy fear that had been solidifying her limbs suddenly melted into something much warmer, much hotter.

This was all Jackie’s fault! Why couldn’t she have taken the letter to Romano herself? Why had she involved her baby sister in the first place? Didn’t she know that was a stupid thing to do? According to everyone else, Scarlett couldn’t be trusted with anything!

She turned to Isabella, her mouth pulled thin. ‘We can’t give the letter to Romano like this.’Jackie would just have to do her own dirty work and talk to him herself. ‘And Jackie will kill me if I tell her what I did. There’s only one thing we can do.’

Isabella started to sniff again, mumbling something about it all being her fault, but Scarlett wasn’t listening; she was staring at the gurgling waters of the stream.

Slowly, she walked back to the very edge of the bank. Between thumb and forefinger, she lifted another page high and then, in a very deliberate motion of her fingers, let it go. Another page followed, then the envelope. It seemed an almost solemn procedure, as if she were scattering dirt on a coffin. Thick, funereal silence hovered in the air around them as they held their breath and watched Jackie’s secret float downstream.

No one else must see the contents of this letter, Scarlett.

Now no one ever would.

CHAPTER ONE

THE air conditioning of the limo was functioning perfectly, but as Jackie stared out of the tinted window at the rolling hills, at the vineyards and citrus groves, she could almost feel the sun warming her forearms. It was an illusion. But she was big on illusions, so she let it slide and just enjoyed the experience.

The whole process of coming home would also be an illusion. There would be loud exclamations, bear hugs, family dinners where no one could get a word in—not that it would stop anyone trying—but underneath there would be a wariness. There always was. Even the siblings and cousins who didn’t know her secret somehow picked up on the atmosphere and joined in, letting her keep them at arm’s length.

They became her co-conspirators as she tried to deny her Italian side and laced herself up tight in Britishness—the one thing her father had given her that she treasured. She had learned how to shore herself up and keep herself together, but then Jackie always excelled at everything she did, and this was no exception.

She hadn’t called ahead to let the family know what time she was arriving. A limousine and her own company were preferable at present. She needed time to collect herself before she faced them all again.

It had been a couple of years since she’d been home to Monta Correnti. And when she did come these days, it was always in the winter. The summers were too glorious here, too full of memories she couldn’t afford to revisit. But then her older sister had chosen a weekend in May for her wedding celebrations, and Jackie hadn’t had much choice. It seemed she hadn’t been able to outrun the tug of a big Italian family after all, even though she’d tried very, very hard.

She turned away from the scenery—the golds and olives, the almost painful blue of the sky—and picked up a magazine from the leather seat beside her. It was the latest issue from Gloss! magazine’s main rival. Her lips curved in triumph as she noted that her editorial team had done a much better job of covering the season’s latest trends. But that was what she paid them for. She expected nothing less.

The main fashion caught her attention. Puccini—one of Italy’s top labels. But she hadn’t needed to read the heading to recognise the style. The fashion house had gone from strength to strength since Rafael Puccini had handed the design department over to his son.

With such a man at the helm, you’d expect the menswear to outshine the women’s collections, but it wasn’t the case. Romano Puccini understood women’s bodies so well that he created the most exquisite clothes for them. Elegant, sensuous, stylish. Although she’d resisted buying one of his creations for years, she’d succumbed last summer, and the dress now hung guiltily in the back of her wardrobe. She’d worn it only once, and in it she’d felt sexy, powerful and feminine.

Maybe that was why the house of Puccini was so successful, why women stampeded the boutiques to own one of their dresses. Good looks and bucketloads of charm aside, Romano Puccini knew how to make each and every woman feel as if she were as essentially female as Botticelli’s Venus. Of course, that too was an illusion. And Jackie knew that better than most.

She frowned, then instantly relaxed her forehead. She hadn’t given in to the lure of Botox yet, but there was no point making matters worse. Although she was at the top of her game, Editor-in-chief of London’s top fashion magazine, she was confronted daily by women who wore the youthful, fresh-faced glow that she’d been forced to abandon early. Working and living in that environment would make any woman over the age of twenty-two paranoid.

Her mobile phone rang and, glad of the distraction, she reached into her large soft leather bag to answer it. The name on the caller ID gave her an unwanted spike of adrenaline. Surely she should be used to seeing that name there by now?

‘Hello, Kate.’

‘Hey, Jacqueline.’

Her own name jarred in her ears. It sounded wrong, but she hadn’t earned the title of ‘mother’ from this young woman yet. Maybe she never would.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’

There was a pause. A loaded sixteen-year-old pause.

‘Are you there? In Italy?’

Jackie’s gaze returned to the view beyond the tinted windows. It whipped past silently, the insulation of the limousine blocking out any noise from outside. ‘Yes. I left the airport about twenty minutes ago.’

There was a sigh—which managed to be both wistful and accusatory—on the other end of the line. ‘I wish I could have come with you.’

‘I know. I wish you could have too. But this situation…telling my family…it needs some careful handling.’

‘They’re my family too.’

Jackie closed her eyes. ‘I know. But it’s complicated. You don’t know them—’

‘No, I don’t. And that’s not my fault, is it?’

Jackie didn’t miss Kate’s silent implication. Yes, it was her fault. She knew that. Had always known that. But that wasn’t going to help calm her mother down when she announced that the child she’d handed over for adoption sixteen years ago had recently sought her out, that she’d been secretly meeting with that daughter in London for the last few months—especially when it had been her mother’s iron insistence that no one else in the family should ever know. To a woman like Lisa Firenzi, image was everything. And a pregnant teenage daughter who’d refused to name the father of her baby didn’t fit in the glossy brochure that was her life.

Jackie hadn’t even been as old as Kate when it had happened. Back then, every day when she’d come down the stairs for breakfast, her mother had scrutinised her profile. When she hadn’t been able to disguise the growing swell of her stomach with baggy T-shirts, she’d been quietly sent away.

She’d arrived in London one wet November evening, a shivering fifteen-year-old, feeling lost and alone. The family had been told she’d gone to stay with her father, which was true. He’d been husband number two. Lisa had managed to devour and spit out another husband and quite a few lovers since then.

So, not only had Jackie to reconcile her mother to the fact that the dirty family secret she’d tried to hide was now out in the open, but she had to break the news to her uncle and cousins—even Lizzie and Scarlett, her sisters, didn’t know. She was going to have to handle the situation very, very carefully.

Lizzie’s wedding would be the first time she and all her sisters and cousins had been together in years and she couldn’t gazump her sister’s big day by turning up with a mystery daughter in tow, and it wouldn’t have been fair to drop Kate into the boiling pot of her family’s reactions either. Jackie had absolutely no idea how they were going to take the news and the last thing her fragile daughter needed was another heap of rejection.

She drew in a breath through her nostrils, the way her Pilates instructor had taught her. ‘I know, Kate. And I’m sorry. Maybe next time.’

The silence between them soured.

‘You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?’

Jackie sat bolt upright in the back seat. ‘No!’

‘Well, then, why won’t you let me meet my uncles and aunts, my cousins—my grandmother?’

There was no shyness about this girl. She was hot-headed, impulsive, full of self-righteous anger. Very much as her biological mother had been as a teenager. And that very same attitude had landed her into a whole heap of trouble.

‘Family things…they’re difficult, you know…’

A soft snort in her ear told Jackie that Kate didn’t know. That she didn’t even want to know. Jackie only had one card left to play and she hoped it worked.

‘Remember how you told me your mum—’ Your mum. Oh, how that phrase was difficult to get out ‘—found it difficult when you told her you wanted to find your biological mother, even though you weren’t eighteen yet? It was hard to tell her, wasn’t it? Because you didn’t want to hurt her, but at the same time it was something you needed to do.’

‘Yes.’ The voice was quieter now, slightly shaky.

‘You’re just going to have to trust me—’ Sweetheart. She wanted to say ‘sweetheart’ ‘—Kate. This is something I need to do first. And then you can come on a visit and meet everyone, I promise.’

Just like every other girl of her age, Kate was rushing at life, her head full of the possibilities ahead of her, possibilities that dangled like bright shiny stars hung on strings from the heavens. They tempted, called. If only she could make Kate see how dangerous those sparkly things were…how deceptive.

Something in her tone must have placated her newly found daughter, because Kate sounded resigned rather than angry when she rang off. Jackie slid her phone closed and sank back into the padded leather seat, exhausted.

She hadn’t realised how hard the reunion would be, even though she’d been waiting for it since she’d put her name on the adoption register when she’d been twenty. When she’d got the first call she’d been overjoyed, but terror had quickly followed. She and Kate had had a tearful and awkward first meeting under the watchful eye of her adoptive mother, Sue.

Kate had been slightly overawed by Jackie’s high-fashion wardrobe and sleek sports car. Sue had taken Jackie aside after a few weeks and warned her that Kate was dazzled by the fact her ‘real’ mum was Jacqueline Patterson, style icon and fashion goddess. Don’t you dare let her down, Sue’s eyes had said as she’d poured the tea and motioned for Jackie to sit at her weathered kitchen table.

Jackie was doing her best, but she wasn’t convinced she could make this work, that she and Kate could settle into a semblance of a mother-daughter relationship. They’d gone through a sort of honeymoon period for the first month or two, but now questions and emotions from the past were starting to surface and not everything that was rising to the top was as glossy and pretty as Jackie normally liked things to be.

Once she told her mother, Kate’s grandmother, the cat would be out of the bag and there would be no going back. But Jackie had no other option. She wanted…needed…to have her daughter back in her life, and she was going to do whatever it took to make a comfortable space for her, no matter how hard the fallout landed.

The limo swung round a bend in the road and Jackie held her breath. There was Monta Correnti in the distance, a stunningly beautiful little town with a square church steeple and patchwork of terracotta tiled roofs seemingly clinging to the steep hillside. It was currently a ‘hot’ holiday destination for Europe’s rich and notorious, but it had once been Jackie’s home. Her only real home. A place filled with memories, yellow and faded like old family photographs.

Before they reached the town centre, the limo branched off to the left, heading up a tree-lined road to the brow of the hill that was close enough to look down its nose on the town but not near enough to feel neighbourly.

The road to her mother’s villa.

Jackie tided the magazines on the back seat, made sure everything she needed was in her handbag and pulled herself up straight as the car eased through gates more suited to a maximum-security prison than a family home.

Romano opened the tall windows of his drawing room and stepped onto the garden terrace. It all looked perfect. It always looked perfect. That pleased him. He liked simple lines, clean shapes. He wasn’t a man who relished anything complicated or fussy. Of course, he knew that perfection came at a cost. None of this happened by accident.

In his absence, the low hedges of the parterre had been clipped by an army of gardeners, the gravel paths raked and smoothed until they were perfectly flat and unsullied by footprints. The flowers in the vast stone urns had been lovingly weeded and watered. And the attention hadn’t been confined to the garden. Every inch of the Puccini family’s old summer home was free from dust. Every window and polished surface gleamed. It was the perfect place to retreat from the grime and noise of Rome in the summer months. And Romano enjoyed it so much here he’d recently decided to keep it as his main residence, even in winter, when Lake Adrina was filled with waves of polished pewter and the wind was less than gentle.

Palazzo Raverno was unique, built by an ostentatious count in the eighteenth century on a small island, shaped like a long drawn-out teardrop. On the wider end of the island Count Raverno had spared no expense in erecting a Neo-gothic Venetian palace, all high arches and ornate masonry in contrasting pink and white stone. It should have looked ridiculously out of place on a tranquil wooded island in the middle of a lake—but somehow the icing-sugar crispness of the house just made it a well-placed adornment to the island. From what he knew of the infamous count, Romano suspected this had been more by accident than design.

And if the palazzo was spectacular, the gardens took one’s breath away. Closer to the house the gardens were formal, with intricate topiary and symmetrical beds, but as they rolled away to the shore and reached to the thin end of the island they gave the impression of a natural Eden.

Romano could resist it no longer. His wandering became striding and he soon found himself walking down the shady paths, stopping to listen to the soft music of the gurgling waterfall that sprang out of a rockery. He didn’t plan a route, just let his feet take him where they wanted, and it wasn’t long before he arrived in the sunken garden.

The breeze was deliciously cool here, lifting the fringes of the drooping ferns. Everything was green, from the vibrant shades of the tropical plants and the dark glossiness of the ivy, to the subtle sponginess of the moss on the walls of the grotto.

It was all so unbearably romantic. The island was the perfect place for a wedding.

Not his wedding, of course. He smiled at the thought. Nobody would ever be foolish enough to think the day would come when he’d pledge his body and soul to one woman for eternity.

A month or two, maybe.

He sighed as he left the leafy seclusion of the sunken garden and walked into the fragrant sunshine of a neatly clipped lawn. From here he climbed a succession of terraces as he made his way back towards the house. The days when this island had been a playground for the idle rich were long gone. He had work to do.

However, he was whistling when he headed into the ground-floor room he’d converted into a studio to collect the paperwork for his afternoon appointment. When a man had a job that involved dressing and undressing beautiful women, he couldn’t really complain, could he?

Before Jackie’s stiletto-heeled foot could make contact with the driveway, her mother flew out of the front door and rushed towards her, her arms flung wide.

‘Jackie! There you are!’

Jackie’s eyes widened behind her rather huge and rather fashionable sunglasses. What on earth was going on? Her mother never greeted her like this. It was as if she were actually overjoyed to see—

‘You’re late!’ Her mother stopped ten feet shy of the limo and her fists came to rest on her hips, making the jacket of her Chanel suit bunch up in a most unappealing manner.

This was more the reception Jackie had been anticipating.

Her mother looked her up and down. Something Jackie didn’t mind at all now she knew her mother could find no fault with her appearance, but once upon a time it had sent a shiver up her spine.

‘I don’t believe I mentioned what time I—’

‘The other girls arrived over an hour ago,’ her mother said before giving her a spiky little peck on the cheek, then hooking an arm in hers and propelling Jackie inside the large double doors of the villa.

What girls?

Jackie decided there was no point in reminding Mamma that she hadn’t actually specified a time of arrival, only a date. Her mother was a woman of expectations, and heaven help the poor soul who actually suggested she deviate from her catalogue of fixed and rigid ideas. Jackie had come to terms with the fact that, even though she was the toast of London, in the labyrinthine recesses of Lisa Firenzi’s mind her middle daughter was the specimen on a dark and dusty shelf whose label read: Problem Child.

Although Jackie hadn’t seen her mother in almost a year, she looked the same as always. She still oozed the style and natural chic that had made her a top model in her day. She was wearing an updated version of the classic suit she’d had last season, and her black hair was in the same neat pleat at the back of her head.

The excited female chatter coming from her mother’s bedroom and dressing room alternated between Italian and English with frightening speed. Three women, all in various states of undress, were twittering and cooing over some of the most exquisite bridal wear that Jackie had ever seen. In fact, they were so absorbed in helping the bride-to-be into her wedding dress that they didn’t even notice Jackie standing there.

Lizzie, who was half in, half out of the bodice, looked up and spotted her first, and all at once she was waddling across the room in a mound of white satin. She pulled Jackie into a tight hug.

‘Your sister finally deigned to arrive for the dress fitting.’

Jackie closed her eyes and ignored her mother’s voice. Dress fitting? Oh, that was what Mamma had her knickers in a twist about. She needn’t have worried. Jackie had sent her measurements over by email a couple of weeks ago and she knew her rigorous fitness regime would not have allowed for even a millimetre of variation.

‘We all know Jackie operates in her own time zone these days, don’t we?’

Ah. So that was it. Mamma was still irritated that she hadn’t fallen in with her plans and arrived yesterday. But there had been a very important show she’d needed to attend in Paris, which she couldn’t afford to miss. Her mother of all people should understand how cut-throat the fashion industry was. One minor stumble and a thousand knives would be ready to welcome her back as a sheath.

She wanted to turn round, to tell her mother to mind her own business, but this was neither the time nor the place. She wasn’t about to do anything to spoil the frivolity of her sister’s wedding preparations. She squeezed Lizzie back, gently, softly.

‘It’s been too long, Lizzie!’ she said in a hoarse voice.

As she pulled away she tried to file her mother’s remark away in her memory banks with all the others, but the words left a sting inside her.

‘Here, let me help you with this.’ She pulled away from Lizzie and walked round her so she could help with the row of covered buttons at the back. The dress was empire line, gently complementing Lizzie’s growing pregnant silhouette. And true to form, the bride was positively glowing, whether that was the effect of carrying double the amount of hormones from the twins inside her or because she was wildly in love with the groom Jackie had yet to meet, she wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, Lizzie looked happier and more relaxed than she’d ever been. If it was down to Jack Lewis, he’d better know how to keep it up, because Jackie would have his hide if he didn’t.

‘Thanks. I knew there was a reason why we had a fashion expert in the family,’ Lizzie said, smiling as she pulled her long dark hair out of the way.

Jackie concentrated on the row of tiny silk-covered buttons that seemed to go on for ever. ‘This dress is exquisite,’ she said as she reached the last few. Which was amazing, since it had to have been made in mere weeks.

Jackie stood back and admired her sister. Getting a dress to not only fit somebody perfectly, but complement their personality was something that even cold, hard cash couldn’t buy, unless you were in the hands of a true artist.

Isabella and Scarlett came close to inspect the dress and mutter their appreciation. Jackie turned, a smile of utter serenity on her face, and prepared herself to greet her fellow bridesmaids.

Isabella first. They kissed lightly on both cheeks and Isabella rubbed her shoulder gently with her hand as they traded pleasantries. Jackie kept her smile in place as she turned to face her younger sister. They kissed without actually making contact and made a pretence of an embrace.

She and Scarlett had been so close once, especially after Lizzie had gone to university in Australia, when it had just been the two of them and she’d felt like a proper big sister rather than just Lizzie’s deputy. She’d even thought vainly that Scarlett might have hero-worshipped her a little bit.

But that had all changed the summer she’d got pregnant with Kate. Scarlett had never looked at her the same way again. And why should she have? Some role model Jackie had been. Who would want to emulate the disaster area that had been her life back then—Jackie in tears most of the day, Mamma alternating between ranting and giving her the ice-queen treatment?

Not long after that Scarlett had moved away too. She’d followed in Lizzie’s footsteps and flown halfway round the world to live with her father. They’d never had a chance to patch things up, for Jackie to say how sorry she was to make Scarlett so ashamed of her. No more late-night secret-sharing sessions. No more raiding the kitchen at Sorella, one of them rifling through the giant stainless-steel fridge for chocolate cake, one of them keeping guard in case the chef spotted them.

Now they talked as little as possible and met in person even less. Jackie released Scarlett from the awkward hug and took a good look at her. They hadn’t laid eyes on each other in more than five years. Scarlett hadn’t changed much, except for looking a little bit older and even more like their mother. She had the same hint of iron behind her eyes these days, but the generous twist of the mouth Jackie recognised from their childhood tempered it a little.

Of course, Lizzie was far too excited to notice the undercurrents flowing around amidst the tulle and taffeta.

‘Come on, girls! You next. I want to see how fabulous my bridesmaids are going to look.’

Scarlett and Isabella had already removed their dresses from their garment bags. They were every bit as stunning as Lizzie’s. She’d been told that all three dresses would be the same shade of dusky aubergine, but she hadn’t realised that they would vary in style and cut.

Isabella’s was classic and feminine, with a gathered upper bodice, tiny spaghetti straps and a bow under the bustline, where the empire-line skirt fell away. Scarlett’s was edgier, with a nineteen-thirties feel—devoid of frills and with a deep V in the front.

Jackie appointed herself as wardrobe mistress and zipped, buttoned and laced wherever help was needed. When she’d finished, Isabella handed her a garment bag.

Jackie hesitated before she took the bag from her cousin. It had been a bad idea to help the others get dressed. Now they had nothing else to do but watch her strip off. She clutched the bag to her chest and looked for the nearest corner. Isabella and Scarlett just stood there, waiting.

Then she felt the bag being tugged gently from between her fingers. ‘Why don’t you use Mamma’s dressing room?’ Lizzie said as she relieved Jackie of the bag and led her towards a door on the other side of the room. ‘You can freshen up a little from your flight, if you need to.’

Jackie sent her sister a grateful look and did exactly that.

Lizzie had been the only one she’d confided in about her body issues. It had started not long after she’d given Kate away. At first, eating less and exercising had been about getting her shape back before she returned to Italy, removing all evidence that her body had been stretched and changed irrevocably. Mamma had been pleased when she’d met her off the plane, had complimented her on her self-discipline. But back in Italy she’d been confronted with the sheer pleasure of food, the sensuality of how people ate, and she’d shied away from it. Somewhere along the line the self-denial, the discipline, had become something darker. She’d sought control. Punishment. Atonement.

She’d liked the angles and lines of her physique and, when she’d finally escaped Monta Correnti at eighteen and moved to London to take the position of office assistant at a quirky style magazine, she’d fitted right in. Her new world had been full of girls eating nothing but celery and moaning that their matchstick thighs were too chunky.

It had taken her quite a few years to admit she’d had a problem. To admit that the yellowish tinge her skin had taken on had been more than just the product of her Italian genes, that the sunken hollows beneath her cheeks weren’t good bone structure and that it hadn’t been natural to be able to count her ribs with such ease.

Quietly she’d got help. Putting the weight back on had been a struggle. Every pound she’d gained had been an accusation. But she’d done it. And now she was proud to have a body that most women her age would kill for. It was meticulously nourished on the best organic food and trained four times a week by a personal trainer.

Even though she knew she looked good, she still didn’t want to be gawped at without her clothes on. It was different when she was in her cutting-edge designer suits. Dressed like that she was Jacqueline Patterson—the woman whose name was only uttered in hushed tones when she walked down the corridors of Gloss! magazine’s high-rise offices. Remove the armour and she became faceless. Just another woman in her thirties with stretch marks and a Caesarean scar.

With the dressing-room door shut firmly behind her, Jackie slipped out of her linen trouser suit and went through the connecting door to Mamma’s en suite to freshen up. As she washed she could hear her cousin catching Lizzie up on all the latest Monta Correnti gossip, especially the unabridged story of how Isabella had met her own fiancé.

When Jackie felt she’d finally got all the traces of aeroplane air off her skin, she returned to the dressing room and removed her bridesmaid’s dress from its protective covering.

Wow. Stunning.

It reminded her of designs she’d done in senior school for the class play of Romeo and Juliet. Like the other dresses, it was empire line, with an embroidered bodice that scooped underneath the gathered chiffon at the bust and then round and up into shoulder straps.

Not many people knew enough about fashion design to see the artistry in the cutting that gave the skirt its effortlessly feminine swell. Nor would they notice the inner rigid structure of the bodice that would accentuate every curve of a woman’s torso but give the impression that it was nature that had done all the hard work and not the fine stitching and cutting. She took it off the hanger and undid the zip. As she stepped into the dress there was a knock at the door that led back out into the bedroom.

‘Everything okay in there?’ Lizzie’s voice was muffled through the closed door. Jackie smiled.

‘Almost ready,’ she yelled back, sliding the dress over her hips and stopping to remove the bra that would ruin the line of the low-cut bodice.

She’d been right, she realised as she started to slide the zip upwards. If her instincts were correct, this dress was going to fit like the proverbial glove. She doubted it would need any alteration at all.

As she got to the top she ran into problems with the zip. Despite all the yoga and Pilates, she just couldn’t get her arms and shoulder sockets to do what was necessary to pull it all the way up.

‘Lizzie? Isabella? I need a hand,’ she yelled and dipped her head forwards, brushing her immaculately straightened hair over one shoulder so whoever rushed to her aid had easy access to the stubborn zip.

There was a soft click as the door opened. The thick carpet hushed the even footsteps as her saviour came towards her.

‘If you could just…’ She wiggled her shoulders to indicate where the problem was.

Whoever it was said nothing, just stepped close and set about deftly zipping her into place. For a second or so Jackie let her mind drift, wondering if it would look as dreamy as it felt when she raised her head and looked into the full-length mirror, but then she realised something was out of balance.

The fingers brushing her upper back as they held the top of the bodice’s zip together didn’t have Scarlett’s long, perfectly manicured fingernails. Lizzie was already getting too big with the twins to be standing quite this close and, at five feet five, Isabella was a good inch shorter than she was. This person’s breath was warming her exposed left ear.

Jackie stilled her lungs. Where fingers touched bare back, the pinpricks of awareness were so acute they were almost painful.

The person finished their job by neatly joining the hook and eye at the top of the bodice and then stepped back. Jackie began to shake. Right down in her knees. And it travelled upwards until her shoulders seemed to rattle.

Even before she pushed her hair out of her face and straightened her spine, she knew the eyes that would meet hers in the mirror would be those of Romano Puccini.

CHAPTER TWO

HIGH in the hills above Monta Correnti was an olive grove that had long since been abandoned. The small stone house that sat on the edge of one of the larger terraces remained unmolested, forgotten by everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

Just as the sun’s heat began to wane, as the white light of noon began to mellow into something closer to gold, a teenage girl appeared, walking along the dirt track that led to the farmhouse, a short distance from the main road into town. She looked over her shoulder every couple of seconds and kept close to the shade of the trees on the other side of the track. When she was sure no one was following her, she moved into the sunlight and started to jog lightly towards the farmhouse, a smile on her face.

She was on the way to being pretty, a bud just beginning to open, with long dark hair that hung almost to her waist and softly tanned skin. When she stopped smiling, there was a fierce intensity to her expression but, as she seemed to be joyfully awaiting something, that didn’t happen very often. She rested in the shade, leaning against the doorway of the cottage, looking down the hill towards the town.

After not more than ten minutes a sound interrupted the soft chirruping of the crickets, the gentle whoosh of the wind in the branches of the olive trees. The girl stood up, ramrod straight, and looked in the direction of the track. After a couple of seconds the faint buzzing that an untrained ear might have interpreted for a bee or a faraway tractor became more distinct. She recognised the two-stroke engine of a Vespa and her smile returned at double the intensity.

Closer and closer it came, until suddenly the engine cut out and the grove returned to sleepy silence. The girl held her breath.

Her patience ran out. Instead of waiting in the doorway, looking cool and unaffected, she jumped off the low step and started running. As she turned the corner of the house she saw him jogging towards her, wearing a smile so bright it could light up the sky if the sun ever decided it wanted a siesta. Her leg muscles lost all tone and energy and she stumbled to a halt, unable to take her eyes from him.

Finally he was standing right in front of her, his dark hair ruffled by the wind and his grey eyes warmed by the residual laughter that always lived there. They stood there for a few seconds, hearts pounding, and then he gently touched her cheek and drew her into a kiss that was soft and sweet and full of remembered promises. She sighed and reached for him, pulling him close. Somehow they ended up back in the doorway of the old, half-fallen-down cottage, with her pressed against the jamb as he tickled her neck with butterfly kisses.

He pulled away and looked at her, his hands on her shoulders, and she gazed back at him, never thinking for a second how awkward it could be to just stare into another person’s eyes, never considering for a second what a brave act it was to see and be seen. She blinked and smiled at him, and his dancing grey eyes became suddenly serious.

‘I love you, Jackie,’ he said, and moved his hands up off her shoulders and onto her neck so he could trace the line of her jawbone with his thumbs.

‘I love you too, Romano,’ she whispered as she buried her face in his shirt and wrapped herself up in him.

Jackie hadn’t actually believed that a person could literally be frozen with surprise. Too late she discovered it was perfectly possible to find one’s feet stuck to the floor just as firmly as if they had actually grown roots, and to find one’s mouth suddenly incapable of speech.

Romano, however, seemed to be experiencing none of the same disquiet. He was just looking back at her in the mirror, his pale eyes full of mischief. ‘Bellissima,’ he said, glancing at the dress, but making it sound much more intimate.

She blinked and coughed, and when her voice returned she found a sudden need to speak in English instead of Italian. ‘What are you doing here?’

Romano just shrugged and made that infuriatingly ambiguous hand gesture he’d always used to make. ‘It is a dress fitting, Jacqueline, so I fit.’

She spun round to face him. ‘You made the dresses? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

He made a rueful expression. ‘Why should they? As far as anyone else is concerned, we hardly know each other. Your mother and my father are old friends and the rest of your family thinks we’ve only met a handful of times.’

Jackie took a shallow breath and puffed it out again. ‘That’s true.’ She frowned. ‘But how…? Why did you…?’

‘When your mother told my father that Lizzie was getting married, he insisted we take care of the designs. It’s what old friends do for each other.’

Jackie took a step back, regaining some of her usual poise. ‘Old friends? That hardly applies to you and I.’

Romano was prevented from answering by an impatient Lizzie bursting into the room. Still, his eyes twinkled as Lizzie made Jackie do a three-sixty-degree spin. When she found herself back at the starting point he was waiting for her, his gaze hooking hers. Not old friends, it said. But old lovers, certainly.

Jackie wanted to hit him.

‘It’s beautiful!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘Perfect!’

‘Yes. That is what I said,’ Romano replied, and Jackie had to look away or she’d be tempted to throttle him, dress or no dress.

‘Come and show the others!’ Lizzie grabbed her hand and dragged her outside for Isabella and Scarlett to see. Isabella was just as enthusiastic as Lizzie but Scarlett looked as if she’d just sucked a whole pound of lemons. What was up with her? She just kept glowering at Jackie and sending daggers at Romano. Somebody or something had definitely put her nose out of joint.

The fitting was exhausting for Jackie. Not because her dress needed any alterations—she’d been right about that—but because she kept finding herself watching Romano, his deft fingers pinching at a seam as he discussed how and where he would make alterations, the way his brow creased with intense concentration as he discussed the possibilities with the bride-to-be, and how easily he smiled when the concentration lifted.

She’d spent the last seventeen years studiously avoiding him. It was laughable the lengths she’d gone to in order to make sure they never met face to face. Quite a few junior editors had been overjoyed when she’d sent them on plum assignments so that she wouldn’t have to cross paths with that no-good, womanising charmer.

How could she chit-chat with him at fashion industry parties as if nothing had ever happened? As if he’d never done what he’d done? It was asking too much.

Of course, sometimes over the years she’d had to attend the same functions as him—especially during London fashion week, when she was expected to be seen at everything—but she had enough clout to be able to look at seating plans in advance and position herself accordingly.

However, there was no avoiding Romano now.

At least not for the next twenty minutes or so. After that she needn’t see him again. Her dress was perfect. No more fittings for her, thank goodness.

Her mother chose that moment to sweep into the room. She gave Romano an indulgent smile and kissed him on both cheeks. Jackie couldn’t hear what he said to her mother but Mamma batted her eyelashes and called him a ‘charming young man’.

Hah! She’d changed her tune! Last time Lisa Firenzi had seen her daughter and Romano Puccini within a mile of each other, she’d had no compunctions about warning Jackie off. ‘That boy is trouble,’ she’d said. ‘Just like his father. You are not to have anything to do with him. If I catch you even talking to him, you will be grounded for a month.’

But it had been too late.

Mamma had made Jackie help out at Sorella that summer, to ‘keep her out of trouble’. And, if her mother had actually had some hands-on part in running the restaurant rather than leaving it all to managers, she would have known that Jackie and Romano had met weeks earlier when he’d come in for lunch with his father.

Of course she’d paid him no attention whatsoever. She’d seen him hanging around the piazza that summer, all the girls trailing around after him, and she hadn’t been about to join that pathetic band of creatures, no matter how good-looking the object of their adoration was. But Romano had been rather persistent, had made her believe he was really interested, and, when she’d noticed that he hadn’t had another girl on the back of his Vespa in more than a fortnight, she’d cautiously agreed to go out on it with him.

She should have listened to her mother. ‘Like father, like son,’ Lisa had said at the time. Jackie had always known that her mother and Romano’s father, Rafe Puccini, had known each other in the past, but it wasn’t until she’d moved to London and heard all the industry gossip that she realised how significant that relationship had been. By all accounts they’d had a rather steamy affair.

Look at her mother and Romano now! They were laughing at something. Her mother laid a hand on his upper arm and wiped a tear from under her mascara, calling him an ‘impossible boy’. That was as much as Jackie could take. She strutted off to the dressing room and changed back into her trouser suit, studiously ignoring her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t even want to see herself in his dress at the moment.

Keep a lid on it, Jacqueline. In a few minutes he’ll be gone. You won’t have to see him again for another seventeen years if you don’t want to.

When she emerged, smoothing down her hair with a hand, her mother was just finishing a sentence: ‘…of course you must come with us, Romano. I insist.’

Jackie raised her eyebrows and looked at the other girls. Scarlett stomped off in the direction of the en suite, while Isabella just shrugged, collected up her clothes and headed for the empty dressing room.

‘Give me a hand?’ Lizzie asked and turned her back on Jackie so she could help with the covered buttons once again. As she worked Jackie kept glancing at her mother and Romano, who eventually left the room, still chatting and laughing.

‘What’s going on?’ she muttered as she got to the last couple of buttons.

Lizzie strained to look over her shoulder at her sister. ‘Oh, Mamma has decided we’re all going to the restaurant for dinner this evening.’

Jackie kept her focus firmly on the last button, even though it was already unlooped. ‘And she’s invited Romano?’

Lizzie nodded. ‘He’s been spending a lot of time at the palazzo in the last few years. He comes into Monta Correnti regularly and eats at both Mamma’s and Uncle Luca’s often.’

Jackie stepped back and Lizzie turned to face her.

‘Why?’ Lizzie said, sliding the dress off her shoulders. ‘Is that a problem? That she’s invited Romano?’

Jackie smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No problem at all.’

She looked at the door that led out to the landing. Would her mother be quite as welcoming, quite as chummy with him, if she’d known that Romano Puccini was the boy who’d got her teenage daughter pregnant and then abandoned her?

She’d always refused to name the father, no matter how much her mother had begged and scolded and threatened, too ashamed for the world to know she’d been rejected so spectacularly by her first love. Even a knocked-up fifteen-year-old had her pride.

Jackie picked up her handbag and headed for the door. It still seemed like a good plan. There was no reason why her mother should ever know that Romano was Kate’s father. No reason at all.

Refusing an invitation to dine with five attractive women would not only be the height of bad manners but also stupidity. And no one had ever accused Romano Puccini of being stupid. Infuriatingly slippery, maybe. Too full of charm for his own good. But never stupid. And he’d been far too curious not to come.

He hadn’t had the chance to get this close to Jackie Patterson in years, which was odd, seeing as they moved in similar circles. But those circles always seemed to be rotating in different directions, the arcs never intersecting. Why was that? Did she still feel guilty about the way their romance had ended?

That summer seemed to be almost a million years ago. He sighed and took a sip of his wine, while the chatter of the elegant restaurant carried on around him.

Jackie Patterson. She’d really been a knockout. Long dark hair with a hint of a wave, tanned legs, smooth skin and eyes that refused to be either green or brown but glittered with fire anyway.

Yes, that had been a really good summer.

He’d foolishly thought himself in love with her but he’d been seventeen. It was easy to mistake hormones for romance at that age. Now he saw his summer with Jackie for what it really had been—a fling. A wonderful, heady, teenage fling that had unfortunately had a sour final act. Sourness that obviously continued to the present day.

She had deliberately placed herself on the same side of the table as him, and had made sure that her mother had taken the seat next to him. With Lisa Firenzi in the way, he had no hope of engaging Jackie in any kind of conversation. And she had known that.

Surely enough time had gone by that he and Jackie could put foolish youthful decisions behind them? Wasn’t the whole I’m-still-ignoring-you thing just a little juvenile? He wouldn’t have thought a polished woman like her would resort to such tactics.

And polished she was. Gone were the little shorts and cotton summer dresses, halter tops and flip-flops, replaced by excellent tailoring, effortless elegance that took a lot of hard work to get just right. And even if her reputation hadn’t preceded her, he’d have been able to tell that this was a woman who pushed herself hard. Every hint of the soft fifteen-year-old curves that had driven him wild had been sculptured into defined muscle. The toffee and caramel lights in her long hair were so well done that most people would have thought it natural. He’d preferred it dark, wavy, and spread out on the grass as he’d leaned in to kiss her.

Where had that thought come from? He’d seen it in his mind’s eye as if it had happened only that morning.

He blinked and returned his attention to his food, an amazing lobster ravioli that the chef here did particularly well. But now he’d thought about Jackie in that way, he couldn’t quite seem to switch the memory off.

The main course was finished and Lizzie’s fiancé appeared and whisked her away. Isabella disappeared off to the restaurant next door and when Lisa was approached by her restaurant manager and scuttled off with him, talking in low, hushed tones, that left him sitting at the table with just Jackie and Scarlett. He made a light-hearted comment, looking towards his right at Jackie, and saw her stiffen.

This was stupid. Although he didn’t do serious conversations and relationship-type stuff, there was obviously bad air between them that needed to be cleared. He was just going to have to do his best to show Jackie that there were no hard feelings, that he could behave like a grown-up in the here and now, whatever had happened in the past. Hopefully she would follow his lead.

He turned to face her, waited, all the time looking intently at her until she could bear it no longer and met his gaze.

He smiled at her. ‘It has been a long time, Jackie.’

Jackie’s mouth didn’t move; her eyes gave her reply: Not long enough.

He ignored the leaden vibes heading his way and persevered. ‘I thought the March issue of Gloss! was particularly good. The shoot at the botanical gardens was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.’

Jackie folded her arms. ‘It’s been seventeen years since we’ve had a conversation and you want to talk to me about work?’

He shrugged and pulled the corners of his mouth down. It had seemed like a safe starting point.

‘You don’t think that maybe there are other, more important issues to enquire after?’

Nothing floated into his head. He rested his arm across the back of Lisa’s empty chair and turned his body to face Jackie, ready to engage a little more fully in whatever was going on between them. ‘Communication is communication, Jackie. We have to start somewhere.’

‘Do we?’

‘It seemed like a good idea to me,’ he said, refusing to be cowed by the look she was giving him, a look that probably made her employees perspire so much they were in danger of dehydration.

Now she turned to face him too, forgetting her earlier stiff posture, her eyes smouldering. A familiar prickle of awareness crept up the back of his neck.

‘Don’t you dare take the high ground, Romano! You have no right. No right at all.’

He opened his mouth and shut it again. This conversation had too much high drama in it for him and, unfortunately, he and Jackie seemed to be, not only on different pages, but reading from totally different scripts. He looked across the table at Scarlett, to see if she was making sense of any of this, but her expression was just as puzzling as her sister’s. She looked pale and shaky, as if she was about to be sick, and then she suddenly shot to her feet and dashed out of the restaurant door. Romano just stared after her.

‘What was that all about?’ he said.

Jackie, who was obviously too surprised to remember she was steaming angry with him, just frowned after her disappearing sister. ‘I have no idea.’

He took the opportunity to climb through the chink in her defences. He reached over and placed his hand over hers on the table top. ‘Can’t we let the past be the past?’

Jackie removed her hand from under his so fast he thought he might have a friction burn.

‘It’s too late. We can’t go back, not after all that has happened.’ Instead of looking fierce and untouchable, she looked very, very sad as she said this, and he saw just a glimpse of the young, stubborn, vulnerable girl he’d once lost his heart to.

‘Why not?’

Suddenly he really wanted to know. And it wasn’t just about putting the past to rest.

She looked down at his hand on the tablecloth, still waiting in the same spot from where she’d snatched hers away. For a long time she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

‘You know why, Romano,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t push this, just…don’t.’

‘I don’t want to push this. I just want us to be able to be around each other without spitting and hissing or creating an atmosphere. That’s not what you want for Lizzie’s wedding, is it?’

She frowned and stared at him. ‘What on earth has this got to do with Lizzie’s wedding?’

Didn’t she know? Hadn’t Lizzie or Lisa told her yet?

‘The reception…Lizzie wanted to have it at the palazzo. She thought the lake would be so—’

‘No. That can’t be.’ She spoke quietly, with no hint of anger in her voice, and then she just stood up and walked away, her chin high and her eyes dull, leaving him alone at the table, drawing the glances of some of the other diners.

This was not how most of his evenings out ended—alone, with all the pretty women having left without him. Most definitely not.

Back at the villa, Jackie ignored the warm glow of lights spilling from the drawing-room windows and took the path round the side of the house that led into the terraced garden. She kept walking, past the fountains and clipped lawns, past the immaculately groomed shrubs, to the lowest part of the garden, an area slightly wilder and shadier than the rest.

Right near the boundary, overlooking Monta Correnti and the valley below, was an old, spreading fir tree. Many parts of its lower branches had been worn smooth by the seats and shoes of a couple of generations of climbers.

Without thinking about the consequences for her white linen trousers, Jackie put one foot on the stump of a branch at the base of the trunk and hoisted herself up onto one of the boughs. Her mind was elsewhere but her body remembered a series of movements—a hand here, a foot there—and within seconds she was sitting down, her toes dangling three feet above the ground as she stared out across the darkening valley.

The sun had set long ago, leaving the sky a shade of such a deep, rich blue that she could almost believe it possible to reach out and sink her hand into the thick colour. The sight brought back a rush of homesickness, which was odd, because surely people were only supposed to get homesick when they were away, not when they came back. It didn’t make any sense. But not much about this evening had made sense.

She’d expected Romano to be a grown-up version of the boy she’d known: confident, intelligent, incorrigible. But she hadn’t expected such blatant insensitivity.

She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sensation of the cool night breeze on her neck and cheeks.

Thank goodness she hadn’t given into Kate’s pleading and let her daughter come on this trip. If Romano could be so blithe about their failed relationship all those years ago, she’d hate to think how he might have reacted to their daughter.

If only things had been different…

No. It was no good thinking that way. Time had proved her right. Romano Puccini was not cut out to be a husband and father. The string of girlfriends he’d paraded through the tabloids and celebrity magazines had only confirmed her worst fears. Maybe, if he’d settled down, there would have been some hope of him regretting his decision to disown his firstborn. Maybe a second child might have melted his heart, caused him to realise what he’d been missing.

A huge sigh shuddered through her. Jackie kicked off her shoes and looked at her toes.

And Romano had made her miss all of those moments too. Without his support she’d had no choice but to go along with her mother’s wishes. How stupid she’d been to believe all those whispered promises, all those hushed plans to make their parents see sense, the plotting to elope one day. He’d said he’d wait for ever for her. The truth was, he hadn’t even waited a month before moving on to Francesca Gambardi. One silly spat was all it’d taken to drive him away.

For ever? What a joke.

But she’d been so in love with him it had taken right up until the day she’d handed her newborn daughter over to stop hoping that it was all a bad dream, that Romano would change his mind and come bursting through the door to tell her he was so sorry, that it was her that he wanted and they were going to be a proper family, no matter what his father and her mother said.

Well, she’d purged all those silly ideas from herself about the same time she’d tightened up her saggy pregnancy belly. It had taken just as much iron will and focus to kill them all off.

‘Jackie?’

It was Scarlett’s voice, coming from maybe twenty feet away. Jackie smiled. She’d never quite got used to the Aussie twang that both her sisters had developed since moving away. It seemed more prominent here in the dark.

‘Up here.’

‘What on earth are you doing up there?’

Scarlett walked closer and peered up at her, or at least in her general direction. She’d only just left the bright lights of the house behind and her eyes wouldn’t be accustomed to the dark yet.

‘Come up and join me. The view’s lovely,’ she said.

‘I know what the view looks like.’ Scarlett stared up at the tree. ‘You’re being silly.’

That was altogether possible, Jackie conceded silently, but she wasn’t going to admit that to anyone. Scarlett folded her arms and stared off into the distance.

‘What? You’re not going to tell me I had too much wine at dinner?’ Jackie said.

Scarlett just shook her head, the movement so small Jackie guessed it was more an unconscious gesture than an attempt at communication. She had that same can’t-quite-look-at-you expression on her face that she always wore in Jackie’s presence. It made Jackie want to be twice as prickly back. But it became obvious as she continued to observe her sister that Scarlett hadn’t taken into account that Jackie had been out here long enough to get her night vision and could see her sister’s features quite clearly. After a few seconds the hardness slid out of her expression, leaving something much younger, much truer behind.

‘No. I’m not going to tell you that.’ Her voice was husky but cold.

Jackie stopped swinging her legs. She knew that look. It was the one Scarlett had always worn when she’d heard Mamma’s footsteps coming up the stairs after she’d done something naughty. Was Scarlett…was she hiding something?

Just as she tried to examine Scarlett’s face a little more closely, her sister turned away.

‘Mamma wants us all in the drawing room for a nightcap. She says she’s got some family news, something about Cristiano not being able to come to the wedding.’

Jackie swung herself down off the branch in one fluid motion and landed beside her sister. She supposed they’d better go and make peace with their mother. Mamma hadn’t been best pleased when she’d returned from her powwow with the restaurant manager to find that all her illustrious dinner guests had deserted her.

CHAPTER THREE

DESPITE the lateness of the hour, Romano stripped off by the edge of the palazzo’s perfect turquoise pool and dived in. Loose threads hung messily from the evening he’d left behind and in comparison this felt clean, simple. His arms moved, his muscles bunched and stretched, and he cut through the water. Expected actions brought expected results.

But even in fifty laps he couldn’t shake the sense of uneasiness that chased him up and down the pool. He pulled himself out of the water, picked up his clothes and walked across the terrace and through the house, naked.

Once in his bedroom he threw the floor-to-ceiling windows open and let the night breeze stir up the room. But as he lay in the dark he found it difficult to settle, to find any trace of the tranquillity this grand old house usually gave him.

More than once during the night he woke up to find he’d knotted the sheet quite spectacularly and had to sit up and untangle it again before punching his pillow, lying down and staring mutely at the inky sky outside his windows.

When dawn broke he gave up trying to sleep and put on shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes and set out on an uneven path that ran round the perimeter of the whole island. When he’d been a boy, he’d always thought the shape of Isola del Raverno resembled a tadpole. The palazzo was on the wide end, nearest the centre of the lake, and the long thin end reached towards a promontory on the shore, only a few hundred metres away. As he reached the ‘tail’ of the island he slowed to a jog, then came to a halt on the very tip. He stood there for quite some time, facing the wooded shore.

Monta Correnti was thirty kilometres to the west, hidden by rolling hills.

He’d waited here for Jackie once. His father had been back in Rome, either dealing with a business emergency or meeting a woman. Probably both. When he and his father had spent the summers here, Papa’s presence had been sporadic at best. Romano had often been left to his own devices, overseen by an assortment of servants, of course.

He’d hated that when he’d been young, but later he’d realised what a gift it had been. He’d relished the freedom that many teenagers yearned for but never experienced. No wonder he’d got a reputation for being a bit of a tearaway.

Not that he’d ever done anything truly bad. He’d been cheeky and thrill-seeking, not a delinquent. His father had indulged him to make up for the lack of a mother and his frequent absences and, with hindsight, Romano could see how it made him quite an immature seventeen-year-old, despite the cocky confidence that had come with a pair of broad shoulders and family money.

Perhaps it would have been better if Papa had been stricter. It had been too easy for Romano to play the part of a spoiled rich kid, not working hard enough at school, not giving a thought to what he wanted to do with his life, because the cushion of his father’s money and name had always been there, guarding his backside.

He turned away from the shore and looked back towards the palazzo. The tall square tower was visible through the trees, beautiful and ridiculous all at once. He exhaled, long and steady.

Jackie Patterson had never been just a fling, but it made things easier if he remembered her that way.

She’d challenged him. Changed him. Even though their summer romance had been short-lived, it had left an indelible mark on him. Up until then he’d been content to coast through life. Everything had come easily to him—money, popularity, female attention—he’d never had to work hard for any of it.

Meeting Jackie had been such a revelation. Under the unimpressed looks she’d given him as she’d waited tables at her mother’s restaurant, he’d seen fire and guts and more life in her than he’d seen in any of the silly girls who had flapped their lashes at him in the piazza each day. Maybe that was why he’d pursued her so relentlessly.

Although she’d been two years his junior, she’d put him to shame. She’d had such big plans, big dreams. Dreams she’d now made come true.

He turned and started to jog round the remaining section of the path, back towards the house.

After they’d broken up, he’d taken a long hard look at himself, asked himself what he wanted to make out of his life. He’d had all the opportunities a boy could want, all the privileges, and he’d not taken advantage of a single one. From that day on he’d decided to make the most of what he had. He’d finished school, amazing his teachers with his progress in his final year, and had gone to work for his father.

Some people had seen this as taking the easy option. In truth he’d wanted to do anything but work for the family firm. He’d wanted to spread his wings and fly. But his mother had died when he’d been six, before any siblings had come along, and the only close family he and Papa had were each other. So he’d done the mature thing, put the bonds of family before his own wishes, and joined Puccini Designs with a smile on his face. It hadn’t been a decision he’d regretted.

He’d kept running while he’d been thinking and now he looked around, he realised he was back in the sunken garden. He slowed to a walk. Even this place was filled with memories of Jackie—the most exquisite and the most intimate—all suddenly awakening after years of being mere shadows.

Did she ever think of the brief, wonderful time they’d had together? Had their relationship changed the course of her life too? Suddenly he really wanted to know. And more than that, he wanted to know who Jacqueline Patterson was now, whether the same raw energy and fire still existed beneath the polished, highlighted, glossy exterior.

Hopefully, the upcoming wedding would be the perfect opportunity to find out.

‘What’s up, little sister?’

Jackie put down the book she was reading and stared up at Lizzie from where she was sitting, shaded from the morning sun by a large tree, her back against its bark. ‘Nothing. I’m just relaxing.’

Lizzie made a noise that was half soft laugh, half snort. ‘Jackie, you’re the only person I know who can relax with every muscle in their body tensed,’ she said as she carefully lowered herself down onto the grass.

Jackie took a sideways look at Lizzie’s rounded stomach. Carrying one baby had been hard enough. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have two inside her.

Lizzie was smiling at her. An infuriatingly knowing, bigsister kind of smile.

Okay, maybe trying to do the usual holiday-type thing wasn’t such a great idea. She found relaxation a little…frustrating. She kept wanting to get up and do things. Especially today. Especially if it distracted her from remembering the look in Romano’s eyes last night when he’d reached for her hand across the table.

He’d made her feel fifteen again. Very dangerous. She couldn’t afford to believe the warmth in those laughing grey eyes. She couldn’t be tempted by impossible dreams of love and romance and for ever. It just wasn’t real. And he shouldn’t be able to make her feel as if it were. Not after all that had happened between them.

The nerve of the man!

Ah, this was better. The horrible achy, needy feeling was engulfed by a wash of anger. She knew how to do anger, how to welcome it in, how to harness its power to drive herself forwards. Who cared if it left an ugly grey wake of bitterness that stretched back through the years? She was surviving, and that was what counted.

Being angry with Romano Puccini was what she wanted, because without the anger it would be difficult to hate him, and she really, really needed to hate him.

Jackie exhaled, measuring her breath until her lungs were empty. This was better. Familiar territory. Hating Romano for rejecting her, for abandoning her and their daughter.

How could the man who had left her pregnant and alone, a mere girl, flirt with her as if nothing had happened?

‘You’re doing it again.’

Jackie hurt her neck as she snapped her head round to look at her sister. She’d half forgotten that Lizzie was sitting there and her comment had made Jackie jump. ‘Doing what?’

‘Staring off into space and looking fierce. Something’s up, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ The word shot out of her mouth before she had a chance to filter it. Lizzie leaned across and looked at her, resting her hand on Jackie’s forearm.

‘No…’ Jackie said, wearing the poker face she reserved for fashion shows, so no one could tell what her verdict on the clothes would be until it was printed in the magazine. ‘It’s nothing.’

Why had she said yes? It wasn’t as if she’d been planning on telling Lizzie her problems, certainly not in the run-up to her wedding. She looked at her sister. The poker face started to disintegrate as she saw the warmth and compassion in Lizzie’s eyes.

Could she tell Lizzie now? It would be such a relief to let it all spill out. Over the years, her secrets had woven themselves into a corset, holding her in, keeping her upright when she wanted to wilt, protecting her from humiliation. Seeing Romano last night had tightened the laces on that corset so that, instead of giving her security, it made her feel as if she were struggling to breathe. Suddenly she wanted to rip it all off and be free.

But it wasn’t the time to let go, even if her sister’s open face told her that she would understand, that she would comfort and not condemn. Already Lizzie was tapping into her maternal side, helped along by the buzzing pregnancy hormones. It brought out a whole extra dimension to her personality. She was going to be an excellent mother, really she was.

The sort of mother you have never been. May never be.

A shard of guilt hit Jackie so hard she almost whimpered, but she was too well rehearsed in damage limitation to let it show. Just as an underwater explosion of vast magnitude happening deep on the ocean floor might only produce a small irregularity on the surface, she kept it all in, hoping that Lizzie couldn’t read the ripples on her face.

She smiled back at her sister, squinting a little as she faced the morning sun. ‘It’s just wedding jitters.’

Lizzie’s concerned look was banished by her throaty laugh. ‘I thought it was me who was supposed to get the jitters.’

Jackie saw her chance and grabbed it, turned the spotlight back where it should be. ‘Have you? Got any jitters?’

Lizzie shook her head. ‘No. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.’ She went quiet, gazing out over the gardens, but the look on Lizzie’s face wasn’t fierce or hard; it was soft and warm and full of love. Jackie envied her that look.

She leaned in and gave her sister a kiss on the cheek. ‘Good.’ This was about as expressive as communication got in their family. But Lizzie got that. She knew how pleased her little sister was for her.

Lizzie began to move and Jackie stood up to lend her a hand as she heaved herself off the slightly dewy grass. ‘Why don’t you get rid of those jitters of yours by going into town with Mamma and Scarlett? They’re planning to leave shortly.’

‘Maybe.’

As she watched Lizzie walk away Jackie decided against the idea of joining her mother and other sister on their jaunt. A morning in the company of those two would give her grey hairs.

Going into Monta Correnti, however, taking some time to rediscover her home town, to see whether it still matched the vivid pictures in her head, now that was a plan she could cope with.

Exploring Monta Correnti was fun, but it didn’t take more than an hour or so, and Jackie soon returned to feeling restless. She kept wandering anyway, and ended up in the little piazza near the church, outside Sorella.

It was late morning and Scarlett and Mamma were probably inside, having a cool drink before they decided what they were going to eat for lunch. She really should go in and join them.

But beautiful smells were coming from Uncle Luca’s restaurant next door and, despite the fact she’d sworn off carbs, she had a hankering for a simple dish of pasta, finished off with his famous basil and tomato sauce.

So, feeling decidedly rebellious, she sidestepped her mother’s restaurant and headed for Rosa. Uncle Luca was always good for a warm welcome and she wanted to pump him for more information on all of Isabella’s brothers. This year had certainly been a bombshell one for her extended family. So much had happened already. First, there had been the shocking announcement that Uncle Luca had two sons living in America that nobody had known about. Isabella had been trying to get in contact, but she wasn’t having much luck. The family had thought that sending invitations to Lizzie’s wedding might help break the ice, but Alessandro had declined and Angelo hadn’t even bothered to reply.

Personally, Jackie wasn’t too optimistic about Isabella getting any further with that. This family was so dysfunctional it wasn’t funny. But she understood the need to heal and mend, to ache to bring forgotten children back into the fold.

She also wanted news of Isabella’s little brothers. She didn’t know if Valentino was in Monta Correnti at the moment or not, but it would be great to catch up with him before the hustle and bustle of Lizzie’s wedding. She also wanted to find out the latest news on Cristiano. Mamma had announced last night that he’d been injured at work, fighting a fire in Rome, and was currently in hospital. Of course, Mamma had made it all sound totally dramatic, even though he’d only suffered minor injuries. Jackie would have preferred an update straight from her uncle, minus the histrionics, hopefully. Cristiano wasn’t going to make it to the wedding either, which was such a pity. She’d always had a soft spot for him.

The entrance to Rosa was framed by two olive trees in terracotta pots. Jackie brushed past them and stood in the arched doorway, looking round the restaurant. The interior always made her smile. Such a difference from Sorella’s dark wood grain and minimalist decor.

Everything inside was a little outdated and shabby, but, somehow, it added to the charm. There was a tiled floor, wooden tables and chairs in various shapes and styles, fake ivy climbing up the pillars and strings of garlic and straw-covered bottles hanging from the ceiling. Locals knew better than to judge a restaurant’s food by its decor. Sorella, next door, was where the rich visitors and tourists ate, but Rosa was where the locals came, where families celebrated, where life happened.

At this time of day, the restaurant was deserted, but not silent. There was a hell of a racket coming from the kitchen. A heated argument seemed to be taking place between two women, but Jackie couldn’t identify the voices above the banging of pots and pans and the interjections of head chef Lorenzo.

Unfortunately his fierce growling was not having the desired effect, because nobody shot through the kitchen door looking penitent. However, she heard someone enter the restaurant behind her.

Jackie had never been one for small talk. She didn’t chat to old ladies at bus stops, or join in with the good-natured banter when stuck in a long queue. Perhaps it was her upbringing in Italy. When things went wrong, she wanted to complain. Loudly. So she didn’t turn round and make a joke of the situation; she just ignored whoever it was. For a few seconds, anyway.

‘Buon giorno.’

The warm tones, the hint of a smile in the voice, made her spine snap to attention. She licked her lips and frowned.

‘Are you stalking me?’ she said, without looking round.

Romano had the grace not to laugh. ‘No. I came to see Isabella, but I won’t lie—I was hoping I would run into you this morning.’

She didn’t dignify the pause that followed with an answer.

‘Jackie?’

She took a deep, calming breath, opening her ribs and drawing the air in using her diaphragm, just as her personal trainer had taught her. It didn’t work. And that just irritated her further. She’d bet the man standing behind her didn’t have to be taught how to breathe, how to relax.

He wasn’t standing behind her any more. While she’d been on her way to hyperventilating he’d walked round her until she had no choice but to look at him.

‘I would like to talk with you. I believe we have some things to discuss, some mistakes from the past to sort out.’

Now she abandoned any thoughts of correct breathing and just looked at him. That, of course, was her big mistake. The expression on his face was so unlike him—serious, earnest—that she started to feel her carefully built defences crumbling.

What if he actually wanted to acknowledge Kate after all these years? What if he really wanted to make amends? Could she let her pride prevent that?

No.

She couldn’t do that to her daughter. She had to hear him out.

As always, Romano had sensed the course of her mood change before it had even registered on her face.

‘Have lunch with me,’ he said.

Lunch? That might be pushing it a bit far. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but the kitchen door crashed open, cutting her off.

‘We have to, Isabella!’ Scarlett said, marching into the dining area, looking very put out indeed. ‘What if she talks to him again? What if—?’

‘I don’t think it is the right time,’ Isabella countered in Italian. ‘After the wedding, maybe.’

Scarlett, as always, was taking the need for patience as a personal affront. ‘After the wedding might be too late! You know that.’

Isabella’s hands made her reply as she threw them in the air and glared at her cousin. ‘You’re so impulsive! Let’s just wait and see how things—’

It was at that moment that she spotted Jackie and Romano, her view half blocked by a pillar, both staring at her.

‘—turn out,’ she finished, much more quietly, and gave Scarlett, who was still watching Isabella intently, a dig in the ribs. Scarlett turned, eyes full of confusion, but they suddenly widened.

‘Jackie!’ she said warmly, smiling and rushing over to give her a hug. Jackie stayed stiff in her embrace. It felt awkward, wrong. But she had to give Scarlett credit where credit was due—she was putting on a wonderful show.

‘Isabella and I were just talking…’

That much had been evident.

Scarlett paused, her gaze flicked quickly to the ceiling and back again. ‘We’re planning a surprise hen party for Lizzie and we want to drag you out to lunch to help us organise it!’

Isabella looked at Scarlett as if she’d gone out of her mind.

Isabella voiced Jackie’s very thought. ‘I don’t think Lizzie—’

‘Nonsense!’ Scarlett said with a sweep of her hands. ‘And there’s no time like the present. You don’t mind, do you, Romano?’

Romano didn’t really have time to say whether he minded or not, because Scarlett grabbed Jackie’s elbow and used it as leverage to push her back out into the sunshine, while Isabella followed.

Yep, thought Jackie, rubbing her elbow once she’d snatched it back, Scarlett was getting more and more like their mother every year.

Once they were clear of the tables and umbrellas out front of the restaurant, Jackie turned and faced them. ‘You two are deranged!’

Isabella looked at the cobbles below her feet, while a flash of discomfort passed across Scarlett’s eyes. ‘We need to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Don’t we, Isabella?’ She hung a lead weight on every word of that last sentence.

Jackie looked towards the restaurant door, not sure if she was annoyed or relieved that her chance meeting with Romano had been unexpectedly hijacked. She looked back at her cousin and her sister in time to see a look pass between them. Isabella let out a soft sigh of defeat.

‘I suppose we do. But we need to go somewhere private,’ she said. ‘Somewhere we won’t be interrupted or overheard.’

The three of them looked around the small piazza at the heart of Monta Correnti hopelessly. Growing up in a small town like this, you couldn’t sneeze without the grapevine going into action. And, this being Italy, the grapevine had always had its roots back at your mamma’s house. She’d be waiting with a handkerchief and a don’t-mess-with-me expression when you got home.

That was why Jackie and Romano had gone to such lengths to keep their relationship secret once their respective parents had warned them off each other. They’d been careful never to be seen in public together unless it was when Romano and his father had eaten at Sorella on one of Jackie’s waitressing shifts.

Scarlett stopped gazing around the piazza and put her hands on her hips. She fixed Isabella with a determined look. ‘I know one place where we won’t be disturbed.’ She raised her eyebrows and waited for her cousin’s reaction.

‘You don’t mean…?’ Then Isabella nodded just once. ‘Come on, then,’ she said and marched off across the old town’s market square. ‘We’d better get going.’

A low branch snapped back and hit Jackie in the face. She lost her footing a little and gave her right ankle a bit of a twist. Nothing serious, but she’d been dressed for a stroll around town and a leisurely lunch, not a safari.

‘Sorry,’ called Scarlett over her shoulder as she tramped confidently down the steep hill.

Jackie said nothing.

What had started off as a brisk walk had turned into a full-on hike through the woods. Her stomach was rumbling and she was starting to doubt that food was anywhere in the near future. What kind of shindig was Scarlett planning for Lizzie that involved all this special-forces-type secrecy?

Eventually the trees thinned and the three women reached a small, shady clearing at the bottom of the hill with a small stream running through it. Jackie smoothed her hair down with one hand and discovered far too many twigs and miscellaneous seeds for her liking. When she’d finished picking them out, she looked up to see Isabella and Scarlett busy righting old crates and brushing the moss and dirt off a couple of medium-sized tree stumps.

As she looked around more closely Jackie could see a few branches tied together with twine lying on the floor, obviously part of some makeshift construction that had now collapsed. A torn blue tarpaulin was attached by a bit of old rope at one corner to the lower branch of a tree while its other end flapped free.

Scarlett sat herself on the taller of the two tree stumps and motioned with great solemnity for Jackie to take the sturdiest-looking crate. Isabella took the other crate, but it wobbled, so she stood up and leaned against a tree. Jackie suddenly wanted to laugh.

It all felt a bit ridiculous. Three grown women, sitting round the remains of an ancient childhood campfire. She started to chuckle softly, but the shocked look on Scarlett’s face killed the sound off while it was still in her throat. She looked from her sister to her cousin and back again.

‘So…What’s this all about? You’re not planning something illegal for Lizzie’s hen do, are you?’

Scarlett looked genuinely puzzled and every last trace of hilarity abruptly left Jackie at that point. Despite the summer sun pouring through the leafy canopy, she shivered.

‘It’s you we need to talk to,’ Isabella said. ‘The party was just an excuse.’

Scarlett looked scornful at Jackie’s tardiness to catch on. ‘Can you imagine what Lizzie would do if we planned a night of debauchery and silliness? Not very good for her public image.’

Not good for anyone’s image, Jackie thought.

Scarlett stood up and looked around the clearing. ‘This was our camp. Isabella and I used to come here to share secrets.’

‘I remember how close you both were—joined at the hip, Uncle Luca used to joke. It was such a shame that you fell out. I thought—’

‘Jackie! Please? Just let me talk?’

The hint of desperation in her sister’s voice sent cold spiralling down into Jackie’s intestines.

‘This is difficult enough as it is,’ Scarlett said, and stood up and ran a hand through her hair. She looked across at Isabella.

‘There’s no easy way to say this,’ Isabella continued. She pushed herself away from the trunk of the tree she’d been leaning on and started pacing. Jackie just clasped her hands together on her knees and watched the two women as they walked to and fro in silence for a few seconds, then Scarlett planted her feet on the floor and looked Jackie squarely in the eye.

‘We know your secret.’

Although her mouth didn’t open, Jackie’s jaw dropped a few notches. Her secret? Not about Kate, surely? They had to mean some other secret—the anorexia, maybe. Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘And what secret would that be, exactly?’

The leaves whispered above their heads, and when Isabella’s answer came it was only just audible. ‘About the baby.’

An invisible juggernaut hit Jackie in the chest.

‘You know I…? You know about…?’

Their faces confirmed it and she gave up trying to get a sentence out.

But exactly how much did they know? All of it? She stood up.

‘You know I was pregnant when I went away to live with my father?’

They both nodded, eyes wide.

‘You know I gave the baby up for adoption?’

Isabella nodded again. ‘No one told us, but it was kind of obvious when you came home the following summer without a baby.’

Oh, Lord. They knew everything. She sat down again, but she’d chosen the wrong crate and it tipped over, leaving her on her hands and knees in the dirt. Both Isabella and Scarlett rushed to help her up. She was shaking when she grabbed onto their arms for support.