have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How
could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but
what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for
someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign
of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk?
To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to
the last village she had passed through what felt like
hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her
now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She
gave a small shiver.
She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the
time she had been on this road, but someone must use
it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She
looked up towards the mountains, and, as though
somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw
the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards
her.
The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.
Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the
black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger
and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce
of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road
in front of him.
Caterina had been very clever, working on his
grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been
here… But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting
the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find
ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been
caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role
within the government, unifying different charities
and providing hands-on administrative practical help
and expertise.
The severity of this particular crisis had meant that
he had not even been able to return to Italy for his
grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to
find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a
local place of worship and add his prayers to those
of her other mourners.
A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once
told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a
nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.
The Castillo had come to her through her first husband
who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles,
had also been the second cousin of her second husband,
Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the
Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.
He had always been her favourite out of her two
grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays
with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had
been his grandmother he had turned to when his
mother had announced that she was marrying her
lover — a man Lorenzo detested.
He had never been able to bring himself to forgive
his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his
father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to
the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and
their determination to put themselves first whilst laying
claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His
mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce
his father had been taken to spare him the pain
of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of
course. His feelings had been the last thing on her
mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and
chosen him above her husband and her son.
The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition
of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and
changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then
cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he
saw a car blocking the road and a young woman
standing beside it.
Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes,
choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it
skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of
the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand
upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support,
the moment she had seen the other car.
What kind of madman drove like that down a road
like this — and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily,
holding on to the door of the car for support as she
watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and
come towards her.
'Disgraziata!' A stream of Italian followed the
snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled
at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed
by him — or by any man — ever again.
'When you’ve quite finished…' Jodie interrupted
him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. 'For a
start, I’m not Italian. I’m English. And—'
'English?' He made it sound as though he had
never heard the word before. 'What are you doing
here? Why are you on this road? It is a private road
and leads only to the Castillo.' The questions were
thrown at her like so many deadly sharp stiletto
knives.
'I took a wrong turning,' Jodie defended herself. 'I
was trying to turn round, but a wheel got stuck, and
now the tyre is flat.'
She was pale and thin, her eyes huge in the exhausted
triangle of her small face, her fair hair
