was frowning. Immediately her chin tilted proudly.
'I have a problem with my leg. I was in an accident
and it was damaged. Sometimes when it gets overtired…'
She looked away from him. 'If you Don’t
want to marry me because of it, then—'
'Is that what he told you? The man you were to
marry?' Lorenzo guessed. 'That he didn’t want you
because of it?'
Jodie’s face burned. She had said too much — a
mistake she could only put down to her tiredness and
the stress of everything that had happened to her.
'No.'
'But it was a cause of some conflict between you?'
Lorenzo continued to probe.
'He didn’t like the fact that it was…damaged.' She
made an attempt at a dismissive shrug. 'But then,
that’s only natural, isn’t it? Men do like beautiful
women, and—'
'It is an intrinsic part of human nature to value
beauty,' Lorenzo told her. 'But sometimes the greatest
beauty of all comes only through suffering and pain.'
Jodie looked at him uncertainly. She was too tired
to try and analyse such a cryptic, sombre remark.
Instead, she looked longingly towards the bed.
Lorenzo followed the direction of her gaze.
'I’ll leave you now. You should find everything
you need in the bathroom, but if you do not then just
ask Pietro when he brings up your case. He will inform
Maria, and she will attend to it.'
'Pietro and Maria,' she said, carefully repeating
their names. 'Your servants?'
'They look after the Castillo. Originally they were
employed by my grandmother. By rights they should
both retire, but this has always been their home and
it would be a cruelty to send them away now — or to
imply that they are not able to be of any use,' he
added warningly. 'Once I have spoken with my lawyer,
and put in hand the arrangements for our marriage,
I shall address the matter of making this place
more habitable.'
They were going to be living here? There were so
many questions she knew she ought to be asking, but
right now she was too exhausted to care about anything
other than getting some sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
AT LEAST the bath water was hot, and the towels
Maria had brought for her, bustling importantly into
the bedroom on a stream of incomprehensible Italian
whilst she inspected Jodie with her sharp gaze, were
deliciously soft and thick.
As in the bedroom, the decor in her en suite bathroom
was very plain, but there was no mistaking the
quality of the sanitaryware or the cool smartness of
the marble covering the floor and walls.
Wrapped in one of the towels, Jodie padded barefoot
back to her bedroom and opened her case,
quickly searching through it for the nightshirt she
knew she had packed. But when she lifted her neatly
packed tops out of the case she started to frown. Her
nightshirt was there, all right, but so also was the
deliciously frivolous new underwear she had bought
for her honeymoon: bras and short knickers in floral
patterns; silk thongs that fastened with satin bows; a
sheer floral mini-slip that was so pretty she hadn’t
been able to resist it; even the cream lace and satin
basque she had bought on a sudden impulse one
lunchtime after yet another evening spent with John
refusing to do anything more than indulge in gentle
'petting'.
She hadn’t known then, of course, that the reason
he had not taken their intimacy to its logical conclusion
had not been because he had loved her so much,
but because he had loved her so little. Now, thanks
to Louise, she knew that all the time she had been
aching for him and admiring his restraint he had secretly
been turned off by her.
What on earth was this stuff doing in her case? She
found the answer in a small note from her cousin-inlaw,
tucked in between the folds of her nightshirt.
It seemed such a pity not to take these with you.
You never know, you might meet someone who will
appreciate them — and you.
Jodie almost laughed out loud. Andrea had had
more of a presentiment than even she could have
guessed! As a bride-to-be, she ought to be able to find
a use for such frivolous items, but she knew that
Lorenzo would be even less appreciative of both them
and her than John had been.
She pulled on her nightgown and closed the case,
placing it on the floor before crawling into the middle
of the huge bed and switching off the light.
By rights she ought to be thinking about the situation
she had put herself into and working out how
best to extricate herself from it, but she was far, far
