THE ITALIAN DUKE’S WIFE
Пенни Джордан
In Penny Jordan"s latest book, The Italian Duke"s Wife,
an Italian aristocrat chooses a young English woman
as his convenient wife. When he unleashes within
her a desire she never knew she possessed, he is soon
regretting his no-consummation rule….
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was not going to do the girly thing and burst into
tears, Jodie told herself, gritting her teeth. It might be
growing dark; she might be feeling sick with that familiar
stomach-churning fear that she had made a big
mistake — and about more than just the direction she
had taken in that last village she had passed through
what seemed like for ever ago; tonight might be the
night she and John should have been spending at their
romantic honeymoon hotel — their first night as husband
and wife…but she was not going to cry. Not
now, and in fact not ever, ever again over any man.
Not ever. Love was out of her life and out of her
vocabulary and it was going to stay out.
She winced as her small hire car lurched into a
deep rut in the road — a road which was definitely
climbing towards the mountains when it should have
been dropping down towards the sea.
Her cousin and his wife, her only close family since
her parents" death in a car accident when Jodie was
nineteen, had tried to dissuade her from coming to
Italy.
"But everything’s paid for," she had reminded
them. "And besides…"
Besides, she wanted to be out of the country, and
she wanted to stay out of it for the next few weeks
during the build-up to John’s marriage to his new
fiance.e, Louise, who had taken Jodie’s place in his
heart, in his life, and in his future.
Not that she’d told her cousin David or Andrea, his
wife, about that part of her decision as yet. She knew
they would have tried to persuade her to stay at home.
But when home was a very small Cotswold market
town, where everyone knew you and knew that you
had been dumped by your fiance. less than a month
before your wedding because he had fallen in love
with someone else, it was not somewhere anyone with
any pride could possibly want to be. And Jodie had
as much pride as the next woman, if not more. So
much more that she longed to be able to prove to
everyone, but most especially to John and Louise
themselves, how little John’s treachery mattered to
her. Of course the most effective way to do that would
be to turn up at their wedding with another man — a
man who was better-looking and richer than John, and
who adored her. Oh, if only…
In your dreams, she scoffed mentally at herself.
There was no way that that scenario was likely to
happen.
"Jodie, you can’t possibly go to Italy on your own,"
David had protested, whilst he and Andrea had exchanged
meaningful looks she hadn’t been supposed
to see. It was probably just as well they were now in
Australia on an extended visit to Andrea’s parents.
"Why not?" she had demanded with brittle emphasis.
"After all, that’s the way I’m going to be spending
the rest of my life."
"Jodie, we both understand how hurt and shocked
you are," Andrea had added gently. "Don’t think that
David and I Don’t feel for you, but behaving like this
isn’t going to help."
"It will help me," Jodie had answered stubbornly.
***
It had been John’s idea that they spend their honeymoon
exploring Italy’s beautiful Amalfi coast.
Jodie winced as the hire car hit another pothole in
the road, which was so badly maintained that it was
becoming increasingly uncomfortable to drive.
Her leg was aching badly, and she was beginning
to regret not having chosen to spend her first night
closer to Naples. Where on earth was she? Nowhere
near where she was supposed to be, she suspected.
The directions for the small village set back from the
coast had been almost impossible to follow, detailing
roads she had not been able to find on her tourist map.
If John had been here with her none of this would
have happened. But John was not with her, and he
was never going to be with her again.
She must not think of her now ex-fiance., or the fact
that he had fallen out of love with her and in love
with someone else, or that he had been seeing that
someone else behind her back, or that virtually everyone
in her home village had apparently known about
it apart from Jodie herself. Louise, so Jodie’s friends
had now told her, had made it obvious that she
wanted and intended to have John from the moment
they had been introduced, following her parents"
move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had
been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that
Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to
make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie reflected
bitterly. She should have realised how shallow
John was when he had told her that he loved her "in
spite of her leg". She winced as the pain in it intensified.
She was never going to make the kind of mistake
she had made with John again. From now on her heart
was going to be impervious to "love"—yes, even
though that meant at twenty-six she would be facing
the rest of her life alone. What made it worse was
that John had seemed so trustworthy, so honest and
so kind. She had let him into her life and, even more
humiliatingly painful to acknowledge now, into her
fears and her dreams. No way was she going to risk
having another man treat her as John had done — one
minute swearing eternal love, the next…
And as for John himself, he was welcome to
Louise, and they were obviously suited to one another,
too, since they were both deceitful cheats and
liars. But she, coward that she was, could not face
going home until the wedding was over, until all the
fuss had died down and until she was not going to be
the recipient of pitying looks, the subject of hushed
gossip.
"Well, let’s look on the bright side," Andrea had
said lightly when she had realised Jodie was not going
to be persuaded to abandon her plans. "You never
know — you might meet someone in Italy and fall
head over heels in love. Italian men are so gorgeously
sexy and passionate."
Italian men — or any kind of men — were off the life
menu for her from now on, Jodie told herself furiously.
Men, marriage, love — she no longer wanted
anything to do with
any of them.
Angrily Jodie depressed the accelerator. She had
no idea where this appallingly bumpy road was going
to take her, but she wasn’t going to turn back. From
now on there would be no U-turns in her life, no
looking back in misery or despair, no regrets about
what might have been. She was going to face firmly
forward.
David and Andrea had been wonderfully kind to
her, offering her their spare room when she had sold
her cottage so that she could put the sale proceeds
towards the house she and John were buying — which
had not, with hindsight, been the most sensible of
things to do — but she couldn’t live with her cousin
and his wife for ever.
Luckily John had at least given her her money
back, but the break-up of their engagement had still
cost her her job, since she had worked for his father
in the family business. John was due to take over
when his father retired.
So now she had neither home nor job, and she was
going to be—
She yelped as the offside front wheel hit something
hard, the impact causing her to lurch forward painfully
against the constraint of her seat belt. How much
further was she going to have to drive before she
found some form of life? She was booked into a hotel
tonight, and according to her calculations she should
have reached her destination by now. Where on earth
was she? The road was climbing so steeply…
"You, I take it, are responsible for this? It has your
manipulative, destructive touch all over it, Caterina,"
Lorenzo Niccolo d’Este, Duce di Montesavro, accused
his cousin-in-law with savage contempt as he
threw his grandmother’s will onto the table between
them.
"If your grandmother took my feelings into account
when she made her will, then that was because—"
"Your feelings!" Lorenzo interrupted her bitingly.
"And what feelings exactly would those be? The same
feelings that led to you bullying my cousin to his
death?" He was making no attempt whatsoever to conceal
his contempt for her.
Two ugly red patches of angry colour burned betrayingly
on Caterina’s immaculately made-up face.
"I did not drive Gino to his death. He had a heart
attack."
"Yes, brought on by your behaviour."
"You had better be careful what you accuse me of,
Lorenzo, otherwise…"
"You dare to threaten me?" Lorenzo demanded.
"You may have managed to deceive my grandmother,
but you cannot deceive me."
He turned his back on her to pace the stone-flagged
floor of the Castillo’s Great Hall, his pent-up fury
rendering him as savagely dangerous as a caged animal
of prey.
"Admit it," he challenged as he swung round again
to confront her. "You came here deliberately intending
to manipulate and deceive an elderly dying
woman for your own ends."
"You know that I have no desire to quarrel with
you, Lorenzo," Caterina protested. "All I want—"
"I already know what you want," Lorenzo reminded
her coldly. "You want the privilege, the position, and
the wealth that becoming my wife would give you—
and it is for that reason that you harried a confused
elderly woman you knew to be dying into changing
her will. If you had any compassion, any—" He broke
off in disgust. "But of course you do not, as I already
know."
His furious contempt had caused the smile to fade
from her lips and her body to stiffen into hostility as
she abandoned any pretence of innocence.
"You can make as many accusations as you wish,
Lorenzo, but you cannot prove any of them," she
taunted him.
"Perhaps not in a court of law, but that does not
alter their veracity. My grandmother’s notary has told
me that when she summoned him to her bedside in
order to alter her will, she confided to him the reason
that she was doing so."
Lorenzo saw the look of unashamed triumph in
Caterina’s eyes.
"Admit it, Lorenzo. I have bested you. If you want
the Castillo — and we both know that you do — then
you will have to marry me. You have no other
choice." She laughed, throwing back her head to expose
the olive length of her throat, and Lorenzo had
a savage impulse to close his hands around it and
squeeze the laughter from her it. He did want the
Castillo. He wanted it very badly. And he was determined
to have it. And he was equally determined that
he was not going to be trapped into marrying
Caterina.
"You told my grandmother I loved you and wanted
to make you my wife. You told her that the fact that
you were so newly widowed, and that your husband
Gino was my cousin, meant that society would frown
upon an immediate marriage between us. And you
told her you were afraid my passion would overwhelm
me and that I would marry you anyway and
thus bring disgrace upon myself, didn’t you?" he accused
her. "You knew how na..ve my grandmother
was, how ignorant of modern mores. You tricked her
into believing you were confiding in her out of concern
for me. You told her you didn’t know what to
do or how you could protect me. Then you ""helped""
her to come up with the solution of changing her will,
so that instead of inheriting the Castillo from her — as
her previous will had stated — I would only inherit it
if I was married within six weeks of her death. As
you told her, everyone knows how important to me
the Castillo is. And then, as though that were not
enough, you conceived the added inducement of persuading
her to add that if I did not marry within those
six weeks, you would inherit the Castillo. You led her
to believe that in making those changes she was enabling
me to marry you, because I could say I was
fulfilling the terms of her will rather than following
the dictates of my heart."
"You can’t prove any of that." She shrugged contemptuously.
Lorenzo knew that what she had said was true.
"As I’ve already told you, Nonna confided her
thoughts to her notary," he continued acidly. "Unfortunately,
by the time he managed to alert me to what
was going on, it was too late."
"Much too late — for you." Caterina smirked at him.
"So you admit it?"
"So what if I do? You can’t prove it," Caterina repeated.
"And even if you could, what good would it
do?"
"Let me make this clear to you, Caterina. No matter
what my grandmother has written in her will, you will
never become my wife. You are the last woman I
would want to give my name to."
Caterina laughed. "You have no choice."
Lorenzo had a reputation for being a formidable
and ruthless adversary. He was the kind of man other
m
en both respected and feared — the kind of man
women dreamed excitedly of enticing into their beds.
He was also a superb male animal, strikingly handsome,
with a hormone-unleashing combination of arrogance
and a predatory, very dangerous male sexuality—
a sexuality that he wore as easily as a panther
wore its coat. He was not just a prize, but perhaps the
most coveted prize amongst the very best of Italy’s
most eligible and wealthy men. All through his twenties
gossip columns had seethed with excited interest,
trying to guess which high-born young woman he
would make his duchess. It certainly wasn’t from any
lack of willing partners to share his wealth and his
title, along with enjoying the sexual pleasure of mating
with such a vigorously sensual man, that he had
escaped into his thirties without making any kind of
formal commitment to the women who had pursued
him.
Lorenzo looked at his late cousin’s wife. He despised
and loathed her. But then, he despised most
women. From what he had experienced of them they
were all willing to give him whatever he wanted because
of what he had, what was outside the inner him:
wealth, a title, and a handsome male body. What he
actually was was of no interest to them. His thoughts,
his beliefs, all that went to make up the man who was
Lorenzo d’Este didn’t matter to them anywhere near
so much as his money and his social position.
"You have no choice, Lorenzo," Caterina repeated
softly. "If you want the Castillo you have to marry
me."
Lorenzo permitted his mouth to curl in sardonic
disdain.
"I have to marry, yes," he agreed softly. "But nowhere
does it say that I have to marry you. You have
obviously not read my grandmother’s will thoroughly."
Her face blanched, her narrowed eyes betraying her
confusion and distrust.
"What do you mean? Of course I have read it. I
dictated it! I—"
"I repeat, you did not read the will my grandmother
signed thoroughly enough," Lorenzo told her. "You
see, it stipulates only that I must marry within six
weeks of her death if I want to inherit the Castillo
from her. It does not specify who I should marry."
Caterina stared at him, unable to conceal her anger.
It stripped from her the good looks which had in her
youth made her a sought-after model, and left in their
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