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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.