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www.millsandboon.co.uk
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.