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Once while she was at university there had been a boy. He had wanted to be her lover… a wild ragazzo from the streets of Naples, sponsored by a wealthy benefactor because of his intelligence. She had not been able to hide from him her indifference to his feelings.
He had accused her then of not being ‘real’, of not being a person in her own right. She had listened gravely to his insults and then calmly cut him out of her life, relieved, if the truth was known, to end the acquaintanceship with him, because deep down inside her part of her had been disturbed by him, not sexually, but mentally, and she had resented that quiet ripple across the placid surface of her life.
How complacent she had been. How stupidly, wantonly complacent.
She closed her eyes, and Elliott, glancing at her through his mirror, was thankful that they were nearly home. If she was going to burst into tears, he would rather it was when Bea was there to cope and commiserate. As the thought formed, her eyelids lifted, and the golden eyes flashed proud rejection of his thoughts back at him.
So she was not as remote and serene as she appeared. She had pride and spirit. She would need them if she was to succeed in her plans to form a completely new life for herself, more in step with the modern world than the old-fashioned protected one of her grandfather.
‘Nearly there,’ he told her, turning off the main road and driving through the small Cotswold village that was only a handful of miles from his and Beatrice’s home.
The village delighted Francesca, and she swiftly recognised the Tudor architecture of the stone cottages. History was her love, and because her mother was English she had studied British history in almost as much detail as she had Italian.
‘Here we are.’
Elliott turned in through the gates of the mellow Cotswold house. Even before they had left the car, the front door was thrown open and a young woman came hurrying out. Older than Francesca, she nevertheless had an unexpected youthfulness that the Italian girl hadn’t anticipated, having heard many times of how Beatrice had been the mainstay and substitute mother to her family after her parents’ death.
She wasn’t as tall as Francesca herself, and was slightly plumper, a baby clutched in one arm while a blond-haired little boy ran forward to fling himself into Elliott’s arms almost before the car door was open.
‘Welcome to England,’ Beatrice greeted her with a warm smile. ‘Come inside. You must be feeling the cold after Italy. You must tell me if your room isn’t warm enough. The central heating’s on, but all the bedrooms have fires and we can light one for you if necessary. I hope you won’t mind dining en famille tonight. Henrietta, who runs the house and us, is away visiting friends at the moment, and I’m afraid everything is rather disorganised.
‘By the way,’ Beatrice asked her, as she urged her inside the house, ‘what are we to call you? Francesca… or do you have a nickname—Chessie perhaps?’
Beatrice’s warm, friendly smile touched something inside her that reminded her very much of her mother.
No one in il Duca’s household was allowed the informality of having their name abbreviated, and consequently all her life she had been Francesca; a graceful, elegant name, which she suddenly realised had often been a very difficult one to live up to. Chessie, now… Chessie conjured up a very different image indeed. A Chessie might be permitted all kinds of follies and foolishnesses never permitted a Francesca, and so, turning her back on the rigorous training of twenty-four years, Francesca returned Beatrice’s smile and said firmly, ‘Chessie will be fine.’
Chessie…
She savoured the name to herself as she followed Beatrice upstairs. It had an untrammelled, freedom-loving sound to it that she liked; it made her feel young and vibrant… it made her feel she was free of the burden of being the granddaughter of the Duca di Valeria, the rejected promised wife of Paolo di Calveri.
From her room she could see over the surrounding countryside. She felt curiously at home here in a way she had not expected. She liked her hostess, and suspected she would also like her host once she had got to know him.
Initially she had protested when her godparents had arranged this break for her, but she had been too listless to resist their plans. Now that she was here, though, she wondered that she had never thought of coming before. Here no one knew about her and Paolo, apart from her hosts. No one cared that she was the granddaughter of il duca… no one would ever call her ‘Francesca’ in that curt, disapproving tone of her grandfather’s that had so often chilled the warmth of her youth.
Here she was Chessie… a young woman just like any other, with enough qualifications to find herself a job should she so wish… with surely her whole future spread out in front of her, rather like her view of the pretty countryside.
A sense of eagerness and adventure she had not experienced in a long long time flowed through her. She started to unpack her cases, humming as she did so.
CHAPTER TWO
‘THIS DINNER PARTY, are you sure you do not need any help?’ Francesca asked gravely, with memories of her mother’s dinner parties and the days of anxiety and tension that preceded them lest she fell short of her father-in-law’s exalted standards in some way and called down his wrath upon her head.
Beatrice laughed.
‘No… everything’s under control. Most of the food was prepared last week before Henry left, and it’s in the freezer… as for the rest… well, our friends are very easygoing and quite happy to take pot luck.’
‘Pot luck?’ Francesca wrinkled her forehead and obligingly Beatrice explained the phrase for her.
‘But the silver—the crystal… You have no maid, and surely these will need to be cleaned?’
‘Henry and I did all that before she left. We live quite simply here, Chessie,’ Beatrice told her gently.
Immediately Francesca flushed, and Beatrice was quick to comfort her.
‘Please don’t be embarrassed. We know that you come from a very different and far grander background than ours.’
‘My mother says that the formality insisted upon by my grandfather is no longer necessary, but nothing anyone can say will make him change his ways. My mother says he takes pride in them. He is very arrogant.’
‘And you both love him and resent him,’ Beatrice guessed. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, to constantly strive for the approval and affection of someone who only seems to notice you’re there when you do the wrong things?’
‘Very,’ Francesca agreed bleakly. ‘So… if I cannot help with the meal, perhaps I could take charge of the children.’
‘No. What you can do is to make yourself so alluringly beautiful that none of my male guests will be able to take their eyes off you, and with their wives watching them watching you, I shan’t have to worry if my food isn’t up to scratch, shall I?’ Beatrice teased her, calmly accepting the change of subject and its implications. She had no intentions of putting any pressure on Francesca to discuss the past or her family with her; she simply wanted the Italian girl to feel at home with them. Sometimes she had such a look of taut constraint that Beatrice ached to tell her that what she was enduring would eventually pass, but she sensed that Francesca was too proud to welcome any intrusion into her personal pain, however well-meant.
‘Could you help us?’ Lucia had begged her in that unexpected telephone call four weeks ago. ‘We have a god-daughter, a charming, beautiful girl, who is simply fading away before our eyes. She needs a change of scene, a change of life-style…” And she had gone on to explain to Beatrice exactly what had happened.
‘It is not in her heart that she is hurt, but in her pride, in her belief in herself, and these can be even harder wounds to bear. But I think they will heal more easily if she is away from Italy, and more especially if she is away from her grandfather.’
And so Beatrice had readily agreed to invite Francesca to stay. And not just because of the debt she herself owed the Fioris.
It had been Lucia who had counselled her so wisely when she had thought her own love for Elliott to be hopeless—she had believed that it must be impossible for him to love her. But even without that debt she would still have wanted to help.
Elliott arrived home an hour before their dinner guests were due.
‘I take it Oliver’s still included in the guest list?’ he asked her, after mixing them both a drink, bringing them up to the bedroom, and telling her to sit down for five minutes and relax.
‘Yes.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Elliott, I’m not trying to matchmake, but it occurred to me that Chessie might be the ideal solution to Oliver’s research problem. You know he’s desperate to find someone to take over the Italian research on his latest book, and that he can’t get away himself. Chessie has a history degree.’
‘She also has a stunning figure, a beautiful face, and the kind of vulnerability that will make Oliver tear her to shreds if he gets the mood on him, and you and I both know it,’ Elliott warned her grimly, interrupting her, and then adding, ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea… on the face of it. But Oliver’s lethal. He’s also a man and very human…’
‘Meaning?’ Beatrice questioned him uncertainly.
‘Meaning that to you, my dear wife, he may behave like a perfect gentleman, but where women less wrapped up in their husbands are concerned, he can be… well, let’s just say that he has all the usual male appetites and that he’s quite capable of satisfying them and then ejecting the woman concerned from his life with rather brutal efficiency.’
‘You think he’d try to seduce Chessie?’ Beatrice asked uneasily.
‘I don’t know. He’s one of those men who’s a law unto himself, and I wouldn’t like to predict what he might do.’
Beatrice’s eyes rounded in astonishment. Her husband was an astute judge of character and normally very crisp and to the point in giving his opinion of his fellow men.
‘Well, I only thought that tonight we could see how they get on, and then…’
‘Liar,’ Elliott interrupted her ruthlessly. ‘You intended to dangle Chessie in front of him like a very tempting piece of bait, in the hope that her expertise in Italian history will prove so irresistible that it will outweigh his legendary dislike of working with women.’
‘And do you think it will?’ Beatrice asked him slyly.
Elliott looked at her in their bedroom mirror and eventually said grimly, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Unfortunately for Oliver or for Chessie?’
‘Potentially, for them both!’
In her own bedroom, Chessie too was looking into a mirror, but she was alone with her reflection, unlike Beatrice and Elliott.
‘Nothing too formal,’ Beatrice had advised her when she had asked her what she should wear, and she only hoped that what she had chosen would be suitable.
Her grandfather had set great store by the correct appearance, and Chessie was not sure where on the scale of formality her scarlet Valentino wool crêpe dress would stand.
True, it was very plain, the soft fabric draped subtly to reveal her curves… true it had a high, round neck, and long, all-covering sleeves… but it was also short, just above the knee, and the colour itself was so eye-catching that it scarcely needed any further adornment.
She had left her hair down, catching it back with a gilt bow. She was wearing matching gold bow earrings from which a pearl was suspended, and a collection of fine gold bangles which made a soft musical sound when she moved.
Sheer black tights, high-heeled suede pumps, the Chamade perfume she had switched to only months ago, and which she still wasn’t completely sure about. It was so different from the cool, fresh fragrance she had worn before. A fragrance chosen by her grandfather as being ‘suitable’ for a young woman of his house.
The dining-room of the Cotswold house was barely a fifth of the size of that in her grandfather’s palazzo but it had a welcoming warmth that Francesca infinitely preferred.
The problem was, as one of her aunts had austerely told her, when as a teenager she had dared to complain that the vast, echoing rooms of the seventeenth-century palazzo had no warmth about them, that she and her mother had been ridiculously indulged by her father, who had broken the tradition of centuries in refusing to move his new bride into the family home, but who had instead bought a pretty little villa on the outskirts of the city with its own private garden and an informal courtyard that Francesca remembered with nostalgic longing.
When her grandfather’s health had started to fail, though, her father had given in to family pressure to move himself and his family into the family home.
The palazzo was a vast, echoing place with marble floors, and a quantity of rococo gilt mirrors. It cost a fortune to maintain, and it was only by judicious marriages and deploying their resources into commerce that the family had been able to retain a home that was really more a museum-piece than suitable for modern-day living.
Francesca knew that her mother had never felt wholly comfortable living there. For one thing, she was no longer really in charge of her own household, the palazzo being run by a maiden aunt of the family, who refused to allow anyone to take over from her.
The palazzo possessed a vast warren of higgledy-piggledy rooms on the floors above the grand reception-rooms, more than enough to house all the aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived there.
It must be rather nice to be like Beatrice and to have to share this lovely home with only one’s husband and children. Had she married Paolo, her home would have been in a palazzo even more enormous than her grandfather’s. Francesca frowned thoughtfully. If she had never really looked forward to such a prospect, then why had she not said so? Why had she allowed her grandfather to dominate her life?
‘Do you think everything looks all right?’ Beatrice asked her, anxiously coming into the room and mistaking her frowning introspection for a critical study of her table.
‘It looks lovely,’ Francesca told her truthfully. ‘What time do your guests arrive?’
‘Any minute now. Elliott will serve them drinks in the drawing-room, while I help Henry in the kitchen. I wonder, Chessie, would you be very kind and help Elliott to entertain them? I’ve invited two other couples: the local doctor and her husband, who’s a lecturer at Oxford; a business colleague of Elliott’s who lives a few miles away and his wife; and another neighbour of ours, Oliver Newton. He’s a writer. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He writes under the name of Dominic Lacey.’
‘I’ve seen his books. He writes thrillers, doesn’t he?’
‘Sort of. He’s an expert on Elizabethan England, and he sets his books in that period. They’re very popular. He’s having problems with his latest one, though. His main character, a spy working for Francis Walsingham, is sent to Italy to find out as much as he can about a supposed Borgia plot against Elizabeth, and it seems that Oliver is having problems with the research into the Italian part of the book. He was saying only the other day that he can’t spare the time to go to Italy himself and that he may well have to employ a research assistant. I thought…’
She broke off as the doorbell rang.
‘Oh, heavens, they’re arriving already.’
There were no nuances of the fine art of entertaining that were not known to Francesca. She mingled with Beatrice’s guests with the quiet grace she had inherited from her mother, adding to it the sophisticated polish she had learned from her aunts, keeping the conversational ball rolling, parrying questions that threatened to become too curious and deftly making each person she spoke to feel that she was genuinely interested in what they had to say.
‘Who is she?’ Oliver Newton asked Elliott, as they stood together by the fire. He had been watching her for the last five minutes, studying the elegant grace of her body, acknowledging that she was an extremely beautiful and skilled woman.
‘The god-daughter of some friends of ours. Let me introduce you.’
Oliver had arrived while Francesca was talking to Helen and John Carter, the doctor and university lecturer, and although she had seen him arrive, good manners had dictated that she did no more than give him a brief glance.
Now he was coming towards her with Elliott, and the tiny shock she had experienced on seeing him redoubled. He was not a handsome man, his features were too hard for that, but no woman could ever overlook him. His eyes were the colour of the sea-spray on the wildest parts of the Italian coast, his hair dark enough to belong to one of her cousins.
The thought sprang into her mind that here was a man who would defy God himself to achieve what he wanted; a man who owned no master… no higher authority… no barriers.
‘Francesca, allow me to introduce you to a friend of ours, Oliver Newton.’
‘Oliver, meet Francesca, C…’
‘Valera,’ Francesca supplied quickly for him, deliberately omitting her title, and introducing herself as she had done to the other guests by extending her hand and saying firmly, ‘Please call me Chessie.’
His flesh felt hard and dry, its contact with her own sending a shocking pulse of sensation through her skin that made her pull away from the handshake.
The silver-ice eyes registered her reaction and mocked her for it.
‘Chessie?’ he questioned, smiling cruelly at her. ‘I think not. Francesca suits you much more. Besides, I abhor nicknames.’
His arrogance took her breath away; that and his blatantly obvious desire to hurt her, and, thus challenged, she reacted in a way she herself would never have expected, looking him full in the eyes and saying coolly, ‘Since we are hardly likely to meet frequently, I don’t think it can really matter how you choose to address me, Mr Newton.’ And then she turned her back on him and walked calmly over to the Carters, neither of whom had seen the small by-play, and both of whom welcomed her back enthusiastically.
‘Who did you say she was?’ Oliver questioned Elliott again, apparently unaffected by her rebuke.
‘The god-daughter of some Italian friends of ours.’
‘Mm… with no husband or lover in tow, and some very expensive tastes, to judge from her clothes. What’s she doing here, Elliott?’
‘If you really want to know, why don’t you ask her?’
Oliver’s eyebrows rose, but Elliott wasn’t a man to be challenged or disconcerted by the cool stare of those hypnotic eyes.
‘Dinner, everyone,’ Beatrice announced, opening the drawing-room door.
She had deliberately not placed Francesca next to Oliver, thus making her his partner, but opposite him, and next to John Carter, knowing that the dinner-table conversation which she fully intended to monitor would include the revelation that Francesca was an expert on her country’s history, thus giving her a chance to shine as Beatrice fully believed she deserved to do. It would also give Oliver an opportunity to see that she was not only beautiful but intelligent as well.
Oliver had a theory about women, as unfounded as it was unfair, but Beatrice made allowances for him, understanding that much of his bitter cynicism must spring from the cruelty inflicted on him by his ex-wife.
She had learned from friends in the area that Oliver had adored the little girl he had thought was his child, and local opinion was that he could probably have fought a custody case for her and won, but he had refused to adopt such a course of action because, as he had once harshly told Beatrice, not long after her own daughter was born, he had judged it preferable for the child to be with her mother and the man who was truly her natural father than to be with him, no matter how much he might love her.
This was the first time Francesca had attended such an informal dinner party, where the conversation didn’t so much flow politely as eddy and swirl in fascinating and challenging torrents that refused to allow her to remain aloof.
In a very short space of time she was explaining to John Carter her intention of embarking on a new career, and at first she was so carried away by her own enthusiasm that she didn’t hear the brief sound of derision Oliver Newton made.
He interrupted her enthusiastic flow of plans to challenge directly, ‘Forgive me if I seem cynical, Francesca, but surely if your enthusiasm for a career were as great as you are giving us to understand, you would already have forged the beginnings of this career. You are, after all, no newly qualified graduate, on your own admission.’
Francesca sensed the waiting tension of the other dinner guests. The men looked slightly uncomfortable, with the exception of Elliott, whose expression it was difficult to read, but Francesca had the oddest belief that he was silently encouraging her to go on and not give in to what amounted to little more than bad-mannered bullying.
The women on the other hand looked expectant, as though long used to Oliver Newton’s challenging statements and looking to her to defend their sex.
It was a challenge she dared not resist… the kind of challenge she would doubtless often have to face in her new life.
‘You are quite right,’ she agreed in the cool, beautifully modulated voice she had inherited from her father, her English accentless and perfect. ‘Unfortunately, until recently, my life was planned to take a different direction.’
‘Really? You intrigue me. What kind of direction?’
The rudeness of the man was intolerable. Francesca looked at him coldly, the haughty, dismissing look of her grandfather, but on this man it had no effect. The silver-ice eyes defied the dismissal of hers, demanding that she answer his question.
‘I was to have been married,’ she told him briefly, ‘and, to save you the inconvenience of questioning me further, yes, it was my fiancé who drew back from the marriage.’
Francesca could sense the sympathetic interest of everyone apart from Oliver himself.
‘Unfortunate… but hardly grand tragedy,’ he told her harshly. ‘And so, now, instead of embracing a husband, you have decided to embrace a career. Hardly the action one would have expected from the newly broken-hearted.’
How would she have felt had she actually loved Paolo, on receiving such an insult? As it was she had the greatest difficulty in remaining in her seat, and not reacting to that hard-edged stare by getting up and fleeing the room.
Forcing back every instinctive feminine reaction she possessed, she calmly finished another forkful of food and then said quietly ‘It wasn’t a love match, but a marriage arranged between our families. It had been agreed when we were quite small that Paolo and I should marry. I see my decision not as that of a broken-hearted victim, but simply that of a person to whom one career avenue is now closed, and who therefore seeks another.’
Beatrice who had been listening to this exchange with growing tension, was thankful to see Henrietta walk into the room ready to clear away the dinner-plates and serve the pudding.
Someone asked Francesca when she had first become interested in Italian history, and Beatrice, not aware of how she had introduced herself to Oliver, interrupted quickly, ‘Oh, I expect it was the first time you realised the significance of your family’s place in Italy’s history, wasn’t it, Chessie? The first Duca was a captain in the army of Lorenzo the Magnificent, wasn’t he?’
Try as she might, Francesca couldn’t stop herself from looking at Oliver Newton. He was sitting there regarding her with a narrow, derisive smile, as though he knew quite well what had led her into concealing her family title.
‘Now I begin to understand the arranged marriage,’ he told her contemptuously in a low voice that reached only her ears. ‘And the beautiful, if artificial manners…’
Francesca bit back a sharp retort. She was suddenly weary of sparring with him. He exhausted her, draining her mental energy and challenging her so much at every turn that he seemed to suck her very life-force from her.