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And then she began to walk away, half afraid that he might try to stop her. But he did no such thing. She saw the brief narrowing of his eyes as she turned on her towering heels and walked across the cathedral square, and she was aware of the burn of his gaze as she allowed herself to be swallowed up in a group of guests. Her hands were trembling and her heart was racing and for a moment she contemplated leaving the wedding right then. Nothing was stopping her. She could hurry back to the hotel she’d booked into, pack up her stuff and head back to London. She could run away from her ex-fiancé and all the painful memories that seeing him again evoked.
But Justina knew she couldn’t do that. She and Roxy had only recently been reunited, and she couldn’t let her old friend down on such an important day. Averting her face from a paparazzi camera which seemed to have sprung from out of nowhere, she gave a ragged sigh. She was just going to have to behave like a grown-up and deal with it. She would go to the wedding reception and avoid Dante. How hard could it be? She was good at avoiding people—and she doubted that he’d be on his own for long.
She made her way towards the line of red double-decker buses which had been hired to take all the guests to the reception and found a seat, smiling politely at the man who immediately slid in next to her and started to introduce himself. But it was difficult to concentrate on what he was saying, even though he was doing his level best to flirt and was wearing a whole row of bright medals on his military uniform. He was probably some kind of dashing war hero, she thought gloomily, as well as being handsome in that blond and square-jawed sort of way.
So why could she never be attracted to someone like him—the sort of man she knew she should be attracted to? The dependable type who might easily adore her if only she’d give them half a chance. Wasn’t it a mark of her own emotional failure that nobody had ever come close to making her feel the way that Dante had done? And wasn’t that the main reason why she was still single as thirty loomed on the horizon—with no stable relationship and the chances of having a baby receding with every year that passed?
She remembered the magazine interview she’d given only last week, when the persistent journalist had managed to make her confront that uncomfortable fact. That if she waited too long she might never have a baby of her own. Feeling cornered, Justina had said that of course she wanted a baby. And then had added jokily that first she would need to find someone to be her baby’s father!
The double-decker bus lumbered through the narrow Norfolk lanes before turning in to the grand gates which led to the Duke’s estate. A long, gravelled drive swept up to the groom’s ancestral home and as the bus halted outside, Justina felt the breath catch in her throat as she glanced up at the perfectly proportioned golden building which Roxy had told her so much about.
Surrounded by green parkland, Valeo Hall was guarded by two snarling bronze lions which stood on top of two plinths. The pillars lining the steps up to the massive oak door were garlanded with the same fragrant white flowers which had decorated the cathedral, and Justina breathed in their sweet scent as she stepped down onto the forecourt. Lucky Roxy, she found herself thinking. A new husband and a new life. A whole new future just sitting waiting for them. Surely she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt a moment of wistful envy at that moment?
Standing in line, waiting to congratulate the newlyweds, she gave the handsome Duke a quick hug and seconds later was enveloped in a cloud of tulle and white lace as his bride stepped forward to embrace her tightly.
‘Oh, Jus.’ Roxy beamed. ‘I’m so glad you could come! Did you enjoy the service?’
‘It was gorgeous. You look gorgeous—the loveliest bride I’ve ever seen. But you didn’t tell me that Dante was going to be here,’ Justina whispered.
‘Should I have done?’ Roxy smiled in a conspiratorial way which made her look about nineteen again. ‘I know you aren’t together now, but I thought I’d invite him anyway—because for a while, Dante was a big part of my life. You don’t mind, do you?’
Justina gave a wry smile. What could she say? That seeing him again had been like revisiting an unbearably dark and painful place? She looked at Roxy’s luminous face and reminded herself that this was about more than her own hurt pride and wounded heart. This was Roxy’s day—and surely she could suffer seeing Dante one more time for her sake?
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Always good to get a blast from the past.’
Touching her fingertips to her diamond tiara as if checking it was still there, Roxy frowned. ‘So there’s nothing going on between you any more?’
‘You’re kidding?’ Justina’s denial was vehement and heartfelt. ‘Dante and I are history.’
She moved aside to make way for the next guest and took a glass of champagne from a passing waitress. Raising the glass to her lips, she drank more quickly than normal—but the quick hit of fizzy wine made rebellion begin to simmer inside her as she walked towards the reception. Why should she allow herself to be intimidated by Dante D’Arezzo when she was strong enough to stand up to him? She was an independent woman, wasn’t she? Not some little mouse. If she ran into him at the reception—and that was a big if, since she intended to stay as far away from him as possible—then she would stonewall him, just as she’d managed to do outside the church today.
She looked around. Guests were beginning to file into the vast banqueting hall which had been laid with individual tables. The golden and white room was hung with chandeliers, blazing splintering light over the heirloom crystal and silver. Here there were more pillars, all woven with ivy and spring flowers, and Justina had the sense of having walked into an enchanted glade where anything could happen.
She found her name on the seating plan, pleased to discover that she was sandwiched between a brigadier-general—which meant that he would probably be about eighty—and a Lord Aston, who she’d never heard of. But her main source of pleasure came from the fact that she was nowhere near Dante. At least Roxy had been diplomatic enough to seat them on opposite sides of the room.
She made her way across the shiny floor of the banqueting hall towards her table, but her extra-high heels and her cheongsam dress meant that all her attention was focussed on making the journey without mishap. She wasn’t really paying attention to the other guests who were taking their places, and it wasn’t until an olive hand reached over to pull out her chair that some internal warning system began to sound.
Justina froze with a terrible sense of inevitability as she looked down into the brilliant dark gaze of the man she had once thought would be her husband.
CHAPTER TWO
HER HEART RACING with fury and an unwanted kind of excitement, Justina stared into Dante’s dark face—wishing she could wipe that supercilious smile from his lips. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said viciously, and an
emerald-decked redhead sitting opposite jerked up her head in surprise.
‘Do keep your voice down, Justina,’ he said. ‘This is an aristocratic wedding where name-calling will almost certainly not be tolerated.’
Justina could have shaken him. Or punched against that solid wall of a chest. Or...something. Something which involved stamping her foot like a child and demanding that he be removed from her proximity as quickly as possible. As it was, she could do little except sit down in the chair which he was now pulling out for her. Because he was right. This was the wedding of one of her oldest friends and she could hardly cause a scene by demanding that she be moved to a different seat, could she?
He had risen to his feet and was helping her into her chair, his fingers briefly brushing over her shoulders before he slid into the vacant chair beside her.
She turned to look at him, careful to keep her voice low even though she could feel her nerve ends screaming in response to that unexpected touch of his hands. ‘I’m surprised you even know the meaning of the word “tolerate”,’ she said. ‘How did you manage to get here before me when I was on the first bus?’
‘I drove.’
Justina nodded. He’d driven. Of course he had. Could she really imagine him obediently trooping onto the transport provided like everybody else? He was the ultimate control freak, and whatever happened it always had to be on his terms.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘What I don’t understand is why you happen to be sitting here?’
‘For exactly the same reason as you, I imagine. Waiting for the wedding breakfast to begin, and with it the opportunity to toast the bride and groom and wish them many happy years of wedded bliss.’
‘Please don’t wilfully misunderstand me, Dante. That’s not what I meant and you know it.’ Reluctantly Justina’s eyes focussed on the hard planes of his face, which were softened only by the sensual curves of his lips. She saw the faint shadow at his jaw which always appeared, no matter how often he shaved.
Why did he have to be so damned sexy? she thought. And why was her traitorous body reacting so hungrily to him as she breathed in his warm and earthy scent?
‘I looked at the table plan and your name was nowhere near mine. I was just celebrating my good fortune at such a sympathetic placement and now I find you next to me. So how did that happen, Dante?’
‘Simple. I changed the names,’ he said unrepentantly.
Justina glared at him. How could she have forgotten his high-handedness? That way he had of just blazing in and taking whatever it was he wanted as if the world was just one giant boardroom? ‘You can’t turn up at a posh society wedding and start rearranging the seating!’
‘I just did.’ He sat back in his seat and glittered her a lazy smile. ‘And since no one else has a problem with it I suggest you go with the flow and enjoy yourself.’
‘Enjoy myself? With you beside me? That’s a joke, right?’ She bent to put her bag on the floor, mainly in an attempt to disguise the sudden tremble of her fingers. ‘If I wanted to spend the afternoon in the company of a snake I’d head for the nearest pit.’
Dante saw the mutinous look on her face as she lifted her head again and for a moment he almost smiled. How could he have forgotten her outrageous defiance—the only woman in the world who had not deferred to his wishes? Who had been determined to get her voice heard and insisted that her career was just as important as his.
For a while he had enjoyed their delicious battle of wills, with the subsequent make-up sessions which had been all about red-hot passion. Until he’d been forced to realise that she meant what she said. That her objections had not been some sustained sexual tease and that she had no intention of compromising her lifestyle after their marriage. She was a singer and a performer, she’d told him, and she’d been given opportunities which came along all too rarely. She’d told him she couldn’t—no—she wouldn’t turn them down. She’d also smilingly had the nerve to tell him to stop being such a dinosaur and to respect how important her career was. But behind her smile had been the definite glint of steel, and that had unsettled him. He remembered being furious and then—surprisingly—hurt. Until he’d forced himself to be grateful for his lucky escape. Because her attitude did not bode well for a long-term relationship with someone like him.
His thoughts cleared and he found himself looking into clear amber eyes which were framed so exquisitely by her dark lashes. He waited until their wine had been poured and then let his gaze linger on her bare left hand.
‘So. No wedding band. I note that you have not been as fortunate as your bandmate in the matrimonial stakes,’ he observed.
Pausing midmouthful of wine, Justina almost choked with indignation. ‘The matrimonial stakes! It’s not some kind of horse race!’
‘No?’ He shrugged. ‘But it is a race, all the same. Most women like to be in a permanent relationship by the time they’re your age because they are thinking about the inevitable ticking of their biological clock. What are you now, Justina? Thirty-one? Thirty-two?’
‘I’m not even thirty!’ she gritted out, and it wasn’t until she saw the answering gleam in his eyes that she realised she had fallen into some horrible sort of trap.
She’d ended up sounding defensive about her age, just because she was about to leave her twenties behind without a wedding ring on her finger. Dante had managed to do what Dante always did so well—he’d made her feel bad about herself.
So don’t let him! She slanted him an adversarial look. ‘I think these days you’ll find an emerging breed of women who don’t need the mark of a man’s possession to define themselves.’
‘I see your rather aggressively feminist stance hasn’t softened with time.’
‘Feeling threatened, are you?’
‘Believe me, Justina—I’m feeling something a lot more basic than threatened.’
His mocking gaze had flickered to his groin and Justina felt her cheeks grow hot with a mixture of anger and desire. Viciously, she jabbed her fork into an unsuspecting spear of asparagus, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to eat it. What was the matter with her? He was insulting her, and even if he did underpin the insults with a deliberate sensuality why the hell was she responding like this?
She put her fork back down. Perhaps that was what absence did? It hadn’t made her heart grow any fonder, but it had certainly awoken a sexual appetite which she had thought gone for ever. And Dante was the last person she wanted to make her feel this way. As if she’d been wandering around, starved of all comfort and pleasure, until he had suddenly reappeared, symbolising everything she’d been missing in one dark and very dangerous package.
‘Did you go to all the trouble of rearranging your seat just so that you could spend the entire meal being objectionable?’ she questioned.
‘Oh, come on, Justina. You know exactly why I did it. Surely you can appreciate that I am a little curious about you—especially considering that we were once planning to be man and wife?’
‘You mean until you decided that you’d have sex with that...that...’ She wanted to spit out the word tart or whore—but that might give him the erroneous impression that she still cared. Picking up her wine glass, she knocked back a large mouthful. ‘Woman,’ she finished acidly.
‘Will you stop rewriting history?’ he demanded. ‘You know damned well that we’d already broken up by then.’
She opened her mouth to object, and then shut it again—because what was the point? He arrogantly refused to see that he’d done anything wrong and nothing she said was going to change his mind. So let it go. Stop reacting to him, because that’s what he wants you to do.
Yet it felt like hell to be this close to him. Trying like mad to pretend that she felt nothing when inside her heart was beating so loudly she was surprised that someone hadn’t told her to turn the volume down.
She played around with the food some more, before forcing herself to look into his face. ‘Okay. Let’s do it your way and get the niceties over with. What are you doing these days? Still living in Rome, I suppose?’
‘Not any more. These days I have an apartment in New York.’
‘Oh?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Not really. Surprise would imply a degree of interest, which I simply don’t have.’ She pushed her plate away and—forgetting her no-carbs rule—started nibbling on a piece of bread instead. ‘It’s just that you used to act as though paradise was a place in Italy, sandwiched in between Umbria and Emilia Romagna.’
‘My love of my homeland has not diminished, Justina,’ he said silkily. ‘And I go home whenever I can—though that is becoming increasingly less these days.’
‘Business is doing well?’ She made the question sound as if it was a bore to have to ask it.
He attempted a modest shrug, but she reflected with a growing feeling of frustration that modesty was one of the few things he didn’t do well.
‘Business is doing excellently. We’ve expanded our interests in North America and I love the vibrancy of New York. Okay, it isn’t Tuscany—but you can’t have everything.’
Justina ate some more bread—as if that could help fill the emotional hole which Dante had exposed with his words. She didn’t want to think about Tuscany—or the palazzo where the D’Arezzo family had lived for centuries. She had been blown away by the dramatic beauty of the region and the country itself, but her visit there hadn’t been a success. Actually, that was a complete understatement. Dante’s aristocratic family had disapproved of his English pop-star fiancée—especially as her visit had coincided with the release of a promotional video. The one where she’d been dancing energetically while not wearing a bra. Even she had been appalled by how raunchy the finished product had appeared to be—but it wouldn’t have seemed very credible for her to come out and say so at the time.
She had been deemed an unsuitable girlfriend for one of the D’Arezzo men, as well as being a potentially bad influence on his younger sister, and their trip had been cut abruptly short. At the time Justina had accepted what had seemed a rather harsh verdict because she’d had no choice other than to accept it. But it had been yet another nail in the coffin of their relationship.
‘Can’t have everything?’ she echoed sarcastically. ‘But I thought you were the man who always believed he could. Who made “having it all” into an art form!’
‘Oh, how brittle you sound, Justina,’ he murmured. ‘I do hope that your attitude isn’t motivated by envy or avarice. Career taken a nose-dive, has it?’
She was tempted to tell him to go to hell, but some remnant of pride stopped her. Let him know that you’ve carved a respectable life for yourself, she thought. That the sacrifices she’d made had been worth it. She was independent and proud of it. And she was never going to be like her mother.
‘On the contrary, I’m living in London and still writing songs,’ she said. ‘But for other people now.’
‘And you’re successful?’
‘Oh, I do okay.’ Justina kept her smile tight. She could have told him about her recent chart-topping song, or the invitation to write the score for an upcoming musical, but he wouldn’t be impressed. Dante didn’t approve of ambition unless it came from a man. ‘It keeps me in shoes.’
‘Very expensive shoes, by the look of them.’ He lowered his gaze to study her skyscraper heels before lifting his head to let his eyes drift lazily over her face. And it was still the most beautiful face he had ever seen. Her pink lips were pressed together as if she was trying to decide what to do with them and Dante felt a rush of pure and potent lust. It hit his skin like the buffeting of a powerful wave. It turned the blood in his veins into a heated flow as he imagined kissing her again.
And in that moment he knew that he was going to have her one last time. That this fever wouldn’t go away unless he did. He realised then that his desire for her was like a disease which had lain dormant all these years and the sight of her had suddenly reactivated it all over again.
He felt the heavy aching at his groin as he leaned forward a little. ‘And what about men?’ he questioned softly.
‘Men?’
His gaze was steady; his voice was not quite. ‘Nobody in your life you like enough to bring him along today as your “plus one”?’
Justina met the blaze of his eyes, determined he wouldn’t discover the truth. Because wouldn’t he laugh—or, even worse, act smug—if he knew that her time with him had ruined her for other men? That she’d been unable to trust another man enough to get close to—even if she’d found anyone else attractive enough to want to try.
So why not play games with him? Why not pretend that she loved men just as they loved her? Surely pride demanded something along those lines? For Dante was traditional and old-fashioned enough to see her still-single status as some kind of failure.
She took another sip of wine. ‘Oh, I do all right with men,’ she said, and the sudden darkening of his face gave her a brief thrill of pleasure. Because if that was jealousy then it was only a fraction of what she’d felt when she’d walked into his hotel suite that day and seen that naked woman writhing all over him. Fighting back a sudden feeling of nausea, she raised her eyebrows, as if daring him to continue his interrogation.
‘But nobody permanent?’ he persisted.
‘Nope.’ She made it sound like a conscious choice instead of an unwanted situation into which she had been cast. She hadn’t realised that love would be so difficult to find second time around. She hadn’t realised that she would look at other men, compare them to the arrogant Tuscan—and be left completely cold. ‘I don’t do permanence. And now, if you don’t mind, Dante, I think we’ve exhausted pretty much everything we need to say to each other.’
Very deliberately, she turned her back on him and started talking to the Brigadier, who was sitting on her other side—although it took her a moment before she had composed herself enough to concentrate. But the old soldier was a lucky choice of companion. He knew lots about the groom’s ancestral home, and once he got going there was no stopping him. Acting like balm on her ruffled senses, he made for unexpectedly engaging company—especially to someone like Justina, who’d had such an erratic education.
Her mother’s louche and nomadic lifestyle had meant that Justina had changed schools as often as most people changed their wardrobes. By the age of seventeen she’d had a wealth of experience, but not much in the way of formal teaching—unless you counted her mother’s weekly master classes in gold-digging. But from an early age she’d learnt the art of asking the right questions, and the Brigadier was able to answer them all to her satisfaction. He told her all about the battles which had been fought around the beautiful Norfolk estate, and described in detail all the house’s treasures—including the rare Titian painting in the picture gallery.
If only she could have blocked out the occasional drift of Dante’s accent as she heard him entertaining his side of the table throughout the meal. The redhead wearing emeralds had a particularly piercing laugh, and Justina had to stop herself from wincing every time she heard it. If only she could have blotted out her aching awareness of his presence, too. She could almost feel the heat from his body and detect the raw, masculine scent which was so uniquely his.
Someone began banging a spoon against the side of a glass, and as the bride’s father stood up to make his speech Dante leaned over to speak in her ear.
‘You turned your back on me, Justina—and nobody ever does that.’
‘Shh. I know you love talking about yourself but you really must be quiet. The speeches are about to begin.’ She caught the brief look of frustration on his face, before sitting back in her seat and fixing her eyes on the top table.
The bride’s father began to speak. his crumpled linen suit and long hair making him stand out from the rest of the guests. He told a few inappropriate anecdotes which should have had the aristocratic relatives groaning—but it was such a happy occasion that people just started giggling in response. Justina looked around at all the laughing faces and a terrible emptiness started to gnaw away at her. Suddenly it felt as if everyone was sitting within the warm circle of a fire while she was alone on the outskirts, in the dark and cold. The outsider who had no real sense of belonging. And hadn’t it always been that way?
She sat through the rest of the speeches and laughed in all the right places, but after the ceremonial cutting of the cake she picked up her satin clutch-bag and looked around. Dante was busy talking to the redhead and she doubted whether the Brigadier would miss her too much. She’d make as if she was going to the washroom and leave without anybody noticing. She’d have the early night she needed and sleep away her jet-lag—and tomorrow she would wake up and start forgetting about Dante all over again.