Excerpt of The Italian Duke's Wife by Penny Jordan

SHE was not going to do the girly thing and burst into tears, Jodie told herself, gritting her teeth. It might be growing dark; she might be feeling sick with that fa- miliar stomach-churning fear that she had made a big mistake — and about more than just the direction she had taken in that last village she had passed through what seemed like for ever ago; tonight might be the night she and John should have been spending at their romantic honeymoon hotel — their first night as hus- band and wife...but she was not going to cry. Not now, and in fact not ever, ever again over any man. Not ever. Love was out of her life and out of her vocabulary and it was going to stay out.

She winced as her small hire car lurched into a deep rut in the road — a road which was definitely climbing towards the mountains when it should have been dropping down towards the sea.

Her cousin and his wife, her only close family since her parents' death in a car accident when Jodie was nineteen, had tried to dissuade her from coming to Italy.

"But everything's paid for," she had reminded them. "And besides..."

Besides, she wanted to be out of the country, and she wanted to stay out of it for the next few weeks during the build-up to John's marriage to his new fiancée, Louise, who had taken Jodie's place in his heart, in his life, and in his future.

Not that she'd told her cousin David or Andrea, his wife, about that part of her decision as yet. She knew they would have tried to persuade her to stay at home. But when home was a very small Cotswold market town, where everyone knew you and knew that you had been dumped by your fiancé less than a month before your wedding because he had fallen in love with someone else, it was not somewhere anyone with any pride could possibly want to be. And Jodie had as much pride as the next woman, if not more. So much more that she longed to be able to prove to everyone, but most especially to John and Louise themselves, how little John's treachery mattered to her. Of course the most effective way to do that would be to turn up at their wedding with another man — a man who was better-looking and richer than John, and who adored her. Oh, if only...

In your dreams, she scoffed mentally at herself. There was no way that that scenario was likely to happen.

"Jodie, you can't possibly go to Italy on your own," David had protested, whilst he and Andrea had ex- changed meaningful looks she hadn't been supposed to see. It was probably just as well they were now in Australia on an extended visit to Andrea's parents.

"Why not?" she had demanded with brittle empha- sis. "After all, that's the way I'm going to be spending the rest of my life."

"Jodie, we both understand how hurt and shocked you are," Andrea had added gently. "Don't think that David and I don't feel for you, but behaving like this isn't going to help."

"It will help me," Jodie had answered stubbornly.

* * * It had been John's idea that they spend their honey- moon exploring Italy's beautiful Amalfi coast.

Jodie winced as the hire car hit another pothole in the road, which was so badly maintained that it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable to drive.

Her leg was aching badly, and she was beginning to regret not having chosen to spend her first night closer to Naples. Where on earth was she? Nowhere near where she was supposed to be, she suspected. The directions for the small village set back from the coast had been almost impossible to follow, detailing roads she had not been able to find on her tourist map. If John had been here with her none of this would have happened. But John was not with her, and he was never going to be with her again.

She must not think of her now ex-fiancé, or the fact that he had fallen out of love with her and in love with someone else, or that he had been seeing that someone else behind her back, or that virtually every- one in her home village had apparently known about it apart from Jodie herself. Louise, so Jodie's friends had now told her, had made it obvious that she wanted and intended to have John from the moment they had been introduced, following her parents' move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie re- flected bitterly. She should have realised how shallow John was when he had told her that he loved her 'in spite of her leg'. She winced as the pain in it inten- sified.

She was never going to make the kind of mistake she had made with John again. From now on her heart was going to be impervious to 'love' — yes, even though that meant at twenty-six she would be facing the rest of her life alone. What made it worse was that John had seemed so trustworthy, so honest and so kind. She had let him into her life and, even more humiliatingly painful to acknowledge now, into her fears and her dreams. No way was she going to risk having another man treat her as John had done — one minute swearing eternal love, the next...

And as for John himself, he was welcome to Louise, and they were obviously suited to one an- other, too, since they were both deceitful cheats and liars. But she, coward that she was, could not face going home until the wedding was over, until all the fuss had died down and until she was not going to be the recipient of pitying looks, the subject of hushed gossip.

"Well, let's look on the bright side," Andrea had said lightly when she had realised Jodie was not going to be persuaded to abandon her plans. "You never know — you might meet someone in Italy and fall head over heels in love. Italian men are so gorgeously sexy and passionate."

Italian men — or any kind of men — were off the life menu for her from now on, Jodie told herself furi- ously. Men, marriage, love — she no longer wanted anything to do with any of them.

Angrily Jodie depressed the accelerator. She had no idea where this appallingly bumpy road was going to take her, but she wasn't going to turn back. From now on there would be no U-turns in her life, no looking back in misery or despair, no regrets about what might have been. She was going to face firmly forward.

David and Andrea had been wonderfully kind to her, offering her their spare room when she had sold her cottage so that she could put the sale proceeds towards the house she and John were buying — which had not, with hindsight, been the most sensible of things to do — but she couldn't live with her cousin and his wife for ever.

Luckily John had at least given her her money back, but the break-up of their engagement had still cost her her job, since she had worked for his father in the family business. John was due to take over when his father retired.

So now she had neither home nor job, and she was going to be —

She yelped as the offside front wheel hit something hard, the impact causing her to lurch forward pain- fully against the constraint of her seat belt. How much further was she going to have to drive before she found some form of life? She was booked into a hotel tonight, and according to her calculations she should have reached her destination by now. Where on earth was she? The road was climbing so steeply...

"You, I take it, are responsible for this? It has your manipulative, destructive touch all over it, Caterina," Lorenzo Niccolo d'Este, Duce di Montesavro, ac- cused his cousin-in-law with savage contempt as he threw his grandmother's will onto the table between them.

"If your grandmother took my feelings into account when she made her will, then that was because —"

"Your feelings!" Lorenzo interrupted her bitingly. "And what feelings exactly would those be? The same feelings that led to you bullying my cousin to his death?" He was making no attempt whatsoever to con- ceal his contempt for her.

Two ugly red patches of angry colour burned be- trayingly on Caterina's immaculately made-up face.

"I did not drive Gino to his death. He had a heart attack."

"Yes, brought on by your behaviour." 'You had better be careful what you accuse me of, Lorenzo, otherwise..."

"You dare to threaten me?" Lorenzo demanded. "You may have managed to deceive my grandmother, but you cannot deceive me."

He turned his back on her to pace the stone-flagged floor of the Castillo's Great Hall, his pent-up fury rendering him as savagely dangerous as a caged an- imal of prey.

"Admit it," he challenged as he swung round again to confront her. "You came here deliberately intend- ing to manipulate and deceive an elderly dying woman for your own ends."

"You know that I have no desire to quarrel with you, Lorenzo," Caterina protested. "All I want —"

"I already know what you want," Lorenzo reminded her coldly. "You want the privilege, the position, and the wealth that becoming my wife would give you — and it is for that reason that you harried a confused elderly woman you knew to be dying into changing her will. If you had any compassion, any —" He broke off in disgust. "But of course you do not, as I already know."

His furious contempt had caused the smile to fade from her lips and her body to stiffen into hostility as she abandoned any pretence of innocence.

"You can make as many accusations as you wish, Lorenzo, but you cannot prove any of them," she taunted him.

"Perhaps not in a court of law, but that does not alter their veracity. My grandmother's notary has told me that when she summoned him to her bedside in order to alter her will, she confided to him the reason that she was doing so."

Lorenzo saw the look of unashamed triumph in Caterina's eyes.

"Admit it, Lorenzo. I have bested you. If you want the Castillo — and we both know that you do — then you will have to marry me. You have no other choice." She laughed, throwing back her head to ex- pose the olive length of her throat, and Lorenzo had a savage impulse to close his hands around it and squeeze the laughter from her it. He did want the Castillo. He wanted it very badly. And he was deter- mined to have it. And he was equally determined that he was not going to be trapped into marrying Caterina.

"You told my grandmother I loved you and wanted to make you my wife. You told her that the fact that you were so newly widowed, and that your husband Gino was my cousin, meant that society would frown upon an immediate marriage between us. And you told her you were afraid my passion would over- whelm me and that I would marry you anyway and thus bring disgrace upon myself, didn't you?" he ac- cused her. "You knew how nai¨ve my grandmother was, how ignorant of modern mores. You tricked her into believing you were confiding in her out of con- cern for me. You told her you didn't know what to do or how you could protect me. Then you "helped" her to come up with the solution of changing her will, so that instead of inheriting the Castillo from her — as her previous will had stated — I would only inherit it if I was married within six weeks of her death. As you told her, everyone knows how important to me the Castillo is. And then, as though that were not enough, you conceived the added inducement of per- suading her to add that if I did not marry within those six weeks, you would inherit the Castillo. You led her to believe that in making those changes she was en- abling me to marry you, because I could say I was fulfilling the terms of her will rather than following the dictates of my heart."