Excerpt of The Italian's Price by Diana Hamilton

INSTRUCTING THE TAXI driver to wait, Cesare Saracino

swung his long legs to the wet pavement and headed towards the small, old-fashioned butcher's shop at the end of the largely deserted narrow high street, his dark eyes grim with determination.

His investigator had tracked down her widowed mother's home address with no difficulty at all. Personally he couldn't see Jilly Lee actually returning here, never mind living in a flat above a butcher's in a small market town on the border of Wales where nothing much ever happened. She needed bright lights, the company of admiring free- spending males. Glitz and glamour.

She wouldn't be here but her mother would know where she had gone since her sneaky disappearance from the villa. Jilly Lee — a soft and silly name for a first class bitch — would be made to pay. He'd find her and haul her back to Tuscany, demand reparation, force her to put her hunt for a wealthy husband and her thieving activities on hold and do the job she'd been hired to do.

His mouth tightened with pain. The way things were going, Jilly Lee wouldn't be in harness for long. Nonna was visibly growing more frail, though it galled him to have to admit that since the arrival of the Lee woman she'd brightened considerably.

"There are no signs of clinical disease," her specialist had informed him three months ago, early in the new year. "But your grandmother is well over eighty and has been a widow for how long?"

"Thirty years." 'And one by one she will have seen most of her contemporaries pass away. The body gets increasingly frail and so the will to live dwindles, there is less and less to look forward to."

Hating the thought that Nonna was simply letting go, he'd kicked against it and suggested hiring a congenial companion.

"Someone to read to me while I do my embroidery? And drone on in a tedious, elderly way about the misdeeds of modern day youngsters and bore me with interminable tales of her own long-gone youth?" She'd patted his hand, her smile, as ever, kind and fond. "I don't think so."

"Someone to keep you company." 'Rosa can do that." 'Rosa has her hands full of housekeeping duties. She can't spare the time to go around the garden with you while you snip things off!"

A dry look. "There are plenty of gardeners to pick me up if I fall over while I'm deadheading — if that's what worries you!"

He'd taken both her frail hands in his. "I spend as much time here at the villa as I can but I'm often away. Of course I worry about you. You took me in when I was a stroppy twelve-year-old. You cared for me. Let me now care for you. And there's no law that says a paid companion has to be in her dotage."

He'd drafted the advertisement himself, offered sky-high wages, sat in on the interviews and had noted the first spark of any real interest in the faded old eyes when Jilly Lee had been shown in.

On first sight she'd seemed vaguely familiar. A face glimpsed at a nightclub in Florence when he'd been entertaining an American client who'd expressed an interest in unwinding in a hot spot? But then these outon- the-prowl bimbos all looked alike. Flowing long blonde hair, pouty scarlet lips, skimpy dresses designed to show pneumatic bosoms and endless legs. Ten a penny. He'd been hit on by enough of them during his thirty-four years to know the type. No wonder Nonna called him cynical.

He'd dismissed the impression. True, Ms Lee had long silky blonde hair but it had been neatly tied back with a black velvet band and the blue shift dress she'd been wearing, although doing nothing to detract from her blatant curves, was demure enough in the hemline stakes.

As in the three previous interviews he'd simply observed, leaving Nonna to run the show, only inputting when he'd felt the need for clarification.

On the face of it she had seemed ideal. Twenty-five years old, so definitely not the middle-aged bore Nonna had stated she wouldn't countenance. English, but with very passable Italian. Excellent references from a famous London store. The time spent in the interim travelling in Italy, picking up the language, taking odd jobs to eke out her savings, moving on, never staying in one place for very long. Now she wanted to settle permanently in this beautiful country.

Rarely sparing him a glance, she'd chatted away with ease, charming and outgoing, and when Nonna — already captivated — had asked her to withdraw for a moment, told him with the first flash of excitement he'd seen coming from her in months, "I like her. She's young, lively and lovely to look at. Just what I need since you point blank refuse to marry and bring a young bride here to brighten my days and keep me on my toes! Plus, we can practice my English together. I once spoke it as well as you do, but now I am rusty. What do you think? Shall we hire her?"

He hesitated, but only for a moment. She might seem ideal but something about this latest applicant struck a false note. An annoying niggle with nothing concrete to back it up.

With a small impatient shrug he dismissed it. Nonna liked her, which was the main thing. She was showing real enthusiasm for the first time in ages, which meant that she wouldn't just let go, give up the will to live.

"If that's what you want."

He would do anything for Nonna. He owed her so much. She had been the first person to give him any real affection. His parents hadn't shown any, to him or each other. It had been a dynastic marriage gone wrong. His father, a workaholic, had rarely been home and his mother, to compensate, had spent money like water and taken a string of lovers.

He could only suppose they had stayed married for the sake of appearances. In the circles they moved in appearances were everything.

On their death in a light aircraft accident on one of the rare occasions when they'd been attending the same function together, he had become heir to the vast family- run business enterprise that ranged from the petrochemical industry through luxury hotels to dealing in fine art and precious gems.

Nonna had helped him come to terms with everything. The business was to be run by his late father's hand-picked executive managers until he reached his majority, of course, but she had hired a private tutor to help him learn all he could about his future inheritance, a project he had eagerly embraced.

He could deny her nothing, but caution, and that niggle, had made him add, "I'll do some rescheduling and stick around for the first few weeks to make sure you suit each other."

A stab of anger shot through him now as he entered the dank passageway which obviously led to the door to the above-the-shop premises. Jilly Lee had charmed his grandmother into trusting her implicitly, into relying on her company, into actually enjoying what the scheming minx had called 'Girl-talk'. And had done a runner when he'd made it plain that he didn't want her in his bed and wasn't in the market for marriage. Taking a whole load of the old lady's cash with her.

He would make her pay. In spades. He stabbed a finger on the bell-push.

Milly Lee flicked on the overhead light and drew the skimpy curtains over the window to shut out the depressing sight of the wet April evening. It hadn't stopped raining all day. The interior of the small living area was just as chilly and depressing and she wouldn't have stayed here a moment longer than necessary after her mother's death — would just have found herself an inexpensive bedsit with enough room for one — but Jilly wouldn't know how to contact her if she did that and since she'd left her job in Florence Milly had no means of contacting her.

That her identical twin was thoughtless went without saying, but that didn't mean Jilly wouldn't get in touch at some stage, when she finally remembered her family back home. Sadly she reflected that Jilly didn't even know that their mother had passed away. She would be gutted. So, until her twin remembered that she had a family who worried about her and made contact, she would have to stay put.

Pushing the floppy fringe of her short blonde hair out of her eyes, she opened the local evening paper she'd bought on her way home from work and optimistically turned to the Situations Vacant column.

She was going to need to find a new job.

Manda, her boss, had told her this morning that she was selling up. She and her husband wanted to start a family — at the age of thirty-six it was time. And conception might prove easier if she wasn't rushing from pillar to post from the crack of dawn.

The likelihood of another florist taking over the business and keeping her on was slim — profits had been dropping for the last year. "You'd better start looking for something else," Manda had warned. "If you find something, don't worry about working out your notice. I can wind the business down on my own. No probs." So that meant she had to find something double quick if she was to be able to pay the rent on this flat.

The sound of the doorbell made her spirits lift. Cleo, her best friend since schooldays, had said she'd pop by this evening, bring a bottle of wine, and they could discuss her wedding plans. Milly was to be chief bridesmaid.

Glad that her friend was a couple of hours early — she'd mentioned nine as the most likely time — she flew down the narrow, carpetless staircase to let her in. And found she was staring at a complete stranger.

A drop dead handsome stranger.

An unexplained sensation quivered its way down her spine, intensifying as a shard of triumph glimmered briefly in the stranger's dark eyes and the sinfully sexy mouth curved in a smile that was definitely more predatory than friendly.

"The disguise doesn't fool me, Jilly, but it suits you — believe it or not."

The deep voice was slightly accented; it made her toes curl. He obviously thought she was her glamorous twin, dressed in the sort of gear Jilly wouldn't be seen dead in — faded old jeans and woolly sweater, the trademark long beautiful hair cut to a boyish bob, and she shook her head, about to tell him he'd made an understandable mistake. But he forestalled her, striding past her, drawling crushingly, "You should have known there was no place to hide. Lesson one — no one messes with me and mine. Lesson two — you pay for trying."