Notorious: Ruthlessly Bedded by the Italian Billionaire / Bound by the Marcolini Diamonds

‘Cousins can and do show physical affection.’

‘I can do without Lucia’s brand of affection. And yours.’

He cocked his head musingly. ‘Nonno will like your feisty sense of independence. I think you’re ready to meet him now.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ She waved a careless hand, doing her utmost to appear relaxed. ‘Lead on. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

Out of the corner of her eye she could see him smiling as he ushered her over to a set of double glass doors which opened to a terrace overlooking the sea they had flown over only a short while ago. The old saying—’caught between the devil and the deep blue sea’—slid into her mind. It was precisely how she felt.

Focus on what Bella would be feeling, she swiftly told herself. Here she was, meeting her grandfather for the first time, a man who’d wanted nothing to do with her family until now. Any sense of affection was impossible. Curiosity, yes. Perhaps resentment, too, at being called in so late in the day, too late for her own father who’d died in exile, never knowing any forgiveness for his grave teenage sin.

She mentally blocked out Dante, training her gaze on the old man being helped up from a sun-lounge by a woman caregiver. He still had a full head of thick wavy hair, shockingly snow-white, framing a face that seemed all bones, the flesh obviously wasted by the cancer that was eating him from the inside. His skin was tanned from lying in the sun, possibly in an attempt to look healthier than he was. He wore a loose white tunic over baggy white trousers. Neither hid the frailty of a body which had probably once been as big and strong as Dante’s.

He was a dying man, maybe in considerable pain, warranting some sympathy despite the other circumstances that had brought her here. It was clearly an effort for him to stand straight and tall, determined on meeting her with dignity. Pride doesn’t die, Jenny thought, and Bella might well be prickly with pride, too, the outcast who hadn’t asked to be rejoined to this Rossini family and had no reason to bow to this patriarch.

Hold your head high, Dante had instructed.

She did.

And met Marco Rossini’s penetrating dark gaze with determined steadiness.

I am Bella. You are my grandfather and you don’t know me. This is not just a test for me. It’s a test for you, too.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEY stood, face-to-face, studying each other in a silence that stretched Jenny’s nerves so far she could feel them twanging with tension. Marco Rossini was taking in every feature of her face as though trying to match them against some picture in his mind, and fear squeezed her heart as she read disappointment in them. Inevitable, she knew, because she had no Rossini genes, though maybe his disappointment was good for her. He mightn’t want to keep her here, since she didn’t look like the son he had banished.

His mouth finally broke into a wry little smile. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, his voice furred with emotion.

‘I’m sorry it was too late for … for my father.’ She hated speaking the deception that had to be carried through, but the sentiment was right if she’d been Bella.

‘So am I, my dear. So am I,’ he repeated sadly.

And her heart went out to him. It was sad, sadder than he knew with his grand-daughter gone, too. Tears welled into her eyes, remembering Bella’s dreadful death, and Marco Rossini reached out and took one of her hands in both of his, patting it comfortingly.

‘Your loss is even more grievous with both parents gone,’ he said in gentle sympathy. ‘I hope I can make up in some way for not being there for you.’

The tears overflowed, spilling down her cheeks. It was awful, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. This should be happening to Bella, getting a grandfather who would care for her. She shook her head, bit her lip, swallowed hard, desperate to regain some control. ‘I’m sorry,’ she choked out. ‘I didn’t mean to …’

‘It’s okay, Isabella,’ Dante soothed, quickly stepping over to a small table beside the sun-lounge, pulling some tissues out of a box and thrusting them into her hand. ‘I’m sure Nonno understands this meeting isn’t easy for you.’

‘Come and sit down, my dear,’ the old man invited, drawing her over to a bigger table shaded by a large umbrella. ‘Pour her a drink, Dante.’

The table was round, the chairs well-cushioned. Marco dismissed his caregiver as Dante poured the three of them drinks from a jug of fruit-juice, adding ice from a more expensive version of an esky. The men sat on either side of her and Jenny did her best to regain some composure, mopping her cheeks, hoping the eye-makeup she’d been taught to apply wasn’t completely messed up, taking several deep breaths to ease the tightness in her chest.

‘Where is Lucia?’ Marco asked his grandson, diverting attention from her while she recovered from her distress.

‘Re-arranging accommodation for Isabella. She had designated the furthermost suite in the guest wing for her, which I didn’t consider appropriate.’

‘Ah! So typical!’ the old man remarked ruefully. ‘I should have directed the choice.’

‘Lucia is used to being your only grand-daughter, Nonno.’ He nodded towards Jenny, a silent warning that his cousin could be spiteful towards her.

‘I’ll take that into account. But for the most part, you’ll have to be my watchdog, my boy.’ It was a reluctant admission of weakness.

‘I will,’ Dante assured him.

‘Put all business on hold. I want you here now. It won’t be for long.’

‘I’ve already done that, Nonno. I want to spend this time with you.’

The old man heaved a weary sigh. ‘I don’t have much energy these days. Thank you for bringing Isabella to me, Dante. She should not have been left alone.’

‘I’ll see that she is never without family support again.’

Jenny couldn’t let that pass. ‘I’m all right. I don’t need anything from you,’ she declared, shooting a frown at both Dante and Marco. ‘I didn’t come to get your family support. I can look after myself.’

The old man eyed her quizzically. ‘Why did you come, Isabella?’

‘Because …’ He forced me to, but she couldn’t say that. ‘Because I wanted to know where my father had come from. Dante told me why you banished him, but you know, it must have been terrible for him, too, knowing he caused his mother’s death. I think now he punished himself, taking on the hardships of living and working in the Outback. It’s a very isolated life. But he was a good man, a good husband, a good father. You could have been proud of what he made of himself.’

She barely knew where the words came from—stories Bella had told about her growing-up years on the cattle station in far west Queensland, her own instinctive spin on the tragedy that had led to Antonio Rossini’s exile, a need to resolve the bad feelings that Dante wanted resolved because that would free her in the end.

Her earnest outburst seemed to drive Marco back inside himself. He closed his eyes. His face sagged. His skin took on a greyish tinge.

Dante leaned forward, anxiously touching his arm. ‘Nonno, Isabella didn’t mean to be accusing.’

The heavy lids slowly lifted. ‘My boy, I’ve been saying the very same things to myself, ever since I read the investigator’s report.’ He turned deeply regretful eyes to Jenny. ‘What was done was done in anger and grief. I loved my wife very much. And I believe what you tell me. Antonio loved his mother very much. He gave you her name.’

Dante hadn’t mentioned that to her. It made more poignant sense of Marco’s disappointment. ‘You wanted to see her in me.’

‘Yes. Antonio looked very like her. I thought …’ He made an apologetic grimace.

‘It’s Isabella on my birth certificate but I’ve always been called Bella,’ Jenny said defensively, shying from being linked to the woman whom Marco had loved and lost. It made her feel even more of a fraud.

‘Bella …’ he repeated softly. ‘A fitting name. You’re a beautiful young woman. Your mother must have been beautiful, too.’

Jenny flushed at the compliment, knowing it wasn’t really deserved since her ‘beauty’ had been engineered by Dante. ‘I thought so,’ she answered stiffly, judging it to be the safest reply.

‘Do you have photographs of your parents you can show me?’

Jenny shook her head, answering with Bella’s own words explaining why she had none of the usual mementoes of her family. ‘The old homestead on the station burnt down when I was eighteen and in my last year at boarding school. My parents were away at the cattle sales. Nothing was saved.’

‘Another loss for you,’ Marco murmured sympathetically.