The Italian's Rightful Bride

‘I was planning to spend the summer knocking about with my ten-year-old son,’ she said.

‘Bring him with you. His Excellency has a daughter of the same age. When shall I expect you?’

‘I don’t know…’ she wavered.

Billy, who had been shamelessly eavesdropping her end of the conversation, mouthed, ‘Montegiano?’

She nodded.

‘Tell him you’ll go.’

‘Billy!’

‘Mum, you want this job so much you can taste it. You know you do.’ He grabbed the phone and spoke into it. ‘She’s on her way.’ Catching her indignant look, he said innocently, ‘I’m just trying to stop you wasting a lot of time. Why do women always dither?’

Secretly she was glad he’d taken the decision out of her hands. She told Carlo that she would be there in a few days, and hung up.

‘Billy, I thought you wanted us to enjoy ourselves.’

He gave her a hilarious grin. ‘But, Mum, we hate enjoying ourselves. It’s so boring.’

She shared his laughter. He was a kindred spirit.

The next morning they piled everything into the car and set off to travel the five hundred miles across Italy, to the outskirts of Rome. As she neared their destination she found herself slowing down, making excuses for the delay.

‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ she said when they reached the edge of the little town of Tivoli.

‘But it’s only another fifteen miles to Rome,’ he protested.

‘I’m tired,’ she said quickly, ‘and I’d rather arrive early tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep.’

Later that night, when Billy had gone to bed, she sat by her window, looking in the direction that led to Rome, and called herself a coward.

Whyever had she agreed to do this? Some things were best left in the past. Yet the truth was that part of her was still the eighteen-year-old Lady Joanna who’d agreed to meet Prince Gustavo as a prospective husband, but in a mood of amused indulgence because Aunt Lilian, who’d planned everything, was such a dear.

‘I’m not really interested,’ she’d told her on the night before Gustavo arrived. ‘Fancy linking us up because he needs my money and you want me to be a princess.’

Aunt Lilian had winced. ‘That’s a very vulgar way of putting it. In our world the right people must meet the right people.’

By ‘our world’ she’d meant wealth and titles. Joanna had an earl among her relatives and a huge fortune, so she was included in the charmed circle, which, even in a modern, supposedly democratic age, remained mostly closed to outsiders.

Joanna had thought all this was hilarious. How young she had been, how full of modern ideas! How sure that she knew it all! How stupidly, cruelly, fatally ignorant!

Sometimes fairy tales came true. Sometimes the sun shone, the birds sang and moon rhymed with June.

That summer had been a time of magic, when the Good Fairy had cast her spell, and everything was perfect for a brief moment.

Even twelve years later, just closing her eyes and letting her mind roam free could bring back the warmth and the sense of once-in-a-lifetime sweetness.

There had been a week-long house party, given by her second cousin, the earl, Lord Rannley, at his stately home in England, Rannley Towers.

She’d first seen Gustavo walking across the lawn towards the house. He was some way off so she had had several minutes to notice everything about him.

He was over six feet, with dark hair and a lean body, moving with a controlled grace that had held her entranced attention. It had been a hot day and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and pulled open the throat.

And that was how he lived in her mind ever after, Prince Charming in the story, handsome and elegant. Everything was perfect, too perfect to be true, if only she’d had the sense to see it.

But she’d lost all her common sense by the time he reached her, one of her cousins introduced them and he had said, in his quiet voice, ‘Buon giorno, signorina. It is a great pleasure to meet you.’

Nobody had warned her that it was possible for the world to turn upside down in a moment because of a young man with dark eyes and a gentle gravity that went straight to her heart.

But it had happened, and after that there was no turning back.

Naturally nobody mentioned the reason for the meeting. Officially Gustavo was travelling to see something of the world, and was calling on old friends of his father. But when the family sat down to dinner he was seated beside Joanna.

She had a hard time dressing for that meal. Now that she’d seen him she examined her own appearance critically.

‘And I’m nothing much,’ she sighed. ‘I’m too tall, too thin—’

‘Not thin,’ Aunt Lilian protested loyally. ‘Slender.’

‘Thin,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Most girls would give their eye-teeth to be your size. If you took a little trouble you’d be beautiful and elegant.’

‘Not beautiful. Not me.’

Aunt Lilian groaned, but there was some justice in Joanna’s complaint. Her hair was fair, not blonde but mousy, her figure coltish rather than elegant. Her face was pleasant despite a slightly irregular mouth and a nose that she wished a fraction shorter. Her eyes were her best feature, being a restful grey, but it wasn’t the deep blue she would have liked. Everything about her just missed being something better, and she had never been so acutely aware of it as now.

The dress she chose was a restrained blue silk which had cost the earth and did little for her. After trying her hair up, then down, then up, she finally let it hang loose about her shoulders. Her make-up was like the dress, restrained, chiefly because she lacked the self-confidence to be bold.

Nobody could have faulted Gustavo’s behaviour over dinner. He talked to everyone and didn’t try to monopolise Joanna. But when he turned to her she felt as though the rest of the room had vanished.

She didn’t know what they talked about either then or over the next few days. They went riding together. There was laughter and idle chatter, and sometimes she would find him looking at her with a serious expression that made her heart turn over.

Halfway through the week he invited her out to a restaurant. He was the perfect host, charming, attentive, but not, to her disappointment, flirtatious. He asked about her life and she told him about how she’d lived since her parents died and her Aunt Lilian had raised her.

He told her about his own life on the Montegiano estate, and the love in his voice told her why he was prepared to put his home before everything else in his life.

‘For six hundred years my family have lived in the same house,’ he told her, ‘always adding to it and making it more beautiful.’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ she told him eagerly. ‘I love old places.’

‘I would like you to see it.’

When they were drinking wine, he said with a touch of ruefulness, ‘You know what our friends plan for us, don’t you?’

Her heart began to beat faster. Was he going to propose right now?