The Italian Duke's Wife

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 expose 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 determined 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 overwhelm me and that I would marry you anyway and thus bring disgrace upon myself, didn’t you?’ he accused her. ‘You knew how naïve my grandmother was, how ignorant of modern mores. You tricked her into believing you were confiding in her out of concern 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 persuading 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 enabling me to marry you, because I could say I was fulfilling the terms of her will rather than following the dictates of my heart.’

‘You can’t prove any of that.’ She shrugged contemptuously.

Lorenzo knew that what she had said was true.

‘As I’ve already told you, Nonna confided her thoughts to her notary,’ he continued acidly. ‘Unfortunately, by the time he managed to alert me to what was going on, it was too late.’

‘Much too late—for you.’ Caterina smirked at him.

‘So you admit it?’

‘So what if I do? You can’t prove it,’ Caterina repeated. ‘And even if you could, what good would it do?’

‘Let me make this clear to you, Caterina. No matter what my grandmother has written in her will, you will never become my wife. You are the last woman I would want to give my name to.’

Caterina laughed. ‘You have no choice.’

Lorenzo had a reputation for being a formidable and ruthless adversary. He was the kind of man other men both respected and feared—the kind of man women dreamed excitedly of enticing into their beds. He was also a superb male animal, strikingly handsome, with a hormone-unleashing combination of arrogance and a predatory, very dangerous male sexuality—a sexuality that he wore as easily as a panther wore its coat. He was not just a prize, but perhaps the most coveted prize amongst the very best of Italy’s most eligible and wealthy men. All through his twenties gossip columns had seethed with excited interest, trying to guess which high-born young woman he would make his duchess. It certainly wasn’t from any lack of willing partners to share his wealth and his title, along with enjoying the sexual pleasure of mating with such a vigorously sensual man, that he had escaped into his thirties without making any kind of formal commitment to the women who had pursued him.

Lorenzo looked at his late cousin’s wife. He despised and loathed her. But then, he despised most women. From what he had experienced of them they were all willing to give him whatever he wanted because of what he had, what was outside the inner him: wealth, a title, and a handsome male body. What he actually was was of no interest to them. His thoughts, his beliefs, all that went to make up the man who was Lorenzo d’Este didn’t matter to them anywhere near so much as his money and his social position.

‘You have no choice, Lorenzo,’ Caterina repeated softly. ‘If you want the Castillo you have to marry me.’

Lorenzo permitted his mouth to curl in sardonic disdain.

‘I have to marry, yes,’ he agreed softly. ‘But nowhere does it say that I have to marry you. You have obviously not read my grandmother’s will thoroughly.’

Her face blanched, her narrowed eyes betraying her confusion and distrust.

‘What do you mean? Of course I have read it. I dictated it! I—’

‘I repeat, you did not read the will my grandmother signed thoroughly enough,’ Lorenzo told her. ‘You see, it stipulates only that I must marry within six weeks of her death if I want to inherit the Castillo from her. It does not specify who I should marry.’

Caterina stared at him, unable to conceal her anger. It stripped from her the good looks which had in her youth made her a sought-after model, and left in their place the ugliness of her true nature.

‘No, that cannot be true. You have altered it, changed it—you and that sneering notary. You have—Where does it say? Let me see!’

She virtually flung herself at him and Lorenzo retrieved the will he had thrown down onto the table earlier. Seizing it, she read it, her face white with rage.

‘You have changed it. Somehow you have—She wanted you to marry me!’ She was almost hysterical with fury.

‘No.’ Lorenzo shook his head, his face impassive as he watched her. ‘Nonna wanted to give me what she believed I wanted. And that, most assuredly, is not you.’

As Lorenzo stood beneath the flickering light of the old-fashioned flambeaux, the small abrupt movement of his head was reflected and repeated in the shadows from the flames.

The Castillo had been designed as a fortress rather than a home, long before the Montesavro Dukes of the Renaissance had captured it from their foes and then clothed and softened its sheer stone walls with the artistic richness of their age. It still possessed an aura of forbidding and forbidden darkness.

Like Lorenzo himself.

Dark shadows carved hollows beneath the sculptured bone structure he had inherited from the warrior prince who had been the first of their line, and his height and the breadth of his shoulders emphasised the predatory sleekness of his body. His mouth was thin-lipped—‘cruel’, women liked to call it, as they begged for its hardness against their own and tried to soften it into hunger for them. It was his eyes, though, that were his most arresting feature. Curiously light for an Italian, they were more silver than grey, and piercingly determined to strip away his enemies’ defences. His well-groomed hair was thick and dark, his suit hand-made and expensive. But then, he did not need to depend on any inheritance from his late maternal grandmother to make him a wealthy man. He was already that in his own right.

There were those who said, foolishly and theatrically, that for a man to accumulate so much money there had to be some trickery involved—some sleight of hand or hidden use of certain dark powers. But Lorenzo had no time for such stupidity. He had made his money simply by using his intelligence, by making the right investments at the right time, and thus building the respectable sum he had been left by his parents into a fortune that ran into many, many millions.

Unlike his late cousin, Gino, who had allowed his greedy wife to ruin him financially. His greedy widow now, Lorenzo reminded himself savagely. Not that Caterina had ever behaved like a widow, or indeed like a wife.

Poor Gino, who had loved her so much. Lorenzo lifted his hand to his forehead. It felt damp with perspiration. Caused by guilt? It had after all been by claiming friendship with him that Caterina had first brought herself to Gino’s attention.

Lorenzo had been eighteen to Caterina’s twenty-two when he had first met her, and was easily seduced by her determination. It hadn’t taken him long, though, to recognise her for the adventuress that she was. No longer, in fact, than her first hint to him that she expected him to repay her sexual favours with expensive gifts. As a result of that, he had ended his brief fling with her immediately.

He had been at university when she had inveigled herself into his kinder cousin Gino’s heart and life, and the next time he had seen her Caterina had been wearing Gino’s engagement ring whilst his cousin wore a besotted expression of adoration. He had tried to warn his cousin then, of just what she was, but Gino had been in too deeply ever to listen, and had even accused him of jealousy. For the first time that Lorenzo could remember they had quarrelled, with Gino accusing Lorenzo of wanting Caterina for himself, and she had cleverly played on that to keep them apart until after her and Gino’s marriage.

Later, Lorenzo and his cousin had been reconciled, but Gino had never stopped worshipping his wife, even though she had been blatantly unfaithful to him with a string of lovers.

‘Where are you going?’ Caterina demanded shrilly as Lorenzo turned on his heel and walked away from her.

From the other side of the hall Lorenzo looked back at her.

‘I am going,’ he told her evenly, ‘to find myself a wife—any wife. Just so long as she is not you. You could have seen to it that I was warned that my grandmother was near to death, so that I could have been here with her, but you chose not to. And we both know why.’

‘You cannot marry someone else. I will not let you.’

‘You cannot stop me.’

She shook her head. ‘You will not find another wife, Lorenzo. Or at least not the kind of wife you would be willing to accept—not in such a sort space of time. You are far too proud to marry some little village girl of no social standing, and besides…’ She paused, then gave him a taunting look and said softly, ‘If necessary I shall tell everyone about the child I was to have had, whom you made me destroy.’

‘Your lover’s child,’ he reminded her. ‘Not Gino’s child. You told me that yourself.’

‘But I shall tell others that it was your child. After all, many people know that Gino believed you loved me.’

‘I should have told him that I loathed you.’

‘He would not have believed you,’ Caterina told him smugly. ‘Just as he would not have believed the child was not his. How does it feel to know that you are responsible for the taking of an unborn child’s life, Lorenzo?’

He took a step towards her, a look of such blazing fury in his eyes that she ran for the door, pulling it open and sliding through it.

Lorenzo cursed savagely under his breath and then went back to the table where he had dropped his grandmother’s will.

He had been filled with fury and disbelief when his grandmother’s notary had finally managed to make contact with him to tell him of his fears, and how he had managed to prevent Caterina from having all her own way by deliberately removing her name from the will so that it merely required Lorenzo to marry in order to inherit, rather than specifically having to marry Caterina.