SHE was going to have to give in and do that U-turn

she had sworn she would not make, Jodie admitted

unhappily to herself. She hadn’t a clue where she was,

and the bright moonlight was illuminating a landscape

so barren and hostile that she was actually beginning

to feel quite unnerved. To one side of her the ground

dropped away with dramatic sharpness, and on the

other it was broken by various jagged outcroppings

of rock.

Up ahead of her she could see where the narrow

track widened out to provide a passing place.

Determinedly she headed for it, and started to manoeuvre

the vehicle so that she could turn round.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, and the back

wheels of the hire car began to spin whilst the car

itself lurched horribly to one side. Thoroughly

alarmed, Jodie put the car in neutral and climbed out,

her alarm turning to despair as she saw that one of

the rear wheels was stuck fast in a deep rut and looked

as though it had a flat tyre.

Now what was she going to do? She certainly

couldn’t drive anywhere in it.

She went back to the car, massaging her aching leg

as she did so. She was tired, and hungry, and thoroughly

miserable. Opening her bag, she reached for

her mobile phone, and the wallet in which she had

placed all the details of her travel arrangements and

car hire.

As she picked up the phone her eyes widened in

dismay. Her phone was already on, and by the looks

of it there was no signal. Not only that, but when she

attempted to dial a number anyway the phone gave

an ominous bleep and the display light died. She must

have left it on, and now the battery was flat. How

could she have been so stupid? She needed help, but

what was she going to do? Stay here and wait for

someone to drive past? She hadn’t seen another sign

of life, never mind another vehicle, for miles. Walk?

To where? Back down the hundreds of kilometres to

the last village she had passed through what felt like

hours ago? The pain in her leg was gnawing at her

now. Should she walk on up into the mountains? She

gave a small shiver.

She hadn’t seen another driver in the whole of the

time she had been on this road, but someone must use

it because she could see tyre tracks in the dust. She

looked up towards the mountains, and, as though

somehow her own despair had conjured it up, she saw

the distant lights of another vehicle racing towards

her.

The relief made her feel almost giddily weak.

Savagely Lorenzo depressed the accelerator of the

black Ferrari, letting the powerful car take his anger

and turn it into a speed that demanded every ounce

of his driving skill as he negotiated the twisting road

in front of him.

Caterina had been very clever, working on his

grandmother in the way that she had. Had he been

here… But he had not. He had been abroad, visiting

the scene of the latest world disaster, helping to find

ways of alleviating the misery of those who had been

caught in it via his unofficial and voluntary role

within the government, unifying different charities

and providing hands-on administrative practical help

and expertise.

The severity of this particular crisis had meant that

he had not even been able to return to Italy for his

grandmother’s funeral, although he had managed to

find time within his meeting-packed day to go into a

local place of worship and add his prayers to those

of her other mourners.

A gentle, unsophisticated woman, who had once

told him she had hoped as a young girl to become a

nun, she had died peacefully in her sleep.

The Castillo had come to her through her first husband

who, in the way of things in aristocratic circles,

had also been the second cousin of her second husband,

Lorenzo’s own father, which was why the

Castillo had been hers to leave as she wished.

He had always been her favourite out of her two

grandsons, Lorenzo knew. He had spent his holidays

with her after the divorce of his parents, and it had

been his grandmother he had turned to when his

mother had announced that she was marrying her

lover — a man Lorenzo detested.

He had never been able to bring himself to forgive

his mother for that. Not even now when she, like his

father, was dead. Her actions had opened his eyes to

the deceitful, self-serving ways of the female sex, and

their determination to put themselves first whilst laying

claim to a sanctity they did not possess. His

mother had always insisted that her decision to divorce

his father had been taken to spare him the pain

of growing up in an unhappy home. She had lied, of

course. His feelings had been the last thing on her

mind when she had lain in the arms of her lover and

chosen him above her husband and her son.

The Ferrari snarled and bucked at the bad condition

of the road. Lorenzo ignored its complaints and

changed gear, hurling it into a sharp corner, and then

cursed beneath his breath as, right in front of him, he

saw a car blocking the road and a young woman

standing beside it.

Jodie winced as she heard the screech of brakes,

choking on the dust raised by the Ferrari’s tyres as it

skidded to a halt only inches away from the side of

the hire car. Automatically she had made herself stand

upright, instead of leaning on her vehicle for support,

the moment she had seen the other car.

What kind of madman drove like that down a road

like this — and in the dark, too? she wondered shakily,

holding on to the door of the car for support as she

watched him uncoil himself from the driver’s seat and

come towards her.

"Disgraziata!" A stream of Italian followed the

snarlingly contemptuous word he had already hurled

at her. But Jodie was not going to let herself be cowed

by him — or by any man — ever again.

"When you’ve quite finished…" Jodie interrupted

him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. "For a

start, I’m not Italian. I’m English. And—"

"English?" He made it sound as though he had

never heard the word before. "What are you doing

here? Why are you on this road? It is a private road

and leads only to the Castillo." The questions were

thrown at her like so many deadly sharp stiletto

knives.

"I took a wrong turning," Jodie defended herself. "I

was trying to turn round, but a wheel got stuck, and

now the tyre is flat."

She was pale and thin, her eyes huge in the exhausted

triangle of her small face, her fair hair

scraped back. She looked about sixteen, and an underfed

sixteen at that, Lorenzo decided unflatteringly,

as he swept her from head to toe with an experienced

male glance that took in the droop of her shoulders,

the hardly discernible shape of her breasts, the narrowness

of her waist and her hips, and the unexpected

length of the denim-clad legs attached to such a small

frame. Was she wearing heels, or were they really as

long as they looked?

"How old are you?" he demanded.

How old was she? Why on earth was he asking her

that?

"I’m twenty-six," Jodie responded stiffly, tilting her

chin as she looked up at him, determined not to be

intimidated by him despite the fact that she was already

aware that he was so spectacularly good-

looking she wanted to run away and hide before he

realised how pathetically inferior as a woman she was

to him as a man. Automatically, her hand went to her