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 Ferraris 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 drivers 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 youve quite finished" Jodie interrupted
him, her own voice every bit as hostile as his. "For a
start, Im not Italian. Im 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?
"Im 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
bad leg. It was really hurting her now.
Twenty-six! Lorenzo frowned as he looked down
at her hands. No rings. "Why are you here on your
own?"
Jodie was beginning to feel she had had enough.
"Because I am on my own. Not that it is any business
of yours," she informed him.
"On the contrary, it is very much my business
since you have seen fit to trespass on my land."
His land? Of course it would be his land; it possessed
exactly the same harsh, arrogant inhospitality as
he did.
"And what do you mean, you are on your own?"
she heard him demanding. "Surely you have aa
husband, or a lover. A man, a partner, in your life."
Jodie winced, and then laughed bitterly. He didnt
know about the still tender nerves he was brutalising.
"I thought I did," she agreed angrily, "but unfortunately
for me he decided he wanted to marry someone
else. This" she gestured towards the landscape and
the car "was supposed to be our honeymoon. But
now" Just saying the words still hurt, but strangely
there was also a savage sense of relief in being able
to vent her emotions instead of having to keep them
locked inside her for the sake of others, as she had
had to do at home.
"Now what?" Lorenzo challenged her. "Now you
are travelling alone and looking for someone to replace
him in your bed? The coastal resorts are the
best hunting ground for that. Not the mountains."
Jodie drew in her breath in outraged fury. "How
dare you say that? I am most certainly not looking
for anyone, let alone someone to replace him. In fact,
that is the last thing I want to do," she found herself
adding. "I shall never let another man into my life to
hurt me. Never. From now on I intend to live by
myself and for myself." Bold words, but she meant
every single one of them!
Lorenzo frowned as he heard in her voice the passionate
intensity of her determination.
"You still want him so much?"
"No!" Jodie told him fiercely, without stopping to
wonder why he was asking such a personal thing. "I
Dont want him at all not now."
"So why are you here running away?"
"I am not running away! I just Dont want to be
there to see him marry someone else," she added defensively
when she saw the way he was looking at
her. "Especially when shes all the things Im not.
Exciting, glamorous, sexy" Jodie lifted her hand to
her face to rub away the tears that had suddenly filled
her eyes. She had no idea why she was telling this
stranger all of this, admitting to him things she had
not even admitted to herself before.
"It is the man who determines whether or not a
woman is "sexy", as you put it," Lorenzo decreed