The Sheikh's Innocent Bride

‘Oh, didn’t you know that the guest house is where Luciano keeps his stash of memorabilia?’ Sancia remarked in apparent surprise. ‘I thought you would have guessed. I mean, there’s nothing at all to be seen up at the castle.’

‘No, nothing,’ Jemima agreed, having naturally noticed that, surprisingly, Luciano had not a single photograph on display anywhere of his late first wife or their little daughter.

‘I know. He had the place stripped...the poor guy.’ Sancia sighed. ‘Once Gigi was gone, he just couldn’t live with even the smallest reminder of her. It was too painful for him. Haven’t you noticed that he never ever mentions her?’

Jemima was not very practised at female games of one-upmanship but she knew enough to know when she was being targeted and she murmured quietly, ‘Are we having tea?’

‘I’m not very domesticated but I do have the tray ready for us.’ Sancia gave her a wide grin, unperturbed by Jemima’s cool intonation, and stepped out into the room that Jemima assumed held a kitchen.

Jemima hovered by the window overlooking the fabulous view of the beach before succumbing to a curiosity that she simply couldn’t suppress. The room she stood in was ironically both her worst nightmare and her most precious discovery. All around her sat the means to satisfy her curiosity about Luciano’s first wife. Giving way to temptation, Jemima wandered around peering at the photos and the paintings.

There was no denying that Gigi Nocella had been superbly photogenic and immensely gifted in the genes department. The brown-eyed blonde, of whom Sancia was but a pale, more youthful copy, was exquisite to a degree very few women were and had reputedly been mesmerising on-screen. And here she was represented in all her earthly glory in various attitudes that ran from young and naïve to sexy and smouldering to pensive and mysterious. But the photos that Jemima paid most heed to were the ones that also contained Luciano.

The first she noted was their wedding photograph, in which he looked ridiculously youthful, reminding her that he had been very young when he married and that Gigi had been several years older.

‘He worshipped the ground she walked on,’ Sancia murmured from behind Jemima, making her flinch.

‘Oh, my goodness, you gave me a fright!’ Jemima spun and fanned the air, refusing to react to the blonde’s provocative statement.

In any case, she didn’t need the verbal commentary when she could see the adoration etched in Luciano’s lean dark face as he looked intently at the mother of his daughter. It hurt Jemima to see that light in his eyes. She knew that he would never look at her with that depth of caring and concern. She would never be that important to him or that perfect in looks and figure that every head would turn to watch her walk by. No, she conceded sadly, she was in a totally different category from Gigi and, whether she liked it or not, Luciano would probably not have looked twice at her had his son not looked at Jemima with love first.

But she would have to learn to live with that reality, wouldn’t she?

‘After the crash, Luciano said he would never ever love a woman again,’ Sancia delivered.

‘Ah, well, life moves on and now he’s getting married and he’s starting another family,’ Jemima responded with deliberate insensitivity before adding, ‘It’s different for you, though, as her sister. You’ll never be able to replace her and you must miss her terribly.’

Red coins of colour accentuated the blonde’s cheekbones. ‘You have no idea.’

‘I do actually. I didn’t know my sister for very long before I lost her but there was a special bond there...at least on my side,’ Jemima confided.

With hindsight she had begun to accept that her twin had not had the capacity to care for others in the same way as she did. She could not argue with the evidence and it was surely better for her to remember her sibling as she had been rather than idealise her memory.

‘Gigi was irreplaceable,’ Sancia told her a tad sharply.

‘But I’m not trying to replace her,’ Jemima responded quietly. ‘How could I? And why would I even want to? Luciano and I have a completely different relationship.’

As Jemima walked back from the beach through the castle gardens her pale blue eyes were overbright with tears. She didn’t want to let the tears fall, not with her usual bodyguards bare yards from her, silent and watchful of her every move. Furthermore she had not the slightest doubt that anything unusual she did would be reported straight back to Luciano, who seemed to worry a great deal about her while he was away from her. He phoned her several times a day and questioned her right down to asking what she ate at mealtimes. And when she had asked him why he bothered when she had so little news to relate, he had told her teasingly that he liked the sound of her voice and could listen to her reciting an old phone book just as happily. The minutiae of Nicky’s day were of equal interest to him and it was obvious to Jemima that Luciano really did miss seeing his son. His conversations with her, however, were just polite and sort of flirty, she reasoned ruefully. He wasn’t a teenager, after all, he was a man of almost thirty-one with sufficient experience to know exactly how to charm a woman.