Dark Angel

CHAPTER ONE

CRUSH barriers held back the baying media horde brandishing cameras and microphones outside the Royal Courts of Justice.

As Luciano da Valenza emerged, surrounded by his triumphant legal team, his new security men rushed to block those climbing the barriers in an effort to reach him. Standing six feet four tall with the lithe, powerful build of an athlete, Luciano dwarved his companions. For a split-second he stilled, stunning golden eyes brilliant in his lean, bronzed face, the only outward sign of the strong emotions gripping him.

He was free: no handcuffs on his wrists, no guards by his side, no prison van waiting to return him to a cell eight feet wide by ten feet deep. For the first time in five hellish years, the right to liberty and dignity was his again. But the moment was soured by the reality that nothing could bring those years back, or alter the harsh fact that the English legal system might have set aside his conviction as unsafe but had stopped short of declaring him innocent.

‘What will you do now?’ an Italian journalist shouted above the general mêlée. ‘I will fight on.’ Responding by instinct to a fellow countryman, Luciano was none-the-less amazed at the naivety of that question, for it was unthinkable to him that he might rest before his name was cleared and his enemies had paid the price for what he had endured.

‘Your immediate plans?’ The same paparazzo was quick to press his advantage.

A dangerous smile slashed Luciano’s lean, darkly handsome features. ‘A glass of 1925 Brunello Riserva and a woman.’

That declaration was met by a burst of appreciative laughter from those who understood enough Italian to translate that audacious declaration of intent.

On the sidelines, Luciano’s lawyer, Felix Carrington, wondered which of the many women who appeared to find his dynamic client irresistible would qualify for that ultimate accolade. Costanza, the sleek Italian brunette, who was surely the most devoted and discreet personal assistant in existence? Rochelle, the sexy blonde beauty, who had withdrawn her evidence on the grounds that she had been drunk and distraught when she had made her original statement? Or even Lesley Jennings, the fiercely intelligent and attractive solicitor in Felix’s own legal firm, whose determination to win Luciano’s release had become a crusade? More probably, Felix decided, a fresh face would capture the younger man’s interest: one of the glossy media or society females who had taken up his cause with such vigour.

Yet five years earlier, when Luciano da Valenza had been tried, found guilty and imprisoned, only a few lines in a local newspaper had reported the event. A foreign troubleshooter headhunted from Rome by the Linwoods, he had been better known in Italy as the up-and-coming aggressive young business blood that he was. But by slow degrees, Luciano’s plight had assumed a much more colourful guise.

In the aftermath of the original trial, Count Roberto Tessari, an Italian nobleman of enormous wealth and unblemished integrity, had come out of nowhere to engage Carrington and Carrington to supply a top-flight defence team on Luciano’s behalf. The older man had also secured Luciano’s assets against the fines imposed by his conviction by paying them out of his own pocket before pledging his bottomless bank account to the long, tough battle of appealing Luciano’s conviction and gaining his release.

In spite of Tessari’s painfully embarrassing efforts to keep his involvement a matter of total blanket confidentiality, someone somewhere had talked. When the rumours had begun, a prominent newspaper had printed a double-page spread on Luciano da Valenza. Their investigation of his background had helpfully delivered those elements beloved of the popular Press: secrecy, illegitimacy, suffering and poverty. At that timely moment, Luciano had then proved that he was indeed an unusual criminal. While recovering from a savage beating by fellow inmates, who resented the attention he was receiving, he had risked his own life to rescue an officer from a fire in the prison hospital. A television documentary questioning his guilt had followed and, if it had lingered a little too lovingly and often on the lady producer’s clear admiration for Luciano’s dark-angel good looks and heroic stature, certainly the programme had generated an amount of interest in his cause which had done him no harm.

When, eighteen months ago, Tessari had died after finally acknowledging Luciano as his son and in an apparent expiation of his guilty conscience had left him everything he possessed, Luciano had become a extremely rich man. Yet not once during the years of Luciano’s imprisonment had the noble count visited his son or even attempted direct communication with him. In addition, Felix had been forced to utilise very persuasive arguments to convince his proud and independent client that he could not afford to refuse that golden inheritance if he wanted his freedom.

‘Thank you for all that you have done,’ Luciano breathed with quiet sincerity as he took his leave of Felix Carrington with a firm handshake. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

A glass of wine and a woman? A meaningless soundbite. Who had he been trying to impress? Luciano asked himself as he swung with lithe grace into the waiting limousine. He no longer needed to play to the gallery to secure support. A grim smile set his wide, sensual mouth, the anger he concealed at what he had withstood still as fierce as it had ever been. It seemed as though all his life he had been fighting other people’s low expectations of him.

‘What’s the point of you working so hard at school? It won’t get you any place…You’re Stephanella da Valenza’s bastard brat and nobody’s ever going to let you forget that! Don’t draw attention to yourself, just be like the other boys,’ his late mother had urged him with frowning anxiety, struggling to comprehend a twelve-year-old hungry for so many things that she herself had neither wanted nor

valued.

Then, as now, Luciano had travelled his own path. To act alone was not new to him. He knew that he would not savour the Brunello Riserva, that superb vintage wine from the Tuscan hills of his childhood, until he had settled several outstanding scores to his own satisfaction. Primarily, those scores centred on the Linwood family and their supporting players. As the only outsider and expendable, he had been set up as a fall guy. In return, he would bring down the chain of wine stores on which the Linwood fortunes had been built. In fact that process had kicked off over a year earlier. Of the Linwood circle, only Rochelle would escape unscathed. In recognition of Rochelle’s belated efforts to redress the wrong she had done, he was prepared to stamp her account more or less paid.

Last but far from being least, however, came Rochelle’s little stepsister, Kerry Linwood. At the thought of his former fiancée, a hard smile set Luciano’s firm lips and his aggressive jawline clenched with formidable purpose. She had brought out his protective instincts and he had convinced himself that to offer her anything other than marriage would be an insult. Yet when the Linwoods had chosen him as the sacrifice to throw to the wolves, Kerry must have been in on that selection process.

Of course she had known he had been framed! Why else had she broken off their engagement without any adequate explanation only the day before his arrest? What he had believed he felt for her had been a rare flight of romantic fancy that had cost him dear, he acknowledged with brooding bitterness. Not a mistake he would ever make again with a woman. Kerry had betrayed him with quite outstanding completeness.

Revenge? No, it was simply payback time. Drama was not required. Luciano was prepared to allow that the volatile Italian and Sicilian genes that mingled in his family tree might dispose him more towards the darker forms of vengeful retribution. But at the same time, Luciano was very much a sophisticate. To secure the natural justice that he desired, every step he had already taken and would take in the near future had been and would continue to be both businesslike and ethical. His maternal grandfather might have fled Sicily when it became too hot to hold him but Luciano was better educated and infinitely cleverer. Even so, perhaps blood would out, Luciano conceded thoughtfully. The primal pleasure with which he looked forward to watching his victims sweat and suffer was a sensation which his brutal Sicilian grandfather would have entirely understood and approved.

‘You shouldn’t be thinking of the Linwoods,’ the slim, svelte brunette seated beside him lamented in liquid Italian, her dark eyes as soft as only a precious few could ever have seen them, for, much like himself, she was not given to revealing her emotions. ‘This is a very special day…live it, Luciano!’

As Luciano surveyed Costanza, a slow, shimmering smile illuminated his grave, dark features. He grasped the expressive hand which she had lifted in a wholly Latin gesture to accentuate her frustration. ‘We will live it together…I promise you,’ he soothed in his rich, dark drawl.

‘Then let’s go home to Italy,’ Costanza urged. ‘Right now, before one more hour passes!’

‘I’m not ready yet,’ Luciano confided equably. ‘Why don’t you allow me to treat you to a vacation instead? After working tirelessly on my behalf for more years than either of us care to count, you certainly deserve to spoil yourself for a change.’

At that suggestion, Costanza compressed her raspberry-tinted lips and said nothing. She recognised a warning when she heard one, knew exactly how far she could go with him and was always careful not to breach that boundary.

Suppressing a soundless sigh, Luciano lounged back in an elegant but deliberate sprawl in the corner of the limo. That amount of space was a luxury he had learned to live without. Piece by piece all that was soft and civilised in him had been stripped away by the prison regime while he fought the system. That unyielding system, the unspoken, unwritten and oft-denied rule that nevertheless decreed that a man who continued to plead innocence of his crime could not be seriously considered for early release by the parole board or even for the reward of a transfer to a less regimented open prison. Luciano had served his time and all of it had been hard time. Often, in prison parlance, he had been ‘banged up’ in his cell for as long as twenty-two mind-numbing hours a day, a particularly cruel torment for a male who had never lost his deep appreciation for the wide open spaces of the countryside.

Leaving that thought behind, for Luciano deemed looking back with regret to what could not be changed a weakness, he experienced a sudden fierce yearning to once again smell the delicate lemony aroma of the flowering vines flourishing on the steep slopes of the Villa Contarini estate. He had lived there until he was eight years old. He had played in the oak woods, raced around pretending to hunt wild boars, had dug without the smallest success for truffles and had brought home fresh fungi as an offering for his overworked mother, only to see his gifts continually claimed by his bone-idle grandfather instead.

But now in Luciano’s imagination, he saw himself standing high at the head of those lush green, close-planted rows of vines to look up at the bright blue cloudless sky and the endless hot sun and rejoice in what he had once taken entirely for granted. He left behind that vision with wry dark golden eyes and contemplated the astonishing fact that he now owned his childhood playground: the Villa Contarini, which stood high on the list of legendary Tuscan vineyards. Once too, he recalled without a shade of amusement, he had nourished a sentimental fantasy of bringing Kerry home as his bride to a very much smaller vineyard where he was paying a winemaker to live out what had once been the height of his own boyish dreams.

Fate gave with one hand and took with the other. Luciano had long accepted that unavoidable fact of life. To buy the vineyard and finance the hopeful creation of a wine to be reckoned with, he had had to concentrate his talents on forging a reputation in the business world and earning serious money. But nowhere was it written that he could not now rearrange his priorities. Ironically, the father whom he had despised from the instant of their first unforgettable meeting had finally forever ensured that he need never again earn his daily crust from humble toil.

‘I kept on a skeleton staff here…I thought you might like to have someone cook for you and answer the phone when I’m not around,’ Costanza told him as they vacated the limo outside a smart townhouse in one of London’s most impressive residential squares.

Accepting the key she handed him, Luciano strove not to wince at the underwritten threat of the possessive brunette welding herself to him like a second skin. Above all else, Luciano had always revelled in his freedom of choice and the loss of that privilege for so many years had made that liberty all the more precious a commodity.

‘Mr da Valenza…’ In the spacious hall beyond the front door, a nervous older woman in a plain dark dress hurried to acknowledge his arrival. ‘I’m Mrs Coulter, your housekeeper. You have some visitors waiting for you in the drawing room.’

An exasperated frownline divided Luciano’s winged ebony brows. In a helpful gesture, Mrs Coulter opened a panelled door on the other side of the hall, for, never having even visited the house that had once belonged to Roberto Tessari, he could have had no idea where to find his uninvited guests. Entering the gracious room, he fell still at the sight of the three women seated together in silence and almost groaned out loud in frustration.