CHAPTER ONE
RIO BENEDETTI SET his even, white teeth together hard and suppressed a very rude word as his godfather cheerfully chatted on about his plans to entertain his unexpected guest. Beppe Sorrentino was a naïve man, trusting and generous to a fault, not at all the sort of man to suspect his self-invited guest of a hidden agenda. Luckily he had a godson like Rio, determined to shield the older man from anyone trying to take him for a ride.
Rio, the billionaire veteran of many triumphant wins in the business world and a man cynically unimpressed by women, knew he had to proceed with discretion because Ellie Dixon had powerful, wealthy friends, and most important, she was the sister of Polly, the current queen of Dharia—a country which rejoiced in oil wealth. Even worse, on paper at least, Ellie was impressive. Nobody knew that better than Rio, who had met her at his friend Rashad’s wedding to her sister Polly. She was a beautiful, intelligent and hard-working doctor. But saintly Dr Ellie’s profile took a fast nosedive if you had her past history exhaustively checked. At best Rio knew her to be a thief and a gold-digger, at worst she could be the kind of doctor who befriended the elderly to persuade them to change their wills in her favour.
Ellie had had a disciplinary action brought against her at work after an elderly patient had died endowing Ellie with all her worldly goods. Not surprisingly, the old lady’s nephew had filed a complaint. But then there had been indications that Ellie might have an unseemly lust for money earlier than that, Rio acknowledged, thinking of the section in the investigative report relating to her grandmother’s diamond brooch. The valuable brooch should’ve gone to Ellie’s uncle but Ellie had somehow acquired it instead, causing much family bitterness.
No, nothing about Ellie Dixon was straightforward, not least her surprising approach to his godfather in a letter in which she had asked to visit because Beppe had apparently once known her late mother.
Of course, it was equally possible that Rio himself was the actual target in Dr Ellie’s sights, he conceded with a certain amount of cynical satisfaction at that idea. Perhaps Ellie hadn’t realised just how very rich he was at the wedding and, knowing where he lived, had come up with this vague connection as an excuse to visit his godfather, Beppe. Women, after all, had often gone to quite extraordinary lengths to try to reel him in, and he was as slick as an eel when it came to avoiding commitment.
He refused to think about what had happened with Ellie at Rashad’s wedding because Rio did not believe in reconstructing unpleasant past events. With women he was very much a ‘hit it and quit it’ kind of guy. He didn’t do serious and he didn’t do long-term. Why would he? He was thirty years old, rich as sin and very good-looking and his female options were so many and varied that, had he wanted to and without effort, he could have slept with a different woman every night of the year. So, if he was Dr Ellie’s target she was in for a severe disillusionment. In any case, the woman was an absolute shrew with a streak of violence, he recalled sardonically.
‘You’re very quiet, Rio…’ Beppe remark
ed. ‘You don’t approve of Annabel’s daughter visiting, do you?’
‘Why would you think that?’ Rio parried, surprised that the older man had seen through his tolerant front.
Beppe simply grinned. He was a small man with greying hair and rather round in shape. Perched in his favourite armchair, he had the cheerful air of a playful gnome and Rio’s shrewd dark eyes softened the instant they settled on him because Beppe Sorrentino was as dear to Rio as any father could have been.
‘I saw you wince when I mentioned how disappointed I was that Ellie wouldn’t agree to stay here in my home as my guest. She’s a very frank young lady. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable because she doesn’t know me and would prefer to stay at the hotel.’
‘It wouldn’t be comfortable for you either to have her here. You’re not used to having guests,’ Rio pointed out, for Beppe had been a childless widower for almost twenty years and lived a very quiet and peaceful life in his family palazzo a few miles outside Florence.
‘I know but I get bored,’ Beppe admitted abruptly. ‘Bored and lonely. No, don’t look at me like that, Rio. You visit plenty. But, Ellie’s visit will be stimulating. A fresh face, different company.’
‘Dio mio…’ Rio rhymed thoughtfully. ‘Why are you so reluctant to tell me anything about Ellie’s mother and yet so excited about her daughter coming here?’
Beppe’s rounded face locked down so fast it was like a vault sliding shut and his dark eyes evaded his godson’s. ‘It’s not something I can discuss with you, Rio. Please don’t take that the wrong way.’
Rio’s even, white teeth gritted again. He had even considered the idea that in some way Ellie could be engaged in an attempt to blackmail his godfather about some dark secret, but even optimistic Beppe would hardly look forward so happily to the visit of a blackmailer. Furthermore Rio couldn’t imagine that Beppe had any dark secrets because he was the most open, transparent personality Rio had ever known. Yet Beppe had known great unhappiness and loss in his private life. His delightful wife, Amalia, had given birth to a stillborn son and had then suffered a severe stroke. From then on right up until her death, Beppe’s wife had endured precarious health and the confinement of a wheelchair. Beppe, however, had remained utterly devoted to his beloved Amalia and, although now pushing sixty, had evinced not the smallest desire to meet another woman.
Rio, in strong comparison, had never been open or trusting with other human beings. He was naturally suspicious and naturally complex. He had been abandoned in a dumpster at birth, born to a heroin-addicted mother and an unknown father and he had spent his formative years in an orphanage until Amalia Sorrentino took an interest in him. Through Amalia he had met her kindly husband, his benefactor. He knew very well that he owed almost everything he had become and everything he had achieved to the man seated by the fireside who had first recognised his intelligence and there was little he would not have done to protect Beppe from any potential harm. And Rio was absolutely convinced that in some way Ellie Dixon was a harmful threat.
Evil temptress? Gold-digging harpy? Hard-nosed feminist? Thief? Scam artist with the elderly? At Rashad’s wedding, he had been treated to giggly, amusing Ellie and enraged Ellie. He had also been led down the garden path right to the door of his hotel room and then assaulted. He hadn’t forgotten the experience. He hadn’t forgiven it either. Insults lingered with Rio. For too many years of his life he had been a nameless orphan, bullied and abused and dismissed as unimportant. And Ellie Dixon had cut him down to size as effectively as the most terrifying nun at the orphanage, Sister Teresa, who had struggled to overcome Rio’s stormy and essentially vengeful temperament.
No, Rio wasn’t the forgiving and forgetting sort. He still occasionally dreamt about Ellie twirling on the dance floor in her diaphanous green dress, her glorious mane of red curls tumbling round her animated face, and he would remember how he had felt and it stung him like salt in an open wound. He had felt that night that he would die if he didn’t have her. Lust multiplied by wine and wedding fervour, he dismissed now with still-gritted teeth. Now all he had to do was sit back and wait for Ellie and her character of many divergent colours to emerge into the unforgiving glare of daylight…
So, would she be the temptress, the prim doctor, the clever academic or the friendly, casual tourist? And just how long would it take for Rio to find out what her game was?
Whatever, it was still game on…
*
Ellie surveyed the vast cache of clothing in sheer wonderment.
‘Yes, your pressie has arrived,’ she confirmed to her sister Polly, with the phone tucked in her nape. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’
‘I know you don’t do shopping, so I did it for you,’ Polly responded cheerfully. ‘You need a holiday wardrobe for Italy and I bet you haven’t had the time to buy anything… Am I right?’
On that score, Polly was right but Ellie, picking up a floaty white sundress with a designer label, was gobsmacked by her sister’s generosity. Correction, her sister’s embarrassingly endless generosity. ‘Well, I’m really more of a “jeans and tee” sort of girl,’ she reminded her sibling. ‘In fact, I think the last time I put on a sundress was when I was visiting you. You know I’m very, very grateful, Polly, but I wish you wouldn’t spend so much money on me. I’m a junior doctor, I’m not living on the breadline—’
‘I’m your big sister and it gives me a lot of pleasure to buy you things,’ Polly told her unanswerably. ‘Come on, Ellie… Don’t be stiff and stuffy about this. We never got much in the way of pressies and treats growing up and I want to share my good fortune with you. It’s only money. Don’t make it change things between us—’
But it was changing things, Ellie thought, suppressing a sigh. She might always have been the kid sister in their duo but she had also always been the leader and she couldn’t help missing that familiarity and her sister, who now lived half the world away in Dharia. Polly didn’t turn to her for advice any more. Polly no longer needed her in the same way. Polly had Rashad now, and a gorgeous little son, and unless Ellie was very much mistaken there would soon be another little royal prince or princess on the horizon. Her sister also had a pair of adoring grandparents in Dharia, who had welcomed her into her late father’s side of the family with loving enthusiasm.
And that was why Ellie was travelling out to Italy clutching the emerald ring gifted to their by her late mother, Annabel, whom she had never known. Annabel had died in a hospice after a long illness while her daughters were raised by their grandmother. Ellie’s mother had left behind three rings in separate envelopes for her daughters.
That there were three envelopes had been the first shock because until that moment Ellie and Polly had not realised that they had another sister, younger than they were, raised apart from them and most probably in council care. A sister, Lucy, completely unknown to them. In each envelope their mother had written the name of each girl’s father.
Polly had flown out to Dharia to research her background in the hope of finding her father, only to discover that he had died before she was even born, but she had been compensated for that loss by the existence of welcoming, loving grandparents. In the midst of that family reunion, Polly had married Rashad, the king of Dharia, and become a queen. As soon as she had married she and Rashad had hired a private detective to try to locate Lucy but the search had been hampered by officialdom’s rules of confidentiality.
Ellie had received an emerald ring along with two male names on a scrap of writing paper… Beppe and Vincenzo Sorrentino. She assumed that one of those men was her father and she already knew that one of them was dead. She knew absolutely nothing else and wasn’t even sure she really wanted to know what kind of entanglement her mother had contrived to have with two men, who were brothers. If that made her a prude, too bad, she thought ruefully. She couldn’t help her own nature, could she? And she didn’t have unrealistic expectations about what she might discover about her paternity in Italy. Neither man might have
been her father, in which case she would simply have to accept living with her ignorance. But the discovery of any kind of relative would be welcome, she conceded sadly, because since Polly’s marriage she had missed having a family within reach.
At the same time she asked herself why she still cherished that idealistic image of ‘family,’ because the grandmother who had raised her and Polly had not been a warm or loving person and her mother’s brother, her uncle Jim, had been downright horrible even when they were children. In fact, recalling how the older man had treated her in the aftermath of his own mother’s death made Ellie flame up with angry resentment, which made her wonder if she would ever share that sad story with Polly. Probably not, because Polly preferred only to see the good in people.
In the same way Polly had blithely declared that her marriage would change nothing between the sisters but, in fact, it had changed everything. Ellie didn’t even like to phone her sister too often because she was very aware that Polly had far more pressing and important commitments as a wife, a mother and a queen. Ellie loved to visit Dharia, as well, but the long flights would eat up a weekend off and she often spent her leave simply catching up on sleep because junior doctors routinely had to work very long hours. At her most recent training rotation she had been working at a hospice and her duties and her patients had drained her both mentally and emotionally.
Indeed as she packed the new wardrobe Polly had had delivered to her into a pair of suitcases Ellie was too weary even to examine the garments and belatedly very grateful that her sister had saved her from an exhaustive shopping trip. No doubt she would look a lot fancier and more feminine in clothing Polly had picked than she would in anything she would have chosen for herself, she thought ruefully, because she had never been interested in fashion.
Far more importantly, Ellie was much more excited about even the slight prospect that she might find her father in Italy. Even Polly, with whom Ellie had played it very cool and cynical on that topic, had no real idea how much Ellie longed to find a father at the end of the Italian trail.
*
Two days later, Ellie walked down the stairs of the small rural hotel she had chosen and was shown out to a delightful three-sided patio, which was festooned with flowers and overlooked a rolling section of the green, vine-covered Tuscan landscape. She breathed in the fresh air with a smile of pure pleasure and relaxed for the first time in many weeks.
Tomorrow she had an appointment to meet Beppe Sorrentino at his home, but today she was free to explore her surroundings and that lack of an actual to-do list was an unadulterated luxury. She settled down at her solo table, smoothing down the light cotton skirt and top she wore in mint green, only momentarily thinking that the uneven handkerchief hems Polly loved were very impractical. Fashion isn’t about practicality, she could hear her sister telling her squarely, and she smiled fondly as a brimming cup of cappuccino coffee arrived along with a basket of pastries.
Ellie powered through her usual work schedule on snatched coffee pick-me-ups and the fresh cappuccino was glorious, as was the croissant, which melted in her appreciative mouth. Indeed it was as she was brushing tiny flakes of pastry from her lips that a tall, dark silhouette blotted out her wonderful view. She blinked behind her sunglasses, supposing it was too much to have hoped that she would be allowed to have the patio and the view all to herself. After all, it was a very small hotel but still a hotel and naturally there would be other guests.
A liquid burst of Italian greeted the new arrival, whom Ellie could not yet see because of the sunlight. The waiter seemed to be falling over himself in his eagerness to greet the man, which probably meant he was a regular or a local, she thought idly. He responded in equally fast and fluent Italian and there was something about that voice, that dark chocolate honeyed drawl, that struck a dauntingly familiar note with Ellie and she paled, dismissing that jolt of familiarity with brisk common sense. After all, it couldn’t be the same man, simply couldn’t be! He lived in the city of Florence and she was miles outside the city, staying in a village hotel convenient to Beppe Sorrentino’s home. No, it absolutely couldn’t be the male who had totally destroyed her enjoyment of her sister’s wedding festivities and left her filled with self-loathing and regret. Even fate couldn’t be cruel enough to sentence her to a second meeting with Rio Benedetti, her worst nightmare cloaked in male flesh.
‘Buongiorno, Ellie…’ Rio murmured silkily as he yanked out the vacant chair at her table and sat down.
Shock, mortification and anger seized Ellie all at once. ‘What the heck are you doing here?’ she demanded baldly before she could think better of such revealing aggression.