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sight, and withdraw her objections. Anything—anything that would let him off this terrible hook.
    But her phone call the previous night had destroyed any such hopes. She’d been almost hysterical, he remembered with distaste, railing that the girl was nothing more than a gold-digging tart, coarse and obvious, a woman of the lowest class. But clever in a crude way because she obviously intended to trap into marriage her poor Paolo, who did not realise the danger he was in.
    At the same time, she’d made it very clear that her threat to expose his fleeting affair with Vittoria, if he did not keep his word, was all too real.
    ‘I want the English girl destroyed,’ she had hissed at him. ‘Nothing less will do.’
    Alessio had been tempted to reply that he would prefer to destroy Vittoria, who was proving embarrassingly tenacious, bombarding him with phone calls and little notes, apparently unaware that her voluptuously passionate body in no way compensated for her nuisance value.
    If she continued to behave with such indiscretion, Fabrizio and his mother might well smell a rat, without any intervention from Zia Lucrezia, he told himself grimly.
    He’d been thankful to escape from Rome, and Vittoria’s constant badgering, to this private hideaway where he could remain incomunicabile. He hoped that, during his absence, she would find some other willing target for her libido, or he might ultimately have to be brutal with her. A thought that gave him no pleasure whatsoever.
    And now he was faced with another, worse calamity. This
    unknown, unwanted girl that he had somehow to entice from Paolo’s bed into his own. Probably, he decided, after he’d deliberately made himself very, very drunk…
    If I emerge alive from this mess, I shall take a vow of celibacy, he thought moodily.
    Guillermo was already opening the heavy wooden entrance door, and Emilia was hovering anxiously. He knew that his instructions would have been minutely carried out, and that the arrangements and the food would be perfect. But visitors at the villa were still a rarity, and the servants were more accustomed to their employer’s own brand of casual relaxation. Zia Lucrezia’s presence would prove taxing for all of them.
    He stepped out of the shadowy hall into the sunlight. The car had halted a few feet away, and the chauffeur was helping the Signora to alight, while Caio yapped crossly from her arms.
    But Alessio’s attention was immediately on the girl, standing quietly, a little apart, looking up at the house. His first reaction was that she was not his type—or Paolo’s, for that matter, and he found this faintly bewildering. In fact she fitted none of the preconceived images his aunt’s fulminations had engendered, he thought critically as he observed her. Nearly as tall as Paolo himself, with clear, pale skin, a cloud of russet hair reaching to her shoulders, eyes like smoke, and a sweet, blunt-cornered mouth.
    Not a conventional beauty—but curiously beguiling all the same.
    Probably too slim, he mused, although the cheap dress she was wearing was singularly unrevealing.
    And then, as if in answer to some silent wish, a faint breeze from the hills behind them blew the thin material back against her body, moulding it against the small, high breasts, the slight concavity of her stomach, the faintly rounded thighs, and long, slender legs.
    Alessio, astonished, felt the breath catch suddenly in his throat, and, in spite of himself, he found his body stirring with frank and unexpected anticipation.
    I’ve changed my mind, he thought in instant self-mockery. I shan’t get drunk after all. On the contrary, I think this ragazza deserves nothing less than my complete and sober attention.
    He became aware that the Signora was approaching, her eyes studying him with disfavour.
    ‘Is this how you dress to receive your visitors, Alessio?’
    He took her hand, bowing over it. His smile glinted coldly at her.
    ‘Ten minutes ago, Zia Lucrezia, I was