‘That’s right, she loves it there,’ Issy replied, grateful for the distraction.
‘Awful shame about the Duke’s passing last summer,’ Frank continued, his smile dying. ‘Son’s back you know. Doing up the Hall. Although he never saw fit to come to the funeral. ’ Spect your mother told you that?’
Edie hadn’t, because her mother knew better than to talk to her about Gio after that fateful summer.
But the news that Gio hadn’t bothered to attend his own father’s funeral didn’t surprise Issy. He and his father had always had a miserably dysfunctional relationship, evidenced by the heated arguments and chilly silences she and her mother had witnessed during the summers Gio spent at the Hall.
She’d once romanticised Gio’s troubled teenage years, casting him as a misunderstood bad boy, torn between two parents who hated each other’s guts and used their only child as a battering ram. She’d stopped romanticising Gio’s behaviour a decade ago. And she had no desire to remember that surly, unhappy boy now. It might make her underestimate the man he had become.
‘Actually, I don’t suppose you know whether Gio’s at the Hall today? I came to pay him a visit.’
According to the articles she’d read, Gio lived
in Italy, but his office in Florence had told her he was in England. So she’d taken a chance he might be at the Hall.
‘Oh, aye—yes, he’s here,’ said Frank, making Issy’s pulse skitter. ‘Came in yesterday evening by helicopter, no less—or so Milly at the post office says. I took the council planners over to the Hall for a meeting an hour ago.’
‘Could I get a lift too?’ she said quickly, before she lost her nerve.
Frank grinned and grabbed his car keys. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’
He bolted the booth and directed her to the battered taxi-cab parked out front.
‘I’ll put your journey out on the house, for old times’ sake,’ he said cheerfully as he opened the door.
Issy tensed as she settled in the back seat.
No way was she going to think about old times. Especially her old times with Gio.
She snapped the seat belt on, determined to wipe every last one of those memories from her consciousness.
But as the car accelerated away from the kerb, and the familiar hedgerows and grass verges sped past on the twenty-minute drive to the Hall, the old times came flooding back regardless.
CHAPTER THREE
Ten Years Earlier
‘I CAN’T believe you’re really going to do it tonight. What if your mum finds out?’
‘Shh, Melly,’ Issy hissed as she craned her neck to check on the younger girls sitting at the front of the school bus. ‘Keep your voice down.’
As upper sixth-formers, they had the coveted back seat all to themselves, but she didn’t want anyone overhearing the conversation. Especially as she didn’t even want to be having this conversation.
When she’d told her best friend about her secret plan to loose her virginity to Giovanni Hamilton two years before, it had been thrilling and exciting. A forbidden topic they could discuss for hours on the long, boring bus ride home every day. And it had had about as much chance of actually happening as Melanie’s equally thrilling and exciting and endlessly discussed plan to lose her virginity to Gary Barlow from Take That.
Gio had been completely unattainable back then. When she’d been fifteen and he’d been nineteen the four years between them had seemed like an eternity.
But it hadn’t always been that way.
When Issy and her mother had first come to live at the Hall, and Gio had appeared that first summer, the two of them had become fast friends and partners in crime. To a nine-year-old tomboy who was used to spending hours on her own in the Hall’s grounds, Gio had been a godsend. A moody, intense thirteen-year-old boy with brown eyes so beautiful they’d made her heart skip, a fascinating command of swear words in both English and Italian, and a quick, creative mind with a talent for thinking up forbidden adventures, Gio had been more captivating than a character from one of Issy’s adventure books.
Best of all, Gio had needed her as much as she’d needed him. Issy had seen the sadness in his eyes when his father shouted at him—which seemed to be all the time—and it had made her stomach hurt. But she’d discovered that if she chatted to him, if she made him laugh, she could take the sad look away.
At fifteen, though, when she’d first formulated her plan to lose her virginity to him, her childhood friendship with Gio had slipped into awkward adolescent yearning.
She’d been gawky and spotty, with a figure her mum had insisted on calling ‘womanly’ but Issy thought was just plain fat, while Gio had been tall, tanned and gorgeous. A modern-day Heathcliff, with the looks of a Roman god and a wildness about him that drew every female within a twenty-mile radius like a magnet.
At nineteen, Gio already had a formidable reputation with women. And one night that summer Issy had seen the evidence for herself.