She pointed her hand as she spoke, praying that it was not trembling. An accusing hand. Directed at the groom. The man whose wedding she had to stop. Right now.
‘Hecannotmarry her!’ she cried out. ‘I am pregnant with his child!’
CHAPTER ONE
Three months earlier...
ARIANAGLANCEDATher reflection in the mirror in the ladies’ room of the uptown, upmarket Manhattan hotel, her peat-coloured eyes, a legacy of her father, deepened by eyeshadow and mascara, her generous mouth lustrous with lipstick.
Her grandfather would say she looked like a harlot, but she didn’t care—he always thought badly of her. Nothing she could do pleased him. Even when she tried to dress demurely he still disparaged her. She was too tall, too full-figured, too curvaceous, too everything. And, worst of all, far, far too outspoken. Always drawing attention to herself in entirely the wrong way.
Unlike her cousin Mia.
It was Mia who was the granddaughter he approved of. Mia, so petite, so slender, with her long fair hair and angelic features. Mia, so gentle and sweet-natured. Quietly spoken, diffident—meek, docile and shy. Just as a woman should be.
That was their grandfather’s opinion, and he did not balk at holding forth about it.
Ariana had heard it all her life, even as a child, and certainly once she became a teenager. She should be inured to it, but it could still sting—even now.
Well, not tonight! Tonight she was four thousand miles away from her grandfather’s grandpalazzoin Umbria and she was going to enjoy herself. She’d just completed the refurbishment of her mother’s new house in Florida, bought with her latest husband—number five, as Ariana had totted it up—and she’d flown to New York to catch up with her other American clients, including her hostess tonight: wealthy socialite Marnie van Huren, a friend of Ariana’s mother, who was bubbly, sociable—and matchmaking.
‘Come to my party, honey, and get yourself a nice man! You career girls are always too busy for romance!’
Ariana had smiled but said nothing. She focussed on her career for a reason—and it wasn’t to compensate for a lack of romance in her life. It was to escape her grandfather’s financial control.
It was a control that was not just financial, but emotional as well—a control he’d always sought to exert over his family. He’d done it with her uncle, Mia’s father, who to his dying day had never stepped out of line any more than his daughter—sweet, docile Mia—did now. That hideous day Ariana’s uncle and aunt had been killed in a car crash, when Mia was seven and she was nine. The tragedy had scarred them all, making her grandfather’s stifling tyranny even more suffocating. He’d become determined to make Ariana like gentle Mia, wanting to chain his granddaughters to his side, not wanting them to have a cent that had not been bestowed upon them by himself even once they’d grown up.
Ariana had vowed never to be dependent, never to let her grandfather curb and constrain her as he did her timid, gentle cousin Mia. Nor to react to that crushing control in the way her own mother had. She had eloped at nineteen with a good-looking penniless wastrel who had soon abandoned her, freshly married and pregnant, in exchange for being bought off by an irate father-in-law, never to be seen again. Least of all by his daughter Ariana.
A succession of marriages interspersed with affairs had followed for her mother, all disapproved of by Ariana’s grandfather, but fortunately always to wealthy men.
Ariana had no intention of copying her mother’s solution to her grandfather’s tyranny. She would never be dependent on a man’s largesse, whoever that man was. She would make her own money, using her own talents.
It hadn’t proved easy, and her precarious efforts to succeed in the overcrowded world of interior design were yet another source of contemptuous disapproval by her grandfather—yet another reason to condemn her. But she’d been dogged in her persistence and her determination, and now, at twenty-seven, she felt she could call herself a success.
It wasn’t, of course, a success that earned her grandfather’s approval—nothing could do that—but it earned her enough money to live a comfortably affluent life. The downside was that it was a life dedicated to her career. Though she dated from time to time, it was never a priority for her. Romance, for now, came a very poor second.
But when she finally had time for romance she would make sure it was the real thing. Permanent. She would not be like her mother, flitting from man to man, husband to husband. No, for her it would be different. One man, one love, one life—together.
One day I’ll meet him! The man I’ll make my life with—who will mean everything to me. The one man in the world who’ll set me alight like a flame, to burn for him all my life!
It would happen one day—and in the meantime there was work and, like tonight, socialising.
She glanced at her reflection again. The figure-hugging cocktail dress showed her generous curves in a way that would have had her grandfather choking. Defiantly, she gave a toss of her head, sending rich brunette waves rippling over her shoulders as, with a final glance, she sashayed out on her five-inch heels and went to party.
Luca Farnese stood at the side of the crowded function room, which was noisy with chatter and the clink of glasses and bejewelled bracelets, and surveyed the scene. He would not be staying long at this high-society Manhattan shindig, only long enough to have the conversation he wanted with his host, and then he’d escape.
Even though he knew, without vanity, that he was being eyed up, courtesy of his darkly good-looking Italian features, his six-foot height and lean, fit body, he had no desire for any dalliance tonight. Or ever. He had already found the woman of his dreams—and she was all he had ever sought in the woman he would make his life with.
A memory of her across the ocean, waiting for him to return and declare himself to her, played in his head, conjuring up her angelical beauty, her fair hair, luminous blue eyes, her tender mouth and her soft, melodious voice. She hadn’t said a great deal, had only hidden her doe-like gaze beneath demure lashes, but from the moment he’d met her—only a handful of weeks ago—he’d been captivated by her. The gentle sweetness of her nature had shone through, and the air of quietness about her had been serene and tranquil. What he had always dreamt of—longed for.
And he knew why.
Bitterly so.
Memory slid back down the years, the decades, and his expression tightened in painful recollection. Raised voices, doors slamming. His father’s voice, pleading and placatory, his mother’s angry and denouncing, vitriolic in its complaint and criticism, unstoppable in the full flow of her histrionics. Then a final slamming of a door and silence. Oppressive, echoing silence.
Himself as a young boy, clutching the landing banisters with clammy hands, his expression strained and anxious. Then going back to his bedroom with a heavy, forlorn tread, his insides knotted up, his heart thumping as he climbed back into bed. But not to sleep. To stare tensely up at the ceiling, hands clenched either side of his stiff body, trying to block out the echoes of the shouting and cursing.