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‘Mum? I’m going away earlier than expected,’ she said apologetically.
‘Frankie...don’t you think you’re getting rather too long in the tooth to be calling me Mum?’ Della snapped in petulant reproof. ‘It makes me feel as if I should be collecting my pension!’
‘Sorry.’ Frankie bit her lip uneasily, a shard of pain that was all too familiar piercing her as Della brushed off the news of her coming absence without comment or indeed any perceptible interest. ‘I have to go to—’
‘I have an appointment with my manicurist in an hour,’ Della interrupted impatiently. ‘I’ll call you some time next month.’
Frankie replaced the receiver, her hand not quite steady. No matter how many times it happened, it still hurt. All the old excuses came flooding back. Her mother had a very busy social life. She was not a demonstrative person. Those years of separation when Frankie had been in Sardinia had damaged their relationship. But at the back of her mind always lurked the insecure fear that her mother would really not have noticed if her daughter had never come home again. And then she felt deeply ashamed of herself for even thinking such a thing.
Frankie’s eyes flashed with growing exasperation. It was early evening and she was thoroughly fed up. Today she had expected to be on a ferry to Genoa, in Italy, and what was she doing instead? She was cooped up in a hideously noisy little Fiat, travelling along narrow, steep Sardinian roads that forced her to drive at a snail’s pace. Why? Signor Megras, the owner of the villas, had not condescended to meet her at his properties.
She had been given the grand tour by an employee and now she had to travel deep into the mountainous interior of the island to negotiate with the owner at his hotel. The drive had already taken far longer than she had anticipated. Of course, she could have taken advantage of the lift she had been offered by the employee, Pietro—he of the sexually voracious dark eyes and the overly eager-to-touch hands. In remembrance, Frankie grimaced. Welcome back to Sardinia, Frankie, home of the macho male and the child-bride...
As swiftly as that designation slunk into her thoughts, she suppressed it again. She knew what was wrong with her. It was these mountains, the same mountains that had imprisoned her for five unforgettable years. Her flesh chilled at the memories, so why should she let them out? That was the past and it was behind her. She was twenty-one now, and fully in control of her own life again.
But still the memories persisted. The culture shock of being eleven years old, one moment living a civilised life in London and the next being suddenly thrust unprepared into the midst of an almost illiterate peasant family, who didn’t even want her. The horror of being told that she would never see London or her mother again. The desertion of her father within days. The loneliness, the fear, the terrifying isolation. All those feelings were still trapped inside Frankie and she knew she would never be free of them.
Her mother had been an eighteen-year-old model when she became pregnant by a handsome Sard photographer called Marco Caparelli. The resulting marriage had been stormy. Her parents had finally separated when Frankie was eight. Her father had stayed in touch but on a very irregular basis, generally showing up when he was least expected and rarely appearing when he was. Once or twice he had even contrived to talk his way back beneath the marital roof again. Frankie’s desperate hope that her parents would reconcile had seemed like a real possibility to her on those occasions.
So, perhaps understandably, she had been upset when her mother met another man and finally decided that she wanted a divorce. Della’s plans had outraged her estranged husband as well. There had been a terrible argument. One day, shortly after that, Marco had picked Frankie up from school. They were going on a little holiday, he had told her and no, she didn’t need to go home to pack, he had laughed, displaying the small case which he’d explained contained everything that she might need for the wonderful trip he was taking her on.
‘Does Mum know?’ She had frowned.
And then he had let her into the even more wonderful secret. Mum and Dad were getting back together again. It might seem a big surprise to her, but while she had been at school Mum and Dad had made up. Wasn’t she pleased that she wasn’t going to have a stepfather after all? And wouldn’t it be fantastic when Mum joined them in Sardinia at the end of the week?
Bitterly rejecting the memory of that most cruel lie of all, Frankie rounded another corkscrew bend on the tortuous road and saw the sign at the head of a tumbledown bridge. ‘La Rocca’, it said. At last, she thought, accelerating up the hill into the village, braking first to avoid a goat and then two pigs. Her surroundings gave her a bad case of the chills. A clutch of scrawny hens scattered as she climbed out of the car in the dusty square.
The village was so poor you could taste it, and the taste of that poverty made Frankie shiver. She was reminded of another village even more remote from civilisation. Sienta, that particular cluster of hovels had been called. Birthplace of her paternal grandfather. Sienta had been a dot on the map of another world.
The silence grated on her nerves. Where was the hotel? She hoped it was reasonable, since she was probably going to be forced to spend the night there. Twenty yards away, through an open doorway, she saw a café. Her nose wrinkled fastidiously as she peered into the dim interior. The thick-set man behind the bar stared stonily back at her.
‘Could you tell me where Hotel La Rocca is?’ she asked in stilted Italian.
‘Francesca...?’
Gooseflesh broke out on her arms, her every muscle jerking painfully tight. That name she never used, that voice...the soft, mellow syllables as smooth and fluid as honey yet as energising for Frankie as the siren on a police car riding her bumper. There was a whirring in her eardrums. Slowly, very slowly, her feet began to turn, her slender body unnaturally stiff as she fought her disorientation, refusing to accept her instantaneous recognition of that voice.
Santino Vitale fluidly uncoiled his long, lean length from behind the table in the far comer and moved silently out of the shadows. Her tongue welded to the dry roof of her mouth. Her skin felt damp and clammy. For a moment she seriously doubted her sanity and the evidence of her own eyes. In an exquisitely cut silver-grey suit, an off-white raincoat negligently draped across his shoulders, Santino looked shockingly alien and exotic against the shabby backdrop of scarred tables and grimy walls.
‘Would you like to join me for a drink?’ Dark eyes as stunningly lustrous as black jet whipped over her stilled figure. Smoothly he captured her hand, warmth engulfing her fingertips. ‘Ah...you’re cold,’ Santino sighed, shrugging off his coat to drape it slowly and carefully round her rigid shoulders.
Frankie stood there like a wax dummy, so overpowered by his appearance, she could not react. Shattered, she couldn’t drag her gaze from him either. At six feet four, he towered over her in spite of her own not inconsiderable height. Devastatingly handsome, he had the hard classic features of a dark angel and the deeply disturbing sexual charisma of a very virile male. Without warning a tide of remembered humiliation engulfed her, draining every scrap of colour from her cheeks. Everything that Frankie had struggled so hard to forget over the past five years began to flood back.
‘This is the La Rocca hotel,’ Santino murmured.
‘This place?’ Complete bewilderment and the sense of foolishness that uncertainty always brought made Frankie sound shrill.
‘And you are here to meet a Signor Megras?’
‘How do you know that?’ Frankie demanded shakily. ‘Just how do you know that? And what are you doing here?’
‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘Sit down?’ she echoed, dazed green eyes scanning him as if he might disappear in a puff of smoke at any moment.
‘Why not? I see no Signor Megras.’ Santino spun out a chair in silent invitation. The proprietor hurried over to polish the ashtray and then retreated again. ‘Won’t you join me?’
A faint shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, highlighting the tattered posters on the wall and the worn stone floor. Every natural instinct spurred Frankie to flight. She reached the door again without the awareness that she had even moved her feet.
