Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain. Carol Marinelli

As she stepped in through the door she then stood for a moment just looking around her in frowning puzzlement. The place had been quite tidy when she’d left here this morning but it didn’t look like that now. The cushions on the sofa were crushed and tumbled. There were two half-drunk coffee-cups sitting on the low table and an empty bottle of wine with two glasses lying on their sides on the floor. She could see through the open door to Sonya’s bedroom that it looked pretty much in the same tumbled state.

      She was still frowning at the mess when her cellphone beeped and, placing her shopping bags on the floor, she fished out her phone to discover the caller was Bianca, the office manager of the tour group she and Sonya worked for.

      She was looking for Sonya. ‘She didn’t turn up to work today,’ Bianca announced. ‘Have you any idea where she is? She isn’t answering her mobile or the phone at your flat.’

      Looking around at the evidence, Francesca could only assume that Sonya had been entertaining an unexpected visitor, though her loyalty to Sonya was not going to let her tell Bianca that.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I left the flat before Sonya was up this morning so I’ve no idea where she is,’ which wasn’t a lie. ‘Didn’t she call in to warn you she wasn’t going to make it?’

      ‘No.’ The manager’s voice was tight. ‘And she’s left me a guide short. It really isn’t on, Francesca. This is the third time in two weeks she’s let me down like this.’

      It was? Francesca’s eyes widened at this surprise piece of information. She hadn’t been aware that Sonya had been skipping off work. ‘I know she’s been suffering with a troublesome wisdom tooth lately,’ which was true. Sonya complained about it a lot but was terror-struck at the mere mention of the word dentist. ‘Maybe she couldn’t stand the pain any more and went to get treatment.’

      ‘And pigs might fly,’ Bianca snapped. ‘It’s this man she has been seeing.’

      Man? ‘What man?’ As far as she was aware, Sonya wasn’t seeing anyone special at the moment.

      ‘Don’t pull the innocent, Francesca,’ Bianca scolded. ‘You know all about the married man she’s lost her head over. If she’s any sense she will drop him before this company drops her. I can’t have my guides not turning up when they should. It makes an absolute mess of my…’

      Francesca stopped listening, so stunned by the turn of this conversation that she had to sit down. She’d known Sonya since they’d been at university together and—OK, she acknowledged, so she was a bit of a rebel and tended to let her heart rule her head. But she confided most things to Francesca and she did not recall her saying a thing about a new man.

      A married man?

      Bianca had to be mistaken, she decided, only to look at the evidence laid out in front of her eyes that told her Sonya was up to something clandestine if she was resorting to skipping work so she could entertain her man here, where there was little chance of them being seen together.

      ‘I’ll come in and cover for her if you need me.’ She cut across whatever it was Bianca was saying. She glanced at her watch. ‘I still have time to get there if it will help you out.’

      ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? You were supposed to be shopping for your dress today. It doesn’t seem fair that you should—’

      ‘The dress is bought,’ Francesca assured, glancing across the room to where she’d placed the elegant dress box that she’d ridden back here safely trapped between her legs. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can make it.’

      ‘You truly are an angel, Francesca,’ Bianca said in relief. ‘Unlike your wretched friend!’

      The phone call ended. Francesca continued to sit there wondering what the heck had got into today. It had begun so well. She’d been happy—everything had been perfect!

      Then Carlo Carlucci had happened, she recalled with a small shiver. Since her run-in with him nothing had gone right. She’d had phone calls that irritated, ill winds blowing chills across her skin and a tiring trudge through Rome’s finest fashion boutiques, looking for a dress she still wasn’t sure about even though she’d bought it. Now Sonya had gone missing and it was just beginning to dawn on her that, true to her flatmate’s nature, she had rung her this morning to ask if she would cover for her at work. Only she’d then chickened out when they’d got into an argument over Angelo.

      And now she had discovered that Sonya had been lying to her! Or keeping secrets was probably a fairer way of putting it.

      But she didn’t want to be fair. She didn’t want to be an angel or have her best friend sniping at Angelo and then likening her to her mother because she happened to lose her patience.

      More irritation struck, slicing right down her backbone and bringing her to her feet. She bent to pick up the used coffee-cups then stopped herself. Tidying up after Sonya was something her mother would do. So was tutting and sighing all over the place, as she’d been about to do.

      ‘Oh, damn it!’ she shouted at the tiny apartment. And she never swore!

      Because her mother would have been appalled.

      ‘Damn it,’ she said again out of sheer black cussedness and went to put her purchases away.

      Then she went still, listening to herself and not liking what she heard. Her mother was gone now and she did not want to think ill of her. She didn’t want to be sniping at her inside her head! There had been too much ill feeling in Maria Bernard’s life while she had been alive, she thought bleakly as she went to unpack and hang up her dress.

      Her mother had once been the beautiful Maria Gianni—only child of Rinaldo Gianni, a man who ran his household with a rod of iron. He’d woven plans around his only daughter that had mapped out her entire future from the day she had been born. Then Maria had thwarted those plans by falling in love with a thankless English rake called Vincent Bernard, who had his eye firmly fixed on Maria’s inheritance. It had taken a month for him to make her pregnant and another month to get her father’s permission to marry her—before Rinaldo Gianni threw them out. Vincent had taken her mother to England. He’d been so sure that his father-in-law would relent and forgive once Maria produced the grandson the old man wanted so much that he was prepared to wait the whole nine months for the event to take place. A girl had not fitted either man’s criteria. Vincent Bernard had cut his losses and left Maria holding a baby girl that nobody wanted by then. A year after that Vincent had divorced her to marry his next rich fool of a wife. Divorce had been the ultimate humiliation and sin in her mother’s eyes. She’d never acknowledged that legal slip of paper ending her Roman Catholic marriage. She’d never forgiven her father for refusing to forgive her for going against his wishes. All three had never spoken again.

      Rinaldo Gianni had died when Francesca was ten years old, having never acknowledged that he had a granddaughter. She’d never met him, just as she had never met her own father, who—and here was the irony—died around the same time. It wasn’t until a year after her mother’s death that she’d given in to a long-suppressed yearning to come to Rome and meet with her only surviving blood relative. And even as she’d taken that first step onto Italian soil she had still been struggling with her conscience because she’d known her mother would not approve. But it was lonely being on her own yet knowing she had a great-uncle living here who might—just might—be prepared to welcome Maria’s child.

      She’d wanted nothing else from Bruno Gianni. Not his money or even his love. She hadn’t got them either, she mused with a wry little smile as she dried herself after a quick shower. Her great-uncle Bruno, she’d discovered, was a very old man living the life of a near recluse in his draughty old palazzo tucked away in the Albany Hills south of Rome. He did not receive visitors. He did not have a great-niece, she was informed by return letter when she’d made her first tentative approach. It had taken determined persistence on her part before the old man eventually gave in and reluctantly granted her an audience.

      It was a strange meeting, she recalled,