Jess's Promise. Lynne Graham

how he is about his privacy. Of course I do,’ her father admitted unhappily. ‘But I also thought—wrongly—that there was no way anyone would ever find out that I’d been responsible for letting Jason and Mark into the house, or even that it was them who had got in.’

      True comprehension finally slotted into place and Jess was impelled up out of her chair, a look of horror stamping her finely moulded features. ‘Oh, my goodness, the break-in at the hall…the painting that was stolen! Were you involved in the robbery?’ she demanded in ringing disbelief. ‘Was it your fault it happened?’

      ‘That same evening I gave Jason and Mark my security access codes and key card for the house,’ Robert admitted shakily, his complexion the colour of grey clay as he stared pleadingly at her. ‘I honestly believed that it was only photos they wanted, Jess. I had no idea they were going to steal anything, but I suspect now that it was all planned and I was an idiot to swallow the story they fed me.’

      ‘You have to go to the police right now and tell them what you know!’ Jess exclaimed.

      ‘I won’t need to…the police will be coming for me very soon,’ Robert countered in a bleak rejoinder. ‘I found out last night that Mr di Silvestri’s security system is so sophisticated that the IT consultant he’s bringing in will be able to tell which employee’s access code was used to gain entry to the hall and switch off the alarm. Apparently we all have individual codes, so the boss will know soon enough that it was me.’

      Chilled to the bone by that news, Jess suppressed a shiver. She was appalled; there was no point pretending otherwise. Her cousins, Jason and Mark Welch, had undoubtedly set her father up to gain access to the hall. They had deliberately subjected him to continual threatening visitations about the debt he could not repay, before finally approaching him with their seemingly simple little proposition. The older man had been naïve indeed to swallow their story of only wanting to take photographs. But then he was naïve, Jess conceded painfully; an uneducated handyman on the Halston estate, who until that cruise had never travelled more than fifty miles from his birthplace or worked in any other environment.

      ‘Did the Welchs steal the painting?’

      ‘I know nothing about what happened that night. I just handed over the codes and the key card, which was put back through the letterbox before I even got up the next morning,’ he admitted heavily. ‘The week after, Jason and Mark warned me to keep my mouth shut. Later, when I spoke to them about the robbery, they insisted that they had had nothing to do with it and that they have an alibi for that evening. I’m not sure I can see them as international art thieves. I wonder if they gave the codes and card to someone else to use. But I really haven’t a clue.’

      Jess was thinking sickly about Cesario di Silvestri, the billionaire Italian industrialist, the theft of whose painting her father would ultimately be held responsible for. Not a man to take such a crime lying down, not the forgiving sort either. How many people would even credit her father’s version of events? Or that he had not willingly conspired with his wife’s cousins? The fact that he had worked for almost forty years for the Halston estate would cut no ice, any more than his current lack of a criminal record and his good reputation. The bottom line was that a very serious offence had been committed.

      As the older man took his leave and urged her not to mention the matter to her mother yet Jess frowned in disagreement. ‘You need to tell Mum about this and quickly,’ she objected. ‘It’ll be a much bigger shock for her if the police turn up and she doesn’t know.’

      ‘Stress could make her ill again,’ Robert argued worriedly.

      ‘You don’t know that. Whatever happens, there are no guarantees,’ Jess reminded her father of the oncologist’s wise words following her mother’s treatment programme the previous year. ‘We just have to pray and hope for the best.’

      ‘I’ve let her down…’ Robert shook his head slowly, his dark eyes filmed with tears. ‘She doesn’t deserve this.’

      Jess said nothing, as she had no words of comfort to offer; the future did indeed look bleak. Should she approach Cesario di Silvestri and speak up on her father’s behalf? Unfortunately, when she thought about the background to her own distinctly awkward relationship with Cesario di Silvestri, that did not seem quite such a bright idea. She had gone out to dinner with Cesario once. When he had invited her, she’d had no choice but to accept out of courtesy, because of her father’s employment with him, and also because he was their most important client at the practice. Her face still burned though whenever she thought back to that disastrous evening when everything that could have gone wrong had done so. Now, she hated visiting the Halston Hall stud while Cesario was in residence. He always made her feel horribly self-conscious and her professional confidence took a nosedive around him.

      Not that he was rude to her; in fact, she had never met anyone with more polished manners. She could not accuse the smoothly spoken Italian of harassment either, because he had never made the smallest attempt to ask her out again since. But there was always an ironic edge to his attitude that made her feel uncomfortable, as though she was a figure of fun in his eyes. She had never understood why he’d invited her out in the first place. After all, she bore no resemblance to the extremely decorative and flirtatious party girls, socialites and starlets who usually entertained him.

      Cesario di Silvestri had a downright notorious reputation with the female sex, and Jess was very well aware of the fact. After all, her parents lived next door to his former housekeeper, Dot Smithers. The stories Dot had told of wild house parties and loose women flown in for the benefit of the rich male guests were the staples of village legend and had provided the fodder for several sleazy tabloid spreads in the years since the Italian billionaire had bought the Halston Hall estate. More than once Jess had personally seen Cesario di Silvestri with two or more women vying for his attention and she had no reason to doubt the rumour that he did, on occasion, enjoy more than one woman at a time in his bed.

      So, in the light of that information, there had never been any question of Jess wanting an invitation to dine out or in with Cesario. Even without all the attendant scandal of his raunchy lifestyle, she remained convinced that he was way out of her league, both in looks and status, and she very firmly believed that nothing good could develop from a relationship based on such obvious inequality. In her opinion, people from different walks of life should respect the boundaries that kept them separate. Her own mother, after all, had paid a high price when she’d chosen to flout those boundaries as a teenager.

      And Jess’s belief in that social division had only been underlined by that catastrophic dinner date. Cesario had taken her to an exclusive little restaurant and she had quickly realised she was seriously underdressed in comparison with the other female diners. He’d had to translate the stupid pretentious menu written in a foreign language for her benefit. During the meal she had struggled in sinking mortification to understand which pieces of cutlery went with which course and was still covered in blushes at the recollection that she had eaten her dessert with a spoon rather than the fork Cesario had used.

      But the highlight of the evening had to have been his invitation for her to spend the night with him after just one kiss. Cesario di Silvestri wasn’t just fast with women, he was supersonic. But his move on her had outraged her pride and hurt her self-image. Had she struck him as being so cheap and easy that she would fall into bed with a man she barely knew?

      All right, so the kiss had been spectacular. But the dizzy sexuality he had engulfed her in with his practised technique had unnerved her and had only made her all the more determined not to repeat such a dangerous experience. She had far too much self-respect and common sense to plunge into an affair with an impossibly wealthy womaniser. Such an imbalanced relationship could lead to nothing but grief, the results of which she had already seen within her own family circle. In all likelihood, if she had slept with Cesario that night he would have ticked some obnoxious male mental score-sheet and never have asked her out again.

      In any case, in recent years Jess had pretty much given up dating in favour of a quiet uncomplicated existence. Her sole regret on that issue was that she adored children and, from her teenage years, had dreamt of one day becoming a mother and having a child