The Italian's Rags-To-Riches Wife. Julia James

handsome. The reason, the article had explained, was that the beautiful people had always been feted and welcomed and admired, and so naturally they found the world a good place to live in. Plain people, like herself, were far less sure of a welcome by others. It made them awkward and self-conscious, uncertain.

      Well, that was true of her, she thought, staring up through the windscreen. She’d felt an outsider all her life, thanks mainly to the circumstances of her birth. But then adolescence had arrived, bringing home to her the tough truth about her appearance, and that sense of being an outsider—shut out from the normal activities of her age group—had been exacerbated a thousand times.

      Laura had finally realised that she had two choices in life. Either to be bitter about being so unattractive, or to get over it and move on. There were other things in life that were worthwhile, and if she just totally ignored her own appearance then she wouldn’t be bothered by it.

      And now she refused to be troubled by it. She wore clothes she could afford, which were serviceable and comfortable. She didn’t bother about her hair—never spending money getting it cut, just tying it back out of the way. And as for make-up, she’d save her money for something more useful. Like groceries and bills.

      And what did she care about a man like Allesandro di Vincenzo, as alien to her as if he’d come from another planet, looking at her with disdain? It was a lot easier when he was doing what he was doing now—completely ignoring her. Immersed in his laptop, he tapped away at the keyboard.

      He must, she realised, be a key part of Viale-Vincenzo. He was clearly rich, and there was an aura of command about him even though he must only be in his early thirties, she surmised.

      She gave a private sour smile as she gazed out of the window, then deliberately forced her mind away from the man in the car. Instead, she looked at the passing countryside as the car sped smoothly along the autostrada.

      This was Italy—the cypresses, the olive groves, the fields and the hills, the vineyards and the red-tiled houses. All bathed in sunlight.

      This is my country, as much as England is.

      Something stirred inside her, but she crushed it down. She might be half-Italian, but it was by accident only, not intent. Her upbringing was English—all English. This was an alien place. She did not belong here. It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all.

      Deliberately, she started to run through all the repairs that needed doing at Wharton. That was the only place that meant anything to her.

      Not anything here.

      Laura got out of the car and looked around her. Involuntarily, her eyes widened. The house in front of her was huge. A grand, aristocratic villa, no less, made of cream-coloured stone. Sash windows marched along the frontage, winking in the sunlight and on the other side of the gravelled drive on which the car had drawn up formal gardens stretched away down a gentle slope. Even at this time of year she could see the grounds were perfectly manicured.

      Tension knotted inside her like a ball of steel wool.

      She was here, in Italy. Inside this vast house was her only living relative. The father of the man who had fathered her. Father of the man who had destroyed her mother with his callousness and cruelty, and who had refused to acknowledge his own daughter’s existence.

      She wanted to run. Bolt. Get away as fast and as far as she could. She wanted to go home, be home—the only home she had ever known, the only home she wanted. She wanted nothing, nothing of what was here.

      She stared about her. That strange pang came again, very deep within. If the man who had fathered her hadn’t been the complete bastard that he had, she might have known this place. Might have been brought here for holidays. Might have run laughing through the gardens as a child. Her mother might have been here too—alive and happy with the man she loved…

      But Stefano Viale had not been interested in love, or marriage, or his own daughter. He had made that very, very plain.

      Inside her head, she heard again her grandmother’s stricken voice.

      ‘He never wrote, not once. Never answered any of your mother’s letters. She was heartbroken—just heartbroken. Not a single letter, not a single kind word to her. He’d taken her innocence, used her and thrown her away!’

      Laura’s expression hardened. That had been the reality she had grown up with.

      Father? She didn’t have one. She never had.

      And she didn’t have a grandfather either. Whatever the man waiting for her inside wanted to call himself.

      ‘This way.’

      The terse, impersonal tones of Allesandro di Vincenzo interrupted her baleful thoughts. She was being directed indoors, and with an increasing sense of oppression she walked inside into a vast marble-floored entrance hall.

      Allesandro strode past her, towards a pair of double doors beyond. He threw them open and walked in. Tomaso was there, at his desk by the window. He looked up immediately. There was a taut expression on his face. Tense. Expectant.

      Suddenly, for all that the old man had manipulated him shamelessly, Allesandro felt he could not do this to him. He should go in first, warn the old man what he was about to get by way of a granddaughter. Then he crushed his compunction. Tomaso was playing hardball—deliberately using Allesandro’s desire for control of Viale-Vincenzo in order to make him do what he wanted. And if what he wanted was his deeply unpleasant granddaughter, he could have her.

      Behind him Allesandro could hear the heavy plod of unfeminine feet shod in flat clumpy shoes that no Italian woman this side of a lunatic asylum would even have possessed, let alone worn.

      The old man was getting to his feet.

      ‘Tomaso—your granddaughter,’ announced Allesandro, his voice studiously expressionless. ‘Laura Stowe.’

      But Tomaso was not looking at him. He was staring past the younger man to the female figure that had walked in behind him. Allesandro watched his face as the old man’s expression changed.

      It became bland, unreadable.

      ‘Laura—’ said Tomaso, and held his hand towards her.

      The girl was standing there, ignoring the hand that stretched out to her. Her face was shuttered, the way it had been the entire journey. The lack of expression made the girl look like a pudding—one of those stodgy English ones, with suet in them.

      ‘I am your grandfather,’ said Tomaso. The face might be bland, Allesandro thought, eyes narrowing minutely, but the voice was not. It was audibly suppressing emotion.

      Something flickered angrily in the girl’s face.

      ‘My grandfather is dead. You are merely the father of the man who ruined my mother’s life.’

      The aggression in her tone was unequivocal. For a moment Allesandro saw new emotion in Tomaso’s face. Shock. Naked and raw.

      The girl held her pitiless gaze.

      ‘The only reason I’m here,’ she told him, ‘is because that man—’ she nodded curtly in Allesandro’s direction, and he felt a spurt of vicious anger both at her manner, and at what he knew was coming next ‘—bribed me to come.’

      ‘He bribed you?’ The old man’s voice was a disbelieving echo.

      ‘Yes.’ Allesandro watched, aghast, as the girl spoke bluntly. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you, or anyone connected with the man who treated my mother so unforgivably! I can’t imagine why you thought I would have the slightest desire or interest in meeting you—any more than the man who fathered me had the slightest desire or interest in my existence, or in what he’d done to my mother!’ A sharp, tight breath made her pause, and then she went on. ‘I’m sorry your son is dead—but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing. Because your son wasn’t anything to do with me. He made that totally clear even before I was born!’

      Shock