Page 2 of Marriage Made In Hate

Bianca, just getting home from work, opened the main front door of the house she lived in, glancing at the mail rack.

Normally the only contents for her were mailshots or any official communications that still came by post. The envelope she lifted out now seemed to be neither.

The address was handwritten in flowing copperplate, the envelope embossed.

She headed upstairs with the bag of groceries she’d picked up on her way from the bus stop.

Once inside her own flat, she slit the envelope open, drawing out the thick, folded sheet of paper inside and flattening it out.

She frowned. It seemed to be from a firm of solicitors.

As her eyes moved down the typewritten contents, her frown deepened.

What on earth—?

Nonplussed, she lifted her eyes, staring out of the small window in her kitchenette.

What possible reason could a posh firm of London lawyers have for asking her to get in touch with them?

Still nonplussed, she fetched her phone from her handbag, which she had deposited on the table in the living room.

Five minutes later she still had no explanation—only an appointment to call at their offices the next day. As to why…

No possible reason came to her.

* * *

Luca was back on the autostrada, heading for Rome.

It was more than a two-hour drive away, and he had a dinner engagement.

He’d spent the previous night at his own home, seeing to the various matters that arose at the extensive estate he’d inherited.

As well as the ancestral palazzo , it came with several farms, vineyards and woodlands, plus various local enterprises from wineries to timber yards.

He employed a highly competent estate manager—inherited from his father who, as a far-flung diplomat, had not himself been able to take on hands-on management—and Luca, too, pursuing his banking career in Rome, was more than happy to confine his own role to that simply of overseer.

Not that he did not look forward to one day basing himself at the palazzo …making it a family home once more.

When he married.

Because of course he would marry—at some point.

He was an only child—an only son—and he must look to the future. Cousins were all very well, but they were remote and distant. No, he must marry himself and generate the next generation. The next Visconte.

Though aristocratic titles in Republican Italy were not official, in his circles they were still used socially. And even though he did not emphasise his own, it meant something to him. Not everyone understood that.

He felt his mind dragged back, as if a hook had caught at it, skewing his thoughts.

An image hovered.

Flaming Titian hair, emerald-green eyes set in a face that had taken his breath away.

A bella figura that combined slim hips and slender waist with pleasingly generous breasts.

Breasts that had peaked even more pleasingly beneath his palms as he’d freed them from the confines of the low-cut, clinging outfit she’d donned that evening simply to give him the pleasure of removing it from her.

His pleasure—and hers. Because she had matched him.

As hungry for him as he had been for her.

As eager for him to strip her down as she was to strip him likewise.

She’d been open in her desire for him, revelling in it, wanting everything he was only too happy to bestow upon her.

Wanting everything about him. Wanting too much—

No, best not go there.

He slewed his mind away, thought back to his visit to Matteo.

His words came back to Luca.

‘ I must make the most of the time I have left to me. You understand that, don’t you, my boy? With my dear Luisa gone before me, she will not mind.’

He frowned. He hadn’t known what Matteo was talking about, but it hadn’t taken long in Matteo’s company for him to understand that it was not just his body that was being assailed by the cancer.

It was assailing his mind as well. Or more likely, he acknowledged, it was the strong drugs he was on.

He was coherent, yes, but he was not the old Matteo.

He was…frailer. In mind as well as body.

Troubled, saddened, he drove on. He would visit again soon. His eyes shadowed. After all, he too must make the most of this limited and fast-passing time he had with Matteo. For it would not last.

* * *

Bianca, smartly dressed as she always was these days, had taken the afternoon off work and now sat in front of a wide, leather tooled desk in a panelled room in a handsome brick terraced Georgian house in the Inns of Court.

The offices of the firm of solicitors who had so mysteriously contacted her.

The elderly solicitor—a senior partner, or so she’d been given to understand—looked across at her, steepling his fingers.

‘Tell me, Miss Mason, how much do you know about your father’s family?’

Bianca stared.

‘My father ?’

She took a breath and looked the solicitor squarely in the eye. Her old life—the one she’d walked away from because it had been as toxic as the man who’d been the cause of her walking away—was colliding with her new one.

‘I don’t even know who he was,’ she said. ‘My mother died when I was very young and I was raised by my aunt, who never talked of such matters.’

That was not strictly true. Her aunt—her mother’s sour, unmarried half-sister—had never flinched from informing Bianca that she should count herself lucky she wasn’t in a care home, that she was nothing but a burden, and that her mother had slept around since she was a teenager.

Bianca hadn’t believed her, because some of the neighbours who remembered her mother—who had known her before she had been fatally knocked down by a car—had told her that, yes, the boys had always been keen on her, because she’d been so pretty, with her fair hair and blue eyes, but she should not believe what her aunt said about her because she was bitter and jealous.

‘And she’s collecting your childcare benefits—don’t you forget that, lovey!’ they’d added.

Bianca was pretty sure that without that her aunt would have put into care without a qualm. As it was, her childhood had not been a walk in the park. She had been endlessly criticised by her carping aunt, endlessly complained about, endlessly warned that she’d come to no good, like her mother…

Maybe that’s why I grew up so rebellious, not bothering with school, always wanting something better for myself than a council flat on a run-down estate in the East End.

Had that been what had made her so eager to snap up what Luca had offered her?

Oh, she’d been hit on by males since she was a teenager—but she was as picky as she was choosy, and no way was she going to give her aunt any opportunity to repeat her slurs on her mother about herself.

But when Luca had walked into that upmarket bar in Canary Wharf full of Hooray Henries, looking tall, cool, drop-dead gorgeous and totally lethal, every other man in the world had simply… disappeared.

The solicitor’s voice cut across her memories. Memories that did her no good…

‘Your mother was Shona Mason?’ he put to her.

He added the dates of her birth and death. Not a long span of time, Bianca thought sadly. Not even thirty…

She nodded.

The solicitor consulted the papers on his desk.

‘Then I have something to tell you that may be of interest to you,’ he said.

Bianca looked at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

The solicitor told her.