The Italian's Rightful Bride - By Lucy Gordon Page 0,4

much,’ she sighed. ‘I’m too tall, too thin—’

‘Not thin,’ Aunt Lilian protested loyally. ‘Slender.’

‘Thin,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Most girls would give their eye-teeth to be your size. If you took a little trouble you’d be beautiful and elegant.’

‘Not beautiful. Not me.’

Aunt Lilian groaned, but there was some justice in Joanna’s complaint. Her hair was fair, not blonde but mousy, her figure coltish rather than elegant. Her face was pleasant despite a slightly irregular mouth and a nose that she wished a fraction shorter. Her eyes were her best feature, being a restful grey, but it wasn’t the deep blue she would have liked. Everything about her just missed being something better, and she had never been so acutely aware of it as now.

The dress she chose was a restrained blue silk which had cost the earth and did little for her. After trying her hair up, then down, then up, she finally let it hang loose about her shoulders. Her make-up was like the dress, restrained, chiefly because she lacked the self-confidence to be bold.

Nobody could have faulted Gustavo’s behaviour over dinner. He talked to everyone and didn’t try to monopolise Joanna. But when he turned to her she felt as though the rest of the room had vanished.

She didn’t know what they talked about either then or over the next few days. They went riding together. There was laughter and idle chatter, and sometimes she would find him looking at her with a serious expression that made her heart turn over.

Halfway through the week he invited her out to a restaurant. He was the perfect host, charming, attentive, but not, to her disappointment, flirtatious. He asked about her life and she told him about how she’d lived since her parents died and her Aunt Lilian had raised her.

He told her about his own life on the Montegiano estate, and the love in his voice told her why he was prepared to put his home before everything else in his life.

‘For six hundred years my family have lived in the same house,’ he told her, ‘always adding to it and making it more beautiful.’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ she told him eagerly. ‘I love old places.’

‘I would like you to see it.’

When they were drinking wine, he said with a touch of ruefulness, ‘You know what our friends plan for us, don’t you?’

Her heart began to beat faster. Was he going to propose right now?

But when she nodded he only said, ‘We must not let them make complicated something that should be very simple. This is our decision, not theirs. There can be nothing without affection and respect.’

The words ‘affection and respect’ chilled her slightly, for they fell far short of what she wanted. But for a while it was enough to be here with him, intoxicated by his presence, falling more deeply in love with every passing second.

Afterwards they went to a nightclub, and danced together. At last, after so much dreaming and hoping, she was in the circle of his arms, feeling his hand firm on her waist, the warmth of his body moving against her. The sensation was so sweet as to be almost unbearable.

She was wildly, passionately in love. She knew now that the songs and the stories were right after all. The world was bathed in a golden light and soon heaven would be hers.

At the end of the week he invited her and Aunt Lilian to visit his estate just outside Rome. She was in seventh heaven. Of course he wanted to show her his home before making any final decisions.

She was so sure she understood him that even his reticence did not trouble her too much. He was naturally quiet and controlled. But that was only on the surface. Behind his barriers she sensed another man, vibrant, thrilling, waiting for the right woman to free his heart.

She knew she could be that woman, because they were alike. She too was quiet and retiring, and they would have a meeting of minds leading on inevitably to a meeting of hearts.

That, at any rate, was what she told herself.

The Montegiano estate only increased Joanna’s sense of magic. Standing about three miles outside Rome, it covered a thousand acres, culminating in the great palace that stood on a rise, dominating the surrounding landscape.

For someone as much in love with the past as Joanna the house was a marvel. Down long corridors she wandered, meeting ancestors who looked down from centuries past. Gustavo described them in a way that brought