Chapter One
Eleanora da Verano gave a silent sigh of envy and long-familiar resignation.
Her sister, Tonia, was looking, as ever, totally stunning.
Her raven hair, swept into an ornate upstyle, her dramatic features—deep-set dark eyes and pouting, lush red lips—and her voluptuous bella figura, displayed to perfection by the sumptuous, low-cut crimson evening gown, made her the image of one of those ultra-glamorous Italian film stars of the nineteen-fifties era.
No wonder Tonia’s fiancé couldn’t take his eyes off her, thought Eleanora, nor any guest at this lavish engagement party at one of Florence’s most expensive hotels.
Tonia, as usual, was basking in all the admiration coming her way.
And receiving, too, the approval of their father, well pleased indeed that his favoured daughter—so like himself, unlike Eleanora—had snapped up a fiancé who was not only a French marquis but also possessed of a fortune large enough to provide not just for the expensive tastes of his bride-to-be but for her father’s as well.
This, Eleanora knew, was necessary, for the da Verano coffers were all but empty—her father’s and sister’s lifelong extravagance had seen to that.
Would the Marquis, gazing blindly smitten at Tonia’s side, mind funding not just his bride’s extravagance but her father the Conte di Crestoni’s as well?
Eleanora wondered. Her expression flickered a moment.
The Marquis was perfectly nice, she allowed, but beyond his title and his wealth he was very, well, ordinary.
Average height, average build, average looks—there really wasn’t anything much to draw the eye.
Nothing compared with—
No, no point thinking of the man Tonia might have married.
Just as rich as the Marquis but, unlike the Marquis, tall, powerfully built, with strong features, a sensual mouth and slate-grey eyes that looked penetratingly out of press photos—the only place Eleanora had seen him—Sanzio Bastoni had climbed from poverty to what he now was, one of Italy’s richest men.
And one whose assessing gaze had, earlier that year, come to rest on Eleanora’s dazzling sister.
Who’d turned him down for a marquis.
* * *
Sanzio put his feet up on his desk, pushing back his chair. The desk was very old, the chair very new, both extremely expensive. But he liked to splash out on expensive things if they pleased him.
And not just on inanimate objects. His gaze dropped now to the glossy magazine his secretary, Gina, had wordlessly placed on his desk at his request, before withdrawing to her own office.
He picked up the magazine, looked at the eye-catching cover photo before turning to the lead story, which ran to several pages.
His gaze rested on the female gazing back at him, her smile dazzling, her diamond-sporting hand resting possessively on the arm of a man the fawningly saccharine headline declared to be her fiancé.
Sanzio’s mouth curled. The august Marquis clearly had deep pockets.
The bill for that lavish engagement bash would not have been settled by the bride-to-be’s family.
Their wealth was gone. The wastrel father had seen to that, and now all his daughter could do if she wanted to go on spending as lavishly as her father—which, Sanzio well knew cynically—she certainly did, was marry money. As she clearly was intent on doing.
And not just wealth. Sanzio’s eyes hardened. Tonia had wanted more than money.
Now she was getting it. A loaded marquis, whose ancestry was as aristocratic as her own.
Unlike mine—
With a sudden gesture he tossed the magazine back on his desk, removed his feet and pulled his keyboard towards him. He had better things to do than waste his time on a ship that had sailed. He had money to make.
His mouth curled again. And it would not be the oh-so-well-born Donna Antonia da Verano he would now be spending it on.
* * *
Eleanora eyed her father warily. His once handsome features were dissipated, and he looked distinctly hung-over.
It was the morning after Tonia’s lavish engagement party, and her father had imbibed freely.
His mood was never good after a heavy night, more so if exacerbated by heavy losses at the gaming tables.
Losses which cumulatively, together with his lifelong extravagance, had consumed three fortunes in his fifty-plus years: his own—his da Verano inheritance—and then both of his wives’.
Tonia’s late mother—killed in a car crashed by her husband after only three years of marriage—whose Sicilian ancestry went back to the medieval Norman kingdom, had come with a very handsome dowry, long since spent, forcing the Conte to remarry.
His eye had gone to Eleanora’s English mother, the horse-mad daughter of a major landowner and maternal grandaughter to a very wealthy industrialist. The second Contessa’s youthful infatuation had been destroyed by her husband’s chronic infidelity and she had eventually decamped with her daughter, placing Eleanora in a boarding school in England and herself remarrying.
She now ran a stud in Argentina with her second husband, Raúl, and was much happier.
Eleanora was on perfectly good terms with her and Raúl, but saw little of them.
Nor did she see much of her father or her sister, except for infrequent de rigueur social occasions, including Tonia’s engagement party last night.
Her father had zero interest in his dull younger daughter, who so painfully lacked his elder daughter’s opulent beauty, a disparity between them that Tonia never failed to remind Eleanora of.
Her father was glowering at her now, as he sat slumped back in an armchair in his apartment, the piano nobile of a prestigious townhouse in Florence, the rent, Eleanora suspected, well overdue, as it usually was.
‘You can take that sanctimonious expression off your sour face for a start!’ he snapped at her, reaching for his prairie oyster to deal with his hangover. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’
Eleanora’s wariness increased.
‘A job?’ She frowned. Now what did her father want?
Though she’d come to Tonia’s engagement party, she was keen to get out of Florence, get away, sad to say, from her father, and get back to the sanctuary of her home.
The place she loved most in all the world.
Tucked away, deep in the remote and rolling countryside of central Italy, lapped by fields, vineyards and olive groves and sheltered by woods—Palazzo Verano.
Her father was speaking again, sounding impatient. ‘Yes. You’re to go to Rome.’
‘Rome?’ Eleanora was nonplussed.
‘I’ve just said that, haven’t I?’ her father said irritably. ‘I want you to go and see Sanzio Bastoni.’
‘What?’ Eleanora was more than nonplussed now. ‘Sanzio Bastoni?’
‘Will you stop repeating everything I’m telling you!’ her father snapped. ‘Yes, Sanzio Bastoni. Now that he can’t get it by marrying Tonia, he’ll have to buy it. And I want top price for it! You can go and tell him.’
She stared, not understanding. ‘Get what? Buy what?’
Her father knocked back his prairie oyster, grimacing as he did so. He slammed the empty glass back on the table beside his chair.
‘What do you think, you imbecile? The Palazzo, of course!’
The colour drained from Eleanora’s face.
* * *
Sanzio’s expression darkened. ‘You will inform the Signorina da Verano that I am not available,’ he told Gina tautly.
‘She says she can be as time flexible as you wish,’ his secretary replied.
Sanzio’s dark eyebrows rose. ‘Really? How unlike her! She likes everyone to jump when she snaps her fingers!’
What the hell was Tonia after anyway, coming to see him? Fresh from celebrating her engagement to her French marquis… She was after something, that was obvious. Tonia was always after something. Until recently, it had been himself…
‘It is not Donna Antonia, Signor Bastoni—’ his secretary now was carefully enunciating ‘—who wishes to see you. It is Donna Eleanora.’
Sanzio’s face went blank. ‘Donna Eleanora? Who the hell is she?’
‘She is Donna Antonia’s sister,’ Gina explained.
He frowned. ‘Sister?’
Did he know Tonia had a sister? If he did, did he care? His frown deepened.
‘Why does she want to see me?’ If she was here as a messenger from Tonia she could take a hike—
‘She mentioned, Signor Bastoni—’ Gina was being very careful still ‘—the Palazzo Verano.’
The frown vanished from Sanzio’s face.
* * *
Eleanora sat on the train from Florence to Rome, heart heavy.
Her father was clearly determined to sell his last remaining asset, the historic da Verano palazzo, in which, so he’d now informed her, indifferent to the fact that his despised younger daughter lived there, Sanzio Bastoni had expressed an interest when he was courting Tonia.
Was he still interested? Desperately, Eleanora hoped not.
Why should he be, now that he wasn’t marrying Tonia?
Besides, the Palazzo was in a dismal state of disrepair—she should know.
Only one wing was still habitable, the old servants’ quarters, where Eleanora was based.
The main section, with all the grand rooms, was semi-derelict and would take a fortune to restore.
Sanzio Bastoni could afford to do so of course—his wealth had been what had attracted Tonia to him in the first place.
Though not just his wealth…
Eleanora could still hear her sister’s coarse laugh.
‘Rough trade, but one hell of a hunk! The earthy type! Totally hot for me of course,’ she’d preened.
‘I’m having a hard time holding him off—he’s not getting a thing until I’ve got his ring on my finger, but I can promise you our wedding night is going to be scorching! ’