Nothing Changes Love. JACQUELINE BAIRD

would be officially free...

      She started the little car and spun along the elegant drive lined with orange and lemon trees and turned right at the main gates on to the road down into Sorrento. She was singing softly to herself as she swung the wheel expertly around the first of half a dozen hairpin bends that zig-zagged down the hillside, only to gasp as, with lightning speed, a black Bugatti sports car swerved violently to pass her, only missing her car by inches.

      The same blasted car again! Stupid macho oaf, she thought scathingly, as she registered the brief outline of a dark, greying man behind the wheel of the gleaming monster of a car. But, once more steadily driving along, she had the same uncomfortable feeling that there was something vaguely familiar about the driver of the Bugatti. She had seen the car a few times in the past few months. It was hard to miss; at first she had thought the driver might have been a guest at some time. But the hotel was small—only twenty luxuriously appointed suites, strictly for the very wealthy and discerning traveller, and she knew virtually all the guests, past and present.

      She had never actually got a good look at the driver. But somehow she had the strangest feeling she knew the man on a more personal basis. Which was ridiculous when she thought about it; people with the sort of wealth that could afford a Bugatti were not in her social circle. Dante, her boyfriend, was comfortably off, owning two jewellery shops—one in Sorrento and another in Amalfi. He was a good, hard-working, serious-minded man and would make her an excellent husband and father to her children.

      A shadow darkened her violet eyes, as she realised with a sense of shock it would be exactly five years tonight since she had lost her child. She had never completely got over the miscarriage, and sometimes in her darkest moods she couldn’t help asking herself if she had finally instigated divorce proceedings herself and was contemplating marrying Dante, more because she still had a desperate longing for a child, than through any great love for the man himself.

      She dismissed the unsettling thought from her mind. Anyway, Dante hadn’t actually proposed yet, she smiled wryly, counting her chickens again! A bad policy, she remonstrated with herself, as she manoeuvred the car through the hectic lunch-time traffic in Sorrento and down to the Marina Piccolae. She had arranged to meet Dante at the Dolphin restaurant, a long wooden structure that stretched out on wooden stilts from the steep cliffs into the sea and served excellent fish dishes. She parked the car on a small cobbled side-lane and walked around the curve of the old port.

      A tender smile curved the corners of her full mouth as she watched the local children playing in the sea. It didn’t seem to bother them that there were fishing boats tied up haphazardly around the water’s edge; in fact it appeared to add to their enjoyment as, like fish themselves, they jumped and dived off the boats.

      Sorrento was a stunning town, built over a flat plateau that rose precipitously from the sea. On the top of the steep cliffs the big hotels had lifts cut through the rock and down to the base and the sea. Small beaches with large rectangular wooden pontoons greatly increased the available sunbathing areas and, for the swimmer, access to the sea itself, but at quite a substantial charge to the public. Certainly more than local children could pay.