the guardian too of its future, but relieved to know that that responsibility would not truly be his for many years to come. And then his father’s unexpected death had thrown him head first into shouldering what had then seemed to be an extraordinarily heavy burden.
But somehow he had carried it—because it had been his duty to do so, and if in doing so he had lost some of the spontaneity, the love of life and laughter and the ability to live for the moment alone that had so marked out his younger cousin, Aldo, like him left fatherless by the crash, then those around him had just had to accept that that had been so.
Some of the older members of the family considered that he had allowed Aldo to take advantage of him, he knew. But like him his cousin had lost his father in the tragedy, and, at only sixteen, it surely must have been a far harder burden for him to bear than it had been for Marco himself.
Marco’s frown deepened as he thought about his younger cousin. He had been totally opposed to Aldo marrying Patti, the pretty English model. The wedding had taken place within weeks of Aldo meeting her, and it had not surprised him in the least to learn that they had fallen out of love with one another as quickly as they had fallen into it.
But there was no point in dwelling on that now. Aldo had married Patti, and baby Angelina had been conceived, even if both her parents had by that time been claiming that their marriage had been a mistake and that they bitterly regretted the legal commitment they had made to one another.
It had been in his role of head of the family that Marco had felt obliged to invite them both to visit them at his home in Tuscany, in the hope that he could somehow help them to find a way of making their marriage work. After all, whilst he might not have approved of it in the first place, they now had a child to consider, and in Marco’s eyes the needs of their child far outweighed the selfish carnal desires of either of her parents.
But, once he had left them to their own devices, an argument had broken out between Aldo and Patti, which had resulted in Aldo driving Patti away from the villa in a furious temper.
They would probably never know just what had caused the fatal accident, which had claimed their lives and left their baby an orphan, Marco reflected sombrely, but he knew just how responsible he felt for having been the one to have brought them both to the palazzo in the first place.
As Aldo’s next of kin he had naturally taken on full responsibility for the orphaned baby, and now three months later it was abundantly obvious that little Angelina had bonded strongly with Marco. Marco’s strong paternalistic instincts had meant that he had decided that it was both his duty and in the baby’s own interests for him to make proper arrangements for her care.
In order to cut down on wasting time unnecessarily on interviews that would not lead anywhere, he had painstakingly spent far more time than he could currently afford sifting through the applications he had received, to make sure that he only interviewed the candidate or candidates who met all his strict criteria, and in the end Alice Walsingham had been the only one to do so; which made it even more infuriating that she had not even taken the trouble to turn up for their interview. It was eleven o’clock, half an hour past the time of their appointment. His patience finally snapped. That was it! He had waited long enough. If Miss Walsingham did ever decide to turn up, she was most definitely not the person he wanted to leave in sole charge of his precious child. Not even to himself was Marco prepared to admit just how attached he had become to his cousin’s baby, or how paternal he felt towards her.
As he stepped out of the hotel into the bright Florentine sunshine it glinted on the darkness of his thick, well-groomed hair, highlighting his chiselled, autocratic features, and the lean-muscled strength of his six-foot-two frame.
Automatically he shielded the fierceness of his topaz gaze from the harshness of the sun by putting on dark glasses that gave him a breath-catching air of predatory power and danger.
An actor studying for a role as a Mafiosi leader would have found him an ideal model. He looked lean, mean and dangerous. No one would dream of making a man who looked as he did any kind of offer he might be tempted to refuse!
Irritably he returned to where he had left Aldo’s Ferrari, which was parked outside the hotel, and he had just climbed into it and put the keys in the ignition when he suddenly remembered that he had not left any message for his dilatory interviewee, just in case she should choose to turn up!
Leaving the keys in the ignition, he climbed out of the Ferrari and strode toward the hotel.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, will you stop nagging me? You aren’t my mother, you aren’t anything to me. Just because your sister has managed to trap my father into marriage that doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do.’
As she listened to Louise’s deliberately hostile and inflammatory speech Alice mentally counted to ten.
It was now five minutes past eleven, and she was over half an hour late for her interview appointment, but it had been impossible for her to leave Louise to her own devices after the teenager’s totally unacceptable behaviour during their trip.
The previous night, Louise had sneaked out of the hotel without her, returning in the early hours very much the worse for drink, refusing to tell Alice where she had been or who with. Alice had been beside herself with anxiety.
As luck would have it, Alice had now learned that her sister’s stepdaughter had spent the evening with a group of young American students who were studying in the city, and who it seemed had thankfully kept a watchful eye on her whilst she had been with them.
However, as one of the students had a little anxiously explained to Alice, Louise had spent a large part of the evening in conversation with a rather unsavoury character who had attached himself to the group and now it seemed Louise had made arrangements to meet up with the man.
In order to ensure that she did not do so, Alice had insisted that Louise accompany her to her interview.
Forced to do so, Louise had left Alice in no doubt about her feelings of resentment and hostility, as well as deliberately making Alice late for her appointment, but now, thank goodness, they had finally reached the hotel. She paid off their taxi driver, primly ignoring the appreciative look he was giving them both—two slender, blonde English beauties. One of whom, with her face plastered with far too much make-up, looked far older than her seventeen years and the other, whose clear, soft skin was virtually free of any trace of cosmetics at all, her hair a natural, soft pale blonde unlike her charge’s rebelliously dyed and streaked tousled mane, looked far, far younger than her much more mature twenty-six.
Although she herself was unaware of it, even the simple skirt and top outfit she had chosen to wear for the heat of the Florentine sunshine made Alice look young enough to be a teenager herself, whilst Louise’s tight jeans and midriff-baring top were drawing the interested gaze of every red-blooded Italian male who saw them.
Sulkily Louise affected not to hear what Alice was saying as she urged her to hurry into the hotel.
Under other circumstances Alice knew that she would have enjoyed simply standing to gaze in admiration at her surroundings. According to her guidebook, this particular hotel, once the home of a Renaissance prince, had been converted into a hotel with such sensitivity and skill by the architect in charge of its conversion that to stay in it was a privilege all in itself.
Unable to resist pausing simply to fill her senses with its symmetry and beauty, Alice was only aware that Louise’s attention was otherwise engaged when she heard her charge exclaiming excitedly.
‘Wow, just look at that car! What I’d give to be able to drive something like that.’
Turning her head, Alice was startled to see parked there in front of them an open-topped scarlet sports car like the one she had seen earlier that morning. Like, or the same? Driven by that same darkly, dangerously, and wholly male man who had looked at her as though…as though…Dragging her thoughts away from such risky and uncomfortably self-illuminating channels, Alice realised with shock that Louise was darting across towards the driver’s door of the car.
‘Louise,’ she cautioned