rel="nofollow" href="#ue74b9162-bf1b-5f56-ba5a-4f3f9a828f27"> CHAPTER THREE
LAUREN ISADORA CLARKE was a Londoner, born and bred.
She did not care for the bucolic British countryside, all that monotonous green with hedges this way and that, making it impossible to get anywhere. She preferred the city, with all its transportation options endlessly available—and if all else failed, the ability to walk briskly from one point to the next. Lauren prized punctuality. And she could do without stiff, uncomfortable footwear with soles outfitted to look like tire tread.
She was not a hiker or a rambler or whatever those alarmingly red-cheeked, jolly hockey-sticks sorts called themselves as they brayed about in fleece and clunky, sensible shoes. She found nothing at all entertaining in huffing up inclines only to slide right back down them, usually covered in the mud that accompanied all the rain that made England’s greenest hills that color in the first place. Miles and miles of tramping about for the dubious pleasure of “taking in air” did not appeal to her and never had.
Lauren liked concrete, bricks, the glorious Tube and abundant takeaways on every corner, thank you. The very notion of the deep, dark woods made her break out in hives.
Yet, here she was, marching along what the local innkeeper had optimistically called a road—it was little better than a footpath, if that—in the middle of the resolutely thick forests of Hungary.
Hive-free thus far, should she wish to count her blessings.
But Lauren was rather more focused on her grievances today.
First and foremost, her shoes were not now and never had been sensible. Lauren did not believe in the cult of sensible shoes. Her life was eminently sensible. She kept her finances in order, paid her bills on time, if not early, and dedicated herself to performing her duties as personal assistant to the very wealthy and powerful president and CEO of Combe Industries at a level of consistent excellence she liked to think made her indispensable.
Her shoes were impractical, fanciful creations that reminded her that she was a woman—which came in handy on the days her boss treated her as rather more of an uppity appliance. One that he liked to have function all on its own, apparently, and without any oversight or aid.
“My mother gave away a child before she married my father,” Matteo Combe, her boss, had told her one fine day several weeks back in his usual grave tone.
Lauren, like everyone else who had been in the vicinity of a tabloid in a checkout line over the past forty years, knew all about her boss’s parents. And she knew more than most, having spent the bulk of her career working for Matteo. Beautiful, beloved Alexandrina San Giacomo, aristocratic and indulged, had defied reason and her snooty Venetian heritage when she’d married rich but decidedly unpolished Eddie Combe, whose ancestors had carved their way out of the mills of Northern England—often with their fists. Their love story had caused scandals, their turbulent marriage had been the subject of endless speculation and their deaths within weeks of each other had caused even more commotion.
But there had never been the faintest whisper of an illegitimate son.
Lauren had not needed to be told that once this came out—and it would, because things like this always came out eventually—it wouldn’t be whispers they’d have to be worried about. It would be the all-out baying of the tabloid wolves.
“I want you to find him,” Matteo had told her, as if he was asking her to fetch him a coffee. “I cannot begin to imagine what his situation is, but I need him media-ready and, if at all possible, compliant.”
“Your long-lost brother. Whom you have never met. Who may, for all you know, loathe you and your mother and all other things San Giacomo on principle alone. This is who you think might decide to comply with your wishes.”
“I have faith in you,” Matteo had replied.
And Lauren had excused that insanity almost in that same instant, because the man had so much on his plate. His parents had died, one after the next. His fluffy-headed younger sister had gone and gotten herself pregnant, a state of affairs that had caused Matteo to take a swing at the father of her baby. A perfectly reasonable reaction, to Lauren’s mind—but unfortunately, Matteo had taken said swing at his father’s funeral.
The punch he’d landed on Prince Ares of Atilia had been endlessly photographed and videoed by the assorted paparazzi and not a few of the guests, and the company’s board of directors had taken it as an opportunity to move against him. Matteo had been forced to subject himself to an anger management specialist who was no ally, and it was entirely possible the board would succeed in removing him should the specialist’s report be unflattering.
Of course, Lauren excused him.
“Do you ever not excuse him?” her flatmate Mary had asked idly without looking up from her mobile while Lauren had dashed about on her way out the morning she’d left London.
“He’s an important and very busy man, Mary.”
“As you are always on hand to remind us.”
The only reason Lauren hadn’t leaped into that fray, she told herself now as she stormed along the dirt path toward God knew where, was because good flatmates were hard to find, and Mary’s obsession with keeping in touch with her thirty thousand best friends in all corners of the globe on all forms of social media at all times meant she spent most of her time locked in her room obsessing over photo filters and silly voices. Which left the flat to Lauren on the odd occasions she was actually there to enjoy it.
Besides, a small voice inside her that she would have listed as a grievance if she allowed herself to acknowledge it, she wasn’t wrong, was she?
But Lauren was here to carry out Matteo’s wishes, not question her allegiance to him.
Today her pair of typically frothy heels—with studs and spikes and a dash of whimsy because she didn’t own a pair of sensible shoes appropriate for mud and woods and never would—were making this unplanned trek through the Hungarian woods even more unpleasant than she’d imagined it would be, and Lauren’s imagination