after his younger brother Rocco’s birth, when he had been only two years old himself. Everyone who had known her said that she had been a saint. Too saintly by far for her husband, who had spurned her and humiliated her publicly, turning instead to his mistress.
Did that same dark tide from his father’s veins run within his own? Alessandro had no idea. He was merely thankful that, unlike his elder brother, he would never need to find out—because his own duty to the Leopardi name stopped well short of having to provide it with a future heir.
He removed a bottle of water from the suite’s well-stocked bar and poured some into a glass. He could feel the stiff, unyielding thickness of the formal invitation jabbing his flesh in exactly the same way in which Falcon’s stiff, unyielding determination that his brothers should pay their dues to their Leopardi blood jabbed his own conscience.
He and Rocco both owed Falcon a great deal. He had taught them and guided them, and he had protected them. Those were heavy duties for a young boy to have taken on, and it was perhaps no wonder that he had always imposed his own sense of duty on them—that he still did so now.
Alessandro didn’t need to remove Falcon’s letter from his pocket to remember what it said. Falcon never wasted words.
‘Alessandro Leopardi,’ he had written on the invitation, ‘and guest’.
A challenge to him? Alessandro shrugged away the sharp pinprick of angry pride.
He would have to go, of course.
He was never comfortable when he had to return to the castle in Sicily where he had grown up. It held far too many unhappy memories. If he had to visit the island he preferred to stay in the family villa in town. Home for him now was wherever he happened to be—although he had an apartment in Milan and another in Florence, and a villa in a secluded and exclusive enclave close to Positano.
He looked at his watch, a one-off made especially for him. He would be leaving by helicopter from City Airport soon, for his own private jet and the onward flight to Florence, where he would stay at his apartment in the exclusive renovated palazzo that had originally belonged to his mother’s family.
‘Look, Leonora, I really don’t think this is a good idea.’
Leonora gave her younger brother a scathing look.
‘Well, I do—and you promised.’
Leo groaned. ‘That was when I was halfway down one of Dad’s best reds, and you’d tricked me.’ He stood up, his brown hair tousled. He might be six foot three in his socks, but right now he still managed to have the frustrated look of a younger brother who had just been outwitted by his older and smarter sister, Leonora decided triumphantly.
‘You agreed that the next time you flew your boss into London in the private jet I could fly him back.’
‘Why? He hates women pilots.’
‘I know. After all, he’s turned my job applications down often enough.’
Leo’s expression changed. ‘Look, you aren’t going to do anything silly, are you? Like barging into his office, telling him you flew the plane and asking him for a job? You’d have as much chance of succeeding as you would have of getting into his bed,’ Leo told her forthrightly.
Leonora knew all about the stunning beauties the Sicilian billionaire who owned the airline her younger brother worked for dated, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow Leo to guess how much his comment hurt—as though somehow it was a given that she wasn’t woman enough to attract the interest of a man like Alessandro Leopardi. Not, of course, that she wanted to be one of Alessandro Leopardi’s women, but she certainly did want to be one of his pilots.
‘No, of course I’m not going to ask him for a job.’
Leonora crossed her fingers behind her back. She was in full jokey can-do Leonora mode now—even in the privacy of her own thoughts. It just wasn’t fair. She was every bit as good a pilot as her younger brother, if not better, and she just knew that if she proved that to Alessandro Leopardi he would offer her a job. His exclusive first-class service flew passengers all over the world, and she wanted to be one of that elite group even more than she had once wanted to work for someone like Alessandro himself as a private pilot.
‘You can’t possibly think you’ll really get away with this,’ Leo protested.
‘No, I don’t think it. I know it,’ Leonora told him promptly, going on firmly, ‘Since you let me fly the new jet when you were sent to collect it I’ve been having extra lessons in one, and I’ve probably racked up more flying hours than you have.’ She didn’t even want to think about how much it had cost her to get those flying miles in such an expensive craft, or how many lessons in Mandarin she had had to teach to earn the money.
‘Okay, so you can fly the plane. But you haven’t got a uniform.’
‘Ta-dah!’ Leonora said, opening her trench coat to reveal the uniform, and then producing her cap from the supermarket bag in which she had been carrying it.
Leo’s face was a picture. ‘You know if you get found out that I’ll be the one losing my job.’
‘Only wimps get found out,’ Leonora replied as she slipped off her coat and swept up her hair before cramming it under the cap
‘Captain Leo Thaxton at your service.’
Leo groaned again. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve stolen my uniform without stealing my name as well?’
‘No,’ Leonora told him. ‘It’s my name too. I’ve never had cause until now to be glad our parents thought it a good idea to give us practically the same name. Now, come on.’
‘What about the co-pilot?’
‘What about him? It’s Paul Watson, isn’t it? The one who breaks Alessandro Leopardi’s rule about his pilots not partying with the stewardesses? I’m sure I shall be able to persuade him that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to say anything.’
‘I knew I should never have told you about Paul. He’s going to kill me.’
Ignoring him, Leonora demanded, ‘Come on. I need you to drive me to the airport and get me through all the security stuff.’
‘I do not know why you’re doing this.’ Leo groaned again, and then corrected himself. ‘That’s not true, of course. I do know why you’re doing it. You are doing it because you are the most stubborn and determined female ever.’
‘That’s right,’ Leonora agreed breezily. But inwardly she was thinking, I’m doing it because I hate, hate, hate not getting what I want, and I want that job with Avanti Airlines more than I want anything else in the world.
Yes, all of that was true—and when she was working full-pelt in her ‘I’m up for anything’ tomboy mode in front of an audience it was easy to pretend that the other Leonora— the one who longed for love and commitment, and to be allowed to be that other self she dreamed of—simply did not exist. At least for the length of her ‘performance’.
She did want her dream job, of course, and she certainly wanted the opportunity to challenge Alessandro Leopardi, to demand that he explain to her just why her sex weighed so heavily against her when she had such excellent qualifications. It was, after all, against the law to disqualify an applicant for a job on the grounds of their sex. There was no point in telling Leo about her plans, though. He would only worry. Better to let him think she was trying to make a point to him rather than planning to make Alessandro Leopardi agree that she was a good pilot and worthy of being given the job she craved so much.
CHAPTER TWO
IT HAD been a good flight, but then Alessandro had not expected it would be anything other than good. He had, after all, flown the new jet himself shortly after they had first taken delivery of it six months earlier, and had been very impressed with the way it handled.
Alessandro