Giselle's Choice Read Free

the anticipation of bad news even before he told her.
    â€˜We’ve got to get back to London asap. There’s been an accident. The full details aren’t known yet, but it seems that Aldo and Natasha and her father have been the victims of an assassination attempt by one of Natasha’s father’s business rivals. There was a bomb in the car in which they were all traveling. Aldo had told me that they were going to England to look at a property Natasha’s father wanted to buy there—a big country estate. Natasha and her father are dead, but Aldo is still alive. He’s in hospital in Bristol. Moira’s arranged for us to be picked up here by helicopter and taken to Barbados, where there’ll be a private jet waiting for us. The helicopter should be here within the hour.’
    Horrified, Giselle was already out of bed, going to Saul to hold him tightly as she told him, ‘I’m so sorry— I’ll get ready. It won’t take me long.’
    She knew how fond he was of his cousin, even though they lived such vastly different lives, and as she dressed and packed she prayed that Aldo would be all right. Poor Aldo. He was the most gentle and kind of men, and deserved a far more appreciative wife than Natasha. Giselle shivered, as she remembered what Saul had said. Aldo no longer had a wife. Natasha was dead.
    She and Saul had just finished packing their cases when they heard the sound of a helicopter arriving. One of the golf-type buggies the complex supplied for its visitors to get around on was already waiting outside their villa. The breakfast they had been served when Saul had rung Reception to tell them that they were leaving remained untouched apart from the cup of coffee Giselle had poured for Saul—black and strong, his weakness and only addiction apart from her, as he was fond of saying.
    During the flights from the complex to Barbados, and from there to Heathrow and then on again by helicopter to the hospital in Bristol—the nearest specialist hospital to the scene of the accident—Saul talked about his cousin and Giselle listened. She had met Aldo, of course. Giselle and Saul had first become lovers during a trip to Arezzio when she had accompanied Saul there as an architect seconded to his company by the practice he had been employing with regard to a new hotel complex.
    Aldo was nothing like Saul. Where Saul was ruthlessly masculine and charismatically sexy, Aldo was self-effacing, an aesthete and a dreamer. Natasha, Aldo’s Russian wife, had tried to convince Giselle that the reason Saul had sworn never to have children was because he resented the fact that his child could never inherit the role of Grand Duke of Arezzio. Saul, though, had made it plain that his reasons for wanting to remain childfree were based on his own childhood and the fact that his parents had been absent from it and from him, nothing else, and Giselle had seen that he was speaking the truth. Aldo loved the quiet backwater that was hissmall country, and had been grateful for the help that Saul had given him with its finances. A small price to pay, Saul had told Giselle, for the freedom he had to live his life the way he wished to live it because his father had been the younger and not the elder brother.
    Giselle might not have liked Natasha but she would never have wished her dead—and especially not in such a dreadful manner.
    The drips of information relayed to Saul whilst they travelled had told them only that because Aldo had been sitting in the front passenger seat of the chauffeur-driven car he had been spared the worst of the blast, but Natasha and her father had died at the scene of the accident.
    â€˜Natasha’s father’s business methods were murky, to say the very least,’ Saul told Giselle. ‘It’s very clear that his deals have made him enemies, and many powerful people do not approve of what he’s done whilst accumulating his fortune. And