Sophie and the Scorching Sicilian Read Free Page A

duty to his name and the people who served his family, some for generations. He was ashamed of the selfish and cowardly impulse that had made him turn his back on them just because he didn’t want the constant reminders of his failure.
    His jaw firmed as his keen gaze swept the scene ahead. Others should not suffer for his failings. The duty that was as much an integral part of Marco’s genetic make-up as the colour of his eyes had brought him back today—duty and a desire to regain something he had… lost ?
    Could a man know he had lost something and be unable to name it? Marco, not inclined towards such philosophical debate, had no idea but he did know that his pulse rate did not quicken with anticipation as he approached his home as it once had; he recognised the familiar sights and smells but he did not feel them as he once had.
    He had always been passionately proud of his inheritance. When had that passion become duty? he wondered as he paused and looked down at his ancestral home.
    The home he had brought his bride to, the home he had walked away from the day she ran off with his best friend and he had filed for divorce.
    He pushed away the black thoughts from a year ago—in thehistory of this ancient building it was a blink of an eye; in his life more than enough time to lick his wounds as any longer would smack of self-indulgence. His pride had been injured, but a man did not regain self-respect by running away, and any bad memories these walls held for him now would be easier to live with than Allegra had been!
    The marriage had been a disaster from the start, but it wasn’t her drinking and infidelity that had sickened him most; it had been the fact he had fallen for her sweet innocent act.
    And there were other memories here.
    This was where he had spent his childhood.
    He had roamed the estate and enjoyed a degree of freedom that he might not have had his parents been more hands-on.
    But his actress mother was often away on location. His father, a distant figure, had been around more frequently, but having left a promising law career to enter politics, where his integrity made him as many enemies as allies, his family came a very poor second to being a public crusading figure.
    Perhaps one more enemy, Marco thought, his eyes growing bleak as he recalled the grim day in the nineties when he had learnt from a news broadcast that there had been an assassination.
    One bullet—his father had died instantly and the title had come to Marco.
    â€˜Marchese.’
    Marco was startled from his dark reflections by the form of address he did not use in his professional life.
    â€˜Alberto!’ A smile of genuine pleasure tugged his mobile mouth into an upward curve that softened the austerity of his classically cut features as he moved forward, his hand outstretched in welcome.
    The other man jumped out of the open-topped vehiclewith an agility that many men twenty years his junior would have envied and came to shake his hand.
    â€˜You are looking well, Alberto,’ Marco approved truthfully.
    â€˜As are you.’
    He clapped the younger man on the shoulder and felt the hard muscles under his fingers.
    The younger man’s expensive suit did not hide a soft belly; it hid a body that was hard and tough from riding and from indulging in the sort of extreme sports that Alberto did not totally approve of.
    He was relieved to see that the city life of high finance—a man should not spend his days indoors—had not softened Marco Speranza, but sorry that there was a hardness and cynicism in his green eyes that had not been there in his youth.
    But then a man who had been through what he had was allowed a little cynicism.
    â€˜You are keeping an eye on the new man?’
    The estate manager Marco had taken on had been in the post for three years now but to Alberto, whose family had served Marco’s for generations, the younger man would always be new.
    â€˜He is a hard