The Italian's Innocent Bride Read online

  THE ITALIAN’S INNOCENT BRIDE

  Clare Connelly

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and have no existence outside the author’s imagination. They have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names and are pure invention.

  All rights reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reprinted by any means without permission of the Author.

  The illustration on the cover of this book features model/s and bears no relation to the characters described within.

  First published 2015

  (c) Clare Connelly

  Photo Credit: dollarphotoclub.com/Forgiss

  Contact Clare:

  http://www.clareconnelly.co.uk

  Blog: http://clarewriteslove.wordpress.com/

  Email: [email protected]

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  PROLOGUE

  The news came to him while he was in the middle of a meeting with the President of the United States.

  Three sentences that instantly managed to turn the blood in his body ice cold.

  Jane has been attacked. She’s alive. But in hospital.

  He’d had no qualms on walking out on one of the most powerful men in the world. Nothing mattered to him as much as the safety of his ex-wife. Though their marriage had ended three years earlier, he had vowed to protect her for the rest of her life.

  The idea that she’d been hurt now because she had once been Mrs Carlo Santini filled his mouth with a metallic taste. It was fury, and it was adrenalin.

  He’d had no business marrying her. Someone like Jane Lang didn’t belong in his world. With her sweet smile and naïve outlook on life, she’d stood out like a wildly growing rose in the middle of a manicured lawn.

  And yet, he’d wanted her.

  She’d been nineteen and he a cynical, wealthy twenty nine year old. He’d been used to getting what he wanted, and had seen no reason that she should be any different. He’d sought her out, because their secret past had demanded it of him, but he’d never told her that. Instead, he’d overpowered her with love and desire, and he’d proposed.

  If he’d known that marrying her would rob her of her sweet smile and naïve outlook, might he have reconsidered?

  He’d never know the answer to that. That called for speculation, and Carlo dealt with fact. All he knew for sure was that he had been selfish enough to take her as his wife without properly preparing her for what lay in store. A nineteen year old virgin, who’d grown up without much love or affection, had been powerless to resist the full charms of Carlo Santini. He’d promised her the world, and very quickly disappointed her. For that one year, she’d tried. He saw now, with hindsight and a greater understanding of what life had been like for her, how hard she’d tried. And how much that trying had cost her.

  As his private jet cruised along the tarmac at London’s City airport, he swore one thing.

  Jane must be made safe, at all costs.

  She was no longer his wife, but she would always, until his dying breath, be his responsibility.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Try to stay calm, Jane. Your husband will be here soon.”

  Blood was clumped against Jane’s pale blonde hair, and a persistent ringing sound in her left ear was making hearing difficult.

  She opened her mouth to speak but the tube they’d inserted made it impossible. Her pale blue eyes were round like saucers as she stared up at the young man with the kind smile. His white doctor’s coat was splattered in red. Her blood? She eyed it apologetically then winced, when the sudden movement sent a blinding pain shooting through her.

  “You gave your neighbour quite a fright,” he continued, looking past her now, as he pushed the bed she lay on through a set of double doors. They banged loudly against the end of the metallic frame as she whooshed through, and Jane jumped.

  It brought back a memory. Something cold and heavy being pounded against her face. It made no sense. She closed her eyes, trying to catch the threads of memory. But it was all jumbled up. Like a mirror that had been splintered in the middle, only shards of her day remained. She remembered getting dressed earlier that day. Lingering over what to wear, and what the weather would do. London was, of course, notoriously difficult to predict. She remembered that she’d been at lunch. Alone. And she remembered the waiter; a man with dark hair and black eyes. He’d reminded her, at first, of him. Carlo Santini. Only at first, because no one was exactly like her powerful ex-husband. But what had she done between getting dressed, and going to lunch? And, crucially, afterwards? What had happened that she’d been bashed over the head, and rendered unconscious?

  “You’re going to be fine.” The doctor promised, clicking the bed into place against the wall. “I’m going to run a few tests and then come back with some news.”

  Jane couldn’t speak, so she nodded. It hurt.

  “Try not to do that.” He smiled, and his face crinkled to form two perfect dimples in his cheeks. “You’ll be able to talk again soon. Until then, I want you lying here admiring the spectacular wallpaper.”

  Her gaze flicked to the pale yellow surface, and then back to the doctor. With her eyes, she showed both agreement and amusement. Almost as soon as he disappeared through the doors, a nurse entered.

  “’Ello, darlin’,” she said, reaching for Jane’s chart and reading the doctor’s hastily penned notes. “I see those medics have gone and tubed you.” She rolled her expressive brown eyes towards her greying hair and then reached for a pair of gloves. “I can get that out for you now.” She came to stand over Jane, and made a tsking sound as she examined the head wound.

  Jane had never known her parents. Instead, she’d spent time in a series of foster homes, until she’d finally been old enough to free herself from the system. But this woman reminded her of what a mother should be. Her face was pleasingly lined, around the eyes and the mouth. It spoke of a life spent smiling. “Quite a ding you’ve got here,” she said with a shake of her head, as she put her fingers on the edge of the tube. “Doctor Mark will fix you right up, though. He’s the best in the business.”

  Jane would have smiled if she had any freedom of movement in her lips. Despite the fact she couldn’t speak, the nurse continued to chat, as she went through the instructions for removing the tube. It was painful and uncomfortable, but Jane was glad when it was out. She coughed, and instinctively looked around for water. The nurse poured a small measure into a plastic cup and handed it to Jane.

  She wrinkled her nose as she drank it. Her throat was so badly scratched by the tube that she didn’t even mind that the water tasted like the Thames.

  “How do you feel?” The nurse asked sympathetically.

  Jane tried to clear her throat, but that burned even worse. “I’ll live,” she croaked, her usually refined accent coming across as just a whisper.

  “That’s the spirit. My name’s Deb, and you can call on me anytime. The police want to have a word with you regarding the incident.”

  “The police?” She arched her brows expressively. “I don’t know what I’ll be able to tell them.”

  “I expect anything might help. I’ll tell them to come through when they arrive. At this time on a Friday though, it could be a while.”

  Jane lifted a finger and touched her hair. It was bright red from the blood that had spilled out of her skull. She would discover, in the coming days, that it had stained not only her hair, but also the black and white tiles that lined the portico of her Kensington townhouse.

  “Oh, and your husband’s been notified. Or
rather, I spoke to someone on his staff.”

  “My husband?” She remembered then, the doctor’s assurances earlier, that Carlo would shortly arrive.

  Deb nodded, sending her wiry hair shooting out like a thousand little jacks in boxes.

  “But…” she lifted a slender hand to her neck, in a futile attempt to ease some of the pain she was feeling. “We’re divorced,” she finished weakly. Three years later, it still hurt to say those words.

  Deb frowned. “He’s listed as your next of kin on the admission forms.”

  “I didn’t fill any forms out,” she persisted, and her body began to shake at the very idea of seeing Carlo Santini again. For she had not set eyes on him since that last fateful morning in Rome. When she’d finally got it through her head that their marriage was a sham.

  Why he’d married her was still a mystery.

  But that he’d been wrong to do so was obvious.

  “This isn’t your first time at the hospital.”

  Oh, God. She blanched; her face was so white she almost faded into the bed. The miscarriage. Her stomach ached as she remembered her last time inside these butter yellow walls. “Carlo, my ex-husband… he doesn’t know about the baby.” She linked her fingers together in her lap and fidgeted them furiously. “Please, Deb…”

  Deb closed the door and stepped back into the private room. Yes, she was a maternal person; clearly empathetic now in the face of Jane’s visible pain. “Don’t worry, darling. He might be your husband but your hospital records are still something we keep private. Unless you tell him, he won’t find out.”

  “Okay.” She released the breath she’d been holding. She lifted her cornflour blue eyes to Deb’s face and tried to smile. “I know you must think I’m terrible. But we were already separated… and I didn’t find out I was pregnant until I… until I… came here.”

  Deb clucked sympathetically, and gently rearranged the pillows behind Jane’s head. “It’s none of my business, petal.”

  Jane nodded, and felt that searing stab of pain radiate through her skull.

  “The doctor will arrange for something to take that away,” she promised. “And I’ll come back and check on you shortly.”

  “Thank you, Deb.”

  Jane waited until she was alone, and then exhaled a long, slow breath. She eased herself further back into the pillows, and the plastic crinkled beneath her.

  And so, she would see Carlo again. The certainty made her blood pound through her body.

  She lifted her fingers once more to the tacky blood at the side of her head. Why couldn’t she remember what had happened? She’d had something in her hands, she remembered now. A shopping bag? Yes. It had been black. She remembered staring at it as the blow came down against her head.

  But who would attack her? And why? Was it possible that she had been a victim of random crime?

  She lifted a hand to her neck and felt for the familiar pendant she wore. It was the one gift from Carlo that she couldn’t bear to part with. Everything else had been disposed of. But this had been special. The two carat diamond solitaire had been a gift on her birthday. And that had been the night they’d conceived their baby. The two gifts had become inextricably linked in her mind; the baby and the bauble. Having lost one, and grieved for that loss every day since, she wore the necklace to honor the child.

  It hung around her slender neck now, as it always did.

  She made a sound of relief as her fingers wrapped around its cold shape. If she’d lost that too, she might just have fallen apart.

  Jane must have dozed off, for she was woken with a start when the doors banged inwards. Two police officers entered; a man in his forties with a jagged nose and thin lips, and a short woman with bright red hair and a freckled face.

  “Jane Santini?” The woman asked, her accent heavily influenced by the East end suburbs.

  “Jane Lang,” she corrected huskily. “I use my maiden name.”

  “Miss Lang, I’m Constable Warren. This is Constable Stuart. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your attack. Do you feel up to talking?”

  Jane compressed her lips. “I’m sorry for your wasted trip, but I don’t have much I can tell you.”

  Constable Warren sent her partner a look that seemed to say, ‘I told you so’, then stepped further into the room. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Make yourselves at home,” Jane muttered, looking around the austere room apologetically.

  “We won’t keep you long,” the man promised, settling himself into one of the hard plastic seats at the foot of the bed.

  At one time, Jane might have made a joke, to put them at ease. But marriage and heartbreak had changed her. She compressed her lips and kept her gaze level.

  “Why don’t you start with what you do remember,” Constable Warren suggested, remaining standing close to Jane’s head.

  “I remember having lunch...”

  “Where?” Constable Warren interrupted, her pen officiously poised above her notebook.

  Jane’s face flickered with a frown. “Agolini’s,” she said after a minor pause. “I like their gnocchi.”

  “And who did you meet?”

  “I went by myself,” she said matter of factly.

  “By plan? Or did someone fail to show up?” Constable Stuart pressed.

  Jane shook her head and almost swore when shards of light danced in front of her eyes. “Damn it, I have to remember to stop moving my head.” She lifted her fingers to her temples and held them there, to remind her to stay still as much as anything. “I don’t think I was meeting anyone. It’s near my home, and I go there whenever I want to… be amongst people.” She was lonely. So lonely. Every day was a challenge to be got through, to distract her from the fact she wasn’t with Carlo. Only her neighbour, and now friend, Liz offered any kind of pleasant distraction to her days.

  “I see,” Constable Stuart murmured, though Jane was pretty sure he didn’t. No one could understand the stagnating emptiness of her life. It wasn’t just Carlo’s absence, but their baby’s too. The family she’d longed for since her own childhood had been ripped away from her.

  “And after lunch?” Constable Warren picked up the questioning, her dark eyes beetling as she scrutinised Jane’s pretty face. Even now, having taken a rather severe knock to the side of her head, she was quite obviously very beautiful. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. It was totally flawless, not a freckle or mark anywhere in sight. Her eyes were enormous; almond-shaped and set wide on her symmetrical face. Her lashes were thick and black, and her nose petite, with a little ski jump at the end. Her lips were pale pink, her mouth wide. Her blonde hair, though now matted with crimson blonde on one side, hung in loose waves on the other, half way down her back.

  “I don’t remember,” she said with genuine anguish. “I wish I could. I know I had a black shopping bag when I came in my gate.”

  Constable Warren carefully hid her frustration. This sort of confusion was routine with victims of crime, particularly when a head trauma was involved. “The memories will come back,” she said quietly, putting a hand on the young woman’s pale fingers. “And you can call or email me as you do recall various details. In the mean time, let’s try something else.” She scraped the chair over the tiles, and placed it beside Jane’s head. It effectively cut Constable Stuart from the inquiries, but Jane didn’t mind. Warren seemed far more useful and interested in working out just what had happened.

  “Tell me what you would normally do when you come home.”

  Jane sucked in a breath and tried to imagine a normal day. “I open the door…”

  “No,” Constable Warren’s smile was reassuring. “Let’s take it back even further. Where do you carry your keys?”

  “In my handbag.”

  “Always in your handbag?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. So you come home, and then?”

  “I unlatch my gate and step onto the property,” she said, uncertain how much detail the
Constable Warren required. “Then I unlock the door and step inside.”

  “Do you think you’d notice if someone was waiting for you?”

  Jane pulled a face. “I would have said yes until today.”

  Constable Warren’s expression was sympathetic. “I’m only trying to gather an impression as to whether your attacker was hiding in wait for you, or just an opportunistic thug.”

  Jane freed her hand from the Constable’s and lifted it to her necklace. “I doubt theft was their motive, anyway. This necklace is worth a small fortune and would have been easy to slip off once I was unconscious.”

  Constable Warren made an approving sound as she leaned forward to inspect the diamond. “Excellent. I think you’re probably right.” She clicked her ballpoint pen back in, and settled back into the chair. “Jane, more than likely this was a random attack. Perhaps a junkie, though that’s uncommon in your area, it’s not unheard of. I’m happy to have someone change your locks and check your property over for you. There’s also a Victims of Crime group who can arrange some temporary security presence for you while you settle back into your place.”

  Jane didn’t need that. She mightn’t have a family, but she did have money. Thanks to Carlo and his guilt complex over their marriage.

  “Thank you, Constable.”

  “You have my business card. I’d like you to contact me if you think of anything. I don’t care if it’s minor. Sometimes something really small can help us a great deal.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  Constables Stuart and Warren rose as one. As they moved towards the door, it banged open, admitting the fabulous, dark, breath-takingly handsome figure of Carlo Santini.

  Jane’s eyes flew to him, drawn, as they always had been, by some invisible magnetic force. Three years had not changed him. He was as imposing, powerful and gorgeous as ever.

  Her gut clenched in instant recognition of the man who’d broken her heart. His darkly tanned skin showed a pallor, as he scanned Jane’s petite form. His eyes drifted over her slender figure, collapsed against the bed, to the bright red stain on her head. He ground his teeth, then turned to the two police officers. “Detectives,” he murmured grimly, turning his back on Jane and giving the two uniformed officers his complete attention.