A Legacy of Secrets

‘Buona fortuna!’ An exceptionally pretty and very tearful woman thrust a black leather-bound diary and a set of car keys at Ella as she wished her good luck dealing with Santo and then shouted over her shoulder an old Italian proverb that Ella had heard a few times from her mother. ‘If a man deceives me once, shame on him. If he deceives me twice, shame on me.’

‘I take it that’s a no, then?’

A deep, rich voice had Ella turn and, as he walked out of his office, she could, for a dizzying second, understand his PA’s willingness to have given this man a second chance. She clearly wasn’t giving him a third for, with a sob, she ran for the door, leaving Ella alone with him.

Green eyes met hers and there was a hint of an unrepentant smile on a very beautiful mouth and, on his left cheek, a livid red hand print.

‘Are you here for an interview?’ he asked Ella in Italian and when she nodded and introduced herself, he gestured to his office and she followed him in.

He needed no introduction.

CHAPTER ONE

SANTO JERKED AWAKE, his heart racing, and reached out for familiar comfort, but rather than in bed with a lover beside him, he was asleep alone on a couch.

What happened last night?

His mind was a cruel trickster.

It did not tell him what had happened—it showed him little clues.

There was an empty whisky bottle on the floor, which Santo stepped over to get to the bathroom, and when he looked down he saw that he was still wearing the wedding suit, but his tie was off and the shirt torn and undone.

He checked the inside pocket of his jacket, remembered Ella double-and triple-checking that he had them before she left and he went off to be best man at his brother’s wedding.

The rings were still there.

He splashed his face with water; his face and chest were a mass of bruises.

Santo looked at his neck and grimaced, but a few love bites were the least of his concerns as yesterday’s events started to come back to him.

Alessandro!

Santo picked up the phone to arrange a driver, but he got the night receptionist who, perhaps unaware that she should not ask such questions, enquired where he wanted to go and Santo promptly hung up.

Looking out of the window, from his luxurious vantage point, Santo could see the press waiting. Rarely for Santo, he couldn’t stomach facing them, or his brother, alone.

‘Can you pick me up?

Despite the hour, Ella answered the phone with her eyes closed. After four months working for Santo Corretti she was more than used to being called out of hours, though he sounded particularly terrible this morning. His deep, low voice, thick with Italian accent, was still beautiful, if a touch hoarse.

Yes, beautiful and terrible just about summed Santo up.

Peeling her eyes open, she looked at the figures on her bedside clock. ‘It’s 6:00 a.m.,’ Ella said. ‘On a Sunday.’ Which should have been enough reason to end the call and go back to sleep. Yet, all night, Ella had been half expecting him to ring, so much so she had sat with her giant heated rollers in last night and had already laid her clothes out. Like the rest of Sicily, Ella had watched the drama unfold on television yesterday afternoon and had seen updates on the news all night. Even her mother in Australia, watching the Italian news, would know that the much-anticipated wedding of Santo’s brother, Alessandro Corretti, to Alessia Battaglia had been called off at the last minute.

Literally, at the last minute.

The bride had fled midway down the aisle and the world was waiting to see how two of Sicily’s most notorious families would deal with the fallout.

Yes, Ella had had a feeling that her services might be required before Monday.

‘Look, this is my day off.’ She did her best to hold firm. ‘I worked yesterday…’ Of course, as just his PA, Ella hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Instead her job had been to ensure that Santo arrived sober, on time and looking divine as he always did.

The divine part had been easy—Santo made a beautiful best man. It was the other two requisites that had taken up rather a lot more of her people skills.

‘I need to pick up Alessandro from the police station,’ Santo said. ‘He was arrested last night.’

Ella lay there silently, refusing to ask for details, while privately wondering just what else had happened yesterday.

She had raised a glass to the screen as she had seen Santo arrive at the church, talking and joking with Alessandro, privately thinking that the gene pool had surely been fizzing with expensive champagne when these two were conceived.

They could, at first glance, almost be twins—both were tall and broad shouldered, both wore their jetblack hair short, both had come-to-bed dark green eyes—but there were differences. Alessandro was the eldest, and the two years that divided the brothers were significant.

As firstborn son to the late Carlo Corretti, Alessandro was rather more ruthless, whereas Santo was a touch lighter in personality, more fun and extremely flirty—but he could still be completely arrogant at times.

‘Come and pick me up now,’ Santo said, as if to prove her point. Ella let out a long breath, telling herself that in a few weeks, if she got the job she had applied for, then all the scandal and drama of the Correttis would be a thing of the past. Working for Santo was nothing like she’d imagined it would be. ‘The press are everywhere,’ he warned, which was Santo’s shorthand to remind her to look smart—even in a crisis he insisted on appearances. ‘Take a taxi and then pick up my car and drive it around to the hotel entrance. Text me when you’re there.’

‘I hate driving your car,’ Ella started, but was met again with silence. Having given his orders, Santo would assume she was jumping to the snap of his manicured fingers, and had already hung up.

‘Bastard,’ Ella hissed and then she heard his voice.

‘You love me, really.’

Ella was too annoyed to be embarrassed. ‘I love lying in on a Sunday morning.’

‘Tough.’

This time he did hang up.

In a few weeks you’ll be out of it, Ella told herself as she rang for a taxi. The woman on the other end of the phone sounded half asleep as well and told Ella it would be a good fifteen minutes to half an hour, which suited her fine. She climbed out of bed and headed straight for the shower and then to the mirror, but Santo could forget it if he thought she was going to arrive in full make-up. She changed her mind, because like it or not, Santo was her boss and Ella took her work very seriously. So, instead of a slick of mascara and lipgloss—which were usual weekend fare, if she wore any make-up at all—Ella set to work with the make-up brushes and then smoothed out her hair a touch and tied it into a low ponytail. She pulled on a dark grey skirt and sheer cream blouse and added low heels.

One good thing about working for Santo was her clothing allowance.

Actually, it was the only good thing.

And Ella wasn’t even particularly interested in clothes!

Hearing the taxi toot outside her small rented flat, Ella checked her appearance one more time and then grabbed her ‘Santo Bag’ as she called it, making sure that she had his spare set of car keys, before heading outside. She squinted at the morning sun and took in the vivid colours of a gorgeous Palermo in May. The ocean was glistening and the city still seemed to be sleeping. No doubt the whole of Sicily had had a late night, waiting for updates in the news.

‘Buongiorno.’ Ella gave the taxi driver the address of the smart hotel where Santo was staying and then sat back and listened to the morning news on the radio.

Of course the jilted Corretti groom was being talked about long after the headlines had been read.

And, of course, the taxi driver was more than delighted with the news. ‘Trouble!’ he told her. ‘As if a wedding would ever unite the Corretti and Battaglia families…’ and happily he chatted some more, unaware he was driving her to meet with Santo. Ella chose not to enlighten him. Santo didn’t exactly keep her informed about the goings-on in his family. If anything, his Italian picked up pace if he ever had to speak with one of them, just enough to make it almost impossible for her to work out what was being said.

‘They have always fought?’ Ella checked.

‘Always,’ the driver told her and then added that even the death of Salvatore Corretti a few weeks ago would not bring peace between the two families. ‘The Correttis even war with themselves.’