Chapter 1
The whole pre-wedding party thing was revving up like a gigantic engine, and Charley had never felt less like partying in her entire life.
Now a night at La Scala, dear God, she thought heavily. For here she stood surrounded by luxury in this posh Milan hotel suite, about to put on a posh designer dress that must have cost more money than she dared let herself think about, so she could look the part for a posh gala evening spent at La Scala, while back home in England the family business was about to go under, taking everything they owned along with it.
She had not wanted to come to her best friend’s wedding, but her father had insisted. Her brother Charles had gone a whole step further and become really angry. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped at her. “Do you want Dad to feel worse than he already does about this mess?” “Go to Adelina’s wedding as planned,” he’d instructed, “and while you’re there, wish her all the damn best from me with her super-rich catch.”
It had been said with such bite that it made Charley wince to recall him saying it. Charles was never going to forgive her best friend for falling in love with another man.
Then Adelina and her parents had put even more pressure on her to come to Milan, and in the end, it had been easier to give in and do what everyone wanted her to do when all she’d wanted to do was be by her father’s side supporting him.
But instead she had to shimmy into this dress, Charley told herself, puffing back an unruly curl when it flopped across one eye as she settled the straps onto her shoulders, then turning to the mirror to check out the finished effect.
What she saw reflected back at her sent instant horror pouring into her expressive face. The dress was way too clingy in all the wrong places, and the silver-grey color looked awful against her pale skin! And it was not for the first time in her twenty-two years that she wished with all her heart that she were a delicate and sweet-boned brunette like Adelina.
But she wasn’t. She was a long, curvy redhead with an unruly long mop of glossy chestnut curls that just refused to stay confined, no matter how much torture she put herself through in an effort to pin them up. Add skin so startlingly white it looked dreadful against the silver-threaded grey silk, and it was like looking at a ghost!
When Adelina had bought the dress a couple of months ago to wear to her betrothal party, she’d looked fabulous in it—pure sensation on legs. Yesterday, she’d tossed it at Charley in disgust. “I don’t know why I bought it.” I hate the color. “The length is not right, and my boobs don’t fill it.”
Well, there was no chance of that problem here, Charley thought, her small white teeth biting down into her full bottom lip as she hitched the tightly fitted basque top further up the pale plump slopes of the breasts and grimly thanked the boning in the bodice for helping it to stay put.
The rest, she saw on second inspection, didn’t cling quite as badly as she’d first thought it did, and—face it, Charley—she then firmly told herself, Beggars cannot be choosers, girl, so you should—
The sudden knock at her suite door diverted her attention. “Are you ready, Charlotte?” Adelina’s mother called out. “We must not be late for La Scala.”
“Certainly not,” Charley thought dryly. “Just one more minute!” she called back.
La Scala waited for no man, not even the higher echelons of Italian society she was about to mingle with; she mocked as she slid her feet into a pair of high, slender silver mules, then turned to apply a coating of clear gloss to her lips. She refused point-blank to use the seductive red color that Adelina had supplied along with the dress.
Standing back to give her reflection the final once-over, she suddenly found the humor in standing here in her ill-fitting borrowed feathers and laughed for the first time in weeks. All she needed now was for her best friend to toss her that fabulous diamond ring her betrothed had presented her with, and she’d be sorted. All family debts were paid via the first pawn brokerage she could find.
But Adelina wasn’t quite that giving—not that Charley resented her for that. Adelina Alonzo had been her closest friend since the day they had both found themselves stuck in the same strict English boarding school, feeling like a pair of aliens dropped in there from outer space. Adelina had come to the school directly from a carefree lifestyle in Sydney with her Italian-born parents. They’d gone from ordinary to mega-rich overnight when an uncle in England died suddenly, making Adelina’s father the main beneficiary of the London-based Alonzo Inc.
Whereas Charley, well, she had been sent to the same school after her mother had caused a terrible scandal by having an affair with their local, very married MP. She had been so mercilessly teased and bullied at her old school about the affair that her father had decided to remove her from the situation by placing her in a school hundreds of miles away from the fuss.
Did it stop the teasing? No, it didn’t. Did she tell her father that? No, she did not, because he’d already been too cast down by the scandal and the fact that their mother had walked out and left them, taking with her what funds she could grab. So Adelina had become her close friend and confidante. They looked out for each other. Adelina was the black-haired, black-eyed spitfire with a solid grounding in good Australian spunk, and Charley was the much quieter one, with her natural spirit squashed by the bullies and a mother who’d never bothered to get in touch again after she’d walked out.
From the age of twelve to their present age of twenty-two, she and Adelina rarely did anything without the other one knowing about it. Now her friend was about to marry into one of Italy’s finest families, and, despite not wanting to be here, Charley was ready to shelve her own worries and do whatever it was going to take to help make Adelina’s wedding day next week absolutely perfect. It was Adelina’s family who’d paid to bring her over here. They had provided her with everything from room and board to clothes to suit every glittering occasion, even if they were Adelina’s cast-offs.
And she was grateful to them—she was, because she could not have afforded to come otherwise, no matter what her father had said. So here she was, one week into a two-week sabbatical from family troubles, joining in the partying run-up to Adelina’s glossy marriage to her super-rich, super-sophisticated beau.
