‘The sooner I get you safely out of the country the better,’ Heather said with feeling.

It was raining even harder as their plane took off, climbing into the clouds. But then they broke through into light, and they both pressed eagerly against the window until the air hostess brought them a snack.

‘I can’t get my head around you being swept off your feet,’ Angie told Heather. ‘Much more my crazy style than yours.’

‘Yes, it’s not like sturdy, dependable me, is it?’ Heather mused. ‘Dashing off to live in another country, practically another world.’

Angie was diplomatically silent but she couldn’t help wondering about Peter who had been Heather’s fiancé for a year before dumping her a week before the wedding.

‘I’m not on the rebound,’ Heather said, reading her un-spoken thoughts. ‘I love Lorenzo, and we’re going to make a wonderful life together in Sicily.’

‘You’re right. New horizons. Lovely.’ Angie’s face assumed a look in which mischief and innocence were evenly matched. ‘You did say Lorenzo had two brothers, didn’t you?’

‘I’ve only met one of them, Renato.’

‘Yes, you told me. I can’t believe that any man would behave like that, actually coming to your counter at Gossways, pretending to be a customer, just so that he could look you up and down.’

Gossways was the most luxurious department store in London, and Heather had been working there, selling perfumes.

‘I don’t blame him for wanting to meet the woman his brother was courting,’ Heather said now. ‘It’s just the way he did it. Not a hint about who he was, and then, when Lorenzo took me to meet him at the Ritz that night, there he sat, just waiting for me to walk into his lair.’

The meeting had been dramatic. Renato Martelli had approved of Heather, but in such a high-handed manner that she’d stormed out of the Ritz, nearly killing both of them under the wheels of a taxi. In the high drama of that evening Lorenzo had begged her to marry him, and she had relented. Now, barely a month later, she was on her way to Sicily for the marriage. She had, as Angie said, been swept off her feet.