to regret not having chosen to spend her first night

closer to Naples. Where on earth was she? Nowhere

near where she was supposed to be, she suspected.

The directions for the small village set back from the

coast had been almost impossible to follow, detailing

roads she had not been able to find on her tourist map.

If John had been here with her none of this would

have happened. But John was not with her, and he

was never going to be with her again.

She must not think of her now ex-fiance., or the fact

that he had fallen out of love with her and in love

with someone else, or that he had been seeing that

someone else behind her back, or that virtually everyone

in her home village had apparently known about

it apart from Jodie herself. Louise, so Jodie’s friends

had now told her, had made it obvious that she

wanted and intended to have John from the moment

they had been introduced, following her parents"

move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had

been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that

Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to

make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie reflected

bitterly. She should have realised how shallow

John was when he had told her that he loved her "in

spite of her leg". She winced as the pain in it intensified.

She was never going to make the kind of mistake

she had made with John again. From now on her heart

was going to be impervious to "love"—yes, even

though that meant at twenty-six she would be facing

the rest of her life alone. What made it worse was

that John had seemed so trustworthy, so honest and

so kind. She had let him into her life and, even more