Finally he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. After all, his ex-wife was hardly responsible for insolent verses printed in a London scandal sheet. He could easily have refused the annulment if he wished. It had seemed a heaven-sent way out of a horrible situation, Alex thought, his mind drawn back to feverish nights in Rome during which Maria would scream incomprehensibly and regularly throw objects at his head. In a period of two months he had had the windows in their bedroom replaced four times, to the great amusement of the household servants.

He still remembered the awed sense of joy he felt when Maria confessed—in a moment of calmness—that she was in love with a priest and wanted to annul their marriage. He had, in fact, been on the verge of volunteering for the dragoon guards, even given his position as heir to the earldom. Hang his father! Patrick would make a better earl than he, any day. He would have done anything, anything to get away from his Italian wife.

Alex flung himself into a big armchair next to the fire, thinking moodily of his first meeting with Maria. He had been in Italy for barely a week, and he attended a concerto at the Palazzo Barberini with some count; he could barely remember his name now. Count Rossi-Ferrini, he thought. And there she was. She looked exactly like the girl he had met in the gardens of Stuart Hall, the girl he had spent fruitless weeks searching for. True, she didn’t have red hair, and he was certain that the garden girl, as he had taken to calling her in his head, did. And she didn’t smell as sweetly clean and innocent as that girl did. Odd, given that Maria was a well-born Italian maiden and that girl was training to be a prostitute. But their faces were the same shape, a delicate triangle, and they both had intriguingly full lower lips.

Fool that he was, he assumed that Maria and he would share the same passion that he and the garden girl had … what an absolute jackass, Alex thought, his lips twisting cynically. Once married, Maria had to be compelled to any sort of physical intimacy. When they finally did share a bed it was abundantly clear that far from being the innocent, convent-raised girl her family had represented her to be, she was no virgin. After that the marriage rapidly disintegrated, spiraling into a series of screaming tirades on her part and longer and longer absences on his part. He took trips into the Italian countryside, stopping at any taverna he saw, drinking local wine until he fell off the bench. By the end of a year his Italian was fluent and his tolerance for alcohol (never slight) had doubled.