Page 21 of Bound By The Italian’s 'I Do'

‘What?I can’t hear you properly.’

‘Listen to me, Amelia Seymore is a traitor. She’s been a spy this whole time. She’s working with her sister to destroy us.’

‘Amelia Seymore?’ Alessandro’s incredulity was clear.

‘Yes! Seymore! The Aurora project is compromised. And listen, she claims to have found some kind of proof of corruption against us.’

‘Did you say corruption? What corruption?’

‘I don’t know, but according to the messages I read, Amelia Seymore has found evidence of corruption by us. I’m in the Caribbean with her sister. I’ll keep her out of the way here and stop her communicating with anyone and causing any more damage. Can you deal with Amelia? This needs to be nipped in the bud and damage limitation undertaken immediately.’

‘Consider it done,’ Alessandro said, his voice now low and dangerous.

Despite the bad reception, the message had got through, and a fraction of the tightness in Gianni’s chest loosened. ‘I may be out of reach for a while,’ he said, ‘but I’ll try and get a message to you when I know what’s going on.’

‘Likewise. Speak soon, cousin.’

Gianni disconnected the call and took a deep breath of relief. His cousin was like a human missile when it came to taking down targets. Amelia Seymore stood no chance now she was in his sights. Whatever she and her sister had planned against them would fail.

But that still left Issy to deal with. She was an unknown quantity. The messages he’d read suggested her only job was to distract him while Amelia did the dirty work, but who knew what plans they’d concocted in the privacy of their home that had left no digital trace.

By the time she came back out on deck, now wearing a black vest with spaghetti straps over a black bikini and a pair of tiny denim shorts, her large shades once again covering much of her face, he knew the only safe thing to do was proceed with his own plan and get her to St Lovells. On the open sea at this time of year, there were too many other yachts about, too many ways for her to escape thePalazzo delle Festeand reach safety and communication with another vessel. There would be no escape for her from St Lovells. Not without his explicit agreement.

‘Did you find your phone?’ he asked as she approached him.

She shook her head. ‘I have no idea what’s happened to it.’

‘It will turn up,’ he assured her.

Flopping onto the sofa across from his, she tucked her legs under her bottom. ‘I hope so.’

Unable to resist, he held his phone out. ‘You can always use mine if you need it. It’s fully charged.’

‘Thank you but I don’t know any of my contacts’ numbers.’ Her shoulders rose. ‘I suppose it’s the curse of the age we live in that we don’t need to commit people’s phone numbers to memory.’

‘You mean you want to use your phone to make an actual phone call?’ he asked in pretend horror, and was rewarded with a definite loosening of her taut frame and a snuffle of laughter.

‘I know. Who’d have thought it, ’eh? Using a phone to call people on. Whatever next?’

‘People using televisions to watch TV?’

‘Now you’re going too far.’ The amusement on her face dimmed a little. She raised her face to the sky and sighed. ‘When I was a little girl, my mum had one of those old-fashioned address books, you know the ones where you could write someone’s name in it along with their address and phone number?’

‘I am familiar with old-fashioned address books,’ he said drily. Hisnonnahad had one that had been crammed full of names, and random pieces of paper with scribbled numbers that used to fly onto the floor whenever the book was opened. ‘Some people still use them.’

‘Do you reckon? I used to laugh at Mum for keeping one and thought it hilarious that she could still recite her childhood phone number from memory. It just seemed so old-fashioned and unnecessary to me when everything could be stored on your phone. I know my phone will turn up and if it doesn’t, I’ll be able to buy another one and retrieve all my data, but I can just imagine my mum—as she was back then—laughing at me now for relying on technology when the old-fashioned way would have made it more likely I had it stored in my brain.’

‘You say as she was back then... You mentioned before something about her being in rehab. If you don’t mind me asking, what is she in rehab for?’ He leaned back, managing to resist the temptation to fold his arms across his chest and stare at her like a headmaster waiting for a rule-breaking student to come up with a wild non-convincing lie to get them off the hook.

Slowly, Issy lowered her face and met Gianni’s stare through the darkness of their respective shades. While she’d made her fruitless search for her phone and showered the sea salt off her skin, the space away from Gianni had been the space she needed to talk sense back into herself. She and Amelia had spent ten years working towards this point. She could not throw it away just because of a major case of hormone problems for the bastard she was so desperate to bring down. And one of those reasons she so desperately wanted to bring him down was because of her mother. Because one of the many consequences of Gianni destroying her life had been the loss of the mother who’d once cherished and adored her two daughters. Jane Seymore was alive only in the sense that her heart still pumped blood through her body. ‘She has many issues. Drugs is the biggest one.’

‘Your mother is a drug addict?’

Yes, you bastard. Because of you.

‘She’s not a junkie in the traditional sense that people think of drug addicts. She doesn’t inject herself thank God but that’s only because she has a needle phobia. It’s mostly strong prescription stuff delivered to the comfort of her home—dealers nowadays have diversified into home delivery. Basically, she takes whatever she can get her hands on that stops her having to think or feel.’ Anything that stopped her remembering all that she’d lost.

There was a flicker in his eyes and she suddenly had the sense that he was weighing up whether or not to believe her. ‘How long has she been like this?’

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