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He knocked on his window and told his driver where they were going. Then he wondered what the hell he was doing. Picking up a student taking a gap year would be bad enough. This woman was dangerous.
Not that she looked it. She projected innocence with her casual clothes and naked face. She chewed the corner of her mouth as though having second thoughts.
The virgin act wasn’t normally his thing, but there was something in the way she nervously licked her lips that made desire dig sharp talons into his vitals. It wasn’t a hunter’s instinct to plunder the helpless. That wasn’t his thing, either. Rather, he sensed she was quietly fighting a betrayal of her attraction toward him—one that exactly matched the sexual heat he was struggling against.
That was compelling.
In those seconds when she had looked at his mouth, silently begging him to ravage hers, he’d nearly given in to... Hell, had he ever felt such anticipation for a woman? His emotions had been buried alongside his brother, never to be resurrected. But as the hunger in her gaze had fixated on his lips, he’d felt something other than cynicism and the relentless press of obligation.
He had seen, oddly, an open door to freedom, when every other woman struck him as the bait inside a cage.
This one had to be bait, as well. She came from duplicitous stock, he reminded himself, redonning his cloak of skepticism. He didn’t doubt she was the granddaughter of the woman who had stolen his great-grandmother’s earrings, given the way she had misrepresented herself to steal into today’s appointment. This doe-eyed innocence had to be an act to throw him off whatever it was that she really wanted.
It was very likely the way her grandmother had gotten the better of his great-uncle. Family legend had it that Istvan’s thieving lover had claimed to be carrying a Karolyi bastard to gain entry to the house. The only reason his mother had agreed to meet Gisella was to ensure there wouldn’t be any scandalous—and false—claims against the estate. There was such a thing as DNA testing and his mother had intended to insist on it.
Was that why Rozalia had come instead of the woman who would have had to undergo a blood test? He wondered what she really wanted. It couldn’t be merely a glimpse of an earring. He would spare his mother the work of getting that answer by taking Rozalia Toth to Kastély Karolyi himself.
When they arrived, he had his driver pause to tell the gatekeeper to get rid of the paparazzi at the fence. As they carried on up the drive, beneath the bower of branches, he caught Rozalia sending him a pithy look.
He lifted a brow in query.
“They’re just tourists, aren’t they?” she said. “The house is listed in a guidebook as one of the best-preserved examples of classic architecture in Eastern Europe. I took a photo myself when I was here earlier today.”
Something in that remark jarred, but he was also reminded of why he was of such interest to long-lens photographers right now. Damn his mother and her matchmaking and rumormongering. In her quest to see the next heir produced, she had singled out the daughter of a family friend—one of many associations cultivated over the last twenty years with the sole purpose that his mother would have the pick of the litter when the time came.
Trudi, an heiress from Austria, was suitably finished at boarding school. She excelled as a socialite, walking the line of interesting without being scandalous. She wrote freelance fashion articles and managed charity events for her father’s auto manufacturing corporation—one that dovetailed nicely with some of Rika’s steel interests. Viktor had had dinner with her twice. Both evenings were pleasantly civil and ended in an underwhelming kiss.
Yet his mother insisted on sowing whispers of a forthcoming announcement, trying to nudge him along. Trudi had signaled her interest by subletting a penthouse here in Budapest while she “helped” her friend curate a fashion line due out this fall. Mostly that involved making appearances in high-profile clubs and other trendy nightspots, amplifying her name so as to create the biggest splash in the headlines when the time came to announce their engagement.
Thus, the jackals were closing in, hoping for the scoop of the year. It increased his trapped, prickly mood, feeding his compulsion to break free of expectations.
“Wow!” Rozalia said as they left the car and walked up the steps into the receiving hall. She flashed him an excited grin that invited him to cast off his brooding tension and join her in her enthusiasm. “It’s like walking into a museum.”
He rarely noticed the grandeur, but now took in the inlaid marble floors that were the craftsmanship of a nineteenth-century Italian master. Ornate mahogany trim and enormous gold-framed mirrors lined the walls. Chandeliers hung from a ceiling with murals and intricate plasterwork.
“Clearly built for impressing visitors,” she murmured, lifting her gaze to the massive staircase. “I can picture all the ball gowns and powdered wigs. My cousin goes to the Met for their big events, but weddings are the only thing I’ve attended that are at all extravagant. Can you imagine what it must have been like?” She laughed at herself. “Maybe you know exactly what it’s like. Do you have many balls?”
They were speaking English and he heard the double entendre.
“The usual amount,” he replied dryly.
After the briefest confounded pause, she burst out laughing. It was, quite simply, the most beautiful laugh he had ever heard. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard anyone laugh in this mausoleum. Not since he was a child. Her laughter echoed to the second-floor ceiling, seeming to catch in the chandelier and make it shiver with musical delight.
He was so caught by the sound, by the light and liveliness in her face, he felt his chest tingle with an urge to chuckle—which definitely hadn’t happened since he was a child.
His butler, Endre, arrived to sober them. Endre offered to take the sorry-looking bag weighing her shoulder.
“To where?” she asked with a blink of surprise, then decided with a flashing smile, “I’ll keep it.” She set the worse-for-wear eyesore on the sofa as they entered the parlor, making Endre look like a dog whose tail had been stepped on.
They ordered drinks. Rozalia asked for pálinka, the Hungarian fruit brandy.
“When in Rome?” Viktor presumed.
“We drink it at family dinners. I could use the grounding influence right now. I’m having a hard time viewing this as your home. I wish Gisella was here to see it.”
* * *
Rozalia was feeling like such a fraud. Like the poor cousin she had always been, standing in glamorous Gisella’s shadow. Of course this was her cousin’s heritage. She loved Gisella to pieces. In some ways Rozalia was closer to her than she was with her actual sister. She and Gizi were the same age and shared the same passion for metallurgy and gemology. Also for the lore of Grandmamma’s earring and the determination to reunite the pieces and gift them to the woman they adored.
But Gisella was a willowy, stunning, spoiled only child. She wouldn’t goggle in a place like this. She would assume she belonged here—which to some extent she did.
Rozalia, not so much.
She turned from glancing out the windows that faced the front gardens and saw that Viktor was watching her the way a cat watches a mouse when it is too lazy to leap just yet. Biding his time.
She searched for a resemblance to her beloved cousin, hoping the familiarity would reassure her, but only found a superficial similarity in coloring and height. He was a lot colder and more imposing than anyone she had ever encountered in her life.
Gisella would know how to handle him, though, no matter the tensile sexuality he wore like armor. Gisella took male admiration for granted and used it.
Rozalia had never presumed men were genuinely attracted to her. Too many had tried to use her as a stepping-stone to get to Gisella. It wasn’t Gisella’s fault that she was a beacon and Rozalia a fence post, but being overlooked left a mark, every time.
That’s why she was confused by Viktor’s sudden desire to dine with her. She was quite sure she had been the only one affected in the back of the car earlier, but he’d made this invitation sound vaguely sexual. If he was the least bit interested in her, it was only because she was here. Convenient. He had a reputation as a playboy and she had enough experience with players to recognize them.
What she didn’t have experience with was feeling so drawn in by one.
She moved her gaze to the paintings before she started acting besotted again. She was confronted by a cheeky nude—literally a gathering of young women in a walled garden showing their backsides to the viewer. The rest were serene seascapes, fruit bowls, and peasants haying a field.
“You mentioned your grandmother dealt in art? I don’t recognize these, but they’re obviously masterpieces.”
“My father was her only child. My mother pilfered everything from his family estate and brought it here. Her mother was next in line after Istvan. There was no one else to inherit this house.” He paused, daring her to contest that.
Rozi wasn’t here to make claims for Gisella’s mother, only asked, “Is the furniture reproduction? Or originals?”
“Both. Our most heavily used is reproduction.”
She noted the escritoire that was likely an authentic Louis Quinze. “I’m a nut for tiny drawers and hidden compartments,” she admitted, firmly grasping her hands behind her back as she examined it. “I’m going to let myself believe there’s a key to a secret passage in one of these.”
“We had to lock it. To keep the ghosts from haunting the rest of the house.”
After an exaggerated gasp of delight, she said, “Thank you.”
His mouth twitched, but their drinks arrived before she could coax any more humor out of him than that one dry comment.
As they took their drinks, she made herself meet his gaze, no matter how disturbing, and say, “Egészségére.”
He repeated it and they sipped.
“Is it too bold to ask you to tour me around?” she asked.
“You wish to case the place?”
“No.” Was he serious or joking? So hard to tell. “I’m an artist. I’m interested.”
“That’s a lot of hats. I thought you were a gemologist and a goldsmith.”
“I’m midway through a master of fine arts in metalwork and jewelry design.” Did she take satisfaction from the slight elevation of surprise in his brows? Heck, yes, she did. “I work full-time for my uncle, making custom jewelry he sells in the shop my grandfather started. Barsi on Fifth? It’s quite well-known in New York.”
It might not have been featured in the title of a movie, but it held a similar reputation and was frequented by the same upper-class clientele.
“I know who your uncle is,” he said blithely.
“Then you know he wouldn’t hire me on nepotism alone. He expects me to constantly fill the well, which is why I’m continuing my education. But all art is inspiration for my own work. I would hate to miss this opportunity to study the masters who came before me, even though their disciplines are different from my own.”
He cocked his head in a small nod, relenting, and waved toward the hall where they had entered. He took her first to a music room where the brass pipes of an organ reached toward the sixteen-foot ceilings. A wall of double doors opened into the adjacent ballroom, which was straight out of Beauty and the Beast.
“Wow.”
“In answer to your earlier question, we host charity events and the odd film crew shooting a period piece.”
“I love those.” She moved into the center of the parquet floor and turned a slow circle, taking in the white walls with gilded trim, blue velvet curtains over the leaded windows and the chandeliers dripping with crystal. “What a dizzying place to live.”
“It’s an expensive obligation. I’d be fine with a modest apartment.”
She bet his definition of modest was a lot different from the place she occupied. Even so, this was only one of his many homes. What were the rest like?
“I’m a romantic, I’m afraid,” she confessed as he led her out to a hallway of portraits and vases that were so colorful and ornate they should have been gaudy but were perfectly tasteful in this surrounding. There was a chill in the air, though, and a faint scent of disuse. “I never want to hear that it’s actually cold as Hades to live here, even in summer. Or that back in the day, they had to use outhouses and drank bad water.”
“Mmm. I don’t know whether you’ll be pleased with this room or not, then.” He took her into an enormous dining room. It was very stately and beautiful, but distinctly chilly and empty. It held only a circular table with eight chairs upon an enormous rug. The windows looked on to the front grounds. “There’s a compartment in the floor where a table for forty is kept. At different times, people have hidden there.”
“Like you? Playing hide-and-seek when you were young?” She came from a big, lively family, but recalled at the last second that he had lost his only sibling, an older brother, when they’d been young men.
“Or you meant in wartime?” she hurried to add, trying to smooth over her gaffe.
“Both of those.” His expression remained inscrutable. “And the odd lover.”
“Oh, I do enjoy hearing about skeletons in the family closet,” she said with relish.
“Never found one of those. They always seemed to get out.” He sipped the drink he carried.
She chuckled, more out of relief since his dry sense of humor gave her the impression he was relaxing a fraction. Not that she would call him affable. Not ever and certainly not to his face.
“They must be a consequence of arranged marriages. Lovers, I mean.” She was teasing him a little, but also wondering if he really planned to succumb to such a thing.
“A consequence of being human, I’d say.” He wasn’t standing that close, but she suddenly felt the heat of his body. The lazy half-lidded look he gave her made her pulse thrum in her throat.
Would he resort to that? she wondered. If he succumbed to an arranged marriage?
She pushed the rim of her glass against her unsteady mouth, wondering what he would think if she told him she was a virgin at twenty-four. That she had made a pact at thirteen with her cousin to wait until they found a man they could truly love. It had partly been inspired their grandmother’s great love for Istvan, but for Rozalia, it was more personal. She needed to be sure she gave herself to a man who wasn’t secretly wishing she was Gisella.
“You come from a love match, I presume?” he asked, leading her into a smaller breakfast room that had a view of the back garden. It was still a showpiece, but much warmer and lived-in with fresh flowers and cut-crystal salt and pepper shakers on the lace tablecloth.
“My parents are deliriously in love,” she said with a grin of affection, moving to the windows that likely caught the morning sun, making for a relaxed start to the day. “But I will concede such a thing to be impractical.” She threw that over her shoulder, then tilted her head to reconsider her words. “Actually, my parents are impractical people, so I don’t know if one correlates to the other.”
“Impractical how?” He came to stand next to her and pointed out the window to the hexagonal windows that formed the roof of a squat, round building. “Like that sort of folly?”
“Why is it a folly? What is it?”
“A conservatory. My mother insists the staff keep it up, even though we can buy orchids for a fraction of the cost of heating that monster.”
“May I see inside it?”
He drew her into a hall where casual jackets hung over a boot bench, then opened the door she suspected was referred to as the service entrance. Faint kitchen noises came from behind a closed door. Looking along as she went down the outside steps, she saw a formal veranda obscured by a privacy hedge.
He was showing her the “home” part of his house, which gave her a sense of privilege and made her warm to him even though he remained very aloof.
Cool evening air surrounded them as they crossed to the door of the conservatory. She hugged her arms across her chest, hiding the way her nipples pushed against the fabric of her T-shirt, glancing nervously to see he’d noticed.
If anything, his attention made her nerve endings tingle all the harder, becoming even more sensitized and receptive. She had never reacted so elementally to any man before in her life. She kept wondering if this was how her grandmother had felt around Istvan—enthralled and ensnared. Helpless to powerful attraction. Desperate, even. Like me, want me. She didn’t want to be that needy, ever, but couldn’t hide from herself that he stoked that compulsion in her.
They entered the conservatory. It was humid as the tropics in here. She inhaled the earthy, dank undertones layered with heady floral aromas and a fragrance of citrus and herbs.
“I love the smell.”
His nostrils twitched and his chest expanded. He grew pensive. “I haven’t been in here for years.”
“I would be in here every day if it was mine.” She looked to the glass ceiling partially obscured by the fat leaves of exotic jungle plants. “This must be amazing in the winter. Oh, butterflies! How magical. You really are the luckiest person to have this.”
“There were birds once. Tomatoes were protected in that section and berries there.” He pointed to some cold frames. “My brother and I got into them. Left the doors open. The birds got into the berries and the cat got after the birds. We were banned after that.”
She smiled, heart squeezed by the memory. It sounded so beautifully human. She wanted to hear more, but his expression stiffened and closed up as though he regretted sharing.
“We grew a garden every summer,” she said. “My mother always put up her own preserves—even though you can buy canned peaches off the shelf for half the price.” She teasingly threw his words back at him.
“She didn’t work?”
“She had four children. It was work, trust me.” She rubbed a sage leaf and dipped her head to draw in the scent. “But being a stay-at-home mother was her dream. She was a daughter of immigrants and grew up in the back of the jewelry shop, mostly raised by her half sister—Istvan’s daughter Alisz.”
She copied his beat of silence, offering him a moment to argue that while sending him a look that told him he’d have an argument on his hands if he did.
He only lifted an unimpressed brow, not intimidated in the least.
She licked her lips and continued.
“Mom wanted to give us what she felt she had missed. She even day-cared Gisella. Mom didn’t take any money for it, either. Even though Aunt Alisz would have paid a nanny so she wanted to pay Mom. Even though we could have used the money. That’s what I mean about my parents being impractical. My mom viewed caring for her sister’s child as simply what you do for family. Maybe it was even payback for Alisz watching her when she was little. But Aunt Alisz didn’t have to work. Her ex-husband is quite well-off. Aunt Alisz wanted to pursue her academic career, though. My mom supported her aspiration by looking after her daughter.”
The way he looked at her, eyes narrowed as he weighed and measured all her words, made her wonder if she should repeat it in Hungarian.
“What does your father do?” he asked.
