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Helplessly Charley watched as the final sample was loaded into the van.
‘Where are they taking them? What you’re doing is theft, you know.’ She tried valiantly to protect the supplier’s goods, but The Duke didn’t deign to answer her, going to speak to the two young men instead. Charley looked at her watch again. She could do nothing about the samples now. But where was her taxi? If it didn’t arrive soon not only would she be responsible for the loss of the samples, she would also miss her flight. She could just imagine how her boss was going to react. Only her fluency in Italian had prevented him from sacking her already, so that he could give his daughter her job.
She reached into her bag for her mobile. She would have to ring the council official who had organised the taxi for her.
The white van was speeding away, and The Duke had come back to her.
‘There are matters we need to discuss,’ he told her peremptorily.
‘I’m waiting for a taxi to pick me up and take me to the airport.’
‘The taxi has been cancelled.’
Cancelled? Charley was feeling sick with anxiety now, but she wasn’t going to let it show—not to this man of all men.
‘Follow me,’ he commanded.
Follow him? Charley opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again as out of nowhere the knowledge came to her that this was a man who had the power to make a woman lose so much sense of herself that following him would be all she wanted to do. But not her, Charley assured herself—and yet wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? Something about him compelled her to obey him, to follow him, as though…as though she was commanded by something outside her own rational control. Her whole body shuddered as immediately and physically as though he had actually touched her, and had found a reaction to that touch that she herself had not wanted to give. What was she thinking?
He was striding towards the car, leaving her with no option than to do as he had instructed her. He was opening the passenger door of the car for her.
He was taking her to the airport? And what had he meant when he had said that he was taking over the project?
She could all too easily picture him in Florence at the time of the Medicis, manipulating politics to suit his own purposes, with the aid of his sword if necessary, claiming whatever he wanted, be it wealth or a woman, and making it his possession. He had that air of darkness and danger about him. She shivered again, but this time not with angry resentment. This time the frisson of sensation that stroked her body was making her aware of him as a man, unnerving and alarming her.
He was not someone who would have any compassion for those weaker than him—especially if they were in his way, or if he had marked them out as his prey, Charley warned herself. Let him do his worst—think the worst of her. She didn’t care. She had far more important things to worry about, like keeping her job and keeping her all-important salary flowing into the family bank account; like doing her bit and following the example of selfless sacrifice her elder sister Lizzie had set. Her sister always managed to make light of all that she had done for them, never revealing that she felt any hint of the shameful misery that Charley sometimes had to fight off because she had been forced to give up her private dreams of working in the world of fine art. Sometimes Charley admitted she felt desperately constricted, her artistic nature cruelly confined by the circumstances of her life.
Raphael slid into the driver’s seat of the car, closing the door and then starting the engine.
The town council had been only too delighted to allow him to finance the restoration work on the garden, and to hand the whole project over to him. Had there been a trace of fear in their response to him as well as delighted gratitude? They knew his family history as well as he did himself. They knew that it involved broken lives and bodies, and the inheritance of blood that belonged to a name that still today caused shudders amongst those who whispered it in secret with fear and loathing. Beccelli! Who, knowing the history of that name, would not shrink from it?
He could not do so, however, Raphael reminded himself as he drove. He was forced every day of his life to face what he was, what he carried within him and its capacity for cruelty and evil. It was an inheritance that tortured and tormented those not strong enough to carry it. Those who, like his mother, had ended up taking their own life out of the despair that knowing they carried such genes had brought. Raphael stiffened against the unwanted emotional intrusion of his own thoughts. He had decided a long time ago that no one would ever be allowed to know how he felt about his blood inheritance or the ghosts of his past. Let others judge him as they wished; he would never allow himself to be vulnerable enough to let them see what he really felt. He would never seek their advice or acknowledge their criticism. He had been left alone to carry the burden of what he was, his father having drowned in a sailing accident and his mother dead by her own hand—both of them gone within a year of one another just as he had entered his teens.
Until he had come of age trustees had managed the complex intricacies of his inheritance and its wealth. A succession of relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—had made room for him under their roofs whilst he was growing up. After all, he was the head of the family whether they liked it or not. Its wealth and status, like its patronage, belonged to him alone.
In the way of such things, his great-aunt’s death and the consequent gathering of the family had given his relatives an opportunity to bring up the subject of his marriage and the subsequent production of the next heir—a favourite subject for all Italian matriarchs with unmarried offspring.
It was no secret to Raphael that his father’s cousin wanted him to marry her daughter, nor that the wife of his only male cousin, Carlo, often wondered if one day her husband or her son might stand in Raphael’s shoes, should he not have a son.
Raphael, though, had no intention of enlightening either of them with regard to his plans. And they knew better than to press him too much.
The Beccelli family had been notorious for their cruelty and their temper. Raphael’s own fear, however, lay not only with what he might have inherited himself but, even more importantly, with the genes that he would pass on, and those who might inherit them. In this modern world it might be possible to screen out those elements that combined to lead to a new life inheriting physical conditions that might damage it, but as yet there was no test that could pinpoint the inheritance of a mental and emotional mindset that would revel in cruelty, or protect a new life from the inner burden that came from knowing one’s history.
They were travelling through the gathering darkness of the spring evening, and it was minutes before Charley caught a glimpse of a road sign that sent her heart thudding with renewed anxiety. She realised that they were going in the opposite direction from her expected destination.
This isn’t the way to the airport,’ she protested
‘No.’
‘Stop this car immediately. I want to get out.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I am not being ridiculous. You have as good as kidnapped me, and my boss is expecting me to be back in England tomorrow.’
‘Not any more,’ Raphael informed her. ‘When I spoke to him earlier he was most anxious that you should remain here—in fact he begged me to keep you and use you for whatever purpose I wished.’
Charley opened her mouth to object to the offensive connotations of his choice of words, and then closed it again when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He wanted to upset and humiliate her. Well, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him think that he had done so.
Instead she said firmly, ‘You said that you have taken over the project?’
‘Yes. I have decided to fund the restoration myself rather than allow my family’s name to be connected with the kind of cheap, tawdry restoration you had in mind.’
‘So you’ll be cancelling our contract, then?’
‘I would certainly like to do so,’ Raphael agreed. ‘But unfortunately it won’t be possible for me to do that and find someone else to complete the work in time for next year’s formal re-opening of the garden. However, I do have some concerns about your suitability to manage the project.’
She was going to be sacked.
‘It seems to me that someone who gave up her Fine Arts degree halfway through to study accountancy instead is not the person to manage this project in the way I wish to have it managed.’
‘My career choices have nothing to do with you,’ Charley defended herself. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that after the deaths of their parents and the financial problems that had followed she had felt morally obliged to train for something that would enable her to earn enough to help her elder sister provide a home for them all.
‘On the contrary, since I am now in effect employing you they have a very great deal to do with me. From now on you will work directly under my control and you will be answerable directly to me. Should I find that you are not able to satisfy me and meet the standards I set, then you will be dismissed. Your employer has already assured me that he has someone in mind to replace you, should that prove necessary.’
‘His daughter,’ Charley was unable to stop herself from saying furiously, ‘who can’t speak a word of Italian.’
Ignoring her outburst, Raphael continued, ‘It is my intention that the garden will be restored as exactly as possible to its original design.’
Charley stared at him in the darkness of the car, the light from the moon revealing the harsh pride of his profile, etching it with silver instead of charcoal.
‘But that will cost a fortune,’ she protested, ‘and that’s just for starters. Finding craftsmen to undertake the work—’
‘You can leave that to me. I have connections with a committee in Florence that is responsible for much of the work on its heritage buildings; it owes me favours.’
And she could just bet that calling in ‘favours’ was something he was very, very good at doing, Charley recognised.
‘Your work begins tomorrow, when we will visit the site together. I have in my possession the original plans.’
‘Tomorrow? But I was only supposed to be here for the day. I haven’t got anywhere to stay, or…’
‘That will not be a problem. You will stay at the palazzo, so that I can monitor your work and ensure that the garden is restored exactly as I wish. That is where we are going now—unless, of course, it is your wish that I ask your employer to send someone else to take over from you?’
Was that secretly what he was hoping? Well, he was going to be disappointed, Charley decided proudly. She was as equally capable of managing a high-budget project as she was of managing a lowbudget one, and in truth there was nothing she would have enjoyed more than seeing the garden come to life as it had once been, if only he was not involved. More important than any of that, though, was her need to keep on earning the money they all so desperately needed right now. She could not afford the luxury of pride, no matter how much it irked her.
The road began to climb up ahead of them, and on the hilltop, caught in the full beam of the rising moon, Charley could see the vast bulk of an imposing building dominating the landscape.
‘That is the Palazzo Raverno up ahead,’ Raphael informed her.
The façade of the building was illuminated by floodlights, and when they had finally came to a halt outside it Charley could see it was Baroque in style, with curved pediments and intricate mouldings displaying the deliberate interplay between curvaceous forms and straight lines that was so much a part of the Baroque style of architecture.
Despite her determination not to betray what she was feeling, when Raphael got out of the car and then came round to the passenger door to open it for her she was totally unable to stop herself from saying in disbelief, as she followed him up the marble steps, ‘You live here? In this?’
Her awed gaze took in the magnificence of the building in front of her. It looked like something that should have belonged to the National Trust, or whatever the Italian equivalent of that organisation was.
‘Since it is the main residence of the Duke of Raverno, and has been since it was first remodelled and designated as such in the seventeenth century, yes, I do live here—although sometimes I find it more convenient to stay in my apartments in Rome or Florence, depending on what business I am conducting.’ He shrugged dismissively, making Charley even more aware of the vast gulf that lay between their ways of life.
‘My nephews would envy you having somewhere so large to play in,’ was all she could manage to say. ‘They complain that there isn’t enough room in the house we all share for them to play properly with their toys.’
‘You all share? Does that mean that you live with your sister and her husband?’
Raphael didn’t know why he was bothering to ask her such a question, nor why the thought that she might share her day-to-day life with a man, even if he was her own sister’s husband, should fill him with such immediate and illogical hostility. What did it matter to him who she lived with?
‘Ruby isn’t married. The three of us—my eldest sister Lizzie, Ruby and I and the twins—all live together. It was Lizzie’s idea. She wanted to keep the family together after our parents died, so she gave up her career in London to come back to Cheshire.’
‘And what did you give up?’
The question had Charley looking at him in shock. She hadn’t expected it, and had no defences against it.
‘Nothing,’ she lied, and quickly changed the subject to ask uncertainly, ‘Will your wife not mind you bringing me here into her home like this?’
‘My wife?’
Raphael had been moving up the marble steps ahead of her, but now he stopped and turned to look at her.
‘I do not have a wife,’ he informed her, ‘and nor do I ever intend to have one.’
Charley was too surprised to stop herself from saying, ‘But you’re a duke—you must want to have a son, an heir…I mean that’s what being someone like a duke is all about, isn’t it?’
Something—not merely anger, nor even pride, but something that went beyond both of those things and was darker and scarred with bitterness—was fleetingly visible in his expression before he controlled it. She had seen it, though, and it aroused Charley’s curiosity, making her wonder what had been responsible for it.
‘You think my whole purpose, the whole focus of my life, my very existence, is to ensure the continuation of my genes?’ The grey eyes were burning as hot as molten mercury now. ‘Well, I dare say there are plenty of others who share your view, but I certainly do not. I have no intention of marrying—ever—and even less of producing a son or any child, for that matter.’
Charley was too astonished to say anything. It seemed so out of character for the kind of man she had assumed he must be that he should not consider marriage and the production of an heir as the prime reason for his own being. That, surely, was how the aristocracy thought? It was the mindset that had made them what they were—the need, the determination to continue their male line in order to secure and continue their right to enjoy the status and the wealth that had been built up by previous generations. To hear one of their number state otherwise so unequivocally seemed so strange that it immediately made Charley wonder why Raphael felt the way he did. Not, of course, that she was ever likely to get the opportunity to ask him. That would require a degree of intimacy and trust between them that could never exist. He was obviously very angry with her—again—and as he took a step towards her Charley took one step back, forgetting that she was standing on a step and immediately losing her balance.
Raphael’s reaction was swift, his hands gripping hold of her upper arms punishingly. Not to protect her from any hurt or harm, Charley recognised, but to protect himself from coming into unwanted contact with her. That knowledge burned her pride and her heart, reminding her of all those other times when men had dismissed her as being unworthy of their interest.
‘You should take more care, Charlotte Wareham.’
‘It’s not Charlotte, it’s Charley,’ she corrected him, tilting her chin defiantly as she did so.
He was still holding her, and once again out of nowhere she was having to fight against the shock of suddenly experiencing an awareness of him that was totally alien to her nature. How could it have happened? she wondered dizzily. She just didn’t feel like this ever—going hot and then cold, trembling with awareness, burning with the heat of sensation surging through her body as it reacted to his maleness.
She had taught herself years ago not to be interested in men, because she had always known that they were not interested in her.
She wasn’t sure when she had first realised that in her parents’ eyes she wasn’t as pretty as either of her siblings. Once she had realised it, though, she had quickly learned to play up to the role of tomboy that they had given her, pretending not to mind when her mother bought pretty dresses for her sisters and jeans for her, pretending that being the family tomboy was what she actually wanted, telling herself that it would be silly for her to try to mimic her sisters when she was so much plainer than they were. It had been her father who had first started calling her ‘Charley’—a name that suited a tomboy far better than Charlotte.
Over the years she had learned that the best way to protect herself from comments about her own lack of femininity and prettiness when compared with her sisters was to ensure that others believed she wanted to be what she was—that she wanted to be Charley and not Charlotte. But now, for some unknown reason, with Raphael’s fingers curling into her flesh, his icecold grey gaze boring into her as though his scrutiny was penetrating her most private thoughts and fears, she felt a sharp stab of pain for what she was—and what she was not. If she had been either her elder sister Lizzie, with her elegance and her classically beautiful features, or her younger sister Ruby, with her mop of thick tousled curls and the piquant beauty of her face, he would not be looking at her as he was—as though he wanted to push her away from him and reject her.
Being so close to him was unnerving her—the sheer solid steel strength of his male body brutally hard against her own unprepared softness. Unwittingly her gaze absorbed the olive warmth of his throat above the collar of his shirt and then lifted upwards, sucked into a vortex of instinct beyond her control, blinding her senses to everything else as she fastened on the angle of his jaw, the pores in his skin, the shadow where a beard would grow if he wasn’t clean-shaven. She wanted to lift her hand and touch him there on his face, to see if she could feel some slight roughness or if his skin was as smooth and polished as it looked. Her gaze lingered and darted across his face with lightning speed, swift as a child let loose in a sweet shop, eager to gather up forbidden pleasures as fast as it could.
How she longed to be set free to draw and paint this man’s image on canvas, to capture the essence of his pride and arrogance so that all that he was, inside and out, was revealed, leaving him as vulnerable as neatly as he had just stripped her of her own defences. That mouth alone said so much about him. It was hard and cruel, the top lip sharply cut. In her mind’s eye Charley was already visualising her own sketch of it, so engrossed in what was going on inside her head that when she looked at his bottom lip to assess its shape it was the artist within her that did that assessing, and not the woman. It was the woman, though, whose breath was dragged into her lungs and whose awareness was not of the lines and structure of flesh and muscle, but instead of the openly sensual curve and fullness of his lips. What must it be like to be kissed by a man with such a mouth? Would he kiss with the cruelty of that harshly cut top lip, demanding and taking his own pleasure? Or would he kiss with the sensual promise of that bottom lip, taking the woman he was kissing to a place where pleasure was a foregone conclusion and all she would need to measure it was the depth to which she allowed that pleasure to take her?
Charley’s throat locked round the betraying sound of her awareness of him that rose in her throat, stifling and suppressing it. She pulled back stiffly within his hold, causing Raphael to immediately want to keep her where she was. Why? Because for a fraction of a second his body had reacted to her with physical desire? That meant nothing. It had been a momentary automatic reaction—that was all; nothing more. Raphael purposely kept his dealings with women confined to relationships in which both people understood certain rules about their intimacy being purely sexual and nothing more. He was committed to remaining single and child-free as a matter of duty and honour, and nothing was ever going to change that. Certainly not this woman.
And yet beneath his grip Raphael could feel the slenderness of her arm, and just registering that was enough to cause his thoughts to turn to how soft her skin would be, how pale and tender, with delicate blue veins running up from her wrist, the pulse of her blood quickening in them as he touched her. Her naked body would look as though it were carved from alabaster: milk-white and silkily warm to the touch.
Furious with himself for the direction his thoughts had taken, Raphael pushed the tempting vision away, ignoring the eager hunger that was beginning to pulse through his body.
It was irrational and impossible that he should desire her. Even her name affronted his aesthetic senses and his love of beauty.
‘Charley. That is a boy’s name and you are a woman,’ he pointed out to her, and then demanded, ‘Why do you reject your womanhood?’
‘I don’t—I’m not,’ Charley protested defensively. Why hadn’t he let go of her? She knew that he wanted to do so. She could see it in his eyes, in the curl of his mouth, so cold and potentially cruel, and yet…A shudder of sensation she couldn’t control swept through her as she looked at his mouth. What would it be like to be kissed by a man like him? To be held, and touched, caressed, wanted…?
A small sound locked her throat, her eyes darkening to such a dense blue-green that the colour reminded Raphael of the deep, clean, untouched waters in the small private bay below the villa he owned on the island of Sicily. The sudden swift hardening of his body before he had time to check its reaction to her caught him off guard, making him deride himself mentally for his reaction. He couldn’t possibly desire her, he told himself grimly. It was unthinkable.
‘No Italian woman would dress herself as you do, nor hold herself as you do, without any pride in her womanhood.’
He was being deliberately cruel to her, Charley decided. He must be able to see, after all, that she did not have the kind of womanhood it was possible to take pride in. She was plain and lanky, unfeminine and undesirable—so much the complete opposite to the beauty her artistic senses admired and longed to create that it hurt her to know how far short she fell of her own standards. Secretly, growing up, she had believed that if she could not be beautiful then she could at least create beauty. But even that had been denied her. It was a sacrifice she had made willingly, for the sake of her sisters. They loved her as she was, and she loved them. That was what mattered—not this man.
And yet when he released her and was no longer touching her, when he looked at her as though he despised her, it did matter, Charley recognised miserably.
Following Raphael into the palazzo, Charley was conscious of how untidy and unattractive she must look, in cheap jeans that had never fitted properly, even when she had first bought them, and the bulky, out-of-shape navy jumper she had thought she might need if she had to visit the site, which she had worn over her tee shirt to allow her more packing space in her backpack. And her shoes were so worn that no amount of polishing could make them look anything other than shabby. But then she forgot her awful clothes as she took in the magnificence of the large entrance hall, with its frescoed wall panels and ceiling, the colours surely as rich and fresh today as they had been when they had first been painted, making her want to reach out and touch them, to feel that richness beneath her fingertips. The scenes were allegorical—relating, she guessed, to Roman mythology rather than Christianity—and had obviously been painted by a master hand. Just looking at them was a feast for her senses, overwhelming them and bringing emotional tears to her eyes that she was quick to blink away, not wanting Raphael to see them. She tried to focus on something else, but even the marble staircase that rose up from the hallway was a work of art in its own right.
Raphael, who had been watching her, saw her eyes widen and change colour, her face lifting towards the frescoes with an awed joy that illuminated her features and revealed the true beauty of the delicate bone structure.
His heart slammed into his ribs with a force for which he was totally unprepared. The fresco was one of his personal favourites, and her silent but open homage to it echoed his own private feelings. But how could it be possible that this woman of all people, whose behaviour said that she had no awareness of or respect for artistic beauty, should look at the fresco and react to it with all that he felt for it himself? It shouldn’t have been possible. It should not have happened. But it had, and he had witnessed it. Raphael watched her lift her hand as she took a step towards the nearest fresco, as though unable to stop herself, and then let it fall back. He hadn’t expected it of her. She hadn’t struck him as someone who was capable of feeling, never mind expressing such an emotion, and yet now he could feel her passion filling the distance between them. If he looked at her now he knew he would see her eyes had darkened to that stormy blue-green that had caught his attention earlier, and her lips would be pressed together—soft, sensual pillows of flesh, too full to form a flat line, tempting any man who looked at them to taste them…
Raphael cursed himself under his breath. He had been without a lover for too long. But he couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone react quite so emotionally to the frescoes other than his mother, who had loved them and passed on that love to him. He could still remember how as a small child she had lifted him and held him so that he could see the frescos at close quarters, her voice filled with emotion as she talked to him about them. His life had been so happy then, so filled with love and security—before he had known about his dark inheritance.
So much beauty, Charley thought achingly. Her heart, indeed the very essence of her had gone hungry for such beauty for so long. In her imagination she tried to comprehend what it must have been like to be the pupil of such an artist, to have the privilege of watching him at work, knowing that one’s own best efforts could never hope to match his smallest brushstrokes, feeding off the joy of witnessing such artistry. Only of course the great masters had never taken on female pupils—not even tomboy female pupils.
Once she had dreamed of working amongst great works of art in one of London’s famous museums, as an art historian, but that dream had come to an end with her parents’ death.
Dragging her gaze from the frescoes, she shook her head like someone coming out of a deep dream and said slowly to Raphael, ‘Giovanni Battista Zelotti, the most famous of all fresco painters of his era. He would never tell anyone the recipe he used for his famous blue paint, and the secret died with him.’
Raphael nodded his head. ‘My ancestor commissioned him after he had seen the fresco he painted for the Medicis in Florence.’
He looked at his watch, his movement catching Charley’s attention. His wrists were muscular, and the dark hairs on his arm underlined his maleness, making her stomach muscles tighten into a slow ache that permeated the whole of her lower body. What would it be like to be touched, held by such a man? To know the polished, controlled expertise of his stroke against her skin…? And he would be an expert at knowing what gave a woman the most pleasure…The slow ache flared into something more intense, causing Charley to catch her breath as she tried to hold her own against her body’s attack on her defences. It must be Italy that was making her feel like this—Italy, and the knowledge that she was so close to the cities she had longed to visit and their wonderful art treasures, not Raphael himself. That could not be—must not be.
CHAPTER THREE
WARMTH, sunshine, a scent on the air coming in through the open balcony windows that was both unfamiliar and enticing, and a large bed with the most wonderful sheets she had ever slept in. And despite everything she had slept, Charley admitted as she luxuriated guiltily in the delicious comfort of the bed and her surroundings, having been woken only minutes earlier by a discreet knock on her bedroom door, followed by the entrance of a smiling young maid with Charley’s breakfast.
When Raphael’s housekeeper had brought her up here last night she had felt slightly daunted, but to her relief Anna, as she had told Charley she must call her, had quickly put her at her ease, organising a light meal for her, and telling her that breakfast would be sent up to her room for her because ‘Il Duce—’ as she had referred to Raphael ‘—takes his breakfast very early when he is here, so that he can go out and speak to the men whilst they are working with the vines.’
Charley was, of course, relieved that she didn’t have to have breakfast with Raphael, and it wasn’t because she was curious about him in any way at all that as she left the bed she was drawn to the balcony windows and the view of the vines she had already seen beyond the gardens that lay immediately below them. Slipping the band she used to tie her hair back off her face over her wrist, Charley padded barefoot to the balcony in her strappy sleep top with matching shorts—a Christmas present from the twins. The outfit was loose on her, due to the weight she had lost over these last anxious weeks.
