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The man’s arrogance was astounding!
Chiara took her hand off the door and folded her arms across her chest. ‘No, I don’t know who you are. Now, if you have nothing better to do than interrogate me on my own doorstep then I’ll ask you to leave. We had a funeral here this week—it is not an appropriate time.’
His eyes gleamed. ‘To the contrary...now is the most appropriate time for this conversation. May I?’
He sidestepped her neatly and was walking into the vast stone hallway before she could stop him.
Spiro whined and Chiara whirled around. ‘Excuse me, what on earth do you think you’re doing? This is my property!’
Except it’s not really, reminded a little voice.
The man turned around to face her and Chiara got the full impact of him. It was almost too much. He made the majestic reception area seem small. He had to be well over six feet, and broad with it. He wore a dark suit that could only be custom-made as it clung to his well-honed physique like a second skin. His air of intense physicality made Chiara think of bare-knuckle fighters she’d seen in a documentary once. It was as if his suit was just a flimsy concession to urbanity.
His gaze slid down to beside Chiara and his lip curled. ‘What is that?’
Chiara glanced down to see Spiro, looking in the general direction of the man and emitting a low growl. She put her hand on his head and looked at her uninvited guest. ‘He’s my dog and you’re upsetting him. This is my home and I’d like you to leave.’
His gaze came back to rest on her and Chiara fought not to fidget under that exacting expression.
‘This is precisely what I’ve come here to discuss—the fact that this home is not actually yours at all.’
Chiara’s insides seized. Was this man from the bank? She forced herself to ask, ‘What are you talking about?’
He didn’t answer right away. Instead he put his hands in his pockets, drawing Chiara’s eye to his mid-section. Heat climbed up her neck and face and she diverted her gaze before he might notice. But he didn’t notice. He was looking up at the walls and turning around in a small circle.
He said, as if to himself, ‘I’ve waited a long time to be here...’
Then he started walking towards the reception room Chiara had just vacated. She went after him. ‘Excuse me, Signor Domenico...’
He turned to face her from the middle of the room and Chiara had the strangest sensation that she was the guest—and not a very welcome one.
‘It’s Santo Domenico.’
Chiara bit out the name. ‘Signor Santo Domenico. I insist you tell me what on earth this is all about or I will call the police.’
Now she was beginning to panic. He must be from the bank. But were they allowed to show up like this? Why had the solicitor not warned her this might happen so soon?
Chiara’s head was starting to hurt again.
He looked around. ‘Where are the staff?’
Chiara felt defensive and wasn’t sure why. ‘There are no staff—not that it’s any business of yours.’
He looked at her, incredulous again. ‘How have you kept this place?’
Chiara knew that was also none of his business, but this whole meeting had taken a surreal turn and she found herself saying, ‘We closed up the rooms we weren’t using and just maintained the few we needed.’
‘You and your parents?’
‘Yes. They were buried in a double funeral two days ago, in case you weren’t aware.’ She was hoping to shock him into some kind of realisation that he was here at a very inappropriate time.
He nodded his head. ‘I am aware, and I’m sorry for your loss.’
He couldn’t have sounded less sorry.
Before Chiara could formulate another word he said, ‘You had a meeting with your solicitor the other day?’
‘Yes,’ Chiara said faintly. ‘How did you know?’
‘It’s customary to have the reading of the will and such after the funeral.’
‘Of course.’
She cursed herself for feeling paranoid. She had no reason to feel paranoid. If he wasn’t from the bank then he had to be the businessman her solicitor had mentioned. She forced herself to calm down. There would have to be due process before anyone evicted her from her own home.
‘So you will now be aware that this castello is in danger of being possessed by the bank unless you can drum up the necessary funds.’ Here he stopped, and looked around again before saying, ‘Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, but I don’t think that’s likely.’
Chiara wanted to point out that he’d been speaking out of turn since the moment he’d materialised on the doorstep, but that wasn’t the issue here. ‘Are you from the bank?’
He shook his head and a small smile played around that disturbing mouth, as if her question was amusing for some unknown reason. It made her want to slap him when she’d never before felt violent towards anyone in her life.
‘So how do you know that information, then?’
He shrugged minutely and looked back at her. ‘I have my sources and I’ve had a...a keen interest in the castello for some time now.’
‘A keen interest...?’ Chiara struggled to make sense of his cryptic response.
He faced her squarely then, and she had the uncomfortable sensation that he was about to be a lot less cryptic.
‘Yes, a keen interest. For my whole life, in fact. Because, you see, the truth of the matter is that this castello actually belongs to me. To my family, specifically—the Santo Domenicos.’
* * *
Nico looked at the woman standing just a few feet away. She couldn’t be more nondescript, in a black shapeless dress, with long light brown hair and not a scrap of make-up. His first impression of her had been that she had to be the housekeeper, but now he noticed the proud bearing of her form. Spine straight, shoulders back...
His conscience pricked—her parents had just died. But he quashed the spark of compassion. This day had been coming for decades and now it was finally here.
His father had died a bitterly disappointed man, and countless other members of his family had suffered as a result of this woman’s family’s actions. He’d suffered too, enduring jeers and taunts his whole life.
‘You’re not one of the powerful now, Santo Domenico—you’re nothing...’
But he wasn’t nothing any more. He had singlehandedly pulled himself out of the streets of Naples and achieved stunning success, and now he was finally ready to reclaim his family’s heritage from the people who had stolen it so many years ago.
His one regret was that his father hadn’t lived to see the castello returned. That he hadn’t lived to see where his ancestors were buried and pay his respects. His father had come here once, with his own father’s ashes, and asked if he could scatter them in the family plot, but he’d been turned away like a beggar.
Nico would never forget the humiliation etched into his father’s face and the rage burning in his eyes.
He’d said to Nico that day, ‘Promise me you’ll walk through those gates one day and reclaim our legacy...promise me.’
And here he was, finally on the verge of fulfilling that promise—except much to Nico’s frustration he wasn’t feeling exactly satisfied. He was distracted by the realisation that Chiara Caruso’s eyes were a very light green. And that she wasn’t perhaps as plain as he’d first thought. She was...intriguingly fresh-faced. Untouched. He was used to women covered in so many layers of artifice, or filled with so many chemicals, it was hard to know what they looked like underneath it all.
She shook her head now, frowning. ‘What are you talking about? This castello can’t belong to you. It’s belonged to my family for hundreds of years.’
Anger made Nico’s voice tight. ‘Are you sure about that?’
Suddenly she seemed hesitant. ‘Well, of course...’
‘Perhaps you’re an expert denier of history, like your father was. Are you really expecting me to believe that you aren’t aware of what happened?’
She went pale. ‘Leave my father out of this. How dare you appear on my doorstep with some fantastical tale?’ She stood back and extended her arm towards the door. ‘I’d like you to leave now. You are not welcome here.’
For a moment Nico’s conscience pricked again, he thought that perhaps he should leave and at least allow her a period of private mourning before returning in a couple of days. But then he registered her words: you are not welcome here. Exactly the same words her father had said to his father when he’d tried to gain access to the family burial plot.
Nico planted his legs wide. He wasn’t going anywhere.
The dog standing beside her emitted another pathetic growl.
He said, ‘I’m afraid that it’s you who is not welcome here. Not for much longer anyway. It’s merely a matter of time before the bank moves to take possession.’
* * *
Chiara stared at this man who looked as immovable as a stone statue. Against every instinct, her curiosity was aroused. Maybe he wasn’t mad—maybe he believed what he was saying.
‘What gives you the right to say such things...that the castello belongs to you?’
‘Because it’s true. My family built it in the seventeenth century.’
Chiara wanted to shake her head, as if that might make order out of what he was saying. She’d known the castello was old—especially some parts of it—but not that old.
He went on. ‘At that time the Santo Domenicos owned this estate and all the land and villages from here to Syracuse.’
What he was talking about was a huge swathe of land, and if it were true—Chiara shook her head. It couldn’t be. ‘My family have been the sole owners of this castello for as long as I know—our name is above the door, etched in stone.’
He dismissed that with a curl of his lip. ‘Anyone can carve words into a slab of stone. Your family took ownership of this castello before the Second World War. The Carusos were the Santo Domenico family’s accountants. When we were in financial difficulty they agreed to bail us out, using the castello as collateral, the agreement being that as soon as we had the money again we would buy the castello back at an agreed price. Then came the war.
‘After the war, your family made the most of the chaos at that time. They claimed to have no knowledge of the agreement and destroyed all the paperwork, saying our claims were bogus. So many people were trying to reclaim ownership of land and possessions after the war that the authorities chose to believe that we were being opportunistic. We were a powerful family, and some were only too happy to see us brought down and destroyed.’
He continued.
‘The war decimated our savings—we lost everything. We became destitute. Your family refused to negotiate or to give us a chance to regain our property. Our very proud Sicilian family was scattered. Most emigrated to the United States. We ended up in Naples. My grandfather refused to leave Italy, always hoping he’d see our lands returned before he died. As did my father. Both were thwarted.’
Chiara struggled to take this in. ‘You can’t have proof of this. I’ve never heard mention of the Santo Domenicos in my life.’
He cast her a jaundiced look. ‘I don’t believe that. Our story is part of local legend around here.’
Chiara flushed when she thought of her very sheltered upbringing. Their housekeeper—before she’d been let go in recent years—had done all the shopping, and her father had gone into the village for supplies since then. Whenever Chiara had ventured out she had noticed the way people looked at her, and she’d burned with self-consciousness because she’d assumed they were judging her less than fashionable clothes and figure.
However, if there was any grain of truth to this man’s claims, perhaps they’d been judging more than her appearance.
Feeling very exposed, and more vulnerable than ever, she repeated, ‘You have no proof of this.’
He arched a brow. ‘Come with me.’
He strode out of the room, and Chiara just looked after him stupidly before she kicked into gear. The sensation that he somehow belonged here struck her again and it wasn’t welcome.
He walked out of the main door and Chiara had the urge to slam and lock it behind him. But something told her that this man wouldn’t be so easily locked out.
He stopped in the main courtyard of the castello and looked left and right, as if trying to figure something out, and then strode confidently to the left, towards where the family church and graveyard were situated. The graveyard she’d only walked away from a couple of days ago, after seeing her parents interred.
When she realised where he was headed she hurried to catch up and called out, ‘This is ridiculous—you must stop this!’
But he didn’t stop. It was as if he couldn’t hear her. He got closer and closer to the graveyard, but at the last moment veered away from it and walked to another gate nearby, overgrown with foliage.
She arrived behind him, slightly out of breath. ‘What are you looking for? That is the old family plot.’
A place she’d never been into herself, because the housekeeper had used to tell her that it was haunted. A shiver went down Chiara’s spine now. Had the housekeeper known something of this man’s fantastic claims?
He thrust aside the foliage and located the latch on the gate. At this moment he barely resembled a civilised man. She could see his muscles moving under the material of his suit and felt another disconcerting pulse of awareness in her lower body. Totally inappropriate and unwelcome.
He pushed open the gate and said in a grim tone, ‘Come on.’
Chiara had no choice but to follow him into the shadowed and dormant graveyard. Sunlight barely penetrated through the gnarled branches of the trees overhead and it was very still. She picked her way gingerly over the uneven ground, not even sure what she was walking on, hoping it wasn’t graves.
He had reached the far corner and was pulling leaves and branches away from something. When she got closer she saw that it was a headstone. He turned to face her with an intense look on his face, and for a moment she was almost blinded by his sheer raw beauty.
Then he took her arm and said impatiently, ‘Look.’
Chiara stood beside him, very aware of his hand on her arm and the disparity in their sizes. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did she could make out faint writing, her heart stuttered and stopped as a dawning dread moved through her.
There, etched in the stone, was the following:
Tomasso Santo Domenico, born and died at Castello Santo Domenico, 1830-1897
She couldn’t believe it. Castello Santo Domenico. Not Castello Caruso.
‘He was my great-great-grandfather.’
Chiara looked around, and now she could see the unmistakable shapes of headstones underneath foliage all around her. They seemed to loom at her accusingly in the gloom. The space closed in on her and claustrophobia rose swiftly. She pulled free of Nicolo Santo Domenico’s grip and turned and made her way out, her skin clammy with panic.
She almost tripped over a mound, and a small sob came out of her mouth, but then finally reached the gate and stepped into bright comforting sunshine, her head reeling.
* * *
Nico stood in the overgrown graveyard, only vaguely aware that Chiara had all but run out of the graveyard. This proof of his family’s legacy was almost too much to take in.
Standing in that grand room just a few moments ago, facing a stricken-looking Chiara Caruso, he’d actually felt a sliver of doubt. Could this grand, crumbling estatereally have belonged to his family? Had they truly once been the most powerful family in southern Sicily? It had seemed almost too much to believe when all he could think of was his grandfather’s bitter countenance and then his father’s. Maybe they’d dreamed it up, frustrated by the struggles they’d faced. Their fall from grace.
But, no. This graveyard was cold, hard evidence that that they had existed in this place. That they had once lived, loved and died here. His ancestors had built it, stone by stone.
