‘What will we do about the car I drove here?’ she asked belatedly.
‘It will be picked up later.’
The Palazzo Barigo lay over an hour’s drive away. Zara used a good part of the journey to sound him out on different kinds of stone and then she discussed the need for a lighting consultant. She found him more silent and less approachable than he had seemed the night before. Had her rejection caused offence? It was probably her imagination, she thought ruefully, but once or twice she thought he seemed distinctly tense. His lean, hard-boned face was taut in profile, his handsome mouth compressed.
‘How did you spend your morning?’ she enquired when she had failed to draw him out on other topics.
‘At the office.’
‘Do you often work at weekends?’
‘I was in New York last week. Work piled up while I was away.’ His fingers flexed and tightened again round the leather steering wheel.
‘This landscape is beautiful. No wonder Edith felt inspired working here.’
‘You talk a lot, don’t you?’ Vitale sighed. The views she was admiring were painfully familiar to his grim gaze. He felt as though his world were turning full circle, bringing him back to the place where the events that had indelibly changed his life had begun. Yet conversely he was conscious that only two years earlier he had taken a step that ensured he could never hope to escape that past.
Zara could feel her face reddening. She did talk quite a bit and it wasn’t exactly intellectual stuff. Perhaps he found her boring. Annoyance leapt through her as she fiercely suppressed a sense of hurt. He wasn’t her boyfriend, he wasn’t her lover, he wasn’t anything to her and his opinion should not matter to her in the slightest.
‘I’m sorry, that was rude,’ Vitale drawled softly, shooting the powerful car off the road and below a worn stone archway ornamented with a centrally placed Grecian urn. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a rough morning but that is not an excuse for ill humour. I find spending time with you very relaxing.’
Zara wasn’t quite convinced by that turnaround and when he parked she got out and said stiffly, ‘You know, if there’s only staff here, you could leave me to explore on my own for an hour. You don’t need to stay—’
‘I want to be with you, angelina mia,’ Vitale intoned across the bonnet, whipping off his sunglasses to view her with level dark golden eyes. ‘Why do you think I arranged this outing? Only to please you.’
As Zara could think of no good reason why he should have bothered otherwise, the anxious tension fell from her heart-shaped face. ‘I’m no good with moody guys,’ she confided with a wry look. ‘They make me uncomfortable.’
‘I’m not moody.’
Aware of the powerful personality that drove him, Zara didn’t quite believe him on that score. He might not be subject to moods as a rule but he was definitely a very driven and strong individual. She was convinced that he could be stubborn and tough and a bit of a maverick but she had no idea how she could be so sure of those traits when she had only met him the day before. And yet she was sure. In much the same way she read the strain in his dark golden gaze and realised for the first time that he wasn’t just flirting with her, he wasn’t just playing a sexual game like so many of the men she had met. Vitale Roccanti was keen to soothe the feelings he had hurt. He sincerely cared about her opinion. Heartened by that conviction, she tried not to smile.
Vitale lifted out the picnic basket Giuseppina had made up and tossed Zara a cotton rug to carry and extended his free hand to her. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat …’
‘The orchard,’ she suggested dreamily, already mentally visualising the garden design she had often studied.
In the heat of the afternoon they strolled along gravelled paths. The clarity of her aunt’s talent as a designer was still as clear as it must have been forty years earlier when it was first created. ‘The garden’s been replanted,’ Zara registered in surprise and pleasure, for she had expected to see overgrown shrubs and trees, the once noticeable lines of her aunt’s vision blurred by many years of growth.
‘Eighteen months ago.’ Vitale’s explanation was crisp, a little distracted. As she stood there against the backdrop of a great yew tree he was remembering his sister dancing along the same path in a scarlet silk gown for a fashion photographer’s benefit, her lovely face stamped with the detached hauteur of a model, only the sparkle of her eyes revealing her true joyous mood. ‘For a while the house and garden were open as a tourist attraction.’
‘But not now,’ Zara gathered.
‘The owner cherishes his privacy.’
‘It’s almost selfish to own something this beautiful and refuse to share it with other people,’ Zara contended in a tone of censure, lavender eyes darting in every direction because there was so much for her to take in.
His handsome mouth quirked as he watched her clamber unselfconsciously onto a stone bench in an effort to gain a better overall view above the tall evergreen hedges. ‘The temple on the hill above the lake offers the best prospect.’
Zara’s fine brows connected in a sudden frown. ‘There was no temple in the original scheme.’
‘Perhaps the owner felt he could add a little something without destroying the symmetry of the whole,’ Vitale murmured a tinge drily.
Zara went pink. ‘Of course. I think it’s wonderful that he thought enough of the garden to maintain it and secure its future for another generation.’
Vitale shot her a searching glance, much amused against his will by her quick recovery. She was a lou
sy liar, having something of a child’s artlessness in the way that she spoke and acted without forethought. She had no patience either. He watched her hurry ahead of him with quick light steps, a tiny trim figure with silvery pale hair catching and holding the sunlight. When he had seen the photos of her he had assumed the hair was dyed but it looked strikingly natural, perfectly attuned to her pale Nordic skin and unusual eyes. He would have to get her clothes off to explore the question further and that was a prospect that Vitale was startled to discover that he could hardly wait to bring about.
Monty Blake’s daughter had an unanticipated charm all of her own. Even in the casual clothes her quintessential femininity, dainty curves and deeply disconcerting air of spontaneity turned him on hard and fast. It was years since any woman had had that effect on him and he didn’t like it at all. Vitale much preferred a predictable low level and controllable response to a woman. He did not like surprises.