They were like a match to kindling. She burned with the ferocity of petrol flung at a fire. An explosion of pleasure she wasn’t sure she’d survive as the sensation burst inside her, rending her in two, and she sobbed his name to the stars.
CHAPTER TEN
LUCYLOOKEDOUTof the window of the music room, where she’d decided to play—perhaps one of her last chances to do so. The snow had stopped. There was little question that the roads were passable and there was now no excuse for her to stay. Except she didn’t want to go.
She’d moved from thinking she could never allow herself to be vulnerable with a man again to sharing some of her deepest fears and dreams with Stefano. The thought of leaving him stung like an open wound in the sea. So she took the pain and did what she had always done with it.
She played.
The piece was a simple one, but something she loved. The perfect acoustics of the room amplified the tune. Sweet and gentle. Almost hopeful. It was how she felt—about her playing, at least.
Without the pressure of performance there wasn’t any stiffness or pain in her hands. Her fears over her injury had lessened, and she’d begun to love the music again. It was what she’d missed. Not learning something complicated to thrill a crowd, or a piece she didn’t enjoy because that was what her performance schedule required. There was no need to strive, because she was enough. Lucy knew now that she wasn’t a fraud. You didn’t get to the position of first violin by fooling anyone. You either had the ability or you didn’t.
Stefano had given that back to her. Restored the confidence that had been slowly yet relentlessly eroded till she’d questioned everything. She allowed herself to see her musicianship through his eyes. Remembered the wonder on his face as he’d watched her play. It was a feeling she allowed to be mirrored inside herself, because he believed in her abilities. Believed inher.
And she’d begun believing in herself again too. Cocooned here in this place, it was as if her creative well had been refilled, with passion blossoming. Somewhere along the way something had happened to her with this brooding, complicated man. A man she didn’t want to leave.
She still hadn’t been honest with him about her violin. In the beginning she’d been scared to say anything till she had the measure of him. Now...? Now she had no excuse other than the realisation that telling him would change everything. The guilt of keeping her secret after the care he’d shown, after they’d made love, was a brutal voice that whispered in her ear about how she’d failed him.
She was sure he’d think that too, the moment she said something. There was no excuse for leaving it so long other than her selfish desire not to change this fragile, beautiful thing between them. To pretend that the outside world didn’t exist, protected as they were by the winter around them. But reality always intruded.
She finished her piece, loosened the strings of her bow, and packed her beloved violin back into its case. Her parents’ lawyers were still arguing over whether it formed part of the marital property pool, but it didn’t matter. She’d come to realise that even in wartime you didn’t hand such a valuable possession to a stranger without it involving some obligation.
Her grandfather had carried that obligation and his sense of guilt till he died. His carefully written diaries hinted at the weight of it—how it had almost crushed him some days. His final words in those last weeks, whilst confused, had spoken of a loss and guilt that plagued him. Of taking something that wasn’t his, to save himself when everything else around him was lost.
It was time for her to complete the mission he’d started over seventy-five years ago. Time to set his memory free.
The door cracked open and her heart began to thump in an excited kind of rhythm. It was like the anticipation of waiting in the wings backstage, just before walking on to perform.
Stefano came into the room and shut the door behind him. She wasn’t sure she would ever get enough of this man. In her quieter moments Lucy realised that she wanted to make her reality here, if only she could ignore her fears of bursting the shimmering bubble of possibility that surrounded them.
She smiled, but that smile rapidly faded. An energy she couldn’t place crackled round him like static. His eyes were dark and glittering as he stared at her with an intensity that caused a shiver to race over her spine. Something was wrong. She knew it. Could feel it intuitively. It was like the sound of a violin when its strings were over-tight. Everything about him was discordant. Too sharp.
‘You seem...tense. Everything okay?’
Stefano’s hands clenched, released. He flexed his fingers. ‘I took a phone call assuming it was you, so I didn’t check the number before answering.’
His voice cut her, sharp and cold, like the whistle of the wind in the ramparts of this place.
‘Instead, I was forced into conversation with His Highness’s private secretary.’
‘I thoughtyouwere His Highness’s private secretary and you were just here repairing the castle?’
Pain was etched on every part of him—in the tense set of his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes, the brutal slash of his mouth.
‘Don’t believe everything you read or hear.’
Lucy walked up to him, reached out and placed her hand on his chest. The heat of him reassured her, when he otherwise appeared wrapped in cold and darkness. The moment seemed fragile and hesitant, and then Stefano dropped his head, took a step back and away from her. It might have been only centimetres, but it felt like an uncrossable chasm.
‘Stefano, who hurt you?’
If she hadn’t been staring at his face, searching for the answer, she might have missed it. But there was a flinch, as if he’d been waiting for a strike.
‘Some of the deepest wounds are self-inflicted.’
Each word sounded as if it had been ground through glass, shredding him as it was spoken.
‘Recently I’ve come to think most things can be fixed,’ she said. He’d allowed her to believe that—one of the many gifts he’d given her in her brief time here.