‘Thank you, Count Moretti. Or is it Your Excellency? I tried researching the correct form of address on the internet and I don’t want to get it wrong.’
‘There is no need for titles,signorina. Please call me Stefano.’
‘Oh... Okay... And you can call me Lucy.’
Calling him by his first name seemed too intimate—as if some essential barrier between them had become shaky, turning into a kind of crumbling foundation that she really wanted to shore up with every bit of scaffolding she could find. But demanding more formality would be rude, and she hoped that here, in this castle, she might get the answers she searched for. Because it was that quest which now kept her glued to the seat.
That, and exhaustion. She was pretty sure her legs wouldn’t move now, after walking as far as she had uphill, since the rental car she could ill afford had given an undignified lurch, a bang, and promptly died.
The corner of the Count’s mouth hitched in a kind of smile, and the panic that had been churning around her stomach settled into something less like a hive of bees and more like a kaleidoscope of butterflies.
‘Lucy.’
Her name sounded wonderful when said by him. Special. Important in a way that had been lost to her years ago.
‘What else did you research on the internet?’
She’d researchedhim. She wasn’t a complete flake—even if this ill-fated and underprepared trip suggested otherwise. Any limited English language press showed Stefano Moretti in the background of photographs, behind Lasserno’s Prince. Always looking sharp in dark sunglasses. More like a bodyguard than the private secretary those same press reports said was his job when he wasn’t restoring his own castle.
The Count of Varno’s official-looking website had plenty of information about his illustrious history and the Moretti family’s proud links to the Crown, as if anything else about them was meaningless. The photograph of him there was a formal study in an exquisitely tailored suit. Tamed black hair. Shaved jaw sharp enough to cut glass. Undoubtedly a handsome man, yet the bland image was almost like a photo of a waxwork dummy.
This man in front of her was something more. Not restrained, perfectly pressed and two-dimensional, but bristling and alive, with the look of someone untamed. Almost feral.
A man she was now staring at, with the firelight flickering over his imposing form, making him appear like the king of the underworld, lording it over his minions...
But she really needed to stop these fevered kinds of fantasies. He was just a man. She was just a woman.
Somehow that realisation just made it worse.
And she still hadn’t answered his question.
The Count of Varno—Stefano—raised one perfect black eyebrow. He stared at her cold and hard for a few moments and she wanted to blurt out all her secrets then and there.Everything.
But if she started it could take a while. Alongwhile. She had no idea how he’d respond, given some of those secrets involved his family. Until she could figure out what his reaction might be, silence was her best friend.
‘Oh, you know... Lasserno. The history of the Varno province.’You. But she didn’t say that. She simply shrugged and hoped that covered the rest.
‘I hope you will find Lasserno worthy of the visit.’
She hoped so too. Everything about her life lay in tatters around her. She needed answers—and they started in a family past she hadn’t dwelled on much since her school days, when she’d had to write an essay on someone heroic and had written about her grandfather.
Lucy swallowed down the knot in her throat. Blinked away the sting in her eyes. She’d loved her granddad, and she missed him, wished she could ask him the truth about his history. But he’d passed away after a long life months earlier, and his death had left questions she had no answers to.
She wasn’t sure now whether he was the hero she’d always thought him or the villain in a bigger tale. She hoped for the former, but the evidence suggested otherwise. It hurt almost worse than Viktor’s betrayal, because Lucy was in desperate need of at least one man in her life tostaya good man when the rest had let her down.
‘I’m sure your country will live up to its expectations.’ Or at least she prayed it would.
Their eyes locked and somehow she forgot about the bone-deep cold that she’d thought would never leave her. Her cheating ex... The uncertainty of her position at work... How everything about her life that she’d thought solid had proved its foundation to be unstable...
There really was only her and him and the fire that cracked and popped in the huge marble fireplace beside her.
Then he blinked, broke the moment. Looked out of the window to the steady fall of snow outside. Whatever had passed between them was lost but she’d felt it—those fleeting seconds when all her focus had been on the present and not on what had gone before or might come next.
If only she could live in that blissful ‘now’ for ever. But her recent past was a mess and her impending future was bearing down on her with the terror and fury of a bear roaring out of the woods. She only hoped that she could put the broken pieces of her life back together.
‘I’m forgetting myself,’ he said, his voice a rough burr over her skin. ‘Would you like a hot drink? Something to eat?’
‘Please...’ She’d eaten little in the past twenty-four hours, snatching food at service centres on the long drive from Salzburg to Lasserno. She really hadn’t had the stomach for anything other than her escape.