The Storm Within
The Storm Within
Trish Morey
About the Author
TRISH MOREY is an Australian who’s also spent time living and working in New Zealand and England. Now she’s settled with her husband and four young daughters in a special part of South Australia, surrounded by orchards and bush land, and visited by the occasional koala and kangaroo. With a lifelong love of reading, she penned her first book at the age of eleven, after which life, career, and a growing family kept her busy until once again she could indulge her desire to create characters and stories – this time in romance. Having her work published is a dream come true. Visit Trish at her website, www.trishmorey.com
The Storm Within by Trish Morey has been selected as a finalist for a prestigious RITA
Award from the Romance Writers of America
The Storm Within
Trish Morey
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
There’s something about a craggy Mediterranean island topped with a looming castle that really appeals to me as a setting. The combination of remote with imposing might well be a mirror to the hero, who is as unapproachable and intimidating as the island setting itself.
Count Alessandro Volta is as unapproachable and intimidating as they come. Scarred both physically and mentally from a tragedy that left him the only survivor, Alessandro shuns society and the media and takes to self-imposed exile on his storm-ridden island home. Until a discovery is made in the secret tunnels beneath his castle, the lost pages from an ancient book of healing.
The woman who comes to evaluate the find is not the crusty woman he was expecting and suddenly Alessandro finds his escape from the world challenged by Dr Grace Hunter, a passionate scientist whose unwelcome presence threatens to break down the dark shields around him and thrust him once again into the light.
But can the fabled book of healing live up to its reputation and heal a heart so savagely broken? And will this unlikely couple ever earn their summer royal wedding?
I hope you enjoy finding out.
With very best wishes,
Trish
x
With grateful thanks to the real Archival Survival team, Angela Henrickson and Geoff McIntyre, and especially to Annie for all her help with a project that was so totally left field.
I’m not sure if this is what you envisioned Annie, when I first put the premise of this story to you, but thank you so much for your advice and assistance and for your sheer enthusiasm!
Any mistakes or omissions are purely author error.
Thank you Annie!
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was coming. From his office overlooking the sea, Count Alessandro Alonso Leopold Volta watched the launch approach the island that was home to Castello di Volta and the seat of the Volta family for more than five hundred years.
The boat hadn’t even docked and already the bitter taste of bile hovered menacingly at the back of his throat.
He growled. He hated visitors, hated the way they brought the smell of the outside world with them, as if clinging to their very clothes. He hated their wide-eyed stares and their looks of horror when they first saw his scars, horror that bleached their faces white and sent their eyes skidding away to the floor or to the nearest work of art. Anywhere, it seemed, that wasn’t his face.
But most of all he hated their pity, for the horror always gave way to pity.
He preferred the horror.
His hands curled into fists at his side. He didn’t want anyone’s pity.
He didn’t want anyone. Period.
The launch slowed, rocking sideways on the bumpy water as it neared the dock and its wash caught up with it. He ground his teeth together and turned away, knowing that this time he had no choice. The package found tucked away in the caves deep beneath the castle had seen to that.
Why here? he asked himself again. Why, of all the places in the world, of all the places that would welcome the attention such a discovery would bring, why had what could be the lost pages from the fabled Salus Totus, the legendary Book of Wholeness, had to turn up here? When had fate taken to wearing a clown’s mask?
He grunted his displeasure and dropped into the chair behind his desk. One week Professor Rousseau had promised him the job would take. No longer than one week to examine and document the pages, to determine whether they were genuine, and if so to stabilise their condition until they could be taken away and prepared for display. One short yet no doubt interminable week, with a stranger clattering around the castle, asking questions and expecting answers, and probably expecting him to be civil in the process.
He looked down at the file he’d been reviewing before the onshore wind had carried with it the thumping beat of an approaching engine, but his skin pulled achingly tight over his jaw and the words before him danced and spun and could have been printed in a different language for all the sense they made.
It could be worse, he rationalised, clamping down on the rising black cloud of his resentment, forcing himself to focus on the résumé in his hands. He flipped the page, turning to the photograph of the woman he was expecting. Reputedly one of the best conservators in the business, Professor Rousseau boasted more than forty years’ experience in the industry. And with short grey hair cut helmet-style around features that looked as if they’d been sculpted from parchment rather than skin, she looked the kind of person who enjoyed books more than people. If he had to put up with a visitor to his island, he could do much worse than this shrivelled-up scientist.
Maybe. And yet still this heavy sense of foreboding persisted in his gut; still the jagged line of his scar burned and stung, as if someone had dragged their nails down his face and chest and sliced open his wound.
One week, he thought, touching fingers to his burning cheek, half surprised when they didn’t come away wet and sticky with blood. One week with a stranger poking around his castle, asking questions, getting under his feet. And whoever she was, and however she looked, it would be one week too long.
CHAPTER TWO
DR GRACE HUNTER TOOK a gulp of sea air and did her best to ignore the butterflies that had seized control of her stomach and were right now threatening to carry it away. Excitement, she told herself. Anticipation. Maybe a little bit of motion sickness too, given the way the launch bounced and lurched over the chop.
But excitement. Definitely there was excitement.
The Salus Totus was the Holy Grail, the Troy of the conservatorial world, and the plum job of examining the pages discovered had fallen right into her lap. If the pages were authentic, and indeed the fabled long-lost pages, if she could prove they were no hoax, her studies of it and the papers she produced on it could make her career.
She should feel excited.
And yet there was something else beneath the thrill of the chase. Something else lurking below the anticipation of holding a page written hundreds of years ago, of feeling that connection between writer and reader that transcended the centuries and rendered time meaningless. And that something else twisted in her gut until the butterflies turned into a serpent that coiled and squirmed in her belly.
Difficult, Professor Rousseau had described Count Alessandro Volta, during her unexpected and rapid-fire phone call from the hospital yesterday, and when Grace had asked what she meant there’d been a distinct hesitation on the line, before other muffled voices had intruded, and she’d added a rushed, ‘I have to go. You’ll be fine.’
Sure. She’d be fine. She gulped in air as the boat ploughed resolutely through the chop and headed for the relative safety of the shore. Relative, because nothing about the rocky island and the imposing castle set upon it looked remotely welcoming. Not the rocky shore or the towering cliffs or the clouds that seemed to hover ominously above the brooding castle in an otherwise clear sky.
She frowned up at them. Lucky she was a scientist, really, and not some paranoid panic merchant who saw portents of doom in every swirling cloud or flutter of apprehension. She was here to do a job after all.
The skipper cut the engines, letting the wash carry the boat into the dock, while the other crew member secured a line, taming the motion before starting to offload cargo onto the dock, her duffel bag amongst it. She gathered her things, her leather backpack and her briefcase containing the Professor’s letter of introduction, along with her specialist tools, glancing up at the castle that sprawled so arrogantly across the clifftop. From sea level the sheer scale of the place was daunting. Up close it must be intimidating, with its high walls punctuated at intervals by perimeter towers topped with crenellated battlements, a central tower rising high above it all, almost sending out a challenge—enter if you dare.
Welcoming? Definitely not. A movement startled her and she jumped as a figure unexpectedly stepped from the shadows thrown by the rocky escarpment into the bright sunlight. Through grizzled eyes in a leathery face the man looked her over as one might consider an unwelcome stray dog found whimpering on the doorstep, before he grabbed her duffel in one dinner-plate sized hand and flung it in the back of a rusty Jeep. He made a lunge for the briefcase in her hand and she pulled her arm away. There was no way she was letting Mr Sensitive loose on her tools.
‘Thank you, but I’m good with this one.’
He grunted. ‘You are not who we were expecting,’ he said in gravelly English, his accent as thick as his ham-hock biceps, before he muttered a few words in Italian to the skipper and hauled himself into the driver’s seat.
‘No. Professor Rousseau sends her apologies. Her mother—’
‘The Count will not be pleased.’
She had no comeback to that, other than to swing herself onto the withered and cracked upholstery of the passenger seat before he could drive away without her.
The Jeep lurched into life and she clutched her briefcase tighter in her lap as the vehicle tore up the narrow road. If you could call it a road, Grace thought, as it narrowed to little more than a one-lane track, zig-zagging up the cliff-face. She made the mistake of looking out of the car as he took another impossibly tight bend, and saw stones spraying over the edge of the cliff, spilling towards the boat now shrinking below. She squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Do you think maybe you could drive a little slower?’
He shook his head gravely, muttered something under his breath.
‘Only I would like to get to look at the discovery before I die.’
‘The Count,’ he almost grunted, ignoring her attempt at humour, ‘he is expecting the Professor.’
‘Yes, you said. I tried to explain—’
‘He will not be pleased.’
Conversation was clearly not his forte. She tried to concentrate on the spectacular view across the expanse of Mediterranean to where the coastline of Italy was just visible in the distance, while trying not to think about the height of the cliff they were scaling that made such a magnificent view possible. But it was the subject of her driver’s concern who stole her concentration and reminded her that the real reason for this coiling uneasiness in her gut was not down to anticipation at working on an ancient text, or motion sickness, or even the brooding castle, but dread.
Therese Rousseau had warned her. She’d said he was difficult and the driver’s words did nothing to suggest the Professor had been unfair in her description. In fact, if anything, maybe she’d been a trifle flattering.
What exactly happened when the Count was not pleased? What was it that she had to look forward to?
At least the Jeep had managed to scale the cliff. The track was widening and now bordered in rocks she could tell had once been painted white, though now they were chipped and faded, their paint worn from exposure to the salt-laden air.
She shivered—the air was noticeably cooler at this height—and looked up in time to see the sun disappear behind the darkening clouds. And despite knowing in her brain that it meant nothing, that it was purely a meteorological phenomenon she was witnessing and not some kind of omen, even though she fought it with all she knew about the world, still she felt an unwanted and illogical sliver of fear slip down her spine.
The massive iron gates clanging shut behind them as they entered the castle grounds did nothing to assuage her unease. Now tension had her tightly wound, but she kept her breathing light as her driver crunched the gears while circling a tiered fountain featuring water nymphs and dolphins—a fountain that was as dry and neglected as the border of leggy, unkempt rosemary bushes that surrounded it.
Everywhere, it seemed, was shrouded in neglect, as if nothing had been touched for years.
And she wondered how anything as fragile as a book had survived in this place for the centuries it was reputed to have.
A miracle?
Or a curse?
This time the tremor seemed to chill her very bones. Great, she thought, doing her utmost to shake off the irrational sense of impending danger. So much for priding herself on being a logical scientist.
The Jeep jerked to a halt and the driver jumped out. ‘Come,’ he instructed, not bothering with her duffel this time, but leaving it to her to retrieve as he pushed open giant timber doors that stretched at least twelve feet high and yet still looked minuscule when compared to the mountainous castle walls that dwarfed them.
And then they were inside and the temperature dropped again. Her footsteps over the massive flagstones echoed in the vast, empty entry hall. Or maybe that was just her heartbeat racing fast and loud …
For a thickset man, her guide moved fast, his short legs carrying him surprisingly quickly up a flight of stairs that looked as if they’d come straight from Sleeping Beauty’s castle. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked from the bottom of the stairs, but he gave no answer, and she didn’t need it to know there was no hope of him taking her directly to the documents she’d come to examine.
The Count, she knew. The same Count who she’d been warned repeatedly would not be pleased. She sighed and started up the stairs behind him, lugging both her briefcase and her duffel. Might as well get the unpleasantries over and done with in that case. Maybe then she could get to work.
She followed him along a long passageway. The walls were dressed with rich burgundy drapes, between which hung portraits of, she assumed, counts long gone. Superiority shone from their steely eyes, along with a sense of entitlement for the world and all its riches. The Counts of Volta, she surmised, were not of modest, unassuming stock. But then why should they be modest, with potent looks that were as masculinely beautiful as they were darkly dangerous?
Slight differences distinguished one from another—a slight tilt of nose, an angle of jaw—and yet all of them in that long, seemingly endless row bore the same dark eyes and brows, topped by the same distinct hairline that intruded onto their temples in sharp points, almost like a shadow cast from … She stopped herself, refusing the link she’d made in her mind. They so did not resemble horns! She was being ridiculous even thinking it.
Besides, she’d researched the latest Count Volta late last night, after the Professor had called with her news, when both the excitement of the task ahead and the cryptic ‘You’ll be fine’ had banished any thoughts of sleep. And she’d remembered then why his name had seemed vaguely familiar, remembered hearing around her eighteenth birthday news reports of the party boat explosion off the Costa Smerelda. Last night she’d read again of the shocking death toll and of the miracle survivor who’d lost his fiancée and his friends that night and who, scarred and bereft, had walked away and turned his back on both a promising career as a concert pianist and society.
The media had pursued him for a while, she’d read, seeking exclusives and exposés, before apparently tiring of the fruitless chase and moving on to juicier, more obliging celebrity prey. And so, entrenched in his self-imposed exile on his island home, he’d slipped into obscurity.
Who could blame him for cutting himself off from the world after an accident like that? Maybe it was no surprise he was ‘difficult’. But it said something for the man that he hadn’t kept the discovery of the documents secret. He would have known the potential for the discovery to once again focus the world’s attention squarely on him. No wonder he’d insisted on only one specialist, and for the job to be completed inside a week.
Which was fine with her. She didn’t want to hang around a crotchety old hermit and his crumbling castle a moment longer than necessary. She wouldn’t get in his way and hopefully he’d stay out of hers.
Her guide came to an abrupt halt, rapping briefly on a pair of doors before poking his head inside one of them, leaving her no choice but to cool her heels behind him. ‘She’s here but it’s not the Professor,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told the boat not to leave until you’re ready.’ And then he swept back past her without a glance, as if fleeing in case he was blamed for collecting the wrong baggage.
So that was why he hadn’t brought her bag in and she’d had to lug it herself—because he thought she wasn’t staying. If she’d needed anything to dispel any remaining shred of apprehension, her introduction as some kind of afterthought fitted the bill perfectly. She pushed open the door he’d left ajar.
‘My name is Grace Hunter and I have a letter of introduction from Professor …’ Her words shrivelled up in a throat suddenly drier than the fountain outside, and it might very well have been clogged with stranded sea nymphs and beached dolphins.
Where was the crotchety old hermit she’d been expecting? The modern-day Robinson Crusoe complete with beard and tattered clothes? Someone who matched the air of neglect that shrouded the rest of this barren island and its crumbling castle? But there was nothing tattered about the man who stood looking out of the window across the room from her now, nothing neglected.
‘… Rousseau.’
The name fell heavily into the empty space between them. He stood still as a statue, his hands clasped behind his stiff back, clad in a suit tailored so superbly to his tall, lean body it almost looked part of him.
But it was his profile that captured her attention, and the clear similarities to his forebears lining the portrait gallery. His strong nose and resolute jaw, and the unmistakable mark of the Counts of Volta, the clearly defined dark hairline that intruded in sharp points at his temples. And he was every bit as powerfully beautiful as those who had gone before. Which made no sense at all …
She swallowed. ‘Count Volta?’
CHAPTER THREE
ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, confronted her full-on.
A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.
She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.
His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’
Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.
He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’
‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’
‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’
His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?
No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’
He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.
‘Did you hear me? I said Bruno will arrange for your return.’
It was all she could do not to stamp her foot. ‘And I said I’m not leaving!
One arm swept in a wide arc. ‘I have no dealings with you. My arrangement was with Professor Rousseau.’
‘No. According to the documents, your arrangement was with her business, Archival Survival. When the Professor was unable to come, she contracted me.’
He grunted, no way about to concede the point. ‘So what is her excuse for being unable to fulfil her contractual obligations herself?’
‘If you’d read this letter you’d know. Her mother is in hospital after suffering a major stroke and she’s rushed to be with her while she clings to life. Admittedly, as excuses go, that’s pretty thin. Clearly it’s more about inconveniencing you.’
If his eyes were lasers, she figured, with the heated glare he gave her she’d be wearing holes right now, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark. She’d grown up in a family that prided itself on being straight-talking. Over the years she’d learned to curb that trait while in civilised company. The Count, she’d already decided, for all his flash clothes and a portrait gallery full of titled ancestors, didn’t qualify.
‘I expected an expert. I do not intend spending a week babysitting someone’s apprentice.’
She sucked in air, hating the fact it was tinged with a hint of sandalwood and spice, with undertones of something else altogether more musky, hating the possibility that it might come from him, hating the possibility that there might be something about him she approved of when the rest of him was so damned objectionable.
But that was still okay, she figured, because finding something she might possibly like only made her more resentful towards him. ‘Seeing you refuse to read this letter, where all the facts are set out in black and white, perhaps I should spell it out for you? I have a Masters in Fine Arts from Melbourne University and a PhD in Antiquities from Oxford, where my thesis was on the preservation and conservation of ancient texts and the challenge of discerning fraud where it was perpetrated centuries ago. So if there’s an apprentice on this island right now, I don’t think it’s me. Does that make you feel more comfortable?’
He arched one critical eyebrow high. ‘You look barely out of high school.’
‘I’m twenty-eight years old. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’d like to check my passport?’
Dust motes danced on the slanted sunlit air between them, oblivious of the tension—dust motes that disappeared with those slanting rays as the sun was swallowed up by a cloud and the room darkened. She resisted the urge to shiver, resisted that damned illogical brain cell that suggested there was some connection between the Count’s dark looks and the weather. And instead she decided that his momentary silence meant assent.
‘And so right now I’d like to get to work. After all, I believe you want this text taken off your hands as soon as possible, and we’ve already wasted enough time, don’t you agree? Perhaps you could arrange someone to show me to the documents so I might get started?’
He scowled as he took the letter from her hands then, scanning its contents, finding everything was as she said and finding nothing to arm him with the ammunition to demand she leave.
He wanted her gone.
He didn’t want women around the place. Not young women, and definitely not halfway to pretty. He had his fix of women once a month, when the launch brought across a local village woman. He never asked her name; she never offered it. Each time she would just wait for him naked in the guest-suite bed, then throw back the covers and close her eyes …
And afterwards the launch would take her back to her village, considerably better off than before she had made the crossing.
No, Alessandro had no need for women.
He shrugged and tossed the letter down on his wide desk. What did it matter what the letter said or didn’t say? ‘I said you are not welcome here, Ms Hunter.’
She stiffened to stone right where she stood, her mouth pursing. ‘Dr Hunter, actually. And I will ensure my stay is as brief as possible. I have no desire to stay any longer than necessary where I am not welcome, I can assure you.’
He sniffed at the correction as he regarded her solemnly. She looked like a woman who had no desires, period. Sure, she was younger than the dried-up Professor, but with her scraped-back hair and that pursed mouth, and in khaki pants and T-shirt, it wasn’t as if she was anything like the women who had once graced his arm and his bed.
God knew, another twenty years or so of staring into her desiccated papers and she’d probably be as dried up and crusty as the Professor. Maybe he had nothing to worry about.
And she was right about one thing: he did want the find off his hands as quickly as possible. If the Professor proved unable to do it personally because of her ailing mother someone else would have to be found, all of it spelling delay after delay.
He ground his teeth together. The longer he waited, the more likely news of the discovery would filter out. The last thing he wanted was the media sniffing around again, turning the place into some kind of fish tank.
‘Then make your assessment as brief as possible and make us all happy by leaving.’ He turned back to gaze out of the window again, knowing she would do exactly that. People always ran from him. And then he frowned, remembering the way her big blue eyes had stared at him …
Yes, she’d been shocked. But where was the revulsion? Where was the pity? Instead she’d examined him as one might regard some kind of science project.
And the snarling beast inside him didn’t like that notion any better.
‘I’d like to see the book now.’
He turned back, surprised she hadn’t changed her mind and taken the opportunity to flee while his back was turned. She was surprisingly feisty, this one, holding her ground when many men twice her age and size would have gone running for the hills. Did she want the opportunity of examining and documenting this discovery so much that she had somehow summoned the will to fight for it? Or was she always this feisty?
Her eyes held his, bright and blue and cold as ice. Once women had looked at him with lust and desire. But that was long ago. There was no lust in Ms Hunter’s eyes, no desire—or at least not for him. But there was something else he read in them. The yearning to become famous? Probably. This discovery, if it proved authentic, would probably make a young conservator’s career.
‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ he said.
She blinked—a fan of black lashes against her peaches and cream complexion. And it occurred to him that it was almost a shame to condemn such translucent skin to the Professor’s wrinkled fate. ‘Pardon?’
A rap on the door and the reappearance of Bruno curtailed any response. ‘The boat wishes to leave,’ he grunted. ‘Are you finished with the girl?’
And with the question came Alessandro’s first smile of the day. In one way he was—though not the way his valet was clearly expecting. He’d agreed she could stay, and this meeting was now over. He’d planned to have Bruno take her to the book. He’d need to have little more to do with her. But was he finished with her?
Maybe not.
What would it take to make her run? What would it take to shake up those frosty blue eyes and strip off that sterile scientific cladding she wrapped herself so tightly in and see what really lay beneath? Besides, if he admitted the truth, he could do with a little entertainment. The woman might provide some mild amusement. She was only here for a few days. What possible harm could it do?
‘No, I’m not finished with our charming guest, Bruno.’ And this time he directed his words at her. ‘In fact, I do believe I’ve scarcely begun. Come, Dr Hunter, and I’ll show you to your precious documents.’
She left her luggage and briefcase where he directed, following him through a tangle of passageways, down wooden stairs that shifted and creaked under their footfall, and then down again—stone steps this time, that were worn into hollows by the feet of generations gone before—until she was sure they must be well below ground level, and the walls were lined with rock. And finally he stopped before a door that seemed carved from the stone itself.
He tugged on an iron ring set into the stone. ‘Are you scared of the dark, Dr Hunter?’ he asked over his shoulder, and she got the distinct impression he would love it if she were.
‘No. That’s never been a particular phobia of mine.’
‘How fortunate,’ he said, sounding as if he thought it was anything but. Then the door shifted open and she got a hint of what was to come—a low, dark passageway that sloped down through the rock. When he turned to her the crooked smile she’d seen in his office was back. ‘Every castle should have at least one secret tunnel, don’t you think?’
‘I would have to say it’s practically de rigueur, Count Volta.’
His smile slipped a little, she noted with satisfaction, almost as if she hadn’t answered the way he’d expected. Tough. The fact was she was here, and with any luck she was on her way to the missing pages of the Salus Totus. Although what they were doing all the way down here …
A slow drip came from somewhere around her, echoing in the space, and while she wished she’d at least grabbed a jacket before descending into the stone world beneath the castle, it was the book she was more worried about now.
‘You are taking me to the book?’
‘Of course.’
‘But what is it doing down here?’
‘It was found down here.’
‘And you left it here?’
His regarded her coldly, as if surprised she would question his decision. ‘The caves have guarded their treasure for centuries. Why would I move it and risk damaging such a potentially precious thing?’
Plenty of reasons, she thought. Like the drip that echoed around the chamber, speaking of moisture that could ruin ancient texts with mould and damp. Something so ancient, even if it proved to be a forgery, should be kept where the temperature and humidity could be regulated and it would be safe from things that scuttled and foraged in the night. She didn’t expect the Count to necessarily know that, but she would have expected him to have had the sense to move the find somewhere safe.
Inside the chamber there was just enough light to see with the door open. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust, but then he pulled the door closed behind them with a crunch and the light was swallowed up in inky blackness and there was nothing for her eyes to adjust to.
Afraid of the dark? No, she wasn’t, but neither did she like being holed up in it. Not with him. She could hear his breathing, she could damn well smell that evocative masculine scent of his, and she dared not move for fear she might brush against him in the dark. She heard the scratch of something rough, caught a hint of phosphorus and saw a spark that burst into flame atop a torch he held. The shifting yellow light threw crazy shadows against the walls, illuminating a cable running overhead with light bulbs hanging sporadically.
‘You couldn’t have just turned on the lights, I suppose?’
‘A storm last night knocked out the cable from the mainland, which is no doubt why your Professor could not contact me. Power is back on in the castle, but the caves will take longer. Don’t you like the torchlight, Ms Hunter. I find it so much more—atmospheric.’
He had just enough accent to curl around the word, transforming it in a way that turned it somehow darkly sensual—something that put a peculiar shiver down her spine. Peculiar, because instead of the chill she’d expected it warmed her in places she didn’t like to think about. Not around him. Shadows danced on the walls of the tunnel, light flickered against the unscarred side of his face, highlighting cheekbone and forehead and that sharply defined hairline, throwing his eyes into a band of black from which only a glint of amusement escaped.
And she could tell he was laughing at her.
Damn him.
‘It’s fine, I guess, if you’re interested in atmosphere. Right now I’m more interested in getting a look at those pages.’
He gave a mock bow in the shadowed darkness. ‘As you command,’ he said, and led the way down the tunnel. Deeper and deeper through the winding channel through the rock they walked, footsteps echoing on the dusty floor, the yellow flame of the torch flickering in the cool air, lighting the way, but never far enough to see more than a few feet at a time. They passed other tunnels that dived away, left and right, and she wondered how you would ever find your way out if the light went out and you were alone down here. She paused to look over her shoulder at one such intersection, trying to get a glimpse of the path behind, but the darkness had swallowed up the view, along with her sense of direction, and she realised that she’d never find her way out alone.
Great. So she had no choice but to trust a man who didn’t want her here and seemed to delight in making her uncomfortable—a man who was leading her through a maze of tunnels a Minotaur would be happy to call home with nothing but a lighted torch to find their way.
Bad call. Did she really want to think about Minotaurs and labyrinths now, when she was down here with a man whose broad shoulders filled the width of the tunnel? Especially when she thought about what had happened to the seven youths and seven maidens from Athens who’d been thrown into the labyrinth to their doom as a tribute to the Minoan king.
Maybe she should have brought a ball of string …
Something clapped down hard on her shoulder—his hand—and she panicked, every instinct telling her to flee. It was only its weight that kept her anchored to the ground.
‘You don’t want to get lost in here,’ whispered a deep voice in her ear, his breath fanning her hair, warm in the cool tunnel air. ‘We might never find you again.’
She turned slowly, hoping to calm her face and her rapid breathing before he could see just how much he’d frightened her, but she was fighting a losing battle on slowing her heart-rate, given what his proximity was doing to her nervous system and his scent was doing to her defences. ‘You startled me,’ she admitted, licking her lips as she looked up at him in the torchlight, struck again by the difference between one side of his face and the other—one side all strong, masculine lines and sharply defined places, the other so monstrously scarred.
His left eye had thankfully escaped the worst, she was close enough to see, and his strong nose and wide mouth were blessedly untouched. It was as if the skin of his cheek and neck had been torn apart and rejoined in a thick, jagged line that snaked up his throat and cheek and tapered to the corner of one eye.
Both those dark eyes narrowed as they looked down at her now. ‘Come,’ he said gruffly, dropping his hand from her shoulder and turning away.
Her shoulder felt inexplicably bereft—cold—the warmth from his long fingers replaced with a bone-deep chill, and she hugged her shoulders as she trailed behind him through the maze of tunnels, trying not to think of the weight of rock above their heads. The tunnels had clearly been here for a long time—surely the ceiling could hold just a little longer? Especially when they must be getting close to their goal.
A surge of adrenaline washed through her. Could the pages truly be from the lost copy of the Salus Totus? How complete would they be? Could she really be close to solving the mystery of generations? The mystery of the contents of those lost pages?
‘Watch your step,’ he said, then asked her to wait as he descended a short steep flight of stairs cut into the rock. At the bottom he turned, holding the torch above him so she could see her way down the narrow steps, but it was the hand he offered to her that looked the more threatening. A large hand, she noted. Tapered fingers. Would it be churlish to refuse? But there was nothing to be afraid of—she’d survived the last time he’d touched her, hadn’t she?
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Trish Morey
About the Author
TRISH MOREY is an Australian who’s also spent time living and working in New Zealand and England. Now she’s settled with her husband and four young daughters in a special part of South Australia, surrounded by orchards and bush land, and visited by the occasional koala and kangaroo. With a lifelong love of reading, she penned her first book at the age of eleven, after which life, career, and a growing family kept her busy until once again she could indulge her desire to create characters and stories – this time in romance. Having her work published is a dream come true. Visit Trish at her website, www.trishmorey.com
The Storm Within by Trish Morey has been selected as a finalist for a prestigious RITA
Award from the Romance Writers of America
The Storm Within
Trish Morey
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
There’s something about a craggy Mediterranean island topped with a looming castle that really appeals to me as a setting. The combination of remote with imposing might well be a mirror to the hero, who is as unapproachable and intimidating as the island setting itself.
Count Alessandro Volta is as unapproachable and intimidating as they come. Scarred both physically and mentally from a tragedy that left him the only survivor, Alessandro shuns society and the media and takes to self-imposed exile on his storm-ridden island home. Until a discovery is made in the secret tunnels beneath his castle, the lost pages from an ancient book of healing.
The woman who comes to evaluate the find is not the crusty woman he was expecting and suddenly Alessandro finds his escape from the world challenged by Dr Grace Hunter, a passionate scientist whose unwelcome presence threatens to break down the dark shields around him and thrust him once again into the light.
But can the fabled book of healing live up to its reputation and heal a heart so savagely broken? And will this unlikely couple ever earn their summer royal wedding?
I hope you enjoy finding out.
With very best wishes,
Trish
x
With grateful thanks to the real Archival Survival team, Angela Henrickson and Geoff McIntyre, and especially to Annie for all her help with a project that was so totally left field.
I’m not sure if this is what you envisioned Annie, when I first put the premise of this story to you, but thank you so much for your advice and assistance and for your sheer enthusiasm!
Any mistakes or omissions are purely author error.
Thank you Annie!
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was coming. From his office overlooking the sea, Count Alessandro Alonso Leopold Volta watched the launch approach the island that was home to Castello di Volta and the seat of the Volta family for more than five hundred years.
The boat hadn’t even docked and already the bitter taste of bile hovered menacingly at the back of his throat.
He growled. He hated visitors, hated the way they brought the smell of the outside world with them, as if clinging to their very clothes. He hated their wide-eyed stares and their looks of horror when they first saw his scars, horror that bleached their faces white and sent their eyes skidding away to the floor or to the nearest work of art. Anywhere, it seemed, that wasn’t his face.
But most of all he hated their pity, for the horror always gave way to pity.
He preferred the horror.
His hands curled into fists at his side. He didn’t want anyone’s pity.
He didn’t want anyone. Period.
The launch slowed, rocking sideways on the bumpy water as it neared the dock and its wash caught up with it. He ground his teeth together and turned away, knowing that this time he had no choice. The package found tucked away in the caves deep beneath the castle had seen to that.
Why here? he asked himself again. Why, of all the places in the world, of all the places that would welcome the attention such a discovery would bring, why had what could be the lost pages from the fabled Salus Totus, the legendary Book of Wholeness, had to turn up here? When had fate taken to wearing a clown’s mask?
He grunted his displeasure and dropped into the chair behind his desk. One week Professor Rousseau had promised him the job would take. No longer than one week to examine and document the pages, to determine whether they were genuine, and if so to stabilise their condition until they could be taken away and prepared for display. One short yet no doubt interminable week, with a stranger clattering around the castle, asking questions and expecting answers, and probably expecting him to be civil in the process.
He looked down at the file he’d been reviewing before the onshore wind had carried with it the thumping beat of an approaching engine, but his skin pulled achingly tight over his jaw and the words before him danced and spun and could have been printed in a different language for all the sense they made.
It could be worse, he rationalised, clamping down on the rising black cloud of his resentment, forcing himself to focus on the résumé in his hands. He flipped the page, turning to the photograph of the woman he was expecting. Reputedly one of the best conservators in the business, Professor Rousseau boasted more than forty years’ experience in the industry. And with short grey hair cut helmet-style around features that looked as if they’d been sculpted from parchment rather than skin, she looked the kind of person who enjoyed books more than people. If he had to put up with a visitor to his island, he could do much worse than this shrivelled-up scientist.
Maybe. And yet still this heavy sense of foreboding persisted in his gut; still the jagged line of his scar burned and stung, as if someone had dragged their nails down his face and chest and sliced open his wound.
One week, he thought, touching fingers to his burning cheek, half surprised when they didn’t come away wet and sticky with blood. One week with a stranger poking around his castle, asking questions, getting under his feet. And whoever she was, and however she looked, it would be one week too long.
CHAPTER TWO
DR GRACE HUNTER TOOK a gulp of sea air and did her best to ignore the butterflies that had seized control of her stomach and were right now threatening to carry it away. Excitement, she told herself. Anticipation. Maybe a little bit of motion sickness too, given the way the launch bounced and lurched over the chop.
But excitement. Definitely there was excitement.
The Salus Totus was the Holy Grail, the Troy of the conservatorial world, and the plum job of examining the pages discovered had fallen right into her lap. If the pages were authentic, and indeed the fabled long-lost pages, if she could prove they were no hoax, her studies of it and the papers she produced on it could make her career.
She should feel excited.
And yet there was something else beneath the thrill of the chase. Something else lurking below the anticipation of holding a page written hundreds of years ago, of feeling that connection between writer and reader that transcended the centuries and rendered time meaningless. And that something else twisted in her gut until the butterflies turned into a serpent that coiled and squirmed in her belly.
Difficult, Professor Rousseau had described Count Alessandro Volta, during her unexpected and rapid-fire phone call from the hospital yesterday, and when Grace had asked what she meant there’d been a distinct hesitation on the line, before other muffled voices had intruded, and she’d added a rushed, ‘I have to go. You’ll be fine.’
Sure. She’d be fine. She gulped in air as the boat ploughed resolutely through the chop and headed for the relative safety of the shore. Relative, because nothing about the rocky island and the imposing castle set upon it looked remotely welcoming. Not the rocky shore or the towering cliffs or the clouds that seemed to hover ominously above the brooding castle in an otherwise clear sky.
She frowned up at them. Lucky she was a scientist, really, and not some paranoid panic merchant who saw portents of doom in every swirling cloud or flutter of apprehension. She was here to do a job after all.
The skipper cut the engines, letting the wash carry the boat into the dock, while the other crew member secured a line, taming the motion before starting to offload cargo onto the dock, her duffel bag amongst it. She gathered her things, her leather backpack and her briefcase containing the Professor’s letter of introduction, along with her specialist tools, glancing up at the castle that sprawled so arrogantly across the clifftop. From sea level the sheer scale of the place was daunting. Up close it must be intimidating, with its high walls punctuated at intervals by perimeter towers topped with crenellated battlements, a central tower rising high above it all, almost sending out a challenge—enter if you dare.
Welcoming? Definitely not. A movement startled her and she jumped as a figure unexpectedly stepped from the shadows thrown by the rocky escarpment into the bright sunlight. Through grizzled eyes in a leathery face the man looked her over as one might consider an unwelcome stray dog found whimpering on the doorstep, before he grabbed her duffel in one dinner-plate sized hand and flung it in the back of a rusty Jeep. He made a lunge for the briefcase in her hand and she pulled her arm away. There was no way she was letting Mr Sensitive loose on her tools.
‘Thank you, but I’m good with this one.’
He grunted. ‘You are not who we were expecting,’ he said in gravelly English, his accent as thick as his ham-hock biceps, before he muttered a few words in Italian to the skipper and hauled himself into the driver’s seat.
‘No. Professor Rousseau sends her apologies. Her mother—’
‘The Count will not be pleased.’
She had no comeback to that, other than to swing herself onto the withered and cracked upholstery of the passenger seat before he could drive away without her.
The Jeep lurched into life and she clutched her briefcase tighter in her lap as the vehicle tore up the narrow road. If you could call it a road, Grace thought, as it narrowed to little more than a one-lane track, zig-zagging up the cliff-face. She made the mistake of looking out of the car as he took another impossibly tight bend, and saw stones spraying over the edge of the cliff, spilling towards the boat now shrinking below. She squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Do you think maybe you could drive a little slower?’
He shook his head gravely, muttered something under his breath.
‘Only I would like to get to look at the discovery before I die.’
‘The Count,’ he almost grunted, ignoring her attempt at humour, ‘he is expecting the Professor.’
‘Yes, you said. I tried to explain—’
‘He will not be pleased.’
Conversation was clearly not his forte. She tried to concentrate on the spectacular view across the expanse of Mediterranean to where the coastline of Italy was just visible in the distance, while trying not to think about the height of the cliff they were scaling that made such a magnificent view possible. But it was the subject of her driver’s concern who stole her concentration and reminded her that the real reason for this coiling uneasiness in her gut was not down to anticipation at working on an ancient text, or motion sickness, or even the brooding castle, but dread.
Therese Rousseau had warned her. She’d said he was difficult and the driver’s words did nothing to suggest the Professor had been unfair in her description. In fact, if anything, maybe she’d been a trifle flattering.
What exactly happened when the Count was not pleased? What was it that she had to look forward to?
At least the Jeep had managed to scale the cliff. The track was widening and now bordered in rocks she could tell had once been painted white, though now they were chipped and faded, their paint worn from exposure to the salt-laden air.
She shivered—the air was noticeably cooler at this height—and looked up in time to see the sun disappear behind the darkening clouds. And despite knowing in her brain that it meant nothing, that it was purely a meteorological phenomenon she was witnessing and not some kind of omen, even though she fought it with all she knew about the world, still she felt an unwanted and illogical sliver of fear slip down her spine.
The massive iron gates clanging shut behind them as they entered the castle grounds did nothing to assuage her unease. Now tension had her tightly wound, but she kept her breathing light as her driver crunched the gears while circling a tiered fountain featuring water nymphs and dolphins—a fountain that was as dry and neglected as the border of leggy, unkempt rosemary bushes that surrounded it.
Everywhere, it seemed, was shrouded in neglect, as if nothing had been touched for years.
And she wondered how anything as fragile as a book had survived in this place for the centuries it was reputed to have.
A miracle?
Or a curse?
This time the tremor seemed to chill her very bones. Great, she thought, doing her utmost to shake off the irrational sense of impending danger. So much for priding herself on being a logical scientist.
The Jeep jerked to a halt and the driver jumped out. ‘Come,’ he instructed, not bothering with her duffel this time, but leaving it to her to retrieve as he pushed open giant timber doors that stretched at least twelve feet high and yet still looked minuscule when compared to the mountainous castle walls that dwarfed them.
And then they were inside and the temperature dropped again. Her footsteps over the massive flagstones echoed in the vast, empty entry hall. Or maybe that was just her heartbeat racing fast and loud …
For a thickset man, her guide moved fast, his short legs carrying him surprisingly quickly up a flight of stairs that looked as if they’d come straight from Sleeping Beauty’s castle. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked from the bottom of the stairs, but he gave no answer, and she didn’t need it to know there was no hope of him taking her directly to the documents she’d come to examine.
The Count, she knew. The same Count who she’d been warned repeatedly would not be pleased. She sighed and started up the stairs behind him, lugging both her briefcase and her duffel. Might as well get the unpleasantries over and done with in that case. Maybe then she could get to work.
She followed him along a long passageway. The walls were dressed with rich burgundy drapes, between which hung portraits of, she assumed, counts long gone. Superiority shone from their steely eyes, along with a sense of entitlement for the world and all its riches. The Counts of Volta, she surmised, were not of modest, unassuming stock. But then why should they be modest, with potent looks that were as masculinely beautiful as they were darkly dangerous?
Slight differences distinguished one from another—a slight tilt of nose, an angle of jaw—and yet all of them in that long, seemingly endless row bore the same dark eyes and brows, topped by the same distinct hairline that intruded onto their temples in sharp points, almost like a shadow cast from … She stopped herself, refusing the link she’d made in her mind. They so did not resemble horns! She was being ridiculous even thinking it.
Besides, she’d researched the latest Count Volta late last night, after the Professor had called with her news, when both the excitement of the task ahead and the cryptic ‘You’ll be fine’ had banished any thoughts of sleep. And she’d remembered then why his name had seemed vaguely familiar, remembered hearing around her eighteenth birthday news reports of the party boat explosion off the Costa Smerelda. Last night she’d read again of the shocking death toll and of the miracle survivor who’d lost his fiancée and his friends that night and who, scarred and bereft, had walked away and turned his back on both a promising career as a concert pianist and society.
The media had pursued him for a while, she’d read, seeking exclusives and exposés, before apparently tiring of the fruitless chase and moving on to juicier, more obliging celebrity prey. And so, entrenched in his self-imposed exile on his island home, he’d slipped into obscurity.
Who could blame him for cutting himself off from the world after an accident like that? Maybe it was no surprise he was ‘difficult’. But it said something for the man that he hadn’t kept the discovery of the documents secret. He would have known the potential for the discovery to once again focus the world’s attention squarely on him. No wonder he’d insisted on only one specialist, and for the job to be completed inside a week.
Which was fine with her. She didn’t want to hang around a crotchety old hermit and his crumbling castle a moment longer than necessary. She wouldn’t get in his way and hopefully he’d stay out of hers.
Her guide came to an abrupt halt, rapping briefly on a pair of doors before poking his head inside one of them, leaving her no choice but to cool her heels behind him. ‘She’s here but it’s not the Professor,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told the boat not to leave until you’re ready.’ And then he swept back past her without a glance, as if fleeing in case he was blamed for collecting the wrong baggage.
So that was why he hadn’t brought her bag in and she’d had to lug it herself—because he thought she wasn’t staying. If she’d needed anything to dispel any remaining shred of apprehension, her introduction as some kind of afterthought fitted the bill perfectly. She pushed open the door he’d left ajar.
‘My name is Grace Hunter and I have a letter of introduction from Professor …’ Her words shrivelled up in a throat suddenly drier than the fountain outside, and it might very well have been clogged with stranded sea nymphs and beached dolphins.
Where was the crotchety old hermit she’d been expecting? The modern-day Robinson Crusoe complete with beard and tattered clothes? Someone who matched the air of neglect that shrouded the rest of this barren island and its crumbling castle? But there was nothing tattered about the man who stood looking out of the window across the room from her now, nothing neglected.
‘… Rousseau.’
The name fell heavily into the empty space between them. He stood still as a statue, his hands clasped behind his stiff back, clad in a suit tailored so superbly to his tall, lean body it almost looked part of him.
But it was his profile that captured her attention, and the clear similarities to his forebears lining the portrait gallery. His strong nose and resolute jaw, and the unmistakable mark of the Counts of Volta, the clearly defined dark hairline that intruded in sharp points at his temples. And he was every bit as powerfully beautiful as those who had gone before. Which made no sense at all …
She swallowed. ‘Count Volta?’
CHAPTER THREE
ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, confronted her full-on.
A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.
She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.
His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’
Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.
He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’
‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’
‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’
His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?
No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’
He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.
‘Did you hear me? I said Bruno will arrange for your return.’
It was all she could do not to stamp her foot. ‘And I said I’m not leaving!
One arm swept in a wide arc. ‘I have no dealings with you. My arrangement was with Professor Rousseau.’
‘No. According to the documents, your arrangement was with her business, Archival Survival. When the Professor was unable to come, she contracted me.’
He grunted, no way about to concede the point. ‘So what is her excuse for being unable to fulfil her contractual obligations herself?’
‘If you’d read this letter you’d know. Her mother is in hospital after suffering a major stroke and she’s rushed to be with her while she clings to life. Admittedly, as excuses go, that’s pretty thin. Clearly it’s more about inconveniencing you.’
If his eyes were lasers, she figured, with the heated glare he gave her she’d be wearing holes right now, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark. She’d grown up in a family that prided itself on being straight-talking. Over the years she’d learned to curb that trait while in civilised company. The Count, she’d already decided, for all his flash clothes and a portrait gallery full of titled ancestors, didn’t qualify.
‘I expected an expert. I do not intend spending a week babysitting someone’s apprentice.’
She sucked in air, hating the fact it was tinged with a hint of sandalwood and spice, with undertones of something else altogether more musky, hating the possibility that it might come from him, hating the possibility that there might be something about him she approved of when the rest of him was so damned objectionable.
But that was still okay, she figured, because finding something she might possibly like only made her more resentful towards him. ‘Seeing you refuse to read this letter, where all the facts are set out in black and white, perhaps I should spell it out for you? I have a Masters in Fine Arts from Melbourne University and a PhD in Antiquities from Oxford, where my thesis was on the preservation and conservation of ancient texts and the challenge of discerning fraud where it was perpetrated centuries ago. So if there’s an apprentice on this island right now, I don’t think it’s me. Does that make you feel more comfortable?’
He arched one critical eyebrow high. ‘You look barely out of high school.’
‘I’m twenty-eight years old. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’d like to check my passport?’
Dust motes danced on the slanted sunlit air between them, oblivious of the tension—dust motes that disappeared with those slanting rays as the sun was swallowed up by a cloud and the room darkened. She resisted the urge to shiver, resisted that damned illogical brain cell that suggested there was some connection between the Count’s dark looks and the weather. And instead she decided that his momentary silence meant assent.
‘And so right now I’d like to get to work. After all, I believe you want this text taken off your hands as soon as possible, and we’ve already wasted enough time, don’t you agree? Perhaps you could arrange someone to show me to the documents so I might get started?’
He scowled as he took the letter from her hands then, scanning its contents, finding everything was as she said and finding nothing to arm him with the ammunition to demand she leave.
He wanted her gone.
He didn’t want women around the place. Not young women, and definitely not halfway to pretty. He had his fix of women once a month, when the launch brought across a local village woman. He never asked her name; she never offered it. Each time she would just wait for him naked in the guest-suite bed, then throw back the covers and close her eyes …
And afterwards the launch would take her back to her village, considerably better off than before she had made the crossing.
No, Alessandro had no need for women.
He shrugged and tossed the letter down on his wide desk. What did it matter what the letter said or didn’t say? ‘I said you are not welcome here, Ms Hunter.’
She stiffened to stone right where she stood, her mouth pursing. ‘Dr Hunter, actually. And I will ensure my stay is as brief as possible. I have no desire to stay any longer than necessary where I am not welcome, I can assure you.’
He sniffed at the correction as he regarded her solemnly. She looked like a woman who had no desires, period. Sure, she was younger than the dried-up Professor, but with her scraped-back hair and that pursed mouth, and in khaki pants and T-shirt, it wasn’t as if she was anything like the women who had once graced his arm and his bed.
God knew, another twenty years or so of staring into her desiccated papers and she’d probably be as dried up and crusty as the Professor. Maybe he had nothing to worry about.
And she was right about one thing: he did want the find off his hands as quickly as possible. If the Professor proved unable to do it personally because of her ailing mother someone else would have to be found, all of it spelling delay after delay.
He ground his teeth together. The longer he waited, the more likely news of the discovery would filter out. The last thing he wanted was the media sniffing around again, turning the place into some kind of fish tank.
‘Then make your assessment as brief as possible and make us all happy by leaving.’ He turned back to gaze out of the window again, knowing she would do exactly that. People always ran from him. And then he frowned, remembering the way her big blue eyes had stared at him …
Yes, she’d been shocked. But where was the revulsion? Where was the pity? Instead she’d examined him as one might regard some kind of science project.
And the snarling beast inside him didn’t like that notion any better.
‘I’d like to see the book now.’
He turned back, surprised she hadn’t changed her mind and taken the opportunity to flee while his back was turned. She was surprisingly feisty, this one, holding her ground when many men twice her age and size would have gone running for the hills. Did she want the opportunity of examining and documenting this discovery so much that she had somehow summoned the will to fight for it? Or was she always this feisty?
Her eyes held his, bright and blue and cold as ice. Once women had looked at him with lust and desire. But that was long ago. There was no lust in Ms Hunter’s eyes, no desire—or at least not for him. But there was something else he read in them. The yearning to become famous? Probably. This discovery, if it proved authentic, would probably make a young conservator’s career.
‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ he said.
She blinked—a fan of black lashes against her peaches and cream complexion. And it occurred to him that it was almost a shame to condemn such translucent skin to the Professor’s wrinkled fate. ‘Pardon?’
A rap on the door and the reappearance of Bruno curtailed any response. ‘The boat wishes to leave,’ he grunted. ‘Are you finished with the girl?’
And with the question came Alessandro’s first smile of the day. In one way he was—though not the way his valet was clearly expecting. He’d agreed she could stay, and this meeting was now over. He’d planned to have Bruno take her to the book. He’d need to have little more to do with her. But was he finished with her?
Maybe not.
What would it take to make her run? What would it take to shake up those frosty blue eyes and strip off that sterile scientific cladding she wrapped herself so tightly in and see what really lay beneath? Besides, if he admitted the truth, he could do with a little entertainment. The woman might provide some mild amusement. She was only here for a few days. What possible harm could it do?
‘No, I’m not finished with our charming guest, Bruno.’ And this time he directed his words at her. ‘In fact, I do believe I’ve scarcely begun. Come, Dr Hunter, and I’ll show you to your precious documents.’
She left her luggage and briefcase where he directed, following him through a tangle of passageways, down wooden stairs that shifted and creaked under their footfall, and then down again—stone steps this time, that were worn into hollows by the feet of generations gone before—until she was sure they must be well below ground level, and the walls were lined with rock. And finally he stopped before a door that seemed carved from the stone itself.
He tugged on an iron ring set into the stone. ‘Are you scared of the dark, Dr Hunter?’ he asked over his shoulder, and she got the distinct impression he would love it if she were.
‘No. That’s never been a particular phobia of mine.’
‘How fortunate,’ he said, sounding as if he thought it was anything but. Then the door shifted open and she got a hint of what was to come—a low, dark passageway that sloped down through the rock. When he turned to her the crooked smile she’d seen in his office was back. ‘Every castle should have at least one secret tunnel, don’t you think?’
‘I would have to say it’s practically de rigueur, Count Volta.’
His smile slipped a little, she noted with satisfaction, almost as if she hadn’t answered the way he’d expected. Tough. The fact was she was here, and with any luck she was on her way to the missing pages of the Salus Totus. Although what they were doing all the way down here …
A slow drip came from somewhere around her, echoing in the space, and while she wished she’d at least grabbed a jacket before descending into the stone world beneath the castle, it was the book she was more worried about now.
‘You are taking me to the book?’
‘Of course.’
‘But what is it doing down here?’
‘It was found down here.’
‘And you left it here?’
His regarded her coldly, as if surprised she would question his decision. ‘The caves have guarded their treasure for centuries. Why would I move it and risk damaging such a potentially precious thing?’
Plenty of reasons, she thought. Like the drip that echoed around the chamber, speaking of moisture that could ruin ancient texts with mould and damp. Something so ancient, even if it proved to be a forgery, should be kept where the temperature and humidity could be regulated and it would be safe from things that scuttled and foraged in the night. She didn’t expect the Count to necessarily know that, but she would have expected him to have had the sense to move the find somewhere safe.
Inside the chamber there was just enough light to see with the door open. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust, but then he pulled the door closed behind them with a crunch and the light was swallowed up in inky blackness and there was nothing for her eyes to adjust to.
Afraid of the dark? No, she wasn’t, but neither did she like being holed up in it. Not with him. She could hear his breathing, she could damn well smell that evocative masculine scent of his, and she dared not move for fear she might brush against him in the dark. She heard the scratch of something rough, caught a hint of phosphorus and saw a spark that burst into flame atop a torch he held. The shifting yellow light threw crazy shadows against the walls, illuminating a cable running overhead with light bulbs hanging sporadically.
‘You couldn’t have just turned on the lights, I suppose?’
‘A storm last night knocked out the cable from the mainland, which is no doubt why your Professor could not contact me. Power is back on in the castle, but the caves will take longer. Don’t you like the torchlight, Ms Hunter. I find it so much more—atmospheric.’
He had just enough accent to curl around the word, transforming it in a way that turned it somehow darkly sensual—something that put a peculiar shiver down her spine. Peculiar, because instead of the chill she’d expected it warmed her in places she didn’t like to think about. Not around him. Shadows danced on the walls of the tunnel, light flickered against the unscarred side of his face, highlighting cheekbone and forehead and that sharply defined hairline, throwing his eyes into a band of black from which only a glint of amusement escaped.
And she could tell he was laughing at her.
Damn him.
‘It’s fine, I guess, if you’re interested in atmosphere. Right now I’m more interested in getting a look at those pages.’
He gave a mock bow in the shadowed darkness. ‘As you command,’ he said, and led the way down the tunnel. Deeper and deeper through the winding channel through the rock they walked, footsteps echoing on the dusty floor, the yellow flame of the torch flickering in the cool air, lighting the way, but never far enough to see more than a few feet at a time. They passed other tunnels that dived away, left and right, and she wondered how you would ever find your way out if the light went out and you were alone down here. She paused to look over her shoulder at one such intersection, trying to get a glimpse of the path behind, but the darkness had swallowed up the view, along with her sense of direction, and she realised that she’d never find her way out alone.
Great. So she had no choice but to trust a man who didn’t want her here and seemed to delight in making her uncomfortable—a man who was leading her through a maze of tunnels a Minotaur would be happy to call home with nothing but a lighted torch to find their way.
Bad call. Did she really want to think about Minotaurs and labyrinths now, when she was down here with a man whose broad shoulders filled the width of the tunnel? Especially when she thought about what had happened to the seven youths and seven maidens from Athens who’d been thrown into the labyrinth to their doom as a tribute to the Minoan king.
Maybe she should have brought a ball of string …
Something clapped down hard on her shoulder—his hand—and she panicked, every instinct telling her to flee. It was only its weight that kept her anchored to the ground.
‘You don’t want to get lost in here,’ whispered a deep voice in her ear, his breath fanning her hair, warm in the cool tunnel air. ‘We might never find you again.’
She turned slowly, hoping to calm her face and her rapid breathing before he could see just how much he’d frightened her, but she was fighting a losing battle on slowing her heart-rate, given what his proximity was doing to her nervous system and his scent was doing to her defences. ‘You startled me,’ she admitted, licking her lips as she looked up at him in the torchlight, struck again by the difference between one side of his face and the other—one side all strong, masculine lines and sharply defined places, the other so monstrously scarred.
His left eye had thankfully escaped the worst, she was close enough to see, and his strong nose and wide mouth were blessedly untouched. It was as if the skin of his cheek and neck had been torn apart and rejoined in a thick, jagged line that snaked up his throat and cheek and tapered to the corner of one eye.
Both those dark eyes narrowed as they looked down at her now. ‘Come,’ he said gruffly, dropping his hand from her shoulder and turning away.
Her shoulder felt inexplicably bereft—cold—the warmth from his long fingers replaced with a bone-deep chill, and she hugged her shoulders as she trailed behind him through the maze of tunnels, trying not to think of the weight of rock above their heads. The tunnels had clearly been here for a long time—surely the ceiling could hold just a little longer? Especially when they must be getting close to their goal.
A surge of adrenaline washed through her. Could the pages truly be from the lost copy of the Salus Totus? How complete would they be? Could she really be close to solving the mystery of generations? The mystery of the contents of those lost pages?
‘Watch your step,’ he said, then asked her to wait as he descended a short steep flight of stairs cut into the rock. At the bottom he turned, holding the torch above him so she could see her way down the narrow steps, but it was the hand he offered to her that looked the more threatening. A large hand, she noted. Tapered fingers. Would it be churlish to refuse? But there was nothing to be afraid of—she’d survived the last time he’d touched her, hadn’t she?
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Trish Morey
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Storm Within, электронная книга автора Trish Morey на английском языке, в жанре современная зарубежная литература