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As she walked, she sipped at her champagne again. She felt the need of it. Her colour was heightened, she knew—knew it from the hectic beating of her heart.
He desires me—the Conte di Mantegna has looked at me and found me pleasing to him...
Into her head sprang an image, immediate and vivid, conjured out of her ready imagination. That woman in the portrait—the brunette—working, perhaps, in her father’s shop, or sweeping floors, or even toiling out in the fields in sixteenth-century Italy... Il Conte passing by, seeing her, liking her beauty, taking a fancy to her. Finding her pleasing to him. Lifting her with one beckoning of his lordly, aristocratic hand out of her hard, poverty-stricken life to dress her in a silk gown and place roses in her hands and jewels around her throat, and take her to his bed...
She felt the pull of it—the allure. Had to force herself to remember all that would have gone with it. The price that woman would have paid.
To know that her place in his life was only ever to be his inamorata—never to aspire to be his wife.
And as for the Count—oh, he would have had everything he wanted. His pale, subservient wife—his compliant, obliging mistress.
Having it all.
She dragged her mind away, making herself inspect the other paintings, consult her catalogue, interview the exhibition’s curator, and then get a few words from the gallery’s director, who greeted her warmly, both in her professional capacity and as the stepdaughter of the late chairman of a global hotel chain—a generous patron of the arts himself.
It had been her stepfather who’d first noticed her interest in art as a teenager, and it was thanks to him that she’d studied history of art at prestigious universities both in England and Italy. He’d encouraged her in her journalistic career. It was a career she found immensely satisfying, and she knew herself to be extremely fortunate in it.
Now, with all her notes taken, she was ready to leave. She’d spend the evening going through them, drawing up the article she would write.
As she made her farewells she found herself glancing around. She knew who it was she was trying to glimpse. And knew why she should not be. Cesare di Mondave was far too disturbing to her peace of mind to allow herself to have anything more to do with him.
He was not to be seen anyway, and she told herself she was glad. Relieved. Because to further her acquaintance with Cesare di Mondave would not be good sense at all.
Involuntarily her eyes went to the portrait of his ancestor—Count Alessandro, regarding the world in all his High Renaissance splendour, his dark gaze compelling, arrogant. In her mind’s eye she saw his wife and his mistress. Two women, rivals for ever, their destinies yoked to the man who had commissioned their portraits.
Had they both loved him? Or neither?
The question hovered in her head, its answer long consumed by the centuries that had passed. All she could know, with a kind of ironic certainty, was that it would not be wise for any woman to have anything to do with the man in whose veins ran the blood of Luciezo’s Count Alessandro.
It didn’t matter that his descendant could have an impact on her that she had never encountered before. That his dark lidded eyes could raise her pulse in an instant...that her eyes had wanted only to cling helplessly, hopelessly, to his sculpted, powerful features, that her hand had yearned to reach towards him, graze the tanned skin of his jaw, brush the sensual swell of his mouth... It didn’t matter at all.
Because letting herself get embroiled with the arrogant, oh-so-aristocratic Count of Mantegna would be folly indeed!
She was not, and never would be, like the lush beauty in the Caradino portrait, haplessly dependent upon the Count’s continuing desire for her, fearing its demise. Her lips thinned slightly. Nor could she ever be like the woman in the other portrait—oh, she might move in Roman high society, but the Viscaris were hoteliers: rich, but with no trace of aristocratic blood. Carla knew without flinching that when il Conte chose a wife, it would be a woman from his own background, with an ancestry to match his.
I would be nothing more than an...an interlude for him.
She walked out onto the pavement and into the warm evening air of Rome in late summer. A low, lean, open-topped car was hovering at the kerb, blatantly ignoring the road signs forbidding such parking. Its powerful engine was throbbing with a throaty husk, its scarlet paintwork was gleaming, and the rearing stallion on the long bonnet caught the light, glinting gold like the crested signet ring on the hand curved around the wheel.
The man at the wheel turned his head. Let his dark, lidded gaze rest on Carla.
‘What kept you?’ asked Cesare di Mondave, Conte di Mantegna.
CHAPTER TWO
CESARE’S HAND RESTED on the leather curve of the steering wheel. Impatience was humming in him. He appreciated that she had a job to do—this woman his eyes had lit upon, drawn without conscious intent to her dramatic beauty, her voluptuous figure, the extraordinarily dark blue eyes that had a hint of violet in them—but for all that he did not care to be kept waiting.
He’d known who she was before he’d made the decision to approach her—he’d seen her about previously in society, even though the aristocratic circles he moved in overlapped only loosely with those of the Viscaris. The Viscaris were, to him, ‘new money’—it was a mere handful of generations since the global hotel group that bore the family name had been founded at the end of the nineteenth century. They were newcomers compared to the immense antiquity of his family—and Cesare felt the weight of that antiquity upon him each and every day.
It was a weight that both upheld him and imposed upon him responsibilities to his ancestry that others could not understand. A duty that reached far back into the Middle Ages, stretching across all his estates from the high Apennine lands leased as a national park, to forests and vineyards, agricultural land and olive groves, and across all his many properties. Every palazzo was a historic monument, including the magnificent baroque Palazzo Mantegna here in Rome, now on loan to the nation and housing a museum of antiquities. And all those estates and properties came with tenants and employees whose livelihood he guaranteed—just as his ancestors had.
Yet at the heart of it all was the ancient Castello Mantegna, the heart of his patrimony. Within its mighty walls, built to withstand medieval warfare, he had spent his childhood, roaming the forests and pasturelands that one day would be his.
Was that something anyone not born to such a heritage could truly understand? The weight of inheritance upon him?
Or did they merely see il Conte—a wealthy, titled man who moved in the uppermost echelons of society, with a cachet that many would only envy? And which women would eagerly seek to bask in...
His dark eyes glinted. There had been no such eagerness in Carla Charteris, though he’d made clear his interest in her. He was glad of it—but not deterred by it. For his long experience of woman had told him immediately that the first flare of her violet-hued eyes as he’d addressed her had showed that she was responsive to him. That was all he’d needed to know—their barbed exchange thereafter had merely confirmed it. All that was required now was for her to acknowledge it.
