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‘You’ll see.’ Vitale parked at the front of the palazzo and, filled with curiosity, Zara scrambled out. Was he planning to introduce her to his uncle? Smoothing her dress down while wishing he had given her some warning of his intentions, she mounted the shallow flight of steps to the front door, which was already opening. She came to a sudden halt when she saw the domestic staff assembled in the marble hall, clearly waiting to greet them.
Joining her, Vitale curved a hand to her elbow and introductions were made. There was no sign of any member of the family and she was confused when a middle-aged manservant called Edmondo showed them into a spacious reception room where once again she expected to meet Vitale’s relatives, only nobody awaited them there either.
‘What on earth are we doing here?’ she demanded of Vitale in a perplexed whisper. ‘Is this where we’re going to stay?’
‘I own the palazzo,’ Vitale told her flatly, breaking the news with the minimum possible fanfare.
CHAPTER NINE
VITALE’S blunt confession hit Zara like a brick thrown at a glass window, shattering her composure. She recalled the tour of the gardens that he had said he had arranged. She remembered the gardener waving at him that same day and she turned pale before a flush of mortified pink mantled her cheekbones.
‘Oh, my goodness, what an idiot I am!’ she gasped, her temper rising hot and fast because she felt exceedingly foolish. ‘But you told me this place belonged to your uncle—’
‘No, I didn’t. I only told you that I was staying here with my uncle and his family when your aunt worked on the garden—’
‘Semantics—you lied!’ Zara shot the furious accusation back at him. ‘You’re so tricky I’ll never be able to trust a word you say!’
Vitale stood very still, reining back the aggression that her condemnation threatened to unleash. ‘I bought the palazzo two years ago when my uncle decided to sell up but, while I have instigated repairs and maintained the property, I have not attempted to make personal use of the house until now,’ he admitted without any expression at all.
He watched her, the daylight flooding through the tall windows burnishing her eye-catching hair and illuminating the fine lacework on her dress while enhancing the slender, striking elegance of her figure. He wondered when her pregnancy would start showing and experienced a glimmer of excitement at the prospect that shook him. But the awareness that her body would soon swell with visible proof of his baby turned him on hard and fast, no matter how fiercely he fought to repress the primitive reaction. Once again in her presence he was at the mercy of feelings and thoughts that were foreign to him and he hated it, craving the cool distance and self-discipline that were more familiar to him.
Zara settled furious lavender eyes on her bridegroom. ‘Why not? If you bought the palazzo why haven’t you used it?’
‘I didn’t feel comfortable here. When I was a teenager I stayed in this house during my term breaks and I have no good memories of those visits,’ he admitted with a hard twist of his eloquent mouth.
‘So what are we doing here?’ Zara demanded baldly, still all at sea.
‘You love the garden—I assumed that you might also like the house. It is a fine one.’
Zara was more confused than ever. An ancestral home was right off the grid of her scale of experience. To talk of it in terms of liking or disliking seemed positively cheeky. Yes, she had friends who inhabited such properties and she had occasionally stayed in them for the weekend but it had never occurred to her that she might one day actually live in one. ‘Why did you buy a pla
ce this size if you don’t even like it?’
‘The palazzo has belonged to the Barigo family for centuries. I felt it was my duty to buy it and conserve it for the next generation.’
‘But your name isn’t Barigo …’ Zara was still hopelessly at a loss.
‘I have chosen not to claim the name but I am a Barigo.’
The penny of comprehension dropped noisily in Zara’s head and she was embarrassed that it had taken her so long to make that leap in understanding. That was why he and his sister had had different surnames. They must have had different fathers. Evidently he was an illegitimate Barigo, born outside marriage and never properly acknowledged by the rest of the family. Yet he seemed so very much at ease against the grandeur of the great house, she mused. He had the education, the sophistication, the inborn classy assurance to look at home against such a splendid backdrop. He also had a level of worldly success and wealth that the most recent of the palazzo’s owners had evidently lacked. Yet in spite of all that, deep down inside himself, Vitale had still not felt good enough to stay in the palazzo he owned and relax there and that disturbing truth twisted inside Zara’s heart like a knifepoint turning.
‘If you buy a house, you should use it,’ Zara told him squarely. ‘You seem to have a lot of staff employed here and you maintain it. My aunt used to say that a house that isn’t lived in loses its heart.’
‘I’m not sure that the Palazzo Barigo ever had a heart,’ Vitale contended wryly. ‘My sister grew up here. It was different for her. This was her home until her father died and my uncle inherited.’
‘Why didn’t your sister inherit?’
‘The palazzo only goes to the men in the family. Loredana got the money instead,’ he explained.
‘So, why did you have to buy it to get it?’ Zara pressed curiously. ‘Because you’re illegitimate?’
‘I’m not illegitimate … it’s too complicated to get into now,’ Vitale countered with a dismissive shrug of a broad shoulder.
He didn’t want to talk about his background and the shutters came back down. He was shutting her out because he didn’t want to tell her any more. But these surroundings, his evidently troubled early life and what had happened to him since then were the key to Vitale’s complex personality. Just then she recalled the strange scarring on his back and wondered once again what had caused it. At the same time, Zara was mystified by the depth of her longing to understand what drove Vitale Roccanti. Once she had thought he was a cold, callous guy focused purely on revenge, but the tiny seed of life inside her womb had steamrollered over that conviction and triumphed. As had her own personal safety, she conceded, recalling how he had brought her father to her door.
‘Let’s take a look at the house,’ she responded lightly, eager to distract him from the bad memories that he had mentioned.
‘You’re hardly dressed for a grand tour—’
