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‘Even with me around?’ he drawled, watching her colour.
She looked down, breathing unsteadily. ‘If you’ve finished your coffee, tell me why you came, and then please go!’
‘My landlord just told me he needs my room for his cousin, who has been evicted from his own place, so I have to find somewhere to live pretty quickly. I’ve started looking around, but Venice is crowded with tourists at the moment, and I can’t afford a high rent—I wondered if Alex would rent me a room here just until I find somewhere else.’
She was taken aback, her nerves jumping. ‘Oh...well, as I said, he isn’t here at the moment, but I don’t think he could, anyway. I don’t think he would be allowed to sublet a room.’
‘And you don’t want me here?’ Patrick suggested, watching her flush deepen, her sea-blue eyes hurriedly look down, hide behind their pale lids, which had a bluish tinge, too, as if blurred by shadows or frosted by long nights of weeping.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ she stammered. ‘Uncle Alex is the legal tenant; it’s up to him.’ But he was right—the very idea sent shivers down her spine—and she had the feeling he could read her reaction with those narrowed, penetrating eyes.
‘You still believe me capable of rape, don’t you?’ he said with a bitterness that made her flinch.
At that moment the phone began to ring and she jumped about a foot in the air, then ran to answer it, very conscious of Patrick watching her.
‘Hello? Oh, Cy,’ she huskily said, very pink, turning her back so that Patrick could no longer see her face.
‘You sound as if you’re getting a cold,’ said Cy. ‘Maybe you’ve got the beginning of flu? I heard from Aunt Patsy that you were sick yesterday; flu often starts that way. If you have got flu, don’t force yourself to go on working; go to bed and stay there.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, holding her voice steady by a superhuman effort. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘You don’t sound fine. Is anything upsetting you? You aren’t cross with me because I’ve had to come back to the States?’
‘No, of course not; I understand,’ she said quickly, wishing she dared ask him to ring back, or could tell him there was someone there, with her, but she was afraid of the questions he might ask.
She did not want to tell him it was Patrick Ogilvie. Cy knew about what had happened to her two years ago. Before she began working at the palazzo he had had her background checked out, and had found out that she had almost been raped in Bordighera.
When he had asked her to marry him, months later, she had been stricken, had felt she had to tell him why she was refusing, and he had stopped her quietly. ‘I know, Antonia; I’ve known from the start,’ he had said. ‘I understand how you must feel. I know you haven’t dated anyone since then, and that you may not be able to face a normal married life for a long time, but that doesn’t matter to me. I think we could be very happy together, Antonia.’
Cy was a quiet, kind-hearted man and was honest enough to tell her that he had a low sex drive, which was why he hadn’t married before. Business occupied most of his time and attention. Antonia knew he liked her, enjoyed her company, but there had never been any desire in his kisses, no demands she could not face, and he wasn’t even in any hurry to name the date for their wedding.
She, in her turn, had agreed to get engaged to him not because she loved him, but because he had offered her a calm future for the first time in two years, and because everyone else had been so delighted—Patsy, Alex and Susan-Jane had all welcomed the news.
‘Is everything OK in Boston?’ Antonia asked him now.
‘Very much so,’ Cy said with obvious satisfaction. ‘I got a new client—an international company. It means I’ll be even busier, but it’s exciting. What did you do today? Find anything interesting?’
She told him about her research into the Munnings drawings, and he was immediately alert.
‘Put that aside for me; I’d like to see that before we decide whether to sell it or not. It would fit quite nicely into my own collection.’
Cy had inherited the collecting bug from his uncle, but he brought a cool intelligence to bear on it and already knew precisely how he wanted his collection to develop. He had decided to concentrate on nineteenth-century art. It should have occurred to her that the Munnings portfolio would interest him, but she had had other things on her mind.
‘Well, I’ll let you get to bed early, Antonia,’ Cy said. ‘Talk to you again soon; goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Cy,’ she said, and hung up after he had replaced his phone.
She turned and met Patrick’s coolly mocking stare. ‘That must have made the transatlantic line red-hot!’ he drawled. ‘The two of you are hardly Romeo and Juliet, are you? It was more like a business report than a bedtime chat between lovers.’ Then, his voice stiletto-sharp, ‘Are you, by the way?’
Dazedly she stared. ‘Are we what?’ Then she picked up what he meant and felt heat burn her face. ‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’
‘You aren’t lovers yet, are you? But then I never thought you would be. You’re still covered in permafrost, and your fiancé doesn’t have a blow torch.’
It was somehow the final straw for Antonia. Her temper raced away from her, she hit him round the face, and saw him rock back on his heels, startled and incredulous, a dark red mark across his cheek.
She couldn’t believe she had done it. She stood there, aghast, staring up at him, her sea-blue eyes wild and stormy between dark lashes, her lips parted, quivering, and a second later Patrick had her in his arms and his mouth descended.
Antonia twisted, struggled, feeling her mind cloud, panic rise inside her, suffocating her. She was thrown back two years, was fighting helplessly against a man’s insistent body, a silent scream in her head.
