An Exception to His Rule(63)

                She closed her eyes briefly because, of course, that wasn’t going to happen. All the same, how to leave him?

                ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she murmured.

                ‘Not easy.’ A smile appeared fleetingly in his eyes. ‘Thanks but no thanks?’ he suggested.

                Harriet flinched.

                ‘Or maybe just, from me, anyway—take care?’ he mused. ‘Yes, in your case, Harriet Livingstone, I think that’s particularly appropriate. Don’t drive into any more Aston Martins, or anything, for that matter; you take care now. By the way, if there are any consequences you wouldn’t be so head-in-the-clouds as not to let me know?’

                Harriet took a sobbing little breath, grabbed her shoes and ran past him out of the door.





                                      CHAPTER EIGHT

                ‘HARRIET, YOU’RE WORKING your fingers to the bone!’ Isabel Wyatt accused as she stood in the studio doorway, shaking raindrops off her umbrella a couple of weeks later. ‘It’s Sunday,’ she continued. ‘Even if you’re not religious, you need a rest. What is the matter?’

                ‘Nothing! Come in. I’ll make you a cuppa. I’m just working on the Venetian masks. It’s a pity they got so dusty. Look at this lovely Columbina!’

                Harriet held up a white porcelain half-mask studded with glittering stones and dyed feathers.

                ‘Where does the name come from?’

                ‘A Columbina is a stock character in Italian comedy, usually a maid who’s—’ Harriet shrugged ‘—a gossip, flirty, a bit of a wag and in English known as a soubrette.’

                ‘Obviously not above disguising herself with a mask for the purpose of delicious secret liaisons,’ Isabel said.

                Harriet paused her dusting operation as the word liaison struck a chord with her, and for a moment she wanted to run away to the end of the earth as she thought of Damien Wyatt.

                But she forced herself to take hold.

                ‘Something like that,’ she murmured. ‘There are examples in this collection of all the different materials used to make masks, did you know? Leather, for example.’ She held up a mask. ‘Porcelain, as in the Columbina, and of course glass. Did you know the Venice Carnival goes back to 1162, when the Serenissima, as she was known then, defeated the Patriarch of Aquileila?’

                ‘I did know that bit, as a matter of fact.’ Isabel took the leather mask from Harriet. ‘I’ve been to the Venice Carnival. It was also outlawed by the King of Austria in 1797 but no one knows exactly what prompted the population of Venice to be so exceedingly taken up with disguising themselves. Come along.’

                ‘Where?’

                ‘Upstairs to your kitchen, where I will make you a cuppa. Now don’t argue with me, Harriet Livingstone!’

                * * *

                ‘What happened?’ Isabel asked about twenty minutes later when they both had steaming mugs of tea in front of them on the refectory table as well as a plate of rich, bursting with cherries fruitcake.

                ‘You mean...?’ Harriet looked a question at Isabel.