Visconti's Forgotten Heir(26)

He made a silent gesture for her to stay when she would have moved past him and then tried not to focus on her, because the thought of her warm nakedness beneath his robe was distracting him and his aching libido beyond belief.

* * *

Browsing along his bookshelves, while trying to ignore what the deep timbre of his voice was doing to her, Magenta was impressed by the diversity of his reading material.

There were beautiful gold-leafed, leatherbound volumes of an encyclopaedia, travel books—particularly ones about Italy—several biographies—mainly of business and political figures—and a whole host of general literature about looking after the planet, the world’s wildlife, as well as the world’s most prized hotels.

Had he read a lot six years ago? She wasn’t sure.

‘I didn’t know you were partial to poetry,’ she murmured when she heard the phone slip back onto its rest. Her head tilting, she noted Lord Byron’s name on a comparatively small and dilapidated-looking little book. ‘He’s my favourite of all the romantic poets.’

‘Really?’ Andreas’s voice sounded strange, and he was looking at her rather oddly. ‘You could have fooled me.’

She couldn’t fail to pick up on the sarcasm behind his remark. ‘You think because I didn’t have as good an upbringing as you that I can’t appreciate good poetry when I read it?’ she uttered, wondering why he’d even say such a thing. ‘We had to study him at school, which is where I developed my taste for romanticism, but this edition’s beautiful and so...’ Old, she was going to say. So old, in fact, that the spine was broken. She reached up to take it down. ‘Why don’t you have it rebound?’

‘Leave it!’

His stern command split the air like the crack of gunshot, freezing her fingers against the dark green suede cover.

‘I was only going to look at it,’ she told him, defending her actions. ‘I wasn’t going to...damage it.’ Not any more than it was already damaged, she thought, with a pained little crease between her eyes. The throbbing in her head that had been so debilitating earlier was threatening to return again. ‘I was just curious to see if I could find my favourite poem.’

‘And what is that?’

His tone was clipped and his eyes were coldly questioning— as hard and questioning as the lines that were now corrugating his high forehead.

‘I don’t know what it’s called. It’s the poem he wrote to the one woman people say he truly loved.’ Funny that she could remember that, Magenta mused, when she had forgotten other, far more important things about her own life. ‘I can’t...’ She put a hand to her head. ‘I can’t bring the first line of it to mind right now.’

‘Try.’

Magenta looked at him quickly, wondering why his voice was so lethally low, and why the glimmer of concern he had shown her before her shower had vanished, to be replaced by what she could only describe as a hard and chilling detachment.

‘I don’t know...’ It was a test she had to pass—for herself as well as Andreas. ‘Something about destiny...’

Words and images seemed to be swimming around in a fog so thick that she couldn’t latch onto anything that made sense in her mind.

And then through it Andreas’s voice came, like a guiding light through the haze. ‘“Though the day of my destiny’s over, And the star of my fate hath declined.”’

That was it! Like someone hypnotised Magenta continued, without taking her eyes off his. ‘“Thy soft heart refused to discover, The faults which so many could find...”’

Her words tailed off, emotion clogging her throat. Had Andreas’s heart ever been soft? Yet his eyes were darkening with such an intensity of emotion that it seemed to reach out and touch her. Because, of course, he had refused to see the faults in her personality, she remembered startlingly. Even when other people, his family in particular, had condemned her, he had still believed in her, trusted her. Though she knew without any uncertainty, and without even knowing why, that he had condemned her too—in the end.

The emotion was so acute in her chest that she thought she would cry out from the pain of it.

‘I need to get dressed.’ She struggled to speak in a small, strangled voice, and stumbled away from him before he could make some comment that she couldn’t have borne.

* * *

He was on the phone, and seemed to wind up the call rather abruptly when he heard her coming into the study, Magenta thought later. He instantly started scribbling something down on a paper pad.

‘Why don’t you use your iPad?’ she suggested rather lamely, feeling awkward and saying the first thing that came into her head because of that tense little episode upstairs earlier.