Page 33 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

She smiled and stopped looking at her feet. ‘I am... I really am!’ she agreed fervently, and then, as their eyes clashed, she added a soft, ‘Thanks for this.’

She didn’t care if he had an ulterior motive. He was doing her a massive favour, and she had never been one to hold a grudge.

She released his hand as they entered the grotto.

‘It is so beautiful...’ she breathed, turning full circle as she gazed around the echoey chamber. The nightmare images in her head were losing their grip...she could almost hear them receding into the distance. ‘It feels I should whisper—like in a church.’

‘So, not scary?’ he asked, watching the look of wonder on her face as she tilted her head back and spun around, her silver-blonde hair spilling down her back.

He felt the years peel away as he saw the place fresh through her eyes, remembered how it had used to feel this way to him once, before everything had become poisoned in his head.

‘No, just beautiful...awesome.’ She took a deep breath and smiled up at him sunnily. ‘You saved me twice.’

The warmth and uncomplicated gratitude in her face as she smiled into his face took his breath away.

She didn’t appear to register his sharp intake of breath as, with a slight furrow in her brow, she looked around the space, struggling to get her bearings. He knew all her recollections would be through the filter of fear.

‘I sat up there?’ Her eye lifted to the ledge where she had sought refuge.

It was a long way up.

‘The tide here is so—’ She stopped as her eyes went fearfully to the arched stone entrance.

‘We are quite safe.’

She nodded and instinctively moved in closer to his side. ‘It all looks so different.’

And the outcome, she realised, could have been very different indeed.

‘I am grateful, you know—I’m very glad you were here and you didn’t walk away.’

His expression froze. ‘Is that who you think I am? Someone who walks away?’

Aware she had struck a nerve, and surprised by it, she responded evenly. ‘I don’t know you well enough to make any judgement. I don’t know who you are. But I do know forsure,’ she emphasised, ‘that without you I would not be here. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m not normally so reckless.’

Some of the stiffness left his face.

‘This was my playground when I was a child,’ he said. His expansive gesture took in the incredible glittering ceiling above their head. ‘You wouldn’t be the first person to be caught out by the tides. There was a camera crew in the eighties, apparently, that barely escaped. They lost a fortune’s worth of photographic gear, so the story goes. Nature is not something that adapts to you—you have to do the adapting.’

She nodded, looking up at him and wondering if she was seeing the real Theo, before lowering her eyes, but not her defences. Thatwouldbe reckless. Seeing something she wanted to see, something that wasn’t there, was a trap she was not about to blunder into.

‘It was stupid...careless of me,’ she said.

And it would be even more stupid to believe that there was more to this man than met the eye—that she had some sort of unique insight. Women had been thinking they would be the one who saw the good in a bad boy—they would be the one to reform him—from time immemorial.

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ he told her.

Good advice, she thought.

‘I won’t.’ A wave lapped at her feet and she shivered. ‘Should we be going back?’ she asked nervously.

‘You’re safe with me.’

The crazy thing was, she realised, replaying his words in her head, she believed it. At that moment he made her feel safe—and yet he was the most dangerous man she had ever met.

Like the man himself, her feelings were totally contradictory.

They walked back to the beach in silence—not comfortable, but not innately confrontational either. For once he wasn’t goading her. He seemed lost in his own thoughts.

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