Page 36 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

As she took hold of the book, to slide the photo back inside, it fell open at a page crowded with close-spaced writing in a hand she recognised as Salvatore’s.

She paused, a sentence leaping out at her from the page.

Have I done the right thing?

She half closed the book. She already knew from the papers she had begun to sort out that Salvatore had used English in his private papers—the ones he presumably hadn’t wanted any of the staff to catch a glimpse of.

She fingered the tooled leather and then opened it again, impelled by the tug of Pandora’s box.

A word or two, she decided, maybe a sentence.

She ignored the guilty twinge as she bent over the open book.

Half an hour later she turned a page and saw that it was empty. Flicking through the pages, she saw that the rest of the book was too.

She turned back to the first page and saw the smudges where her tears had fallen. She glanced at the snapshot before sliding it back inside, her heart aching for every person involved in the real-life drama she had just been given a glimpse into.

Salvatore’s love for his son had leapt from the page, as had his love for his wife, who came across as fragile and damaged. Clearly Salvatore had made a choice that had tortured him. Had he been right? Who was she to say, standing here years in the future? But it was hard not to think that had he not tried to protect his son from the truth things might be very different now... Theo might be very different.

‘What are you doing?’

So engrossed in the tragedy of the past, Grace had lost all sense of place and time, and she jumped a mile. Looking, she knew, the picture of guilt, she turned to face the hostile figure looming in the doorway.

For a second his eyes were on the portrait on the wall, and she glimpsed a world of pain in them before it was gone, and then he was looking at her, his brow lightly furrowed, the suspicion in his eyes hardening.

She reacted to an instinctive impulse and tried to conceal the book clumsily behind her back.

‘What is that?’ he said, looking dark and dangerous and deeply suspicious as he stalked, lean and pantherlike, into the room.

There was something buried beneath the compassion she felt for him that reacted in an irrational or maybe simply a hormonal level to the aura of maleness he projected.

She stretched her stiff lips into a smile and got to her feet, disarranging the papers with a casual sweep of her hand and burying the book beneath the pile.

As he walked forward, casting her a stare of smouldering contempt, Grace’s sinking heart told her that her sleight of hand was no good, and she was only delaying the inevitable.

And not for long.

His brown fingers went unerringly to the leatherbound diary, which he extracted.

His thumb flicked at the gold-edged pages. ‘What is this?’

‘A diary,’ she said.

‘A diary?’ he echoed. His eyes went to her pale face and some of the tension left his own. ‘Yours?’

He reached to hand it back to her—then dropped it when she shook her head.

‘Your father’s...’ she whispered.

‘And what sort of incriminating evidence does it hold,cara, that you are so anxious for me not to read it? What did Salvatore write about you?’ he asked, feeling a surge of self-contempt.

He had almost relaxed his guard, due to his interest in what lay under that blue silk. It had caused him to forget that the owner of the big blue eyes and the supple seductive curves was the woman who had caused Salvatore—who worshipped at the altar of family and heritage—to split his estate.

That was quite a power, and it required a degree of cunning that it would be a mistake for him to overlook—hismistake, and one he was not about to repeat. Sex made some men blind, but not him.

Grace closed her eyes and sighed. ‘It’s not about me. It’s an old diary, and I don’t think you should read it, Theo,’ she said, and she was almost pleading now as she watched him.

His upper lip curled. ‘I had noticed that,’ he drawled nastily.

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