Page 57 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

‘Protectme?’ she scorned.

She wanted to scream.I don’t want protecting. I want to be loved!

But there could be no love without trust.

‘You decided I was guilty before I even walked into this room!’

The accusation vibrated in the air between them like a silent echo. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t even look at her. She turned away for a moment, afraid for a split second that she was actually going to throw up, and not turning back until she had regained control.

‘This will probably make you laugh, but I’d fooled myself that we might have some sort of future together. I know—a joke or what? It’s not even as though I can blame my parents. They never allowed me to read any happy-ever-after stories as a kid, so there’s no excuse. This is all on me.’

She moved her hands in a slashing gesture down her body, as if to emphasise her culpability.

‘There is no reason that we cannot carry on as we are,’ he said.

She looked at him pityingly. ‘If you really think that then you are an idiot. This is about trust. It doesn’t matter how much you want to rip my clothes off—and if it’s any comfort I really want to rip yours off too—without trust...’

She pursed her lips and emitted a whistling sound, and with it went all the nervous energy from her body. Suddenly the fire was gone and she felt empty.

If she had managed to unfasten the clasp on her necklace and throw it at him it would have been the dramatic flourish she wanted. But she hadn’t, so instead she dropped her hands and picked up a pile of the papers that were neatly folded on the table, glared at him and hissed, ‘You want childish? Now,thisis childish.’

She snarled, throwing them at him.

He stared from the trail of papers leading like a yellow brick road and ending at his feet to her face. Her fierce—no, her sad, beautiful face.

He felt he had no control over the tightness in his chest.

She gave a slightly wild laugh, letting it escape her parched throat, then turned on her heel and left the room.

She made it as far as her en suite bathroom, where she bolted the door and, shoulders pressed to the wood, slid slowly down the wall.

She sobbed for something she had never had.

She didn’t know for how long.

It was a knock on the door that broke her free of her miasma of misery.

She slowly pulled herself onto her knees, then to her feet, feeling like an old woman as she shot the latch.

Marta looked at her, and the warmth and compassion in the other woman’s face made her dissolve into tears all over again.

Several minutes later she lifted her face off the other woman’s shoulder and straightened her shoulders.

‘Sorry about that.’

Then she told the other woman what she wanted to happen next.

Marta cautioned her to pause and think—even produced some crazy story about a weather front into the argument—but Grace smiled and closed her ears. She’d had years of practice at resisting people who were convinced they were talking sense...people who thought they knew better than her.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, amused by Marta’s hysterical reaction to the prospect of a little bit of rain. ‘I’m British—we know about rain,’ she told the woman, who was wringing her hands in anxiety as Grace remained adamant.

Exactly an hour later she and her minimal baggage were in a car—not one of the fleet of shiny, high-end expensive vehicles that sat in the garages at the palazzo, but the housekeeper’s own Mini, which was much less daunting.

Grace’s escape plan was split into small, manageable sections. She would complete one and then worry about the next. The trick was not to pause too long to think about it.

She wasn’t thinking—she was acting. And she wasn’t looking back. Although the not looking back might be a mistake, she thought with a wince, as she put the car into reverse and narrowly missed a branch that the wind had brought down in the courtyard.

It soon became clear that Marta had not invented the weather front. It was now windy and raining—a fact that was much more obvious away from the shelter offered by the palazzo buildings. She drove through the big gates and wondered if she would ever return.

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