Page 20 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

Nic nodded and lifted his shoulders in an expressive Latin shrug. ‘Si. And then, after Dad died, Mum moved back to England to be near her twin sister.’

‘You weren’t tempted to join her?’

‘Salvatore asked me to take the job on a permanent basis and, well... I stayed. Got married, had a baby...or actually two.’

Theo, who had stiffened slightly at his father’s name, smiled in response to this update. ‘Congratulations.’ Then his smile faded and his eyes twitched into a straight line above his patrician nose. ‘I’m sorry about your father.’

‘It was his heart. There had been issues for some time.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t know.’

Grace thought it was about time to remind them she existed. ‘You two know one another? Well, obviously you do,’ she said, scrolling through her memory. Had she expressed her opinion on Theo’s character a little too robustly to Nic? ‘You never said?’

She’d addressed the comment to Nic, but it was Theo who responded, his lips quirking at the indignation in her voice.

‘When you spoke of “Nic” it didn’t occur to me that it was Nico...’

He pushed aside the kick of guilt. Far away, it had been easy for him to forget the people whose lives would change when the palazzo and estate changed hands. Being here...

His eyes narrowed. This was not a reason not to divest himself of the past. There was every chance that the new owners would keep Nic and the other staff on after the sale—in fact, he’d make it a condition of sale.

‘Theo and I hung out during the holidays when we were kids. I could tell you some stories,’ Nic said.

‘A threat that scares me,’ Theo drawled, a smile in his voice.

It was the first time she had seen him smile for real, and there was enough charm and warmth to tame a tiger and melt an iceberg.

‘But remember I also can tell some stories,’ he told Nic.

Watching him, she thought he seemed almost human, almost touchable...

She looked away, banished the thought, and reminded herself that he was hard and callous, and that without her and Marta his father would have died alone.

Lost in her own condemnatory tangle of thoughts, she didn’t immediately realise that a chair had been pulled out for her—a courtesy that was Nic’s, not Theo’s. After a slight hesitation she joined the two men, quickly feeling excluded once more as they began to talk, slipping unconsciously from Italian to English and back.

But not because they were reminiscing. It was all estate business.

Grace had worked hard to get her head around the subject, but a lot of what they were now discussing was way above her.

She was sure that Nic was not deliberately excluding her, but Theo’s motives were far less clear-cut, and giving him the benefit of the doubt was a long way off—a distant speck on the horizon.

If Theo was trying to make her feel like an outsider he was succeeding, she decided, resenting the way that he automatically took charge of the discussion and—she had to admit—asked far too knowledgeable questions.

Having slid down in her chair a little, nursing a cup of coffee between her hands, she suddenly pulled herself up, recognising in her muddled thoughts a recurring strand of self-pity.

She was sulking—a fault she thought she had cured.

This wasn’t aboutthem, it was abouther, and her lingering sense of inferiority. She might not be as brilliant and beautiful as the rest of her family, and her legs might not be as long, but they worked and so did her brain.

She couldn’t blame Nic for being relieved to be talking to someone he didn’t have to explain every other sentence to, and Theo was probably enjoying seeing her cold-shouldered out. The way she had been a thousand times before, over the dinner table at home, when everyone got very intellectual or political.

She was playing right into his hands by crawling back in her shell.

‘Do you mind running that past me one more time?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t quite...’

Nic flushed and looked guilty. Theo didn’t look guilty, but that was no surprise. It was already a given that the man was not capable of feeling guilt.

‘Sorry, Grace,’ Nic said. ‘I was just saying that last year’s freak weather affected the olive harvest, but we have great hopes that this year will be a bumper crop.’

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