Page 7 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

Theo gave an internal shrug, pushing away the question. Such speculation was pointless. His father had not reached out—except, perhaps, he mused cynically, to his opportunist nurse, who had been his ‘companion’ in his dying weeks and months.

No, he would do better focusing on the obstacle in his path than on the emotions that had been shaken loose by his father’s death, he decided, his thoughts turning to the gold-digger.

His pride was insulted by the idea of anyone thinking they could shake him down.

Maybe she thought it was a case of like father like son?

If so, she would soon discover this was not the case.

He was retracing his steps when he heard the sound. He paused, frowning as he listened, remembering the encounter he’d once had with a wild boar in almost this exact spot.

It was most likely a deer.

Then he heard it again. Not a deer, or a wild boar. Unless they could swear.

Grace was not lost—just slightly off course.

She knew exactly where she was, and she also knew that her directional miscalculation by the stream after that slip had put an extra mile on her morning hike.

A mile would not be an issue if she hadn’t turned her ankle...

At least the headache she had woken up with this morning had cleared. Or maybe she couldn’t feel it above the throb from her ankle.

She paused, leaning on the fallen branch that made a useful crutch. Her full lower lip caught between her teeth, she bent forward, her determined optimism faltering as she unwrapped the tee shirt she had dipped in the icy stream and wrapped it around her injured extremity to relieve her ankle. Despite her make-do cold compress her ankle was already puffy, starting to discolour, and three times the size of the other.

‘It looks worse than it is,’ she told herself, without conviction.

From where he stood in the tree line, Theo scanned the injured ankle with clinical detachment. A detachment that soon evaporated, morphing into something less objective as his glance shifted, travelling upwards over the sinuous length of the woman’s legs, reaching the understated feminine flare of hips emphasised by the narrowness of a waist that he estimated he could have spanned with his hands.

At that moment the who she was and the how she’d got here became of secondary importance to the way one strap of the vest she was wearing had slid down over a smooth shoulder, revealing a lot of the sports bra she wore underneath. A trickle of sweat was winding a slow path from the hollow at the base of her throat to the cleavage that without the bra would have been revealed.

He had an impression of the soft sounds of nature around them fading out as his eyes followed the slow progress of that pearl of moisture over her pale skin, its journey resulting in a flash of heat that settled solidly in his groin.

For a self-indulgent moment Theo allowed his libido to flare unchecked, welcoming the distraction, taking in the slim curves, the slender, elegant neck, the pale almost silver hair that stuck to her face and spilled untidily down her back.

‘It looks pretty bad.’

At the sound of his voice, the woman started like a deer, her head coming up just in time to witness Theo materialising out of the trees.

The electric blue of those wide, scared eyes lifted to his brought Theo to a dead halt as his body was jolted by a fresh sexual charge.

The adrenaline dumped in Grace’s bloodstream screamed fight or flight—only flight was not an option. A fact she didn’t fully realise until she had scrambled to her feet.

Crying out in pain, she balanced on one leg, her eyes never leaving the man who towered over her for one second as she raised her branch defensively to warn him off. She maintained her stork-like pose for as long as it took her to snatch a deep breath—before she promptly fell on her bottom.

Between losing her balance and hitting the ground she put a name to the face of the sinister stranger.

This was Theo Ranieri.

There were younger, less threatening versions of the palazzo’s joint owner in framed photos throughout the palazzo, but even if there hadn’t been she would have recognised him. Long before she’d arrived here she’d seen an interview in which he had memorably verbally eviscerated the cocky reporter who had made the mistake of coming ill prepared when he’d been granted an interview.

The recognition came to her in a lightbulb moment—a little like the way your life was meant to flash before your eyes when you were dying.

Except she wasn’t dying—or only of mortification.

On the plus side, she was no longer gut-freezingly terrified. Not that her thundering heart had responded to this information yet. Her breath was still coming far too fast to cope with her raised pulse.

‘That must have hurt.’

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