Page 2 of Captive in His Castle
Callie wheeled her small carry-on suitcase out of the arrivals lounge and into a warmth that felt wonderful after the coldness that had recently blanketed England. At the rate the weather was going at home, spring would be over before the sun ever came out.
Joining the queue for the taxi rank, she fired a quick message to let her sister know she’d landed safely. Georgia might be furious with her for interfering, but she would still worry about her because that’s what sisters did. They could infuriate each other like no one else, but always, always, they wanted the other safe and well.
The car at the front of the taxi rank seemed to be turning customers away. When Callie reached the front of the queue, she would have opened the door of the second-ranked car if a loud voice hadn’t made her look up.
The driver of the front car had stepped out and was beckoning her over. Wow, he wastall… and good-looking, good-looking enough that she felt a pang of regret for impulsively dying her hair… thoughts and feelings that barely rose to the surface of her consciousness.
“Are you working?” Realising she was assuming he spoke English, she pretended to drive a steering wheel.
“Si, si, yes.” He lifted her suitcase into the boot. “I was on important call. All good now. I take you. Where you go, lady?”
“Accardiano.”
He whistled his appreciation of the name and opened the front passenger door for her.
Figuring it must be an Italian thing for taxi passengers to sit up front, she sat down and strapped herself in.
He folded himself in beside her and turned on the engine.
It was shortly after he’d weaved them out of the airport’s carpark that he broke the silence by saying, “You want music on?”
She didn’t. The tension headache that had formed when Georgia had caught her leaving their shared flat that morning had returned with a vengeance. “Only if you do.”
He scrolled through the car’s infotainment system, and then music blasted out. By the time he’d worked out how to turn it down, Callie’s ears were ringing.
“New car?” she asked, even though she was in no mood for conversation. She’d gone over and over her plan of action during the flight, but her mind refused to settle. Tracking down Niccolo Martinelli was going to be tough. He had unimaginable wealth, enough to form a protective barrier around himself. The one time she’d met him had been when he’d turned up at the flat to collect Georgia. One of his bodyguards had waited outside the front door, the other waiting in the humongous car illegally parked outside. That had been the night he’d flown Georgia to Paris for a long weekend. He’d dropped her back home three days later, and Georgia had never seen him again. The few times Callie had asked about it, Georgia had shut down and refused to talk about it, which was not at all like her sister. Usually, they shared everything.
“New to me,” the driver agreed with another grin. “You drive?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No need.”
“You live in London?”
“In the suburbs.” The underground terminated a handy five-minute walkfrom her flat.
Traffic on the main road they’d joined was heavy, the going slow. Every crawled mile passed like an hour, fraying her nerves that little bit more.
She was doing the right thing, she told herself for the millionth time. This had to be done. Niccolo couldn’t get married without knowing the truth. She didn’t care what Georgia said; it wasn’t fair on anyone, especially not fair on Georgia, and if Georgia was in her right mind, she’d know it too. But Georgia wasn’t in her right mind, veering from screaming rages to hysterical laughter to floods of tears at the drop of a hat.
“You been Italy before?” the driver asked, interrupting thoughts that were as frayed as her nerves.
“No,” she answered shortly before sighing at her terseness and the rudeness she must be emanating. Her headache and frazzled nerves were not the driver’s fault. “I’ve always wanted to though.” Maybe she’d have a chance to visit Pompeii, she thought, her gaze fixed on Mount Vesuvius rising majestically in the distance. That would be something to share with her students.
“You here to see tourist things?”
“Not quite.” Callie had never been good at lying, not even to strangers.
They merged onto a faster, wider road. The driver changed to a higher gear. He had nice hands, a thought that struck her as weird. Who noticed people’shands? But he really did have nice hands. Large and tanned like the rest of him, the fingers long and tapered.
And then she thought of her sister, and all thoughts of the driver’s hands disappeared.
Soon, they were travelling an Italian motorway. From the latent energy she sensed straining in him, she had the feeling the driver really wanted to put his foot down.
“Where you work?” he asked in another attempt to strike up conversation.
