It was unfortunate that Lord Sevin had just discovered her most closely guarded secret. She had a story ready, of course, one prepared in anticipation of such a discovery coming to pass. It hovered on her lips, ready to spill.
Yet, looking up into his beautiful face, she found herself wanting him to finally know the truth. So she leaned into him, her hands flat upon the strong warmth of his chest. “Don’t you remember me,
ves’tacha?
”
At her use of the Romani word for “beloved,” Sevin was abruptly wrenched back in time. He took her upper arms in his hands and snatched her higher, seeing another face, one years younger. That of a girl only twelve years old. In an abrupt move, he tucked his face into the crook of her neck, sorting out the nuances of her scent. He drew back before she could mold herself to him again.
“You’re Clara’s little sister! The one who was to marry.” He searched for her name, then found it. “Carmella.” When he’d last seen her he’d been eighteen and leaving the gypsy camp that had taken him in for three years. She’d been in her early teens, already promiscuous, and engaged to wed a man much older.
Ella’s face creased in a beatific smile. “Not so little anymore. And no longer engaged.” She sent him a flirtatious glance and trailed her fingers at the neckline of her bodice, attempting to lure his gaze to her feminine contours. His eyes stayed on her face, searching it intently.
She frowned. Was he thinking of her sister? Looking for reminders of Clara in her own features?
He paced a few steps away, putting the desk between them before speaking again in a low voice. “I’m sorry, Carmella ... Ella. So sorry. You must hate me for my part in what happened to Clara. I—”
“No! No, you stupid man.” She slammed her small fist on the desktop, then leaned forward over it, displaying her cleavage to full advantage. “Have you been feeling guilty all this time? You didn’t kill her. Her death was only meant to bring us closer.”
“What?”
Ella straightened, realizing she’d said too much. But his guilt
was
misplaced. Clara hadn’t meant to kill herself over him. Not in the beginning at least. Not until Ella had fueled her fears and eroded her confidence with half-truths and outright lies about Sevin’s supposed dalliances with other women in the towns their caravan visited from time to time.
Finally, on one low night, Ella had lured her sister to the brink of suicide, and then she’d given her the nudge that had tipped her over. It had been a masterful performance on Ella’s part, a falsified confession that she’d made Clara painstakingly draw from her. How she’d secretly smiled to herself, as she’d fabricated her tearful tale. It had been something to the effect that she’d witnessed Sevin fornicating with one of Clara’s rivals in the woods that afternoon. In fact, he’d only gone out hunting with the other men of the tribe.
“I only meant that I—we all missed you when you left. Why did you go without saying anything?” she hedged.
After her sister had died, Ella had naively assumed that Sevin would wait until she grew up to take her sister’s place in his bed and in his life. Instead, he’d disappeared. She’d only recently found him again. And now these rumors that he planned to wed. Had he chosen a partner? If only she could convince him to let it be her.
“It seemed for the best,” Sevin replied.
Ella chose her next words to him with care. “I was only a girl back then, not filled out yet.” She ran her hands down her figure, this time drawing his eyes. But there was no passion in his gaze. The fact that he was unaffected sent a spear of panic through her. “I’m grown now. Experienced. Your equal.”
He shook his head. “You’re human.”
“You’re wrong if you think that was the reason Clara couldn’t handle you. She wasn’t right for you. I saw that. Everyone did.”
“You’re right that we weren’t meant for one another. We were too damn young. But I loved her in my own way,” said Sevin.
“But not in a lasting way. And she knew. She was so afraid of losing you. Whatever you wanted she would have done in order to keep you. But your sybaritic ways were not hers. You need a woman with passions to match your own,” Ella said with the width of his massive desk now separating them. “A woman like me.”
“Ella ...” He combed his fingers through his hair, looking uncomfortable.
Her eyes filled with tears. For once they weren’t feigned. She could feel him slipping away and was terrified he would banish her from his side. No! She needed more time to woo him. To make him understand that he needed her. When she thought of the things she’d done—the terrible things. They’d all been in an effort to have this man love her. He
had
to love her!
She went to him and trailed a bright red fingernail down the center of his chest. He caught her hand in one fist. His touch, even one of rejection, sent a thrill over her. However, this wasn’t going at all as she’d imagined in her fantasies.
“How is it that your scent is a mix of human and fey?” he asked suspiciously.
She shrugged, knowing he wouldn’t like the truth. That she’d been dosing her skin daily with extracts that had been forcibly taken from a variety of ElseWorld creatures while they’d suffered imprisonment. The brother he so doted on had been among them, after all. And it had been his ruin.
“Clara and I had different fathers. Mine was human, and his taint has strengthened in me over time,” she said, using the lie she’d rehearsed. “So you see there is no real barrier to—”
“Why the masquerade?” he interrupted.
“If I’d told you in my interview, would you have hired me? A half blood?”
Before he could answer, a knock sounded on the door behind her. It opened to admit one of the black-coated sentries. The big, annoying one that sported only a single eye in his forehead.
For some inexplicable reason, Sevin looked exceptionally pleased to see him. “You’re back?” he asked, a question in his voice.
“
Sì,
and I brought you a visitor, Lord Sevin.” Ignoring Ella, the sentry came inside and handed a plain white card to his employer. “Awaiting you in the anteroom, she is,” he added.
Sevin read the card and tossed it down. Immediately, he sprang into action, snatching his jacket from the coat hook on his way out. “We’ll discuss this later. You may stay on for now,” he told Ella. Then he strode from the room.
The guard lingered, however, his unblinking eye pinned on her as if he expected her to thieve if he looked away. She perched on Sevin’s desktop behind her, just to annoy him.
“Come along, signorina. I should lock up. Lord Sevin don’t like his office left open for all comers.”
“Oh! Of course.” She smiled at him sweetly, pretending she hadn’t just surreptitiously slipped one of the official-looking letters atop Sevin’s desk into her pocket. Information was money. After she read it, she’d make sure it found its way back to his desk or into the mail tray. No one here would ever be the wiser.
As she slid off the desk, her hand swept something. Curious, she lifted the card Sevin had just received. Written upon it in a feminine hand were the words:
My home is for sale.
Frowning, she flipped the card over, too anxious to care that the guard saw her do it. Two words were discreetly embossed in black upon its opposite side:
Signorina Patrizzi.
Ella crumpled the card in her fist, anger boiling up in her. Then her lips curved into a spiteful smile. She’d left lip rouge on Lord Sevin’s collar, purposely marking him for all the other employees to see.
What would this Signorina Patrizzi make of that?
she wondered.
Quickly, she went to her personal chamber to bathe and dress. Afterward, she would spy upon them and learn what she could until it was time for her next appointment.
Moments later, Sevin threw open the velvet drape that hung at the entrance to the salon’s main arena. He scanned the anteroom beyond it, relieved to find that Alexa still awaited him there. Seated among the patrons and salon employees who mingled around her, she looked elegant, fashionable, and very human.
Upon seeing him, she leaped to her feet, looking relieved as well. But when he came close, she stepped back warily. “You got my message? What do you think?”
His eyes narrowed. “I think I’m pleased to see you.” He bussed her lips with his and watched pink bloom in her cheeks. He’d questioned one of the sentries who’d brought her here just now and had been informed that just after she’d awakened, she had rushed the trio of guards posted outside her house here to the salon with suspicious haste.
“And I wonder that you are in such a fidget to sell your home all of a sudden,” he told her. “Why?”
Because there’s a dead body in my bedchamber, and I will likely be accused of murder when it is found.
“I don’t want to drag you into this,” she said, shaking her head.
“Into what?”
“Nothing,” she said, too quickly. His eyes fell to her hands, which were twisting her handbag into a tangle between them. Noting his study, she forced them to stillness.
“I’ll be frank,” she went on. “I know you want my house. I overheard you and your brothers speaking about your plans for it as you were leaving this morning.”
His mind raced, wondering exactly what she’d overheard. “And you agree to those plans so easily?”
She nodded. “If you’re willing to engage in the fight ahead with my husband’s family for ownership of the property, I will sell it to you. And you are free to re-create your salon there. I have no quarrel with that. But I want a deal made immediately.”
“Tonight?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m leaving Rome as soon as it’s done. Don’t try to change my mind.”
“All right,” he said smoothly, knowing all the while that he most certainly did intend to change her mind. “Wait for me here. I’ll have a runner sent for my attorney.”
Turning on his heel, he made for the doorway through which he’d just come. Stepping through, he held the velvet drape wide, watching her as he murmured privately to a sentry on duty there. He was taking no chances that she’d change her mind and disappear while his back was turned. This woman was proving far too slippery of late.
“Find out what news you can of the elder Signor Tivoli and his son, Laslo, both lately of Venice, and now in Rome,” he told the sentry. “And have my attorney summoned. Immediately.”
As the guard waved over a runner, Sevin turned back to Alexa, who was gazing around the room in fascination. He wondered what she thought of his creation.
“How long until they arrive?” she asked anxiously as he approached her.
“An hour perhaps. Then papers must be drawn up. You’ll be here a while, possibly all night.”
“Oh dear.” She fully intended to flee the moment she had the funds from him, no matter how late the hour, but every second that passed in the interim heightened the danger that Laslo might be discovered. When she’d awakened this evening and found his body, she’d gone to her mother’s room to hurriedly bathe and dress. Afterward, she’d urged the guards Sevin had posted outside the house to bring her here, leaving them none the wiser regarding the corpse in her bedroom. She shuddered, horrified by the remembrance of it.
Had Laslo killed himself? With a poker? But how would he have gotten past the guards in order to do so in her home? The door to the catacombs in the library had been securely locked, so he had not come that way either. However, she hadn’t actually seen him leave the house that morning, now that she thought about it. Had he stayed on in hiding, with plans to do himself in on her carpet? It made no sense.
Whatever the case, she harbored little doubt that she would be blamed for his death. The divorce papers were undeniable evidence that she wished to be rid of him, and many in Italy would leap at the chance to chastise a woman for having sought divorce in the first place. Sentiment in Rome already ran against her family, and she couldn’t take the chance of a trial. Though her mind had twisted the matter around and around, she always came to the same conclusion in the end. She had to flee.
“So this is your salon,” she said, trying to turn the conversation. “It’s beautiful. Quite grand.”
Sevin smiled slightly, allowing her to change the subject. “I’m glad you approve. However, this is merely an anteroom, a meeting place for patrons to engage in verbal foreplay. Some of them never move beyond it. For them, a little flirtation with members of their species is enough. If one is looking for more, the main salon lies through that drape.”
More?
Alexa craned her neck toward the mysterious drape, wondering precisely what that entailed.
“Come. Have a look at what I intend that your family home will become.”
She gazed at what little she could see beyond the gap in the curtain, intrigued in spite of herself. “Well, I don’t actually have time for a tour. I was hoping we could iron out the details of the sale now, as I said.”
“I usually transact business in my offices, not in the hallways,” he said, slipping an arm about her waist. “And those offices are above stairs on the third level. My attorney will be taken there directly, I assure you.” When her footsteps dragged, he added, “Or you could wait here, maybe do a little mingling on your own while I’m at work upstairs.”
She glanced around at the strange creatures that surrounded them in the anteroom, some scantily clad, some with green skin, others with small horns, and still others with even more unusual physical characteristics. They were studiously ignoring her, but she sensed that her presence made them uncomfortable. She also sensed that Sevin had made his suggestion because he knew she would feel awkward remaining here among them.
“To your offices, then,” she said, allowing him to lead her onward. She was curious about the salon, after all, and they must pass the time somehow until his legal man came.
The main salon was enormous, she discovered, as they stepped through the drape, boasting a gilded, coffered ceiling that reached three stories high. At the center of its floor, a carousel turned at a leisurely, mesmerizing pace. Wildly painted and lacquered dragons, unicorns, and other fantastic creatures pumped up and down on poles, their backs eerily bare of passengers for now. With furnishings and wall coverings done up in jeweled tones, and the soft strains of music in the air, the room was a feast for the senses.