Authors: Unknown
It took her fully an hour to make up her mind that she really had no choice in the matter. She struggled out of bed and opened the shutters at the windows to admit the moonlight, then, moving as quietly as she could, she sought out her discarded clothes and dragged them on to her numbed body. Only then did she consider the best way to get out of her room, her heart thumping within her, beating out a rhythm of despair that she found even more demoralising than her own lack of enthusiasm for departing for ever from Domenico's palace.
The door was as firmly locked as she had known it would be. That left the window. It would be easy enough to climb down the wall to the courtyard below, she decided. Any cat-burglar could have done it! Ten years ago, she had been a better climber than any of the boys she knew, but since then she had been a non-competitor in such sports and she felt sadly out of practice. It was like riding a bicycle, she told herself, it was impossible to forget how to do it! But the longer she looked, the further down it seemed.
She had no difficulty climbing out on to the window-sill. Grasping the wooden frame, she lowered her legs over the edge and searched with her toes for some of the footholds she had thought she could use when looking down from above. Her left foot found a solid piece of coping and, gasping with relief, she lowered herself a step further. The window directly below hers proved as useful as she had thought it would and a few seconds later she was hanging from its sill willing herself to leave go and free-fall down the last few feet to the courtyard.
'Let go, and I'll catch you!' a masculine voice bade her from below.
She lost her hold through sheer fright and fell heavily into Domenico's arms. 'How dared you be here!' she moaned against his hard chest. 'I might have been killed, scaring me silly like that!'
His hands tightened about her, shaking her until her teeth rattled. 'You could have been killed if I hadn't been here to catch you!' he retorted. 'That's solid concrete where you were planning to land! Did you think of that?'
'I thought I might break a leg '
'Did you? And what would you have done then?
This courtyard doesn't lead anywhere except into my private rooms!'
£
I thought you were in bed,' she exclaimed. 'If I could break in, I could have let myself out of the front door.'
'Dio mio!'
he exclaimed. 'Do you hate being my prisoner so much? Does this Michael of yours have the key to your heart after all?'
She could not answer him. He held her tightly against him, pushing her face up to meet his with an urgent hand. For an endless moment his eyes searched hers in the darkness and then his lips were joined to hers, kissing her with an ardour that left her weak and breathless in his arms. A ride of passionate response rose within her in answer to his triumphant male challenge that threatened to take possession of her whole being. His hands slid down her back to her hips, pulling her closer still.
'Does your Michael kiss you like this—and this?' he questioned her. 'Dear God, I don't want to know if he does!'
She clung to him, conscious only of the demanding hardness of his lips as they commanded hers. She gasped and her senses reeled.
'Domenico—?'
He let her go, but only to look briefly down at her ashen face. 'Do I go too fast, my darling? You are right, we had better go inside where there are no eyes to see us!' His hands explored her with delight. 'How small you are!' he exclaimed.
'I haven't any shoes on.'
'None at all?' His laughter reverberated against her ribs. 'What have you got on,
carina?'
She pulled away from him, tucking her shirt more firmly into her jeans. 'I couldn't take any of the things you gave me,' she explained the poverty of her garments. 'I have other things in my suitcase '
'If you are ever reunited with it! How did you think to find your friends with the whole of Rome to look for them in?'
'I have the address where we were all going to stay,' she protested. She turned anxious eyes on him. 'You must see that it's best I should go, Domenico. My father will never pay my ransom and you could get into terrible trouble for kidnapping me and—and I don't think I could bear that!'
He caught her by the wrist and pulled her after him through the french windows into what was obviously his study. A coal fire burned in the grate, giving out a welcome heat after the cool air from outside. There was a desk on one side of the room, on which were some papers that he had been working on when he had seen her feet appearing through the window. In front of the fire were two leather armchairs, dark with age, but as comfortable now as they had been when they had first been acquired in the latter days of Queen Victoria.
Domenico switched on a light over his desk and another one behind one of the chairs, snapping out the overhead with his free hand. Deborah made a small effort to reclaim her wrist from his hold, but his only response was to tighten the grasp of his fingers, pulling her round to face him. The shadows on his face gave him an arrogant look that sent her heart rushing into a new and painful tattoo of half joyful, half fearful anticipation.
'The clothes are yours!'
She shook her head. 'I can't accept them from you.
You must see that I can't! If my father pays for them, I'll wear them then.'
'You'll wear them now if I have to put them on you with my own hands!' he threatened her grimly.
'Domenico, I have to go!' she insisted.
'Back to Michael Doyle?'
'And to the others too. You must see that it's the best thing—for both of us!'
He sat down on the nearest chair, pulling her on to his knee with a firmness that came as a relief to her trembling limbs. She didn't object at all when he pushed her head back on to his shoulder and anchored her there with a loving hand.
'You had better forget all about Michael Doyle,' he said at last. 'If I had my way you'd never see him again!'
It was hard to think clearly about Michael or anyone else with his dark, Roman face so close to hers. If she stayed in the same room with Domenico any longer, she would never want to leave at all.
'I like Michael!' she said loudly.
His anger was every bit as exciting as she had expected it to be, but she could not allow him to cloud her judgment by kissing her again. 'Why won't you let me go?' she asked sadly.
'You ask me that?' he demanded. 'You ask me that
now}
Can't you feel how much I want you, sweetheart? If I had my way with you, would you still want to run away from me, back to this Michael of yours?'
She tossed her head in the air, breaking free of his restrictive hold on her. 'Why shouldn't I? It wouldn't change Alessandra's position in your life, would it? So why should it change Michael's in mine?'
Her heart missed a beat at the contemptuous look on his face. 'He would accept you as his wife knowing you had already given yourself to another man?'
She shrugged her shoulders, trying not to cry. 'Why not? Alessandra must know she isn't the first woman in your life!'
Domenico ripped her off his knee and stood up, his face as bleak as she could have wished. 'Alessandra is better not discussed by you!' he bit out. 'I think you had best go back to your room,
signorina
, before the temptation to still your tongue becomes too much for me! I am trying to remember that you are a guest in my house and that your defences are unlikely to be as strong against me as you pretend. In fact I could bend you to my will as easily as that!' He flicked his fingers under her nose. 'Could I not, Miss Beaumont?'
'Yes,' she whispered, more scared than she liked to admit.
His expression softened. 'Yes,' he repeated after her. 'Remember that,
cara mia,
the next time you pit your strength against mine! You can only win if I allow you to!'
'But '
He bent his head, brushing his lips against hers. 'There are no buts, Miss Beaumont. As my prisoner you must learn to do as you're told. Is it understood?'
And not try to escape again? Was she a coward not to even want to try?
'Yes,
signore
,' she said meekly, too meekly. Then she flung back her head and looked him straight in the eyes. 'But you can't stop me
thinking
about Michael!'
He smiled an ironic smile. 'You think not? I think I could, but I won't—not yet!' He opened the door for her and bowed to her as she preceded him out the door. 'Shall I take you back to your room?'
Deborah shook her head and fled. When she reached her room she tore off her clothes and climbed back into her brand new nightgown, burying her face thankfully into the soft pillows. But it was a long time before she slept. She turned on her side and wept bitterly for her lost illusions about Michael and men in general.
It was raining in the morning. Deborah looked out at the dripping skies and marvelled inwardly that they should have caught her mood so exactly.
How was she going to face Domenico Manzu?
Her spirits quailed at the prospect. Domenico was like no one else she had ever met, or was ever likely to, and she hadn't the remotest idea how to cope with him.
It was easier to imagine Michael's reaction to the unpromising weather. He would take the pouring rain as a personal insult to himself, and there was something rather loveable about that. Domenico had no such comfortable idiosyncrasies for her to dwell on. He was as unyielding and as arrogant as the side of a mountain and she had never had much of a head for heights. If she had a little of his devastating confidence in himself she might have found an equal ability to deal with her own rebellious emotions before he had taken any desire to do so out of her hands with a masterful ease that made her breathless just to think about. No one had ever kissed her with such appalling effect, demanding a surrender her traitorous body had exulted in making. It was that that threatened to destroy her. A physical response to his lovemaking she could have understood, but she, unasked and unsought, would have presented him with her heart and mind as well. Only her pride had saved her from revelling in the new allegiance her whole being had discovered in his embrace—and this when she knew he was more than half engaged to marry Alessandra and that he was only passing the time of day with herself.
Be that as it may, somehow or other he had to be faced, and there seemed to be only one answer to that particular problem. She would pretend to herself that she was playing a part and was not really herself at all. She had all the props to hand: a palace, new clothes such as she had never worn before, and a prevailing sense of unreality that had persisted even in her dreams all through the long night that had followed her unsuccessful attempt to escape from the custody of Domenico Manzu! Domenico Manzu, she repeated dreamily to herself. Ah, there was a name to conjure with! It would take a poorer spirit than hers to have much difficulty in pretending that he, too, was nothing more than part of this episode of fantasy in which she had somehow become involved.
She wore a dress of navy-blue, with a Quaker collar and cuffs on the short sleeves. In it she looked slimmer than she did in jeans and, she was pleased to see, much less young and vulnerable than she had feared. Only her sea-green eyes, deep and mysterious, betrayed a lack of sophistication that at that moment she could only deplore. When she looked back at herself in the looking-glass, she looked scared stiff.
'Dio mio!'
she taunted herself, remembering Domenico's exclamation of the night before. 'What more can he do to you?'
The unspoken answer brought a hot wave of colour to her face. Deborah didn't see herself as pretty at all in that moment. She was filled with exasperation that she couldn't better control her inner self. It had seen a governor it liked far better and her own inadequate measures to restore order were dismissed with the contempt they deserved.
'What am I going to do?' she asked herself.
Her mirror-image had no suggestions to make, except what amounted to cowardice in the face of the enemy, to ring for the maid and to ask to have her breakfast brought to her room. But, if she did that, how much harder would it be to face Domenico at lunch-time?
She snatched up her handbag, stuffing a lipstick into its empty spaces alongside her purse and a spare handkerchief, and raced for the stairs, giving herself no time to change her mind and cower in her room after all. Her high-heeled shoes sounded on the marble of the stairs and gave her something else to think about. She was unaccustomed to the sound of her footsteps echoing through such majestic spaces.
Gianetta heard her coming and smiled up at her. 'What a super dress! Did you choose it, or did that brother of mine?'
Deborah's expression froze. 'Does it matter?'
'Not a bit! You look a million dollars in it, whoever chose it!'
Deborah clutched the banister, discovering too late that its generous width forbade her stretching her hand across it. She lurched forward, retrieved her step with only a slight loss of dignity, and sailed down the rest of the stairs with her head held high.
'Domenico chose it! Naturally!'
'Naturally,' Gianetta agreed on a sigh. 'He has very good taste.'
Domenico had heard the exchange and was standing waiting for them in the dining room. He had his head on one side and his eyes were bright as he watched the two girls come into the room.
'I'm glad you approve my choice,' he said dryly to his sister. 'She looks charming, as I knew she would, but I think when we go on our sightseeing expedition she had better wear a hat.' His eyes met Deborah's. 'You will be able to hide behind the brim,' he added with a slight smile.
'Hide from whom?' she asked in creditably steady tones.
'From the men in your life?' he suggested, openly laughing at her.
She gave him a startled glance. Did he mean
Michael
? Belatedly, she remembered that she was his prisoner and that of course he didn't want to have her recognised by any of her friends.