To Kiss a Count

‘Blast it all,’ she muttered, wishing she could dash her fan against something, as Calliope had. Why, why, had he come into her life again? Reminding her of things she could never have.

Fortunately, Calliope was too preoccupied to hear Thalia’s little outburst. ‘Ah, here is a chair,’ she exclaimed, drawing Thalia with her as she claimed the last open seat along the wall just ahead of one of those dandies.

‘Now I have kept my promise to Cameron to sit down,’ Calliope said, snapping open that fan. ‘Now I must keep mine to you, Thalia dear.’

Thalia laughed. ‘I don’t recall any promises.’

‘The one where I vowed to find you a dancing partner. Do you see anyone who strikes your fancy?’

Thalia scanned the dancers, the people chattering on the side of the room, the strollers. ‘Not at all.’

‘There must be someone! Look closer. I refuse to allow you to stay by me all evening, not when I know how you love to dance.’

It was true, Thalia did love to dance. Even now her feet itched to skip and spin in time to the music. She had not had a dance since…

Since the masquerade ball in Santa Lucia. When she and Marco had danced tarantellas and waltzes beneath Demeter’s harvest moon. The Bath ballroom before her faded, shifting into a warm Sicilian night, a blur of masks and dreams.

She remembered how it had felt when Marco had held her in his arms and she had leaned into his shoulder. How warm and strong his lean body had been through the thin cloth of his shirt, how he had smelled of citrus and ginger. She had just wanted to stay there for ever, wrapped up in him, inhaling that essence of him into herself until they were as one.

In that moment, she had forgotten so much. Forgotten who she was, who he was. Forgotten he loved her sister, that he was involved in mysterious schemes she could have no part of. Being in his arms felt right. It felt like what she had been waiting for.

Someone bumped into her, jolting her out of her Italian dreams and back into Bath. Into the cold reality of her dull, English-lady, useless life. Sicily, and the new sense of energised purpose she had once felt there—it was gone. Dancing in Marco’s arms was gone.

‘No, Cal,’ she said. ‘I don’t see anyone I would want to dance with.’

Calliope gazed up at her intently, searching for something behind this refusal. Thalia gave her a bright smile. She was getting good at that lately, yet it did not seem to fool her sister at all.

‘It is early yet,’Calliope said, waving her fan until her black hair stirred. ‘Perhaps more of the gentlemen can be coaxed from the card room later.’

‘Perhaps,’ Thalia said. But she was equally sure there was no one in there she wanted to dance with, either.

Cameron soon found them, giving his wife her punch, and Thalia excused herself. She claimed she sought the ladies’withdrawing room, but in truth she just wanted a moment alone. A moment to suppress those memories again.

In Santa Lucia, for those few days when Clio had asked for help, Thalia had felt useful. Needed. Her talents for the theatre could be used to bring about justice for a thief, to retrieve a treasure of Italian history! No one had ever needed her help before, or found her useful. She was always just the little sister, to be protected and petted. She wanted to help, wanted a mission.

Those days, working with Clio, Averton and Marco, had filled her with energy, a purpose, a passion she had never known before. She was part of a common cause, and that felt wonderful.

The surprised admiration in Marco’s eyes wasn’t bad, either.

Coming back to England, to her old role of cosseted, useless beauty, had frozen all of that. It was just a crystalline memory now.

As was the Marco she had known then. She could hardly think what to make of this new Marco, Lady Riverton’s flirtatious companion.

Thalia found her way down a flight of stairs behind a cluster of giggling young ladies. As they disappeared through a doorway, she stayed back, halted before a looking glass on the wall.

For an instant, she thought she faced a stranger. Then she realised that the lady standing there in pale pink muslin, blonde curls bound with a pearl diadem, was still her. Memories of Italy had not changed her at all. Outwardly, anyway. She still looked like a blasted porcelain shepherdess.

She stepped close to the glass, reaching up to tuck an errant lock back into her coiffure. Her gloved fingertips trailed over her cheekbone, just beneath one blue eye. If she looked more like Clio, tall, auburn-haired, sun-browned as an Amazon warrior, and not so much as if she belonged in a swing in a Versailles garden, would people take her seriously?

Would Marco love her then, as he loved Clio? Or would she just be a distraction, an affair, like Lady Riverton?

‘Never say you have found something to displease you there,’ a softly accented voice said behind her. ‘For truly your face is nothing less than perfection.’

Thalia’s heart suddenly pounded in her breast at the sound of that voice. Her gaze shifted in the glass, finding Marco’s reflection just over her shoulder. He watched her, and for once he did not smile, there was no teasing gleam in his eyes. He seemed a part of the shadows.

Her hand fell to her side. ‘One could say the same about you. All the ladies are just as in love with you here in Bath as they were in Sicily.’

A whisper of a smile just touched the corner of his lips. ‘All of them, Thalia cara?’

‘Most of them.’ She turned away from the mirror, facing him. Perhaps that was a mistake, though. Looking into his eyes reminded her too much of that masked ball, of dancing under the dusty-black Sicilian sky. ‘And yet you seem to have eyes now for only one.’

Marco gave a low, deep chuckle, that maddening dimple flashing in his cheek. ‘Indeed I do.’ He took a step towards her, then another and another, until he leaned his palm on the wall just beyond her head, his touch brushing her hair. He leaned in close, so close she could see the shadow of dark whiskers along his sculpted jaw, the flecks of gold in his brown eyes.

That light citrus-ginger smell, blended with clean starch and the dark essence of him, reached out to her like a beckoning caress. Tempting her to lean into him, to curl her hands into the soft linen of his shirt and hold him against her. When he gazed at her like that, so solemn and intent, she forgot her name, where she was, everything. Everything but him and the way he made her feel like the only woman in all the world.

She even reached up to graze her fingertips along the satin lapel of his coat, but that last faint thought stopped her touch. He made every female feel like the only one. He caught them within the snare of his beautiful eyes, and they became giggling, silly creatures, just like Lady Riverton.

Feeling that sudden cold tinge of disappointment, of hurt, Thalia turned her head to the side so she could no longer see him. Her hand fell to her skirt. She did not want to be like all the others! She didn’t want to lose herself in some silly infatuation. To go helplessly following Marco around Bath with all his other fawning acolytes. She wanted purpose in her life, and that was not it!

Yet he still stood there, his arm inches away from her cheek, gazing down at her as if he could discern all her secrets.

‘What would Lady Riverton say if she could see you here with me?’ Thalia murmured, peering at him from beneath her lashes.

Marco frowned. ‘Lady Riverton?’

‘Yes. Are you not here in Bath as her devoted swain? I suppose she was in need of a replacement for poor Mr Frobisher, after they parted so precipitously in Santa Lucia! Though I must say you are far more handsome than he ever was.’

And surely he was in need of a replacement for Clio, for his hopeless feelings for her. But Thalia found she could not say that aloud. Once, for a few blissful days in Sicily, she had felt free of all constraints. Free to say and express whatever she liked. Here, everything was different.

He was different, too. No matter how close he was physically, there was a vast gulf between them.

Marco’s fingers curled into a fist against the wall. ‘Lady Riverton and I are merely, how you say—friends,’ he said tightly.

‘Friends as you and I were?’ Thalia said. ‘Or like you and Clio?’

‘No one can ever be quite like the Chases, I think. Lady Riverton merely offered to be my tour guide here in Bath, to show me the sites. How could I say no, after my old friendship with her late husband?’