Vows Made in Secret

He sighed. Not that he wasn’t proud of being a de Zsadany. It was just that the name brought certain responsibilities along with it. Such as Seymour’s impending visit. He gritted his teeth. If only the blasted man would ring and cancel.

As if on cue, his mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. Clumsy with shock, and a ridiculous sense of guilt, he pulled it out with shaking fingers: it was Jakob! Relief, and the tiniest feeling of regret, washed over him.

‘Laszlo! I thought you’d be up. I know you’ll have forgotten, so I’ve just rung to remind you that we have a visitor arriving today.’

Laszlo shook his head. Typical Jakob—ringing to check up on him. Jakob Frankel was the de Zsadany family lawyer, and a good man, but Laszlo couldn’t imagine letting his guard down with him or any other outsider. Not any more: not after what had happened the last time.

‘I know you won’t believe me, Jakob, but I did actually remember it was happening today.’

He heard the lawyer laugh nervously.

‘Excellent! I’ve arranged a car, but if you could be on hand to greet—?’

‘Of course I will,’ Laszlo interrupted testily, irritated by the tentative note in the lawyer’s voice. He paused, aware that he sounded churlish. ‘I want to be there,’ he muttered roughly. ‘And let me know if I can do anything else.’ It was the nearest he got to an apology.

‘Of course. Of course! But I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ Jakob spoke hurriedly, his desire to end the conversation clearly overriding his normal deference.

Laszlo murmured non-committally. For most of his life Janos’s hobby had seemed a strangely soulless and senseless exercise. But Annuska’s death had changed that opinion as it had changed everything else.

After her funeral life at the castle had grown increasingly bleak. Janos had been in a state of shock, inconsolable with grief. But once the shock had worn off his misery had turned into a kind of depression—a lethargy which no amount of time seemed able to heal. Laszlo had been in despair; weeks and months had turned into years. Until slowly, and then with increasing momentum, his grandfather had become almost his old self.

The reason for his recovery, like all catalysts for change, had been wholly unexpected. A stack of letters between Annuska and Janos had reminded him of their mutual passion for art.

Tentatively, not daring to hope, Laszlo had encouraged his grandfather to revive his former hobby. To his surprise, Janos had begun to lose his listless manner and then, out of the blue, his grandfather had decided to have his sprawling collection catalogued. Seymour’s auction house in London had been contacted and its flamboyant owner, Edmund Seymour, had duly been invited to visit Kastely Almasy.

Laszlo grimaced. His grandfather’s happiness had overridden his own feeling but how on earth was he going to put up with this stranger in his home?

Jakob’s voice broke into his thoughts.

‘I mean, I know how you hate having people around—’ There was a sudden awkward silence and then the lawyer cleared his throat. ‘What I meant to say was—’

Laszlo interrupted him curtly. ‘There are more than thirty rooms at the castle, Jakob, so I think I’ll be able to cope with one solitary guest, don’t you?’

He felt a sudden, fierce stab of self-loathing. Seymour could stay for a year if it made his grandfather happy. And, really, what was a few weeks? Since Annuska’s death time had ceased to matter. Nothing much mattered except healing his grandfather.

‘I can manage,’ he repeated gruffly.

‘Of course...of course.’ The lawyer laughed nervously. ‘You might even enjoy it. In fact, Janos was only saying to me yesterday that this visit might be a good opportunity to invite some of the neighbours for drinks or dinner. The Szecsenyis are always good fun and they have a daughter around your age.’

In the early-morning light the room seemed suddenly grey and cold, like a tomb. Laszlo felt his fingers tighten around the handset as his heart started to pound out a drumroll of warning.

He took a shallow breath, groping for calm. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said finally. His tone was pleasant, but there was no mistaking the note of high-tensile steel in his voice. ‘I mean, our guest may simply prefer paintings to people.’

He knew what his grandfather really wanted, and why he had inveigled Jakob into suggesting it. Janos secretly longed to see his only grandchild married—to see Laszlo sharing his life with a soulmate. And why wouldn’t he? After all, Janos himself had been blissfully happy during his forty-year marriage.

Laszlo’s fingers curled into his palms. If only he could do it. If only he could marry a perfectly sweet, pretty girl like Agnes Szecsenyi. That would be worth more than fifty art collections to Janos.

But that was never going to happen. For he had a secret, and no matter how many dinner dates his grandfather engineered, a wife was most certainly not going to result from any of them.

* * *

‘Now, you have read my notes properly, haven’t you, Prue? Only you do have a tendency to skim...’

Pushing a strand of pale blonde hair out of her cloud-grey eyes, Prudence Elliot took a deep breath and counted slowly up to ten. Her plane had landed in Hungary only an hour ago, but this was the third time Uncle Edmund had rung her to see how she was doing: in other words, he was checking up on her.

Edmund paused. ‘I don’t want to sound like a nag, but it’s just... Well, I just wish I could be there with you...you do understand?’

His voice cut through her juddering, panicky thoughts and her anxiety was instantly replaced by guilt. Of course she understood. Her uncle had built up the auction house that bore his name from scratch. And today would have undoubtedly been the most important day of his career—the pinnacle of his life’s work: cataloguing reclusive Hungarian billionaire Janos Almasy de Zsadany’s legendary art collection.

With a lurch of fear, Prudence remembered the look of excitement and terror on Edmund’s face when he’d been invited to the de Zsadany castle in Hungary. His words kept replaying in her head.

‘The man’s a modern Medici, Prue. Of course no one actually knows the exact contents of his collection. But a conservative valuation would be over a billion dollars.’

It should be Edmund with his thirty years of experience sitting in the back of the sleek, shark-nosed de Zsadany limousine. Not Prudence, who felt she could offer little more than her uncle’s reputation by proxy. Only Edmund was in England, confined to bed, recovering from a major asthma attack.

Biting her lip, she glanced out of the window at the dark fields. She hadn’t wanted to come. But she’d had no choice. Edmund owed money, and with debts mounting and interest accruing on those debts the business was in jeopardy. The fee from the de Zsadany job would balance the books, but the de Zsadany family lawyer had been adamant that work must start immediately. And so, reluctantly, she’d agreed to go to Hungary.

She heard Edmund sigh down the phone.

‘I’m sorry, Prue,’ he said slowly. ‘You shouldn’t have to put up with my nagging when you’ve been so good about all this.’

Instantly she felt ashamed. Edmund was like a father to her. He had given her everything: a home, a family, security and even a job. She wasn’t about to let him down now, in his hour of need.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to inject some confidence into her voice. ‘Please try not to worry, Edmund. If I need anything at all I’ll ring you. But I’ll be fine. I promise.’

He rang off and gratefully Prudence leant back against the leather upholstery and closed her eyes until, in what felt like no time at all, the car began to slow. She opened her eyes. Two tall wrought-iron gates swung smoothly open to let the limousine pass, and within minutes she was looking up at a huge, grey stone castle straight out of a picture book.

Later she would realise that she had no memory of how she got from the car to the castle. She remembered only that somehow she had found herself in a surprisingly homely sitting room, lit softly by a collection of table lamps and the glow of a log fire. She was about to sit down on a faded Knole Sofa when she noticed the painting.

Her heart started to pound. Stepping closer, she reached out with one trembling hand and touched the frame lightly, and then her eyes made a slow tour of the walls. She felt light-headed—as though she had woken up in dream. There were two Picassos—pink period—a delightfully exuberant Kandinsky, a Rembrandt portrait that would have sent Edmund into a state of near ecstasy, and a pair of exquisite Lucian Freud etchings of a sleeping whippet.

She was still in a state of moderate shock when an amused-sounding voice behind her said softly, ‘Please—take a closer look. I’m afraid the poor things get completely ignored by the rest of us.’

Prudence turned scarlet. To be caught snooping around someone’s sitting room like some sort of burglar was bad enough, but when that someone was your host, and one of the richest men in Europe, it was mortifying.

‘I’m so—so sorry,’ she stammered, turning round. ‘What must you...?’ The remainder of her apology died in her throat, the words colliding into one another with a series of shuddering jolts as her world imploded. For it was not Janos Almasy de Zsadany standing there but Laszlo Cziffra.

Laszlo Cziffra. Once his name had tasted hot and sweet in her mouth; now it was bitter on her tongue. She felt her insides twist in pain as around her the room seemed to collapse and fold in on itself like a house of cards. It couldn’t be Laszlo—it just couldn’t. But it was, and she stared at him mutely, reeling from the shock of his perfection.

With his high cheekbones, sleek black hair and burning amber eyes, he was almost the same boy she had fallen in love with seven years ago: her beautiful Romany boy. Only he most certainly wasn’t hers any more; nor was he a boy. Now he was unmistakably a man: tall, broad-shouldered, intensely male, and with a suggestion of conformity that his younger self had lacked. Prudence shivered. But it was his eyes that had changed the most. Once, on seeing her, they would have burnt with the fierce lambent fire of passion. Now they were as cold and lifeless as ash.

She felt breathless, almost faint, and her hand moved involuntarily to her throat. Laszlo had been her first love—her first lover. He had been like sunlight and storms. She had never wanted anything or anyone more than him. And he had noticed her. Chosen her with a certainty that had left her breathless, replete, exultant. She had felt immortal. The knowledge of his love had swelled inside her—an immutable truth as permanent as the sun rising and setting.

Or so she’d believed seven years ago.

Only she’d been wrong. His focus on her—for that was what it had been—had burnt white-hot, fire-bright, and then faded fast like a supernova.

Prudence swallowed. It had been the ugliest thing that had happened to her. After the fierce bliss of what she’d believed was his love, that disorientating darkness had felt like death itself. And now, like a ghost from paradise lost, here he was, defying all logic and reason.