Secrets of Castillo del Arco

Damned if he would let a Garbas worm his way into Umberto’s granddaughter’s fortune. Damned if he would ever let that happen after what he had suffered. But Raoul was the last person who could keep her safe.

Besides, did Umberto really think it would be such a simple matter to get a twenty four year old woman—any woman, for that matter—to agree to marry him? Why should she give him a second glance when he could give her nothing in return? She would be some kind of fool if she did.

He took his friend’s hand again, half-wondering, half-knowing that this would be the last time they met. ‘Umberto, old friend—my friend—I love you with my life, but this makes no sense. There must be a better way to keep Gabriella safe and I will find it. But I would be no kind of husband for your granddaughter.’

‘I’m not asking you to love her!’ he blustered from the bed, the machines beside him going into overdrive. ‘Just marry her. Keep her safe!’ The door burst open, a nurse rushing through, pushing the visitor aside as she checked her patient.

‘Visit’s over,’ she snapped out without looking over her shoulder. ‘You’re upsetting my patient.’

Raoul raised his face to the ceiling in supplication and frustration. When he looked back at the bed where the nurse fussed, checked and adjusted drips and machines, his old friend looked so forlorn and desperate and beyond tired, a shadow of a man who had once been great. It struck Raoul that his last moments, his last days, should not be wasted in worry such as this, even if it meant promising the impossible so that he might at least die in peace. Umberto deserved that at least.

‘I’ll marry her, old friend, if that is what you ask,’ he said, ignoring the warning scowl he earned in reward from the nurse, grinding the words out between his teeth as the wire in his gut pulled inexorably tighter and trying desperately not to think of the cost to them both. ‘I’ll marry her.’

CHAPTER ONE

Three weeks later

WINTER had come early, the late-September day dressed in drab colours as if the planet itself was mourning the death of her grandfather. But the inclement weather found only empathy with Gabriella D’Arenberg, the damp air and misty rain matching her mood as she stood beside her grandfather’s flower-strewn grave in the Cimetiere de Passy. Then the last of the mourners whispered condolences and pressed cold lips briefly to her cheeks before drifting away along the path.

She would leave shortly too, once Consuelo had returned from the call he had excused himself to take, and they would join everyone at the hotel where the caterers were no doubt already serving canapés and cognac. But for now Gabriella was happy to be left alone in quiet reflection in the cold, dank stillness of the graveyard. Here, under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, there was nothing to intrude, the sounds of the city barely penetrating the stone walls.

Until a dark shadow made her gasp and look around.

He appeared out of the fog, tall, broad and dark as night as he moved stealthily between the funeral sculptures, the winged angels and fat cherubs suspended ghost-like in the swirling mist as he passed. A shiver of recognition—or was it of relief?—washed through her and bizarrely, for the first time that day, she felt warm.

Raoul.

She had seen him at the service; it had been impossible to miss his dark presence in the back of the tiny crowded chapel. Her heart had lifted at the prospect of seeing him again after so many years, only to exit the chapel to a bubble of disappointment when she had found him nowhere amongst the mourners gathered outside.

Raoul, who with his intense black eyes and passionate mouth had been her every adolescent fantasy—dark fantasies she’d had no right to imagine. Wicked fantasies that brought a blush to her cheeks just thinking about them. And, when she’d got news that he’d married, she’d cried for two days solid. She’d cried for him a year later when she’d learned of his wife’s death. Thank God he had no idea about any of it or she could never face him now. Thank God she was over all that.

The crunch of boots on gravel grew louder, his long leather coat swirling about his legs, his hair pulled back into a ponytail that served to accentuate the strong lines and angles of his chiselled features. His eyes, if anything, were even more intense than she remembered under that dark slash of brow. Tortured, even. And something about that intensity frightened her a little, just as if his purposeful stride held a portent of danger, sending a tremor skittering down her spine.

The mist, she thought in explanation, as she continued to log his approach with her eyes. The cold, swirling air …

The air shifted and parted before him and then he was there, standing before her, a mountain of blackness in a mist-shrouded world, so tall that she had to tilt her head back to look up at him and his unflinching expression. He didn’t smile. She didn’t expect him to, not really, not this day.

But this was Raoul, an old family friend, so she dismissed her feelings of foreboding and danger and ventured a nervous smile of greeting, slipping her hands instinctively into his as easily as she had once done, relishing their instant warmth, thinking, you came. ‘Raoul, it’s so good to see you.’

For a moment he seemed to tense, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark by presuming familiarity. Then his hands squeezed hers and the tightness around his mouth relaxed just enough to give an answering smile that still spoke of sadness and loss. ‘Gabriella,’ he said in a way that seemed to cherish every syllable as he uttered it.

Then he leaned down to kiss first one cheek, and then the other, slow, lingering kisses. She shuddered under the brush of his lips against her flesh, his warm breath curling into hers and peeling back the years. She breathed him in, taken by the way he smelt so familiar, of clean skin and warm leather and the same woody notes of his signature scent that she recalled—yet there was so much more besides, as if what she’d remembered had been but a shadow of his essence.

‘I am so sorry for your loss.’ He drew back then, letting her hands drop, and she tried desperately not to be disappointed by his absence, shoving her hands in her coat pockets, not just to keep them warm but more to stop them reaching out for him. Those teenage fantasies might have been behind her, but Raoul was here now, real, broad and achingly close. Inside her pockets, her hands curled into fists.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she managed a little shakily, surprised he could still affect her so deeply and so fundamentally, even after so many years. ‘Or you could have stayed at the house. Where are you staying? You should have let me know.’

He rattled off the name of a hotel that barely registered in the force of the impact of seeing him again. But then, she was hardly herself right now. Memories, especially memories of anything and anyone connected to her grandfather, seemed all too willing to bubble to the surface. Raoul had been close to her grandfather for longer than she had, their two families intertwined as long as she could remember, at least until the tragedy that had wiped out both sets of parents. ‘And of course,’ she said, acknowledging that truth, ‘It’s your loss too.’

‘Umberto was a good man,’ he said with a nod, his deep voice rich with emotion. ‘I will miss him more than I can say.’ Then he blinked and something skated across his eyes, something so sharp and painful she could almost feel its sting, so fleeting it was gone before she could make sense of it, even if he hadn’t turned his head to look down at the grave.

Remembering, she assumed, as she studied his profile and catalogued the changes time had wrought. He had always been on the outer edge of good-looking, his dark, strong features organised in a way that was compelling rather than handsome in any conventional sense, the shadows in his features hinting at unknown dangers and untold secrets.

How many nights had she lain awake imagining all those dangers, all those secrets, wishing she might one day know them all?

Age had lent him even more mystery. The angles of his jaw looked sharper. The secrets hinted at in the shadows seemed darker, his eyes more haunted. True, there were lines around his eyes, but he was simply more, she decided, more than he had been before. More edgy. More mysterious.

More Raoul.

And with a start she realised that, while she’d been lost in her musings, he had changed his focus and was now studying her.

Dark-as-midnight eyes scanned her face, a hint of a frown creasing his brow, and she wondered if something was wrong before he nodded, gave her another of those slight smiles and stepped away a little to look at her. ‘Whatever happened to the Gabriella I used to know? The skinny girl with plaits who always had her head in a book.’

She hid her embarrassment under a laugh, secretly hoping his comments meant that he approved of how she looked now, for it seemed important somehow that he did. She had long since come to terms with the knowledge that she’d never be classically beautiful—her eyes were too large and wide, and the chin that she’d hidden under a hand for much of her early teenage years was too pointy. But it was her face and over the years she’d learned to accept it, if it had taken finishing school to give her the skills to emphasise her eyes and learn to like how she looked. ‘She grew up, Raoul. That skinny girl was a long, long time ago.’

‘It was,’ he agreed, and then he paused, as if remembering another time, other bleak days filled with funerals … ‘How have you been?’

She shrugged. ‘Good. And sometimes not so good.’ She glanced at the open grave, felt the anguish of loss bite hard and bite deep. ‘But, even so, better now for seeing you.’ She paused, wondering how much she could say without revealing too much of herself, and then decided simply to be honest. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

‘And me.’ His dark eyes looked past her. ‘But you should not be alone now.’

‘Oh, I’m not. Not really. Consuelo—a friend—is here. He left … ‘ She looked around, pushing a loose tendril of hair from her face as she scanned the cemetery. ‘He left to take an urgent phone call.’ That seemed to be taking for ever. ‘Probably for one of his foundations, I expect. He heads a charity for children with cancer and leukaemia. He’s always on the phone chasing contributions.’

She was babbling, she knew, making excuses for him as she glanced at her watch before scanning the grounds again, wondering how he could let one of his donors keep him so long, today of all days. ‘We’re heading to the hotel shortly for the wake. Everyone’s already there.’

She looked back up at him, suddenly fearful that this man was about to step out of her life as quickly as he had stepped back into it, leaving her with no idea when she might ever see him again. The thought of going another ten-plus years was suddenly too awful to contemplate. ‘You will come, won’t you? I saw you in the chapel but you’d disappeared by the time I got outside, and I thought I’d missed you. There’s so much I want to talk to you about.’

He lifted a hand and pushed that wayward coil of her hair from her cheek with just the pads of his fingers, the lightest touch that sent a rush of heat pulsing through her. ‘Of course I will come. It will be my pleasure.’

Breath stalled in her lungs; his fingers lingered as he coiled the strands behind her ear, as he looked down at her with those dark, dark eyes …

‘Gabby!’

She blinked, registering her name, but registering even more that Raoul had still not removed his hand. His fingers curved around her neck, gently stroking her skin, warm and evocative, even as she angled her head towards Consuelo’s approach. The touch of an old friend, she told herself, reaching out to someone over a shared loss; it was nothing more than that. It would be rude, an over reaction, to brush his hand away.

‘Are you coming?’ Consuelo asked, still metres away and frowning as his eyes shifted from one to the other, taking in the tableau. ‘We’re going to be late.’

‘Gabriella was waiting for you, as it happens,’ Raoul said, and she looked up at him, surprised. For, even if he had correctly assumed this was Consuelo, that would hardly explain the note of barely contained animosity in his words.

Consuelo didn’t seem to notice. He seemed far more interested in staring at Raoul’s hand where it lingered at her throat, as if just the heat from his glare would make it disappear. For the first time she wondered if maybe it had been there too long. She put her hand to his and tugged it down, but wasn’t about to let him go completely, sandwiching it between her own instead. She noticed he made no move to withdraw from her completely.

‘Am I missing something?’ she asked, looking from one to the other, for the first time realising the similarities in the two men—and the differences. Both shared Spanish colouring, with dark eyes and hair, but that was where the similarities began and ended. Raoul was taller, broader, more imposing. He made Consuelo look almost small. ‘Do you two know each other?’

‘Consuelo and I are old friends,’ Raoul uttered slowly, in a measured tone that suggested they were anything but. ‘Aren’t we, Consuelo?’ The other man’s eyes skittered with something approximating fear before he turned to Gabriella, tugging on his tie.

‘Phillipa said the priest wanted to say a few words,’ he said, ignoring the other man as much as it was physically able. ‘He’s waiting for you to arrive to begin. Now.’

‘Phillipa called you?’ Was that the phone call that had kept him so long? That was odd. Her friend had never before called Consuelo; Gabriella wasn’t convinced Phillipa even liked him. Unless Phillipa had figured—correctly, as it turned out—that her phone would be off and that Consuelo, with his twenty-four-seven phone addiction, would be a better bet. She nodded. At least that made some kind of sense. ‘Then we should go. Raoul, can we offer you a lift?’