The Storm Within

‘The Count will not be pleased.’

She had no comeback to that, other than to swing herself onto the withered and cracked upholstery of the passenger seat before he could drive away without her.

The Jeep lurched into life and she clutched her briefcase tighter in her lap as the vehicle tore up the narrow road. If you could call it a road, Grace thought, as it narrowed to little more than a one-lane track, zig-zagging up the cliff-face. She made the mistake of looking out of the car as he took another impossibly tight bend, and saw stones spraying over the edge of the cliff, spilling towards the boat now shrinking below. She squeezed her eyes shut.

‘Do you think maybe you could drive a little slower?’

He shook his head gravely, muttered something under his breath.

‘Only I would like to get to look at the discovery before I die.’

‘The Count,’ he almost grunted, ignoring her attempt at humour, ‘he is expecting the Professor.’

‘Yes, you said. I tried to explain—’

‘He will not be pleased.’

Conversation was clearly not his forte. She tried to concentrate on the spectacular view across the expanse of Mediterranean to where the coastline of Italy was just visible in the distance, while trying not to think about the height of the cliff they were scaling that made such a magnificent view possible. But it was the subject of her driver’s concern who stole her concentration and reminded her that the real reason for this coiling uneasiness in her gut was not down to anticipation at working on an ancient text, or motion sickness, or even the brooding castle, but dread.

Therese Rousseau had warned her. She’d said he was difficult and the driver’s words did nothing to suggest the Professor had been unfair in her description. In fact, if anything, maybe she’d been a trifle flattering.

What exactly happened when the Count was not pleased? What was it that she had to look forward to?

At least the Jeep had managed to scale the cliff. The track was widening and now bordered in rocks she could tell had once been painted white, though now they were chipped and faded, their paint worn from exposure to the salt-laden air.

She shivered—the air was noticeably cooler at this height—and looked up in time to see the sun disappear behind the darkening clouds. And despite knowing in her brain that it meant nothing, that it was purely a meteorological phenomenon she was witnessing and not some kind of omen, even though she fought it with all she knew about the world, still she felt an unwanted and illogical sliver of fear slip down her spine.

The massive iron gates clanging shut behind them as they entered the castle grounds did nothing to assuage her unease. Now tension had her tightly wound, but she kept her breathing light as her driver crunched the gears while circling a tiered fountain featuring water nymphs and dolphins—a fountain that was as dry and neglected as the border of leggy, unkempt rosemary bushes that surrounded it.

Everywhere, it seemed, was shrouded in neglect, as if nothing had been touched for years.

And she wondered how anything as fragile as a book had survived in this place for the centuries it was reputed to have.

A miracle?

Or a curse?

This time the tremor seemed to chill her very bones. Great, she thought, doing her utmost to shake off the irrational sense of impending danger. So much for priding herself on being a logical scientist.

The Jeep jerked to a halt and the driver jumped out. ‘Come,’ he instructed, not bothering with her duffel this time, but leaving it to her to retrieve as he pushed open giant timber doors that stretched at least twelve feet high and yet still looked minuscule when compared to the mountainous castle walls that dwarfed them.

And then they were inside and the temperature dropped again. Her footsteps over the massive flagstones echoed in the vast, empty entry hall. Or maybe that was just her heartbeat racing fast and loud …

For a thickset man, her guide moved fast, his short legs carrying him surprisingly quickly up a flight of stairs that looked as if they’d come straight from Sleeping Beauty’s castle. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked from the bottom of the stairs, but he gave no answer, and she didn’t need it to know there was no hope of him taking her directly to the documents she’d come to examine.

The Count, she knew. The same Count who she’d been warned repeatedly would not be pleased. She sighed and started up the stairs behind him, lugging both her briefcase and her duffel. Might as well get the unpleasantries over and done with in that case. Maybe then she could get to work.

She followed him along a long passageway. The walls were dressed with rich burgundy drapes, between which hung portraits of, she assumed, counts long gone. Superiority shone from their steely eyes, along with a sense of entitlement for the world and all its riches. The Counts of Volta, she surmised, were not of modest, unassuming stock. But then why should they be modest, with potent looks that were as masculinely beautiful as they were darkly dangerous?

Slight differences distinguished one from another—a slight tilt of nose, an angle of jaw—and yet all of them in that long, seemingly endless row bore the same dark eyes and brows, topped by the same distinct hairline that intruded onto their temples in sharp points, almost like a shadow cast from … She stopped herself, refusing the link she’d made in her mind. They so did not resemble horns! She was being ridiculous even thinking it.

Besides, she’d researched the latest Count Volta late last night, after the Professor had called with her news, when both the excitement of the task ahead and the cryptic ‘You’ll be fine’ had banished any thoughts of sleep. And she’d remembered then why his name had seemed vaguely familiar, remembered hearing around her eighteenth birthday news reports of the party boat explosion off the Costa Smerelda. Last night she’d read again of the shocking death toll and of the miracle survivor who’d lost his fiancée and his friends that night and who, scarred and bereft, had walked away and turned his back on both a promising career as a concert pianist and society.

The media had pursued him for a while, she’d read, seeking exclusives and exposés, before apparently tiring of the fruitless chase and moving on to juicier, more obliging celebrity prey. And so, entrenched in his self-imposed exile on his island home, he’d slipped into obscurity.

Who could blame him for cutting himself off from the world after an accident like that? Maybe it was no surprise he was ‘difficult’. But it said something for the man that he hadn’t kept the discovery of the documents secret. He would have known the potential for the discovery to once again focus the world’s attention squarely on him. No wonder he’d insisted on only one specialist, and for the job to be completed inside a week.

Which was fine with her. She didn’t want to hang around a crotchety old hermit and his crumbling castle a moment longer than necessary. She wouldn’t get in his way and hopefully he’d stay out of hers.

Her guide came to an abrupt halt, rapping briefly on a pair of doors before poking his head inside one of them, leaving her no choice but to cool her heels behind him. ‘She’s here but it’s not the Professor,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told the boat not to leave until you’re ready.’ And then he swept back past her without a glance, as if fleeing in case he was blamed for collecting the wrong baggage.

So that was why he hadn’t brought her bag in and she’d had to lug it herself—because he thought she wasn’t staying. If she’d needed anything to dispel any remaining shred of apprehension, her introduction as some kind of afterthought fitted the bill perfectly. She pushed open the door he’d left ajar.

‘My name is Grace Hunter and I have a letter of introduction from Professor …’ Her words shrivelled up in a throat suddenly drier than the fountain outside, and it might very well have been clogged with stranded sea nymphs and beached dolphins.

Where was the crotchety old hermit she’d been expecting? The modern-day Robinson Crusoe complete with beard and tattered clothes? Someone who matched the air of neglect that shrouded the rest of this barren island and its crumbling castle? But there was nothing tattered about the man who stood looking out of the window across the room from her now, nothing neglected.

‘… Rousseau.’

The name fell heavily into the empty space between them. He stood still as a statue, his hands clasped behind his stiff back, clad in a suit tailored so superbly to his tall, lean body it almost looked part of him.

But it was his profile that captured her attention, and the clear similarities to his forebears lining the portrait gallery. His strong nose and resolute jaw, and the unmistakable mark of the Counts of Volta, the clearly defined dark hairline that intruded in sharp points at his temples. And he was every bit as powerfully beautiful as those who had gone before. Which made no sense at all …

She swallowed. ‘Count Volta?’

CHAPTER THREE

ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, confronted her full-on.

A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.

She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.

His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’

Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.

He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’

‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’

‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’

His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?

No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’

He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.