“Yes… No, thank…”
He grinned at the way she cut herself off from saying thank you. “You’re sure? It’s made from the grapes you won’t be buried beneath come Sunday.”
There was the slightest twitching of her lips before her chin jutted. “Just water for me.”
He shrugged and poured a glass of water from the jug for her, then topped his glass with the opened bottle of red wine and placed the bottle within easy reach of her. He knew perfectly well Callie had refused it on principle. Dante had always been good at reading people, a major factor he attributed to his business success. If you couldn’t read people, it became difficult, if not impossible, to judge those you would employ or go into business with. Niccolo was the same. One ofthe reasons Niccolo had found himself in his current mess of having to marry a woman he didn’t love was down to ignoring his own reading and judgement of the bride’s father. Dante suspected his current house guest had no idea how dangerous Lorenzo Esposito was or the danger she’d put herself in by coming to Italy. He would tell her before he set her free on Sunday, just to stop her from getting any more mad ideas, but for now, he thought it best to keep it from her. Ignorance, as the British liked to say, was bliss, and Callie had enough to be contending with for the moment.
For all his experience and instincts when it came to reading people, Dante had never come across anyone he could read so well and so quickly as Callie. It was those incredible large eyes. However contained – or uncontained, as she’d proved numerous times that day – her body language, those incredible eyes gave away exactly what she was thinking and feeling at any given time. She was fascinating. And seriously, seriously attractive.
“Please, help yourself to antipasti.” He swept a hand over the array of cold meats, olives, cheeses, tomatoes, figs, nuts and breadsticks laid out on a platter between them.
“I’m not hungry.”
“All the more for me then.” Without taking his eyes off her, Dante helped himself to a breadstick and broke it in half with a satisfying snap. “I’m starving.”
And Callie must be too. She hadn’t eaten in at least six hours.
Callie tried to tune out the fact of Dante devouring the cold food, tried to tune out the delicious scents emanating from the platter, and especially tried to tune out the rumbling in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten a scrap of food all day; her plan to grab some breakfast at the airport smothered by the tight knots the blazing row with Georgia had caused in it.
After swallowing what had looked like a ball of mozzarellatopped with a sun-blushed tomato, her captor nodded again at the platter. “Please, don’t starve yourself to make a point.”
“I’m not,” she lied.
“Good.” He helped himself to a plump green olive and gave that hateful yet butterfly-inducing smile. “Because if you were, the only person you would be hurting is yourself.”
Callie had never been a particularly stubborn person, had often thought Georgia, dreamer though she was, had been born with enough stubbornness for them both, but she was damned if she was going to give so much as an inch to Dante Coscarelli. This was a thought she clung stubbornly to until she was served vegetable soup that smelt so fresh and fragrant and came with a bread roll that smelt as if it had come straight out of a baker’s oven that her rumbling stomach could bear the torture no more.
Cutting into the roll and slathering it with a shell-shaped pat of butter, Callie dipped it into the steaming soup, took a bite… and fell straight into tastebud heaven.
“It is to your liking?” her captor asked.
“It’s okay.”
If she wasn’t so busy filling her starving belly, she would have cheerfully smacked the knowing smile off his face.
“How did you find Geppa?” he asked a short while later.
“Sweet,” she admitted. Her personal maid, a young girl barely older than the sixth-formers she taught, had been as intractable as the butler in refusing to help her escape or give her the means to escape or call for help with, but she’d been so sweet with it that Callie had found it impossible to dislike her or blame her. The poor thing probably had a crush on Dante. If there was one thing anyone who taught adolescents knew, it was that when an adolescent was in the throes of a crush, the object of their desire could do no wrong. She imagined most women who came face-to-face with Dante Coscarelli developed a crush on him. She’d come close to developing one herself in that short drive from the airport to hishelicopter field, and she had the most awful feeling he knew it, had the even worse feeling that he could read her like a book.
His dark eyes danced. “Something you approve of here? I am making progress.”
“She’s very young, though. Shouldn’t she be in school?”
“She is twenty and has worked for me since the day she left school. She’s from the local town and is as fascinated by the castle as you pretend not to be.”
She ruddy wellknewit.
Pretending to herself that her cheeks hadn’t turned red, she said, “And where is this local town?”
‘Nine kilometres from the estate. If you manage to escape, follow the road off the main driveway east and you will eventually find it.”
“I don’t suppose you have a map in case I get lost, do you?”
His perfect teeth flashed. “I’m afraid not.”
“Shame.”
“I can draw you one if you like?”
