“Where have you gone?”
Dante blinked himself back to the table he was sat around and grinned. “I was just thinking.”
Niccolo laughed. “About who?”
About the woman currently trying to escape my Castello, who isn’t as beautiful as any of the women here but is sexier and far more intriguing than all of them put together.
Because, while he’d been observing everything happening around him, Callie’s image had been playing in his mind’s-eye. Callie, whose hair smelled of strawberries. Callie, whose presence across the corridor from his room he’d spent the whole night wholly aware of.
Callie would never prance around in a tiny bikini for an old man’s benefit in the belief a quick screw was a shortcut to fame and riches. Even if she did believe it, she would never degrade herself into acting on it. It wasn’t just the fact of her being a teacher that made him certain of this; it was the unquantifiablesomethingshe carried inside her.
In Dante’s world, women like Callie were vanishingly rare, but this was the world he’d chosen to live in. He’d left university with a determination to rebuild the Coscarelli fortune and make his family a name again, and he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The richer he’d become, the thinner and smoother of face the women in his world had become. Other than her hair, Callie, he was convinced, was completely natural. He wondered, again, why she’d coloured it.
“No one in particular,” he answered.
“Then eyes on the game.”
He looked at the board in front of him and then lifted his gaze back to Niccolo.
Chess was a game the two had played since Dante’s father had taught them when they were eight years old. As kids, they would finish school and kick a ball around for hours, a big gang of them playing on the narrow Tuscan streets of their home town. When all the others had been called in by their irate mothers, Niccolo would follow Dante back to his tiny home for a game of chess. Intellectually and strategically, they were well-matched, their games always going to the wire.
In the twenty-seven years they’d competed against each other, not once had either of them beaten the other in less than thirty moves. Barely ten moves in, and Niccolo was only one move from checkmating him.
Before Dante could put his full focus back on the game and save himself from the worst defeat in his chess history, his phone rang. It was Bernard.
“Everything okay?” Niccolo asked once the call had ended.
“My house guest…” His loins had tightened just to hear Callie’s name spoken. “It appears she has gone missing.”
Niccolo’s horror was immediate and obvious.
“Don’t worry,” Dante assured him. “She’s still on the estate; she can’t leave it, but it transpires that she also managed to steal a maid’s phone earlier – she found the staff room and lifted it out of her jacket pocket.”
“She stole aphone?”
“It was found on her within minutes. She tried to crack its passcode so it locked itself, so no harm done.” Callie had been found with it before she’d realised she could call the emergency services on a locked phone.
“But they still let her escape?”
“Those were my instructions. Once she learns for herselfthat escape is impossible, she will accept her fate.” He sighed and laughed at the same time. “Although most probably not. Callie is an intelligent and quick-witted woman. Without me there to keep her in check, she’s going to run rings around my staff.” That she’d managed to steal a phone within twenty minutes of leaving her room and with a dozen staff in attendance proved how wily she was and,Dio, just to imagine her observing all around her and then stealthily striking when opportunity presented itself…
The kind of understanding that only came from thirty years of friendship flowed between them until Niccolo’s shoulders slumped and he swore under his breath. “You will be back for the wedding?”
“Yes. I’ll be standing at that altar with you with the wedding rings in my pocket.”
His oldest friend nodded. It didn’t need pointing out that in an ideal world, neither of them would need to be standing at that altar on Saturday, but ideal worlds didn’t exist. Some chain reactions were unavoidable.
They embraced and kissed cheeks, and then Dante headed back inside the hotel to call in on his family to update them. He didn’t need to go into detail or press secrecy. In the Coscarelli world, family was everything and trust was a given.
Settled in the back of his car, he thought of the long days of relaxation, good company, and good food and drink he’d spent months looking forward to.
A smile spread over his face.
The coming days might not be as he’d envisaged, but sharing a roof with his sexy spitfire meant there would certainly becompensations.
Callie rubbed the back of her neck and looked for the thousandth time at the detailed map Dante had drawn for her. The slight chill in the air was starting to penetrate her thin jacket. The sun in Tuscany wasn’t as warm as the sun in Naples had been.
She’d long ago accepted that she was lost. She’d accepted that long after she’d accepted escaping the estate was impossible and that Dante hadn’t made a strategic error in making his map so detailed. The cypress trees neatly camouflaged a high stone wall that encircled the entire estate bar the manned entry points. A stone wall that was in perfect condition. None of the stones were misaligned enough for her to get enough purchase to lift herself. Even the most determined teenage boy intent on mischief would fail to scale it, but if he did, the shards of sharp rocks and glass running the top of it would have him slicing his hands open, dropping back to the ground and probably breaking his leg in the process.
