on the engine, which seemed very noisy in the rushing silence. A trickle of sweat ran down between her breasts.
‘Run through your mental checklist first,’ Dante advised.
Her mind was a blank and her teeth clenched together. ‘I don’t want to do this with you,’ Topsy admitted starkly.
‘Stop dramatising yourself—just get on with it!’ Dante told her impatiently.
Thoroughly fed up with him and keen to get the experience over with, Topsy rammed the car into gear and hit the accelerator. The vehicle shot back so fast a startled gasp was wrenched from her. Dante shouted something and then there was a sickening crunch and a violent jolt that rattled every tooth in her head, the seat belt cutting into her midriff as it clamped tight.
‘You total maniac!’ Dante roared at her, leaping out of the car as though she had branded him with a burning torch.
Topsy switched off the engine and breathed in deep to ward off the nausea and the dizziness of shock. Detaching the seat belt, she opened the car door and shakily climbed out.
‘You didn’t even look in the mirror before you reversed!’ Dante launched at her incredulously as he bent down to examine the damage to the bonnet of his precious Pagani Zonda.
‘I wasn’t planning to reverse... It’s an unfamiliar car and I went into the wrong gear!’ Topsy protested, folding her arms defensively while trying not to stare at the crunched-up metalwork that now marred the previously pristine paintwork of both vehicles.
Dante flung up his hands in a dramatic gesture. ‘How could you accidentally go into reverse?’
‘You were irritating the hell out of me...distracting me,’ Topsy complained.
Brilliant green eyes targeted her. ‘Oh, so now it’s my fault, is it?’
‘You knew I didn’t want to get behind the wheel. I made it quite clear,’ she argued. ‘I’ll go and apologise to your mother about her car.’
‘Are you going to apologise to me about what you’ve done to my car?’ Dante demanded.
Topsy couldn’t bring herself to say sorry. The accident was his fault, absolutely his fault. ‘You had an argument with me, called me horrible names and then demanded that I drive even though I made it clear that I didn’t want to!’ she condemned bitterly. ‘So, if you ask me, you got what you deserve!’
* * *
Sofia handled the news of the damage to her car with complete aplomb, pointing out that she currently wasn’t using it and that the local garage would soon have it fixed. Topsy insisted that she would pay for the repairs and apologised again. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get on very well with Dante,’ she admitted.
A wry smile crossed his mother’s mouth. ‘My son is accustomed to calling the shots. I knew you would clash but don’t let it worry you. I’m happy with the way you’re handling everything for me.’
For the first time, Topsy asked to have her evening meal on a tray in her room. The prospect of facing Dante across the dinner table was too much for her. She knew she should have apologised. What had happened to her manners? But Dante brought out a side of her nature that she didn’t recognise, provoking only an angry resentful response. He had called her a whore. How dared he? She didn’t feel the least bit forgiving about that. One evening working as an escort did not make a woman a whore. Busying herself checking the guest list for the fancy-dress ball, Topsy made a note of jobs to be accomplished the following day after her trip to Florence with Vittore.
She felt guilty because going to Florence meant she would be taking most of the day off. Vittore worked part time as a financial advisor in the city and generally Topsy went sightseeing while she waited for him to finish and give her a lift back to the castle. Finally, recognising that her shattered nerves were keeping her stress level at an all-time high, she went for a bath to unwind.
When someone knocked on the door about an hour later, she stifled a yawn, knotted the sash of her wrap round her waist and went to answer it.
It was one of the maids carrying a beautiful bouquet of flowers already arranged in a crystal vase. ‘For me?’ Topsy commented in surprise, plucking the gift card from the foliage as the smiling maid settled the vase down on a table by the window.
Dante.
Topsy frowned in surprise, distrusting the gesture. Why would he send her flowers? What was he playing at? At this season the castle gardens were bursting with flowers and she could have picked an armful without anyone even noticing. Involuntarily she bent down, nostrils flaring on the intoxicating perfume of the roses, straightening with a jerk as yet another knock sounded on her bedroom door.
It was Dante, always, she suspected, quick to take advantage of any window of opportunity, any moment of weakness. He was very much a predator. She collided warily with his stunning emerald-green eyes. Colour warmed her cheeks and her mouth ran dry.
‘May I come in?’ he asked, smooth as silk, his self-discipline absolute, a faint smile even softening the hard, handsome lines of his lean dark features.
Even so, regardless of appearances, Dante was still recovering from the demeaning realisation that he had hit a hell of an own goal earlier that day. His temper had got the better of him and he still could not explain to his own satisfaction why that had happened. But he knew he should not have confronted Topsy about what Jerome had told him. He should have kept that information to himself and used it to his advantage because he could gain nothing by making her into an enemy.
In speaking up without logical consideration of what the consequences might be, he had not only made her hostile but also forced her to come up with the ultimate silly story in an effort to excuse her work as an escort. Could she really believe that he would swallow all that nonsense about her having traded a one-off evening as an escort in exchange for some indeterminate piece of information from her own mother? It seemed that she liked to play the poor exploited innocent and he was willing to play along with that to see where it led.
Topsy measured the risk of inviting Dante into her bedroom against the potential embarrassment of being seen trading words with him in her nightwear and slowly, reluctantly, stepped back to open the door wider, deeming discretion to be the wiser approach.
‘I am sorry about your car,’ she proffered on the better-late-than-never principle.
Dante expelled his breath on a sigh. ‘I did force you into driving when you didn’t want to. Understandably you were in the wrong mood.’
‘You called me a whore,’ Topsy reminded him bluntly. ‘That was completely unacceptable.’
‘Sadly, your work as an escort would make you unacceptable to many people. I’m not the only person around here who is prejudiced,’ Dante pointed out steadily, noticing the way the fine silk of her wrap defined the pouting swells of her breasts and the luscious curve of her hips. His jaw line clenched in fierce denial of his burgeoning erection. ‘But you are correct—working a while as an escort doesn’t automatically make you a whore and I should never have called you one.’
‘I spent one wretched evening working as an escort!’ Topsy exclaimed, out of all patience at his judgemental attitude. ‘It shouldn’t make you think of me differently.’
‘You can’t be that naïve.’
As he was the first man to find out about that evening and his reaction was much worse than she had expected, she was beginning to think that she had been just that naïve. She frowned at the thought of how her sisters would have reacted to the news, knowing they would be furious with her, particularly when they had already warned her to be cautious around their mother. But only Odette had had the power to tell Topsy who her father really was and, hurt and bewildered by the discovery that the man she had always believed was her father was not, Topsy would have done almost anything for that knowledge.
‘But maybe you are, gioia mia,’ Dante breathed soft and low in continuance, gazing down at her with an intensity