explode around him?
‘No! ‘ he said, so forcefully that she took a small step backwards and he had to suck in air to regain his composure. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he added more gently. ‘It’s getting late. Goodnight, Dr Hunter. Sleep well.’
He wouldn’t sleep, he knew, as he descended the wide stairs leading to the ground floor. Not now, not after seeing her again. Instead he would read in the library and listen to the storm continue to build outside. He would take comfort in the savagery of the elements and the pounding violence of the sea. He would be at one with its endless torment.
And perhaps in the morning he might have Bruno fetch the woman from the village after all. God knew, books weren’t going to cut it tonight. He would need something.
In the gloom of light he passed the doorway to the ballroom, a flash of lightning illuminating the empty space. Empty but for the grand piano sitting bereft in the far corner of the room.
He paused and gazed at the imprint the lightning had left behind and felt a pang for something long gone. Across the marble tiles, under the rumble of thunder, he approached the instrument like a one-time friend whose friendship had been soured by time. Cautiously. Mistrustfully.
Once he’d known her intimately. Known her highs and her lows and how to wring every piece of emotion from her. She’d been a thing of beauty when the world had been all about beauty.
Before life had soured and turned ugly.
Yet still she sat there, black and sleek, totally shameless. And even now she beckoned, luring him like the memories of a mistress he hadn’t quite finished with before they’d parted company.
And what surprised him more than anything was that he was tempted. He lifted the lid, ran his fingers along the keys, hit a solitary note that rang out in the empty ballroom and felt something twist inside him.
He could have put the lid down then. He could have walked away. But the way his fingers rested on the keys, familiar yet foreign, wouldn’t let him go. Outside the waves crashed; the thunder boomed until the windows rattled. Inside his fingers reacquainted themselves with the cool ivory. He let them find their own way. He let them remember. Let them give voice to his damaged heart.
She woke with a start, her breath coming fast, her heart thumping, not knowing what had woken her, just grateful to escape from her dreams. She reached over to snap on her bedside light but the switch just clicked uselessly from side to side. Great. The storm must have taken out the power again.
The wind howled past the windows, searching for a way in. The sea boomed below, the waves pounding at the very foundations of the island.
What had woken her? Maybe it had been nothing. Certainly nothing she could do anything about now. She settled back down, willing her breathing to calm, not sure if she wanted to head straight back into the heated confusion of her dreams. She ran her hands thought her hair. No way did she want to go back there.
Often when she was working on a piece she would dream of her work, her mind busy even in sleep, imagining the artists and scribes who had produced whatever artefact she was studying. Often her mind would work at solving the puzzles of who and what and why, even when those answers had been lost in time.
But not tonight. Tonight her dreams had been full of one man. A scarred count. Menacing and intense. Unwelcoming to the point of rudeness and beyond, and yet at the same time strangely magnetic. Strangely compelling.
He’d been watching her in her dream, she remembered with a shudder. Not just looking at her—she knew the difference—but watching her, his black-as-night eyes wild and filled with dark desires and untold heat. And even now she could remember the feel of that penetrating gaze caress her skin like the sizzling touch of a lover’s hand. Even now her skin goose-bumped and her breasts firmed and her nipples strained to peaks.
She shook her head, trying to clear the pictures from her mind; she punched her pillow as if that was the culprit, putting them there when she knew it probably had more to do with the storm. The lightning and thunder were messing with her brainwaves, she told herself. All that electrical energy was messing with the connections in her mind. It was madness to consider any other option. Madness.
She didn’t even like the man!
She was just snuggling back down into the pillow-soft comfort of her bed, determined to think about the pages and the translations she would commence, when she heard it—what sounded like a solitary note ringing out into the night. But the sound was whisked away by the howling wind before she could get make sense of it.
She’d almost forgotten about it when there came another, hanging mournful and lonely in the cold night air. She blinked in the inky darkness, her ears straining for sounds that had no place in the storm.
And then, in a brief lull in the wind, she heard what sounded like a chord this time, an achingly beautiful series of notes that seemed to echo the pain of the raging storm. Curious, she stretched out one hand, reaching for her watch, groping for the button to illuminate the display and groaning when she saw what time it was. Three-forty-five.
She had to be imagining things. Lightning flashed outside, turning her room to bright daylight for a moment before it plunged back into darkness. A boom of thunder followed, shaking the floor and windows and sending a burst of rain pelting against the windows.
She pulled back her arm and buried herself deeper under the thick eiderdown. She had to be dreaming. That or she really was going mad.
CHAPTER FIVE
MORNING brought surprisingly clear skies with little trace of the storm that had threatened to rend the night apart. Grace blinked as she drew open the curtains and gazed out over the view. Every surface sparkled with its recent wash, the sapphire sea calm now but for a breeze playfully tickling at its surface. Not a cloud in the sky as far as she could see. She looked up and promptly revised her weather report. Not a cloud in the sky—except for the wispy white one hovering over the castle. She smiled, feeling brighter despite the night-time’s interruptions. Like the tunnels underneath the castle, it would almost be disappointing if the cloud weren’t there.
She wasn’t left to wonder about the arrangements for breakfast. True to the Count’s prediction, Grace had no sooner bathed and dressed than Bruno appeared with a breakfast tray. She didn’t mind if she was being snubbed by being made to take her meals alone; the arrangement suited her. Less chance of running into anyone, she figured. At least less chance of running into the Count. She wasn’t sure she was ready for another encounter so soon after last night’s discomfiting dreams.
And even though she had some questions about the pages, like how he thought they might have come to be in the caves below the castle and who might have left them there, they could wait until he came looking for her. He was sure to come and check how long she thought she would be here.
She was back in her makeshift office across the hall before eight. She’d photographed each of the pages yesterday, taking her time to get detailed photographs of every page and then more detailed shots of the cut edges where they’d been sliced from the book.
The rest of the day she’d spent making meticulous notes on the condition of each of the pages. For something reputed to be upwards of six hundred years old, they were remarkably well preserved, a fact that at first had her doubting they could possibly be authentic and wondering if they were nothing more than a clever forgery. After all, nobody really knew what had been in the missing pages, only that the book and its prayers had been famous for their healing words.
And yet the more she’d examined the pages, the more she’d been convinced they were the genuine article. It couldn’t be confirmed until samples were matched with what little remained of the Salus Totus, but she almost didn’t need that confirmation right now to be sure. And the longer she examined the pages, the more certain she was that this had the potential to be the very biggest discovery of the twenty-first century.
And she was at the heart of it.
Her heart raced