The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

care?’

       Marco could hear the pain she was trying to control. It seared through him, burning through the restraints he had wrapped around his own emotions. An answering pain mixed with yearning and an entirely male desire to hold and protect her spilled over. To say what he had felt listening to Melanie’s revelations had been shock didn’t come anywhere near describing the effect those revelations had had on him. They had pierced the seal he had placed on his own emotions, exposing them to the raw reality of another person’s pain. Lily’s pain.

       Now he felt as though he was at war with himself—with one part of him wanting to comfort her and the other defensively wanting him to ignore what had happened, desperately wanting him to ignore the voice inside him that was telling him that he and Lily shared a unique bond forged in pain. Deep within himself emotions he couldn’t afford to let himself feel were struggling to find a voice. The scar tissue he had forced to grow over them was being ripped from old wounds, and against the pressure of his denial the words came out.

       ‘I once knew a girl who became a model.’

       His harsh and reluctant admission caused Lily to look at him in surprise. Something in the way he had spoken as much as the words themselves jerked her out of her own distress to register his need. She lifted her hand, as though she was going to reach out and touch him, and then let it drop again, saying uncertainly, ‘She was important to you?’

       ‘Yes.’ Another admission was wrenched from him; another clamp removed from the resolve-clad box in which he had locked away his right to feel emotional pain. ‘We were to have been married.’

       Married? Marco had been going to marry someone?

       ‘She’s dead now. That sordid world killed her.’

       Sometimes there were things that were too painful to know, Lily acknowledged, and this was one of them. She was still in Marco’s arms, but now she felt she had no right to be there and that the sanctuary they provided rightly belonged to someone else.

       ‘I’m so sorry.’ She tried to step back from him, but instead of releasing her his hold on her tightened. He was so lost in his pain that he was barely aware he was holding her, Lily suspected.

       ‘I couldn’t protect her and she died. I tried, but I failed.’ Now that the seal damming his past had been pierced the feelings he had locked away for so long flooded past his defences, leaving him powerless to stop himself from revealing the self-contempt he had always tried to keep hidden.

       ‘We grew up together. A marriage between us was what our families had always hoped for. It seemed the right thing to do. We got on well together. She understood the demands of my position. I thought that she knew me and I knew her. I believed I could trust her with anything—my hopes, my doubts, our future together. I believed she trusted me, but I was wrong.’

       ‘I’m sorry,’ Lily repeated

       ‘She’d always told me she was happy with our parents’ plans for our shared future. I didn’t know that she wasn’t. She lied to me.’

       ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to hurt you and was trying to protect you?’ Lily suggested gently, wanting to ease his pain.

       Marco looked at her.

       At no time had anyone—not Olivia and not even himself—suggested that Olivia might have wanted to spare him pain. Lily’s words, her gentleness and her concern for him, felt like the comforting and healing effect of warm sunlight on an unbearably dark, cold place. But he was giving in to something he must not give in to. He was letting the dangerous sweetness that Lily had brought him overwhelm reality. There were still anomalies in Lily’s way of life that logic insisted did not add up

       ‘We’d better get back to the reception. The Duchess will be wondering where we are,’ Lily warned him.

       ‘In a minute. First I want you to explain to me what you were doing working in that photographic studio, given what Melanie said about your childhood. I would have thought that it would be the last place you’d want to be after what. I’ve now learned about you.’

       ‘I was standing in for my half-brother,’ Lily admitted. Now he knew about her parents she felt strong enough to tell him the truth, and then at last he would believe her. ‘My father married a second time. My stepmother was very kind to me. She’s remarried now—my father died ten years ago—but my half-brother has turned our father into a hero figure and wants to follow in his footsteps.’

       She gave a small sigh. ‘He texted me asking me to stand in for him because he knew I was in Milan. I hadn’t realised then that he’d asked your nephew to model for him.’

       She was telling him the truth, Marco recognised on an unsettling surge of uncomfortable guilt. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of that before?’

       ‘I didn’t think you’d believe me,’ Lily told him wryly.

       ‘I probably wasn’t ready to listen even if you had. I’m sorry I misjudged you. ‘

       ‘Something like that,’ Lily agreed. It was impossible for her to tell him now that she had wanted to keep a distance between them because she had feared the effect he had on her. After all, now she not only knew that he did not reciprocate the desire she felt for him, she also knew he was still mourning the girl he had expected to marry.

       She started to walk towards the door, conscious of her duty to the Duchess and her work, but came to an abrupt halt when Marco caught up with her and asked, ‘And Anton? Tell me about him?’

       Lily’s breath escaped in a soft hiss of anxiety. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

       She was lying, Marco knew, but instead of feeling the sense of condemnation against her he would normally have felt instead he felt an unfamiliar stirring of—of what? Curiosity? Or was it something more personal than that? Something that was in fact concern for her?

       Whilst he battled with his own thoughts Lily continued walking back to the reception. She looked so vulnerable and so determined to be strong. No one should have to find strength on their own, without someone who cared about them to help them. He knew the desolate wilderness that place was. He couldn’t let Lily struggle in it. He strode after her, catching up with her to put his hand under her elbow so that they re-entered the reception together.

       Lily didn’t know whether to feel relieved or embarrassed when she realised that the Duchess had put their disappearance down to a desire to be alone with one another. Of course it was true that the presence of Marco’s arm around her was hardly likely to convince the Duchess that she had got things wrong, but somehow Lily found it foolishly impossible to move away from his pseudo-lover-like hold.

      The rest of the evening passed in something of a tired blur for Lily after the emotional trauma of the day. Of course she managed to stop dwelling on her own feelings when the Duchess showed her and Marco over the long gallery housing the villa’s art collection, her professionalism cutting in whilst she made notes and took photographs.

       ‘No wonder you’re so professional—you must have been handling these things practically from your cradle,’ Marco commented at one point, picking up her camera.

       ‘Practically,’ Lily agreed. ‘Not that I ever had much of an interest in fashion. It was always art that fascinated me.’

       ‘Not modern art, though?’

       ‘The past feels more comfortable, more established. I feel safer there,’ Lily told him, only realising when she saw the way he was looking at her just what she might have betrayed.

       ‘Safer?’

       ‘With art of the past there’s no need for me to trust my own judgement,’ she defended herself.

       ‘Safety and your desire for it seems to be a recurring theme in your life.’

       Lily could feel her heart hammering heavily into her ribs.

       ‘The price of having parents who quarrelled a lot and being over-sensitive