The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

him that she was now appealing for rescue and refuge, and Marco’s nature and upbringing would not allow him to deny her either.

       ‘Any decent man would consider it his duty to protect a woman from your sort,’ Marco told Anton curtly. ‘And let me warn you that my protection of Lily will extend beyond this incident. You would be well advised to keep away from her in future. In fact, I’d advise you to leave Italy today.’’

       The smirking self-confidence with which Anton had greeted Marco’s arrival had evaporated now into blustering protest as he complained, ‘You can’t make that kind of threat.’

       ‘I’m not threatening you,’ Marco assured him. ‘I’m simply giving you some advice as a result of your own behaviour.’

       Lily listened to their exchange with gratitude and awe. Marco was being magnificent. He was so completely in control, so completely the master of the situation, completely demolishing Anton who, having released her when Marco arrived on the scene, was now backing off, eventually turning his back on them to disappear into the crowd. She looked at Marco. He was standing rather stiffly to one side of her, looking away from her.

       Marco knew something had happened to him. Something that threatened his defences. His throat felt raw and tight—with tension, nothing else, he assured himself. He looked back at Lily. She looked stricken, but she didn’t say anything. Her face was paper-white as she turned away from him, dignified in defeat, her manner that of a weary combatant struggling to pick up her weapons and continue to fight on alone. She looked alone. He knew all about how that felt—how it hurt, how the heart hardened around that hurt.

       She was trembling violently, her manner that of someone too traumatised to be able to behave rationally. Whatever had happened between her and her ex whilst Marco had been paying their bill had plainly affected her very badly. He stepped towards her, and then checked himself and stepped back. He wanted to cross the chasm that separated him from obeying his instincts but years of denying those instincts, had laid down rules inside him that had to be obeyed. The voices of his inner rebellion were growing stronger, urging him to join them, but he couldn’t. Because he was too afraid. Afraid of being deceived and betrayed. Out of nowhere, out of nothing he could understand, something inside him rejected that possibility, stating clearly and firmly that Lily wouldn’t do that to him.

       All around them people were going about their business, but for Marco his world had come to a halt and was now poised trembling on the brink of something momentous. Lily. His heart pounded and surged inside his chest cavity, as though trying to break free of unwanted bonds. Lily. She had turned to him. She had wanted his help and she had trusted him to give it. Trust. Trust was a rare and precious gift when it was exchanged between two people. Lily had offered him the gift of her trust, and that gift demanded surely that he reciprocate in kind. Trust Lily? Trust anyone with his own vulnerabilities? He couldn’t. He scarcely trusted himself with them. That was why he had had to lock them away.

       A car horn sounded in the traffic and the moment was gone, banished by the demands of the real world. The danger had passed. The path he had laid down for himself had forked, and briefly he had been tempted to take the wrong fork, but thankfully he had recognised the folly of doing so. Practicality reasserted itself within him, much to his relief—if for no other reason than because it was easier to deal with practical matters than it was for him to deal with emotions.

       They had finished their work for the day and, whilst he’d intended to take Lily on a tour of a silk mill as she’d requested, it was plain to Marco that right now she was in no state to do anything. The best thing he could do was get her back to the privacy of the Duchess’s villa.

       She didn’t speak as they were driven back to the villa, simply sat stiffly at his side, her stiffness occasionally broken by the tremors that shook her body.

       The Duchess was out visiting friends, and Lily made no objection when Marco suggested that she might want to rest in their room, letting him guide her up the stairs and along the corridor to their suite, where she subsided onto the bed, sitting tensely at its edge as she spoke for the first time. ‘Please don’t leave me here on my own,’ she begged.

       ‘You’re safe now, Lily,’ Marco responded. ‘He can’t come back into your life now—unless you choose to ask him to do so.’

       ‘Ask Anton into my life?’ Lily shuddered. ‘Never. Never…’

       ‘You must have cared for him once.’ The cool words, a product of his suspicion and refusal to trust, were forced into the open by those voices within him that warned he had already let down his guard far too much, and that now was the time to rectify that mistake whilst he still could.

       But they made Lily flinch visibly, causing him to feel an unexpected stab of guilt as she denied emotionally, ‘No. Never. I disliked him from the start. But he was my father’s friend and I couldn’t avoid him.’

       She had met the other man through her father? Even the logical, searching, suspicious voice within him had to accept that that changed things—but it still insisted on reminding her, ‘You were lovers.’

       CHAPTER NINE

      LILY raised her head and looked up at Marco, revulsion darkening her eyes. Marco’s words had filled her with anguish and fear, flooded her mind with memories that undermined her already shaky self-control.

       She had kept her secrets to herself for so long—refusing to unburden herself to anyone, bearing the horror of them alone—but now suddenly everything was too much for her. She couldn’t go on any longer. She couldn’t bear the pain and the guilt any more.

       She was shivering and trembling, lost in the grip of her emotions and the past.

      ‘No!’ she told Marco vehemently. ‘No. I would never let him even touch me.’ She shuddered. ‘I hated him—loathed him.’ The words gathered speed, spilling out of her in jerky uncoordinated sentences. ‘He kept saying things to me…looking at me…even though he knew how much I hated him. That just made him laugh. He said that he’d get his way in the end and that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. I was only fourteen, and my father…’

       She shuddered again and Marco listened, every word she uttered a fresh lash of anguished guilt against new emotions still raw from having the protective cover he had used to smother them ripped from them. Whilst he had been clinging to his refusal to trust her she had been at the mercy of her tormentor.

       Like a river dammed from its original course and now returning to it, feelings, emotions and awareness were starting to flow back over dry, parched land that was now struggling to cope with the flood, whilst the other course fought desperately to hold on to its supremacy. As always when his emotions seemed to threaten him, Marco took refuge in practical action, going to the cabinet in the sitting room and opening it, pouring Lily a small glass of brandy which he took back to her, instructing her, ‘Drink this.’ When she hesitated, he assured her, ‘You’re in shock and it will help you.’

       Nodding her head, Lily tilted the glass to her lips. The fiery liquid burned its way down her throat, warming her stomach, leaving her feeling slightly light-headed.

       Why had she told Marco what she had? She wished desperately that she hadn’t, but it was too late to deny her admission now. She stood up abruptly, ignoring the dizzy feeling that instantly seized her as she paced the floor at the end of the bed, lost, trapped in a world of fear and despair.

       Marco felt the full weight of the enormity of what she had said to him. She was carrying a terrible burden of emotional pain. He could see that now. A burden of pain he had reinforced by his cruel misjudgement of her. Like a blind man trying to seek his way in unfamiliar territory he tried to understand what he should do—for her, not for himself, because it was her need that mattered to him now. Comforting her was far more important to him than protecting his own emotional distance. He wanted to help her, he recognised. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to love her. Love her? He wanted to love her.