To Kiss a Count. Amanda McCabe

drawing out Lady Riverton’s accomplice, but then it had all gone wrong. Lady Riverton had escaped, presumably with the silver, and now Clio and her husband had to try to find her. A pursuit in which Thalia had no part. She had not helped her sister, or her father.

      Or the one person she found she most wanted to impress. Count Marco di Fabrizzi. Her partner in the theatricals—and in quarrelling. The Italian antiquarian and aristocrat. The most handsome man she had ever met. The man she was certain must be hopelessly in love with Clio.

      Her sisters teased her for rejecting all her suitors. But none of them had ever been at all like Marco. It was entirely her luck that when she did find a passionate, attractive man, he would love her sister!

      Thalia took up the books and papers again, going back to packing them in her trunk. One manuscript slipped from her hands, fluttering pages onto the carpet. As she knelt to retrieve them, the title page caught her eyes. The Dark Castle of Count Orlando—An Italian Romance in Three Acts.

      Her play, the one she had started writing when she met Marco and the adventure of the silver unfolded. A great story of Renaissance Italy, full of love found and lost, vile villains, ghosts and curses. Passion that transcended all else. She had been so excited about it. Now, it seemed rather pointless.

      She straightened the pages and bound them up with string, tucking them into the trunk. Perhaps one day she would take it out again and laugh at it, at her silly fantasies of adventure and true love. Right now, she needed to help Mary finish the packing. England, real life, waited.

      The breeze outside the window was turning brisker, rustling the leaves of the lemon tree. Thalia went to pull the window shut, and stopped to gaze down at the garden, and the cobblestone street beyond the gate. It was truly beautiful, the dusty, sun-soaked old town of Santa Lucia. Beautiful, and full of secrets. Would she miss its sleepy heat, its blasted-blue sky and rocky hills, when she was in cool, green England?

      As the church bells tolled, marking the hour, their servants went on carrying out trunks and cases, piling them up by the garden fountain. She leaned out over the windowsill, watching as the hillocks of luggage grew higher and her time here grew ever shorter.

      The breeze caught at her hair, tugging the golden strands over her brow. As she impatiently brushed them back, she saw him—Marco. Walking slowly past their gate.

      She had heard he had left Santa Lucia after Clio’s wedding, but here he was now. He leaned on the locked gate, watching the commotion around their house with no expression on his dark, gorgeous face. The sun gleamed on his wavy, blue-black hair, turning it as glossy and fathomless as midnight.

      Before she could think, Thalia whirled around and dashed from the room, running down the stairs and out the front door. She dodged around footmen carrying out more trunks, and at last came to rest before Marco. The low, wrought-iron gate was between them, just narrow-spaced bars their hands could touch between. But it might as well have been an ocean.

      Marco straightened, smiling down at her. He was so very handsome, she thought as she stared at him. His bronzed skin over his high, sharp-edged cheekbones, his Italian nose and gleaming dark brown eyes, rich as fine chocolate. The classical beauty only slightly roughened by the dark whiskers along his jaw. Like a Greek god in his temple, a Roman emperor on a coin. Like her own Count Orlando in his dark castle.

      But Thalia had met many handsome men in her life. Her sisters’ husbands, many of her own suitors. There was more to Marco than his fine looks. There was a fiery passion, only thinly veiled by flirtatious good manners. A fierce intelligence. And secrets. Many secrets, which Thalia longed to uncover.

      She doubted she ever could excavate his hidden soul, even given the famed Chase tenacity. He was too skilled at disguises, too consummate an actor. Being good at masquerades herself, she could spot a fellow thespian. No, she could not read his true self, even if she had ten years for the deciphering. And she did not have ten years now; she doubted she even had ten minutes.

      Yet she recalled the hours they had spent together in the ancient amphitheatre. Arguing, laughing—feigning love as they rehearsed their play. They were golden hours indeed, and she knew she would never forget them.

      Never forget him.

      ‘I thought you left Santa Lucia,’ she said.

      ‘I thought you had, Signorina Thalia,’ he answered, giving her a smile. That heartbreaking smile of his, with the one perfect dimple.

      Her Renaissance prince. Who just happened to love her sister.

      Thalia glanced away, calling on all her well-honed acting skills, everything she had learned in the last few topsy-turvy weeks, to hide her true feelings from him. She remembered the solemn, sad look on his face at Clio’s wedding, and it gave her the strength to give a careless laugh.

      It would be too, too mortifying for him to know how she really felt. To be yet again in her sister’s shadow.

      ‘We had far too much packing to do to make a hasty departure, as you see,’she said, gesturing to the trunks. ‘My sister Cory’s sketchbooks, my father’s copious notes on his work…’

      ‘Your Antigone costumes?’

      ‘And those.’ She finally looked at him again, turning to find Marco watching her closely with his vast dark eyes. She could read nothing there, not a flicker of the strange friendship they had formed on that ancient stage. No past, no future. Just this one moment to be together again.

      ‘I am sorry we never got to perform Sophocles’s play,’ he said.

      ‘So am I. But we had a dramatic scene of a different sort, did we not?’

      Marco laughed, a wondrously warm, sunny sound that made her want to laugh, too. Made her want to throw her arms around his neck, and never, ever let go. Once he was gone, once this time was gone, her life would go back to grey, mundane reality again. She would be pretty, useless, flighty Thalia, and her adventures here would be a dream. A warm memory for cold nights.

      ‘You are surely the most fearsome ghost Sicily has ever beheld,’ he said.

      ‘A compliment indeed! I think I have never seen such a haunted place as this. Perhaps…’ Her voice faded, and she glanced away again.

      ‘Perhaps what?’

      ‘It will sound odd, but I wonder if I will become a ghost here,’she said, all in a rush. Her heart teetered on a precipice with him; she should just push it over and be done with it.

      After all, she was known in her family as headstrong. Fearless.Yet something, some hidden kernel of caution, held her back just a bit. Even as she watched little pebbles skitter into the emotional void below her.

      ‘I wonder if I will leave my true self here,’ she murmured, ‘wandering around the old agora, all lost.’

      Marco gently touched her hand. His caress was feather-light, the brush of his fingertips on her skin, yet the contact felt like a quick flash of fire. A heat she craved, even as she knew it would consume her and leave her that pale ghost she feared.

      ‘What is your true self, Thalia?’ he said, all his sunny Italian humour turned to frightening intensity. She wondered if he could indeed see inside her. ‘You are a fine actress indeed, yet I think I see—’

      ‘Thalia!’ she heard her father call from the doorway. ‘Who are you talking to there?’

      Thalia was deeply grateful for the interruption, even as her heart sank at the tearing of their solitary moment. The abyss still waited, but she would not tumble over just yet. ‘It is Count di Fabrizzi, Father,’ she called, still staring at Marco’s hand on hers.

      But he drew it away, and that shimmering instant was truly gone.

      ‘Invite him in!’ her father said. ‘I want to ask his opinion on something to do with those coins Clio found.’

      ‘Of course.’ Thalia gave Marco a quick smile. ‘You see all there is to see,’ she whispered to him.