come with you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m not letting you walk through the city alone, especially when you’re not well.’
It was typical of him to insist on that. Jamie Forster was a warm, kind-hearted, friendly man who cared about other people. He wasn’t either ambitious or dynamic; all Jamie wanted was to enjoy his life, have plenty of friends, and earn enough to live on, comfortably.
He ran a garden centre, which he had inherited from his late father, in a small country town about forty miles from London. Jamie loved working in the open air, with growing things; he had large but capable and sensitive hands, green fingers, which could make anything grow. He almost casually pushed tiny plants into the earth and they sprang up rapidly, vigorous and hearty. His work was more than a hobby, it was a passion, perhaps his only real passion.
Saskia had grown fond of him since she started working there two years ago, but she had never let him get too close because there was so much she had never told Jamie about her past. She was not free to get involved with anyone. Luckily, although Jamie was clearly fond of her, too, he had never shown any sign of being in love with her. If anything, they were such good friends that anything more intimate was almost out of the question. Jamie had had a girlfriend until a few months ago when they had a big row and broke up because Jamie was more interested in his work than he was in his girlfriend. Now and then he took Saskia with him to parties, but only as a friend; Jamie had never even tried to kiss her.
But would Domenico believe that when he knew that she was on holiday in Italy with Jamie? Saskia bit her lip, her eyes flicking towards where Domenico sat, his head a dark silhouette in the glow from the footlights.
Of course he wouldn’t.
He must not meet Jamie. She was terrified of his reaction if he did. Domenico had an ice-cold manner, very controlled, and yet under that ran burning lava which could erupt without warning and devastate those it touched.
Jamie couldn’t possibly cope with Domenico in that mood. Nor could Saskia; she never had been able to; he terrified her when the frozen surface of his manner cracked and the fire beneath leapt out.
A moment later, to her relief, the first act finally came to an end. Saskia ruefully clapped with everyone else as the soprano whirled off stage and the curtains closed. She loved La Traviata, the romantic, piercingly sweet music and the tragic storyline, the nineteenth-century décor, the wonderful clothes the women wore at that time, the heartbreak of that last act. All day she had been waiting on tenterhooks for this evening.
Yet she hadn’t really been aware of anything that was happening on stage!
As the audience began to get up, Saskia ran for the exit, swerving round other people, pushing past anyone who blocked her way, muttering apologies. She didn’t look round to check if Jamie was following. She was too busy concentrating on getting out of the theatre before Domenico or one of his bodyguards caught up with her.
She was already a street away before Jamie panted up beside her. ‘Hey! You almost lost me! I stopped to explain to Terry that we were going back to the hotel; if he didn’t know we had left he would have panicked when he counted up heads and found two missing.’
She gave him an apologetic look. ‘Oh, you should have stayed; I’m sorry I’ve ruined your evening, Jamie! I know how much you were looking forward to La Traviata.’
‘It isn’t your fault; you didn’t ask to have toothache tonight!’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘It’s just fate.’
No, he was wrong, Saskia thought. It wasn’t fate that had planned this evening; it was her own stupid folly. If she hadn’t come to Italy she would never have been in this theatre, she would never have seen Domenico again.
Yet...why had Domenico been there? Had fate been busy, after all?
They came to one of the rounded corners which were so typical of the labyrinthine streets of Venice which curled round and round like the inner spirals of an ear, and Jamie paused, looking up at a street name painted on the wall.
‘We go left here, don’t we?’
‘I can’t remember!’ Saskia looked around anxiously. She wanted to get as far away from the theatre as possible, quickly. She did not want Domenico to catch up with them.
Venice was such a maze of tiny streets and squares, alleys and canals. She hadn’t orientated herself properly yet, and, anyway, had a very poor sense of direction. She could get lost even when she had a map in her hand.
Jamie asked a man walking past and got directions; they started off again and as they approached their hotel at last she began to relax and feel safe. Domenico couldn’t catch up with them now.
She knew he had lost them completely. She didn’t need to see him to be sure of that. She could feel it; his anger, his frustration, as he realised she had got away again. He was searching the streets around the theatre, she sensed, as if she were watching him; moving with that prowling lope which was characteristic of his tall, loose-limbed, long-legged figure, while his eyes flicked, quick and intent, along alleyways, into empty, moonlit squares, hunting for her.
She knew what he was feeling, although not exactly what he was thinking. Domenico was too clever for her to be able to divine his thoughts. She could only tell what he was thinking when his feelings and his thoughts merged, were one. That rarely happened with Domenico, although with some people it often did.
She had discovered her gift many years ago, when she was a child; she hadn’t understood it then, and it was intermittent, so unpredictable, that sometimes months would go by before it happened again, that sudden flash of awareness of what someone else was thinking. Saskia had actually wondered if she was imagining it for a long time, until she reached puberty and it began to happen more frequently. At that age she had experimented with it, turned it almost into a party game for her friends, and been able to check that she was really picking up their thoughts and not imagining them.
Not that she could read everything in their minds, or do so at will, but if ever they were very angry, or upset, or frightened she could tune into those emotions, tell them what they were feeling exactly.
It always amazed them, it even frightened some, who would keep away from her after one such experience, seeing her as someone weird, alarming, even dangerous. People did not like the idea that you could read their minds and know what they were really thinking, even though she assured them that her glimpses of their minds were fragmentary and arbitrary.
‘It’s like picking up radio waves,’ she had told Domenico once. ‘Like voices coming out of the air. I hear what people are thinking...but only if they’re very excited or upset; it only happens when there’s an extra charge of electricity in their brains, I think, boosting the signals so that I can pick them up. Anger or fear or happiness...I always pick up strong emotions.’
‘I can see I’ll have to be careful of you,’ he had said, those grey eyes of his watching her sardonically, and she hadn’t needed to tune into his thoughts to know that he didn’t believe her, he thought it was all nonsense, crazy imagination on her part.
Domenico did not believe in other dimensions—in horoscopes or signs of the zodiac, fortune-telling, mind-reading, the tarot, palm-reading or second sight. Saskia didn’t believe in most of them, either; she had often tried to explain that she didn’t do any of those things, she didn’t even pick up other people’s thoughts voluntarily any more, she hadn’t since her teenage years. She would be glad to stop doing it, especially now, she
