chest, fluttering frantically inside each of the four chambers of her heart. ‘Why?’ Her voice was barely much more than a squeak.
He moved his thumb in a back-and-forth motion over her cheek, his inscrutable eyes holding her prisoner. ‘There are things you don’t know about me.’
Miranda swallowed. What didn’t she know? Did he have bodies buried in the cellar? Leather whips and chains and handcuffs? A red room? ‘Wh-what things?’
‘Not the things you’re thinking.’
‘I’m not thinking those things.’
He smiled a crooked half-smile that had mockery at its core. ‘Sweet, innocent, Miranda,’ he said. ‘The little girl in a woman’s body who refuses to grow up.’
Miranda stepped out of his hold, rubbing at her cheek in a pointed manner. ‘I thought I was here to look at your father’s art collection. I’m sorry if that seems terribly naïve of me but I’ve never had any reason not to trust you before now.’
‘You can trust me.’
She chanced a look at him again. His expression had lost its mocking edge. If anything he looked...sad. She could see the pained lines across his forehead, the shadows in his eyes, the grim set to his mouth. ‘Why am I here, Leandro?’ Somehow her voice had come out whispery instead of strident and firm.
He let out a long breath. ‘Because when I saw you in London I... I don’t know what I thought. I saw you cowering behind that pot plant and—’
‘I wasn’t cowering,’ Miranda put in indignantly. ‘I was hiding.’
‘I felt sorry for you.’
The silence echoed for a moment with his bald statement.
Miranda drew in a tight breath. ‘So you rescued me by pretending to need me to sort out your father’s collection. Is there even a collection?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then maybe you’d better show it to me.’
‘Come this way.’
Miranda followed him out of the suite and back downstairs to a room next door to the larger of the two sitting rooms. Leandro opened the door and gestured for her to go in. She stepped past him in the doorway, acutely conscious of the way his shirt sleeve brushed against her arm. Every nerve stood up and took notice. Every fine hair tingled at the roots. It was like his body was emitting waves of electricity and she had only to step over an invisible boundary to feel the full force of it.
The atmosphere inside the room was airless and musty, as if it had been closed up a long time. It was packed with canvasses, on the walls, and others wrapped and stacked in leaning piles against the shrouded furniture.
Miranda sent her gaze over the paintings on the walls, examining each one with her trained apprentice’s eye. Even without her qualifications and experience she’d have been able to see this was a collection of enormous value. One of the landscapes was certainly a Gainsborough, or if not a very credible imitation. What other treasures were hidden underneath those wrapped canvasses?
Miranda turned to look at Leandro. ‘This is amazing. But I’m not sure I’m experienced enough to handle such a large collection. We’d need to ship the pieces back to London for proper valuation. It’s too much for one person to deal with. Some of these pieces could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe even millions. You might want to keep some as an investment. Sell them in a few years so you can—’
‘I don’t want them.’
She frowned at his implacable tone. ‘But that’s crazy, Leandro. You could have your own collection. You could have it on show at a private museum. It would be—’
‘I have no interest in making money out of my father’s collection,’ he said. ‘Just do what you have to do. I’ll pay for any shipment costs but that’s as far as I’m prepared to go.’
Miranda watched open-mouthed as he strode out of the room, the dust motes he’d disturbed hovering in the ringing silence.
LEANDRO WORKED THE floor of his father’s study like a lion trapped in a cat carrier. It had been a mistake to bring Miranda here. Here to the epicentre of his pain and anguish. He should have sold the collection without consulting anyone. What did it matter if those wretched paintings were valuable? They weren’t valuable to him. Making money out of his father’s legacy seemed immoral somehow to him. He didn’t understand why his father had left everything to him.
Over the last few years their relationship had deteriorated to perfunctory calls at Christmas or birthdays. Most of the time his father would be heavily inebriated, his words slurred, his memory skewed. It had been all Leandro could do to listen to his father’s drunken ramblings knowing he had been the one to cause the destruction of his father’s life. Surely his father had known how difficult this trip back here would be? Had he done it to twist the knife? To force him to face what he had spent the last two decades avoiding? Everything in this run-down villa represented the misery of his father’s life—a life spent drinking himself to oblivion so he could forget the tragedy of the past.
The tragedy Leandro had caused.
He looked out of the window that overlooked the garden at the back of the villa. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to go out there yet. It had once been a spectacular affair with neatly trimmed hedges, flowering shrubs and borders filled with old-world roses whose heady scent would fill the air. It had been a magical place for he and his sister to scamper about and play hide and seek in amongst the cool, green shaded laneways of the hedges.
But now it was an overgrown mess of weeds, misshapen hedges and skeletal rose bushes with one or two half-hearted blooms. Parts of the garden were so overrun they couldn’t be seen properly from the house.
It reminded Leandro of his father’s life—sad, neglected, abused and abandoned. Wasted.
How could he have thought to bring Miranda here? How long before she discovered Rosie’s room? He couldn’t keep it locked up for ever. Stepping in there was like stepping back in time. It was painfully surreal. Everything was exactly the same as the day Rosie had disappeared from the beach. Every toy. Every doll. Every childish scribble she had ever done. Every messy and colourful finger-painting. Every article of clothing left in the wardrobe as if she were going to come back and use it. Even her hairbrush was on the dressing table with some of her silky dark-brown hairs still trapped in the bristles—a haunting reminder of the last time it had been used.
Even the striped towel they had been sitting on at the beach was there on the foot of the child-sized princess bed. The bed Rosie had been so proud of after moving out of her cot. Her ‘big-girl bed’, she’d called it. He still remembered her excited little face as she’d told him how she had chosen it with their mother while he’d been at school.
It was a lifetime ago.
Why had his father left the room intact for so long? Had he wanted Leandro to see it? Was that why he’d left him the villa and its contents? Knowing Leandro would have to come in and pack up every single item of Rosie’s? Why hadn’t his father seen to it himself or got
