wishing he was not interested in knowing why the girl was in such a hurry, or why her hands were trembling. “I should have guessed it. Perhaps you will allow me to transport you safely to the nearest coaching inn?”
She pulled a length of rope from the drawer, using it to tie the satchel closed, as the clasp had come to grief months earlier, not by accident but merely by rotting away with age. She hefted the thing onto her shoulder. “You’d do that, signore? You aren’t going to press me about accompanying you to England?”
Valerian shrugged indifferently. “If you’re asking if I’m about to carry you off will-nilly against your wishes, I fear you have badly mistaken your man. I’ve been most happily traveling across Europe in a long-delayed Grand Tour of sorts, and interrupting it to play ape-leader to a reluctant heiress was not part of my agenda. No, Signorina Crispino, I have wasted enough time with this project. It is time I continue my journey.”
She looked at him carefully, piercingly, for the first time, taking in his well-cut, modish clothes, his tall, leanly muscular frame, and the healthy shock of thick black hair accented by snow-white “angel wings” at the temples—although they didn’t make him look the least angelic, but rather dashing in a disturbing sort of way.
“Naturalmente. If I had looked harder, I should have seen more. Like overcooked pasta, Signor Fitzhugh, you are appealing to the eye, but upon further investigation, can be quickly dismissed as unpalatable, being soft at the center and rather mushy. Now, if you will excuse me?”
Valerian merely bowed, her verbal barb seemingly having no effect on him.
Just as she turned for the door it crashed open, banging loudly against the inside wall and nearly ripping free of its rusted hinges. A heartbeat later a large masculine shape appeared in the doorway. “Ha!” the shape bellowed, his roar one of triumph as he caught sight of Signorina Crispino.
His elation quickly dissipated, however, when he espied Valerian, who was once more standing near the window. The man turned to Signorina Crispino, asking, “Chi?” even as he extracted a small metal mallet from his breeches pocket, raised it above his head, and advanced in Valerian’s direction.
“Bernardo, no! Un momento, per favore!” Allegra made to grab at the man’s arm, but he flicked her away as if she were an annoying fly. “Signor Fitzhugh, be careful! He is crazy and won’t listen to me! I can’t stop him! You must run! Bernardo fará polpette di tuo—he will make meatballs out of you!”
“Sì, the little meatballs!” Bernardo concurred in heavily accented English, grinning his appreciation of that description of what he and his little mallet would soon be doing to Valerian, the weapon gleaming dully in the faint light.
Valerian was not by nature a timid man, far from it, nor was he incapable of protecting himself. He just, frankly, wasn’t in the mood for a fist fight with a man no taller than he was but twice as muscular and at least five years younger. Was this Bernardo even real? No human should be so beautiful—at least not a man. Besides, the fellow was armed, and that didn’t really seem fair.
He decided to even up the odds a bit. Reaching into his breast pocket, Valerian pulled out a small pistol and pointed it at Bernardo, halting him in mid-attack.
“Call off your dog, signorina,” he ordered amicably enough, “before I am forced to place a small hole between the eyebrows on his pretty face. And I so abhor violence.”
Signorina Crispino lifted her slim shoulders in an eloquent shrug before turning her back on the pair of them and heading for the door. “And why would I warn him, signore?” she called over her shoulder. “Shoot him, per favore. You will be doing me a great service. Addio, Bernardo.”
The pistol wavered, only slightly and only for a moment, as Valerian watched the girl go, leaving him standing almost toe to toe with Bernardo, who was jabbering at him in something that sounded like Italian, but not like any Italian the Englishman was accustomed to hearing.
Now what was Valerian going to do? He certainly wasn’t about to shoot the man—he had never really considered doing that—but with that option lost to him, the metal mallet did once more make the two of them an unmatched pair.
“Signorina Crispino—come back here!” he yelled as Bernardo growled low in his throat, raising the mallet another fraction as if unafraid of either Valerian or the weapon in his hand. “I warn you, I shan’t hang alone. Come back here at once or I’ll tell the authorities that you ordered the killing!”
Her head reappeared around the doorjamb. “You English,” she said scathingly. “What a bloodless lot. You can’t even put a hole through a man who is trying to bash in your skull. And as for honor—why, you have none!”
“It’s not that, signorina,” Valerian corrected her urbanely. “It’s just that a prolonged sojourn in one of your quaint Italian prisons until explanations can be made ranks very low on my agenda. I’ve heard the plumbing in those places is not of the best. Now, are you going to call this incarnation of an ancient Roman god off or not? I’m afraid his notion of the Italian language and mine do not coincide, and I don’t wish to insult him further with some verbal misstep.”
Shrugging yet again, Signorina Crispino walked over to Bernardo and gave him a swift kick in the leg in order to gain his attention. “Bernardo, tu hai il cervello di una gallina! Vai al diavolo!”
“Oh, that’s lovely, that is,” Valerian interposed. “Although I hesitate to point this out, I could have told Bernardo here that he has the brain of a chicken. I also could have told him to go lose himself somewhere. Can’t you just tell your lover that I’m harmless—that I’m a friend of your grandfather’s?”
“My lover! You insult me!” she exploded, throwing down the satchel. “As if that were true—could ever be true!” Her hands drawn into tight fists, she wildly looked about the small room in search of a weapon, seizing on the lighted candle that stood in a heavy pewter base, not knowing whom to hit with it first, Bernardo or Valerian.
Bernardo, who seemed to have tired of staring down the short barrel of the pistol, and who did not take kindly to the insults Signorina Crispino had thrown at him, took the decision out of her hands by the simple means of turning to her, his smile wide in his innocently handsome face. “Allegra—mi amore!”
“Ah, how affecting. The Adonis loves you,” Valerian said, earning himself a cutting glance from Allegra.
“Fermata! Stop it—both of you!” she warned tightly just as Valerian’s pistol came down heavily on the side of Bernardo’s head and the man crumpled into a heap at her feet. She looked from Valerian to Bernardo’s inert form and then back at Valerian once again. “Bene, signore. Molto bene. I thought you said you abhorred violence.”
Valerian replaced the pistol in his pocket. “I have learned a new saying since coming to Italy, Signorina Allegra: ‘Quando sé in ballo, bisogna ballare.’ When at a dance, one must dance. Your Bernardo left me no choice. Thank you for coming back, by the way. It was cursed good of you.”
He looked down at the unconscious Bernardo. “I didn’t really wish to hit him. It was like taking a hatchet to a Michelangelo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a pretty face.”
“Behind which resides the most bricklike brain in the good Lord’s nature,” Allegra retorted, giving Bernardo’s inert figure a small kick. “He speaks some English, you know, but it goes straight out of his head—pouf!—when he has to do more than stand up straight and be handsome. Sogni d’oro, Bernardo— golden
