Lucius she said, ‘I’ll go and clean myself up.’
‘The necessary materials will be brought to you.’ he said. ‘We must be sure no foreign substances remain in the wound.’
‘Of course.’ Gina was fast tiring of the fuss. ‘I can cope.’
‘I am sure of it.’ His tone was dry. ‘Your self-sufficiency does you credit. You will, however, wait for assistance in this matter.’
He took her agreement for granted, indicating that she precede him into the house. Gina battened down her instincts and meekly obeyed. ‘I’m sure you know best,’ she murmured in passing, tongue tucked firmly in cheek.
The dress was not only dirty but torn at the hem, she found on reaching her room. Not beyond repair, she supposed, examining the rip, though she was no expert needle-woman. At any rate, she had plenty of other things to change into, so it could wait until she got home.
Despite instructions, she ran hot water in the bathroom basin and began cleaning off the worst of the mess. The graze was quite extensive, with tiny pieces of gravel embedded in the shredded flesh. Concentrating on extracting them, she was taken unawares when Lucius entered the room bearing a first-aid box.
‘You were to wait until I brought this!’ he exclaimed.
Seated on a padded stool, her foot raised on the bath edge to enable her to see what she was doing, Gina resisted the urge to pull down the skirt she had raised to mid thigh.
‘I hardly expected you to bring it up yourself,’ she said lamely.
Dark brows rose. ‘You think such a task beneath me?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. I just took it…’ She left the sentence unfinished, holding out her hand for the box. ‘It’s very good of you, anyway.’
Lucius made no attempt to hand it over. Placing it on the long marble surface into which the double basins were set, he seized soap from the dish and washed his hands. Gina watched in silence, reminded that she should have done the same before attempting to touch the graze at all.
His presence in the confines of the bathroom—spacious though it was—made her nervous. She found it difficult to control the quivering in her limbs when he took a pair of tweezers from the box and sat down on the bath edge to start work on the gravel.
The hand he slid about the back of her calf to hold her leg still was warm and firm against her skin, his fingers long and supple, the nails smoothly trimmed; she could imagine the way they would feel on her body—the sensual caresses. Her nipples were peaking at the very notion.
Stop it! she told herself harshly, ashamed of the sheer carnality of her thoughts. It might be a long-established fact that women were as capable as men of enjoying sex without love, but she had never followed the trend. From her mid teens she had determined not to settle for anything less than the real thing: the kind of love her mother had known for Giovanni Carandente. The possibility that Lucius could be her father’s nephew was enough on its own to prohibit any notion she might have of relaxing her ideals.
‘I am sorry if I hurt you,’ Lucius apologised as her leg jumped beneath his hands. ‘There are only a few more small pieces to come, and then we are finished but for the antiseptic.’
‘No problem,’ she assured him. ‘You’re being very gentle. It’s quite a mess, isn’t it? I didn’t realise how deep some of the bits had gone.’
‘Thankfully, there should be no lasting scars,’ he said without looking up from his task. ‘It would be a pity to mar such a lovely leg.’
‘Don’t you ever stop?’ she asked with a sharpness she hadn’t intended.
This time he did look up, expression quizzical. ‘You find my admiration irksome?’
Gina drew a steadying breath. ‘I find it a little too…practised, that’s all.’
‘Ah, I see. You think I express the same sentiments to all women.’ The dancing light was in his eyes again. ‘Not so.’
He was hardly going to admit it, Gina told herself as he turned his attention once more to her knee. Not that it made any difference.
The antiseptic stung like crazy, but Lucius made no concessions. He finished the dressing with an expertly applied bandage.
‘You may remove the dressing tomorrow to allow the healing tissue to form,’ he said, relinquishing his hold on her at last.
Gina got to her feet to try a somewhat stiff-legged step, pulling a face at her reflection in the mirrored wall. ‘I haven’t had a bandaged knee since I was eight!’
‘Long skirts, or the trousers women everywhere appear to have adopted, will cover your embarrassment.’
The dry tone drew her eyes to the olive-skinned face reflected in the mirror. ‘You disapprove of the trend?’ she asked lightly.
‘I prefer a woman to dress as a woman,’ he confirmed. ‘As most men would say if asked.’
‘Donata wears them,’ Gina felt bound to point out, stung a little by the implied criticism. ‘With that attitude, I’m surprised you allow it—to say nothing of the rest!’
‘I said preference not outright rule,’ came the steady response. ‘Assuming that by the “rest” you refer to the state of my sister’s hair, no amount of castigation can hasten the regrowth.’
Gina turned impulsively to face him, ashamed of the dig. ‘I spoke out of turn. You said yesterday that she’d recently returned from school?’
The smile was brief and lacking in humour. ‘She was despatched from her school for behaviour no reputable establishment could tolerate.’
‘Not just for a haircut, surely!’
‘A minor transgression compared with breaking out of the school in order to attend a nightclub in the nearby town. Not for the first time it appears. This time she was caught by the police when they raided the place in search of drugs.’
Gina gazed at him in dismay. ‘You’re not saying Donata was actually taking them?’
‘She assures me not.’
‘You do believe her?’
Lucius lifted his shoulders, mouth wry. ‘I hardly know what to believe. I bitterly regret allowing her to persuade me into sending her to Switzerland at all. Her education was complete enough without this “finishing” she was so anxious to acquire.’
‘She can’t have been the only one to kick over the traces,’ Gina ventured.
‘If by that you mean was she alone on the night in question, the answer is no. There were two others caught with her. One American girl, one English. They too were despatched to their respective homes.’
‘I see.’ Silly as it seemed, Gina felt like apologising for the part the English girl had played. ‘I don’t suppose it helps much.’
‘No,’ Lucius agreed. ‘I am still left with the problem of a sister turned insurgent. While she resides
