in place then, and black kohl surrounded her eyes. Her face was caked in far too much make-up.
On the face of it the photograph might depict an eighteen-year-old who looked far too sexually available, but the image looking back at her stabbed at Louise’s heart. It wasn’t just because she was looking at herself that she could see the vulnerability behind the overt sexuality. Anyone with her training and experience would be able to see the same thing. A caring father should surely also have seen it.
Louise looked again at the photograph. All that holiday she had deliberately worn clothes so provocative that it was hardly surprising she’d had virtually every boy in the village looking for easy sex, hanging around the villa they’d been renting. She’d looked cheap and available, and that was how she had been treated. Of course her grandparents had tried to suggest she wore something more discreet, and of course she had ignored them. She’d been very young for her age, despite her appearance—sent to an all-girls school, and just desperate to fit in and be accepted by the coterie of girls who mattered there. By changing her appearance she’d wanted to provoke her father, to force him to notice her. Of course he had not wanted anything to do with her, preferring instead to be with Melinda and her two pretty little girls.
What a fool she had been. And more than a fool.
‘Quite a change,’ Caesar couldn’t help saying wryly when he saw her looking at the photograph her grandfather had included in his letter to jog his own memory about the identity of the young woman who had conceived what the dying man had claimed was his son. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you.’
‘I was eighteen and I wanted …’
‘Male attention. Yes, I remember.’
Louise could feel her face beginning to burn.
‘My father’s attention …’ she corrected him in a cool voice.
Was it the way she was looking at him or his own memories that stung with such unpalatable force? He had been twenty-two to her eighteen, newly in full control of his inheritance and free of the advisers who had previously guided him, and very much aware that his people were judging his ability to be the Duke they wanted—one who would preserve their traditions and way of life.
At the same time he’d been searching for a way to discreetly pursue his own plans for modernisation in the face of hostility to any kind of change amongst the older generation of headmen in charge of the villages. In particular the leader of the largest village, where Louise had been staying, had vetoed any idea of new developments—especially when it came to the role of women who, as far as he was concerned, must always be subservient to their menfolk and their family. That headman, Aldo Barado, had been able to marshal the support of many of the leaders from the other villages, which had led to Caesar feeling he had to tread very carefully and even make some concessions if he was to achieve his goals.
Whilst time and the growing insistence of the younger members of the community on modernising had helped to bring in many of Ceasar’s plans, Aldo Barado remained unconvinced and still insisted on the old ways.
Louise’s modern views, and her determination to be herself, had immediately caused Aldo Barado to be antagonistic towards her. He had come up to the castello within two days of Louise’s arrival in the village to complain about the effect she was having on the young people, especially the young men, and even more especially on his only son who, despite the fact that he was engaged to be married in a match arranged and sanctioned by his father, had been openly pursuing Louise.
Of course Caesar had had no option other than to listen to the headman’s demands that he do something about the situation and the girl who was openly flouting the rules of their society, and that was the reason and the only reason he had gone down to the village to introduce himself to her family—so that he could observe her behaviour and if necessary have a word with her father.
Only the minute he had set eyes on Louise any thought of remaining detached and ducal had been swept away, and he had known instantly, with gut-wrenching certainty, just why the village youths found her so compellingly attractive. Not even her atrocious hairstyle and choice of clothes had been able to dim the light of her extraordinary natural beauty. Those eyes, that skin, that softly pouting mouth that promised so much …
Caesar had been shocked by the force of his own response to her, and even more shocked by his inability to control that response. From the day he had been told of his parents’ death, at six years old, he had developed emotional strategies to protect himself from the bewildering and often frightening aloneness he felt. He must be brave, he had been told. He must be strong. He must remember always that he was a Falconari and that it was his destiny and his duty to lead his people. He must put them, his family name and its history first. His own emotions didn’t matter and must be controlled. He must always be a duca before he was a vulnerable human being.
After Aldo Barado’s visit to complain about Louise he had, of course, tried to behave as he knew he should—even going to the extent of seeking out her father to express the headman’s concern. But he knew now, after receiving Louise’s grandfather’s letter, that whilst he had listened to Aldo Barado, and to Louise’s father and his wife-to-be, he had not made any attempt to listen to Louise herself. He had not looked beneath the surface. He had not seen what he should have seen.
Now, knowing how she had been rejected and treated by her father, he had to ask himself how much of that was down to him.
He looked at the photograph again. He had been so caught up in his own fear of the emotions she aroused in him that he had not seen what he could so plainly see now, and that was the unhappiness in the eyes of the girl in the photograph. Because he had not wanted to see it. It was guilt that was fuelling his anger now, he knew.
‘And you expected to get your father’s attention by going to bed with me?’ he demanded caustically.
He was right. Of course he was right. Her behaviour had driven her father away, not brought them closer. Encouraged by the combined denunciations of both Aldo Barado and Melinda, her father, who had never been able to deal well with anything emotional, had turned on her, joining their chorus of criticism.
How naive she had been to expect that somehow Caesar would materialise at her side as her champion, her saviour, and tell them all that he loved her and he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her ever again. Caesar’s very absence had told her all she needed to know about his real feelings for her, or the lack of them, even before the headman had told her father that he was acting on Caesar’s instructions.
Now, when she looked back with the maturity and expertise she had acquired, she could see so clearly that what she had taken for Caesar’s celebration of a shared love and a future for them, when he had abandoned his self-control to take them both to the heights of intimate physical desire, had in reality been a breaching of his defences by an unwanted desire for her that he had bitterly resented. Those precious moments held fast in his arms in the aftermath of their intimacy, which had filled her with such hope for the future and such joy, had filled him with a need to deny that what they had shared had any real meaning for him.
He might want to deceive himself about his own motivations, but she wasn’t going to lie to him about the motives of that girl he had hurt so very badly.
Lifting her head, she gathered herself and let him hear the acid truth. ‘Well, I certainly didn’t go to bed with you so that I could be publicly humiliated by the headman of my grandparents’ village whilst you remained aloof and arrogant in your castello! My father was furious with me for being, as he put it, “stupid enough to think that a man like Caesar could ever have wanted anything from
