of his injuries, confronted her full-on.
A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.
She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.
His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’
Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.
He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’
‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’
‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’
His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?
No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’
He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.
‘Did you hear me? I said Bruno will arrange for your return.’
It was all she could do not to stamp her foot. ‘And I said I’m not leaving!
One arm swept in a wide arc. ‘I have no dealings with you. My arrangement was with Professor Rousseau.’
‘No. According to the documents, your arrangement was with her business, Archival Survival. When the Professor was unable to come, she contracted me.’
He grunted, no way about to concede the point. ‘So what is her excuse for being unable to fulfil her contractual obligations herself?’
‘If you’d read this letter you’d know. Her mother is in hospital after suffering a major stroke and she’s rushed to be with her while she clings to life. Admittedly, as excuses go, that’s pretty thin. Clearly it’s more about inconveniencing you.’
If his eyes were lasers, she figured, with the heated glare he gave her she’d be wearing holes right now, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark. She’d grown up in a family that prided itself on being straight-talking. Over the years she’d learned to curb that trait while in civilised company. The Count, she’d already decided, for all his flash clothes and a portrait gallery full of titled ancestors, didn’t qualify.
‘I expected an expert. I do not intend spending a week babysitting someone’s apprentice.’
She sucked in air, hating the fact it was tinged with a hint of sandalwood and spice, with undertones of something else altogether more musky, hating the possibility that it might come from him, hating the possibility that there might be something about him she approved of when the rest of him was so damned objectionable.
But that was still okay, she figured, because finding something she might possibly like only made her more resentful towards him. ‘Seeing you refuse to read this letter, where all the facts are set out in black and white, perhaps I should spell it out for you? I have a Masters in Fine Arts from Melbourne University and a PhD in Antiquities from Oxford, where my thesis was on the preservation and conservation of ancient texts and the challenge of discerning fraud where it was perpetrated centuries ago. So if there’s an apprentice on this island right now, I don’t think it’s me. Does that make you feel more comfortable?’
He arched one critical eyebrow high. ‘You look barely out of high school.’
‘I’m twenty-eight years old. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’d like to check my passport?’
Dust motes danced on the slanted sunlit air between them, oblivious of the tension—dust motes that disappeared with those slanting rays as the sun was swallowed up by a cloud and the room darkened. She resisted the urge to shiver, resisted that damned illogical brain cell that suggested there was some connection between the Count’s dark looks and the weather. And instead she decided that his momentary silence meant assent.
‘And so right now I’d like to get to work. After all, I believe you want this text taken off your hands as soon as possible, and we’ve already wasted enough time, don’t you agree? Perhaps you could arrange someone to show me to the documents so I might get started?’
He scowled as he took the letter from her hands then, scanning its contents, finding everything was as she said and finding nothing to arm him with the ammunition to demand she leave.
He wanted her gone.
He didn’t want women around the place. Not young women, and definitely not halfway to pretty. He had his fix of women once a month, when the launch brought across a local village woman. He never asked her name; she never offered it. Each time she would just wait for him naked in the guest-suite bed, then throw back the covers and close her eyes.
And afterwards the launch would take her back to her village, considerably better off than before she had made the crossing.
No, Alessandro had no need for women.
He shrugged and tossed the letter down on his wide desk. What did it matter what the letter said or didn’t say? ‘I said you are not welcome here, Ms Hunter.’
She stiffened to stone right where she stood, her mouth pursing. ‘Dr Hunter, actually. And I will ensure my stay is as brief as possible. I have no desire to stay any longer than necessary where I am not welcome, I can assure you.’
He sniffed at the correction as he regarded her solemnly. She looked like a woman who had no desires, period. Sure, she was younger than the dried-up Professor, but with her scraped-back hair and that pursed mouth, and in khaki pants and T-shirt, it wasn’t as if she was anything like the women who had once graced his arm and his bed.
God knew, another twenty years or so of staring into her desiccated papers and she’d probably be as dried up and crusty as the Professor. Maybe he had nothing to worry about.
And she was right about one thing: he did want the find off his hands as quickly as possible. If the Professor proved unable to do it personally because of her ailing mother someone else would have to be found, all of it spelling delay after delay.
He
