blink cleared some of the boredom from those fine, dark eyes. ‘‘Pardon me, Your Grace, for failing to recognize you. You seem to have left your coronet at home.’’ When she glanced at Drew her brows lifted in haughty inquiry. ‘‘You aren’t a Sebastiani.’’
‘‘No. Call me Drew, Signorina Giaberti.’’ His smile suggested that if she didn’t call, he would. Soon. ‘‘It is signorina, isn’t it?’’ There was no ring on her left hand.
Her mouth twitched in amusement. ‘‘And if it isn’t?’’
‘‘Life is seldom fair, but rarely is it that absurdly malignant.’’ For some reason his bantering tone slipped, as if he’d spoken nothing more than the truth.
She tipped her head, curious, and met his eyes.
The hairs on his forearms stood on end. He looked into those dark eyes and he knew—he was going to have her. When and where didn’t matter. He would have this woman naked and damp and crying out for him.
Her eyes widened. A small, alarmed jerk of her head snapped the contact.
‘‘Signorina Giaberti called in the bomb threat,’’ Captain Mylonas announced with relish.
It took a second for Drew to throw off the odd spell and understand what the man had said. When he did, his stomach contracted in quick, hard denial. But however his body rejected the implications, his mind knew very well that lovely packages could hold ugly surprises. Yet he still wanted her.
How far had he sunk?
The woman was unimpressed by the implicit accusation. Her glance at the captain was annoyed, no more. ‘‘Madre di Dio. It was a warning, not a threat. You might consider thanking me.’’
‘‘Thanking you? For attempting to kill hundreds of innocent people?’’
‘‘I tried to kill no one. If I hadn’t called, the building wouldn’t have been evacuated and the fire—’’ She broke off suddenly. ‘‘I warned you about the bomb. I didn’t threaten you with one. The distinction may be subtle to one of your intelligence, so I will give an example. If I say that looking at your smug, shiny face might cause me to lose my supper, that is a warning. If I say I’m going to vomit all over your pretty uniform unless you go away, that is a threat.’’
Drew choked on a laugh, then doubled over as another coughing fit hit.
Lorenzo took a step towards him. He waved his cousin back, stepping out into the hall so he wouldn’t interfere with the interrogation while his body tried to eject the lining of his lungs. He ended up leaning weakly against the wall, eyes watering as he dragged deep breaths through his raw throat. His head pounded, a hard, hot throb of pain. He blinked the moisture back.
One of the police officers was staring at him. Bloody hell. In another minute he’d have the fool over here asking if he needed medical attention. He made the effort to straighten, glancing down at the scuffed white tiles of the floor…
And the world slipped behind a wall.
Sounds, color, vision—all were still there, but removed. Distant, as if everything had slid behind glass. The pain in his head went from a throb to a long slice of agony.
Not again—please, not now. Not again.
But his plea was as trapped as the rest of him. As if someone had taken a grip on two corners of the world and pulled, the square tiles of the floor stretched into parallelograms. Pain became pressure, livid, explosive, almost living, as if it could burst out of his skull and splatter his brains on the white, elongated tiles. He tried to move, to at least close his eyes. And couldn’t. He could only stand frozen while the tiles melted and the beast behind his eyes rose in a huge wave—
As suddenly as it had come, it was gone. The tiles dragged themselves back into their proper shapes, the pressure receded, tidelike, leaving him cold and clammy and weak. Last to go was the wall, the glassy barrier that muffled everything…
‘‘…all right, sir?’’
He looked up. The officer he’d seen earlier was standing in front of him, looking very young in a soot-smudged uniform. Those spaniel eyes hadn’t yet learned a cop’s detachment.
Drew dredged up a reassuring smile. ‘‘Afraid I inhaled too much smoke earlier. I’ll be fine.’’
As fine as a man could be, that is, when he was losing his mind.
Chapter 2
Montebello was a tiny island with a long history. Conquered, traded, overrun and reconquered, its 3,100 square miles—less than half the size of Wales, smaller than forty-eight of the United States—held detritus from more than two thousand years of bloody civilization. A farmer’s plow might turn up Roman coins, an Assyrian ax head, Egyptian pot shards or a handful of spent casings from a machine gun used by Mussolini’s occupying army. As Drew’s limousine climbed the stubby mountains that separated the airport from the capital city, it passed goats grazing in a tumble of hewn rocks that had once been the walls of a Byzantine monastery.
The Turks had destroyed that monastery after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Beneath the highway’s smooth modern paving lay earth once tramped by Roman legions, who had brought law and the cult of Aphrodite to this small, fertile island. Muhammad’s followers had walked here, proclaiming the oneness of God with curved scimitars while their mathematicians brought to the world new ways to measure its bounds. The militant Knights of St. John and the secular knights of Richard I arrived with their straighter swords a century later, housing God in different architecture. They also brought to the island those practical mysteries of commerce and government that supported the growth of a new class—a middle class.
Soon, though, they lost the island to the Doge of Venice. The local nobility didn’t fare well in that change of power, but the growing class of artisans and traders prospered under a ruler entranced with the glittering possibilities of commerce. The Venetian branch of a northern Italian family, the Sebastianis, invested heavily in the island and eventually moved there.
Not until Napoleon overran Europe did the little island taste autonomy. The French Emperor claimed it along with his Italian territory, but he had no troops to spare for so distant a possession. The local mechanisms of government persisted, but no one was truly in charge—at least, no one the locals could agree on.
A small, prosperous island without a strong defender wouldn’t be allowed to dabble in sovereignty for long. Augustus Sebastiani, by then a Duke, stepped into the temporary vacuum and by a combination of trickery and economic clout made himself the de facto head of state. He forestalled any violent courtships by Montebello’s acquisitive neighbors with a series of canny trade agreements and marriages. One Sebastiani daughter went to France, another to a Spanish prince, while the oldest son took a noble English bride.
This hedging of bets through arranged marriages proved wise when, after Waterloo, Europe divided the spoils and England acquired Montebello and held it in a loose and friendly grip. In 1880, either from altruism or a lack of interest, Great Britain bestowed the island upon its people in the person of King Augustus Sebastiani, who promptly married an English noblewoman with ties to the British throne.
The Sebastianis had ruled ever since. In some ways the family personified the results of the island’s long and bloody history—a mingling of races, religions, tongues and cultures
