had surged towards them across a narrow bridge and she’d been separated from her friends and forced backwards. By the time she’d managed to shoulder her way between the feathered wings and get back to the bridge Chiara and her friends had been swallowed up in the fog and the crowds and were nowhere in sight.
She’d raced across the bridge and along the crowded paths as best she could, trying to catch up, colliding with people wearing headdresses constructed from shells, or jester hats strung with bells, or ball gowns nearly the width of the narrow streets. But she was relatively new to Venice, and unsure of the way, and she’d crossed so many bridges—too many—that even if Chiara turned back how would she even know where to find her? She could have taken any number of wrong turns.
Useless.
She might as well go home to the tiny basement apartment she shared with Chiara—wherever that was. Surely even if it took her all night she would stumble across it eventually. With a final sigh, she reefed the mask from her face. She didn’t need a lace veil over her eyes to make her job any more difficult. She didn’t need a mask tonight, period. There would be no party for her tonight.
Her cloak slipped as she pushed her hair back, inadvertently exposing one shoulder to the frigid air. She shivered as she grappled with the slippery cloth and tucked herself back under what flimsy protection it offered against the cold.
She was bracing herself to fight her way back over the bridge and retrace her steps when she saw him. A man standing by the well in the centre of the square. A man in a costume of blue trimmed with gold. A tall man, broad-shouldered, with the bearing of a warrior.
A man who was staring right at her.
Electricity zapped a jagged line down her spine.
No. Not possible. She darted a look over her shoulder—because why should he be looking at her? But there was nothing behind her but the canal and a crumbling wall beyond.
She swallowed as she turned back, raising her eyes just enough to see that he was now walking purposefully towards her, and the crowd was almost scattering around him. Even across the gloom of the lamp-lit square the intent in his eyes sent adrenaline spiking in her blood.
Fight versus flight? There was no question of her response. She knew that whoever he was, and whatever he was thinking, she’d stayed there too long. And he was still moving, long strides bridging the distance between them, and still her feet refused to budge. She was anchored to the spot, when instead she should be pushing bodily into the bottleneck of people at the bridge and letting the crowd swallow her up and carry her away.
Much too soon he was before her, a man mountain of leather tunic and braid and chain, his shoulder-length hair loose around a face that spoke of power. A high brow above a broad nose and a jawline framed with steel and rendered in concrete, all hard lines and planes. And eyes of the most startling blue. Cobalt. No, he was no mere warrior. He must be a warlord. A god. He could be either.
Her mouth went dry as she looked up at him, but maybe that was just the heat that seemed to radiate from his body on this cold, foggy evening.
‘Can I help you?’ he said, in a voice as deep as he was tall.
He spoke in English, although with an accent that suggested he was not. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and her tongue seemed to have lost the ability to form words in any language.
He angled his head, his dark eyes narrowing. ‘Vous-êtes perdu?’ he tried, speaking in French this time.
Her French was patchier than her English, so she didn’t bother trying to respond in either. ‘No parlo Francese,’ she said, sounding breathless even to her own ears—but how could she not sound breathless, standing before a man whose very presence seemed to suck the oxygen out of the misty air?
‘You’re Italian?’ he said, in her own language this time.
‘Si.’ She swallowed, the action kicking up her chin. She tried to pretend it was a show of confidence, just like the challenge she did her best to infuse into her voice. ‘Why were you watching me?’
‘I was curious.’
She swallowed. She’d seen those women standing alone and waiting on the side of the road, and she had one idea why he might be curious about a woman standing by herself in a square.
She looked down at her gown, at the stockinged legs visible beneath the hem of her skirt. She knew she was supposed to look like a courtesan, but... ‘This is a costume. I’m not—you know.’
One side of his mouth lifted—the slightest rearrangement of the hard angles and planes of his face that turned his lips into an almost-smile, a change so dramatic that it took her completely by surprise.
‘This is Carnevale. Nobody is who they seem tonight.’
‘And who are you?’
‘My name is Vittorio. And you are...?’
‘Rosa.’
‘Rosa,’ he said, with the slightest inclination of his head.
It was all she could do not to sway at the way her name sounded in his rich, deep voice. It was the cold, she told herself, the slap of water against the side of the canal and the whisper of the fog against her skin, nothing more.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’
He held out one hand and she regarded it warily. It was a big hand, with buckles cuffing sleeves that looked as if they would burst open if he clenched so much as a muscle.
‘I promise it doesn’t bite,’ he said.
She looked up to see that the curve of his lips had moved up a notch and there was a glimmer of warmth in his impossibly blue eyes. And she didn’t mind that he seemed to be laughing at her, because the action had worked some kind of miracle on his face, giving a glimpse of the man beneath the warrior. So he was mortal after all...not some god conjured up by the shifting fog.
Almost reluctantly she put her hand in his, then felt his fingers curl around her hers and heat bloom in her hand. It was a delicious heat that curled seductively into her bloodstream and stirred a response low down in her belly, a feeling so unexpected, so unfamiliar, that it sent alarm bells clanging in her brain.
‘I have to go,’ she said, pulling her hand from his, feeling the loss of his body heat as if it had been suctioned from her flesh.
‘Where do you have to go?’
She looked over her shoulder at the bridge. The crowds were thinning now, most people having arrived at their destinations, and only latecomers were still rushing. If she set off now, at least she’d have a chance of getting herself warm.
‘I’m supposed to be somewhere. A party.’
‘Do you know where this party is?’
‘I’ll find it,’ she said, with a conviction she didn’t feel.
Because she had no idea where she was or where the party was, and because even if she did by some miracle manage to find the party there was the slight matter of an entry ticket no longer in her possession.
‘You haven’t a clue
