The Bride's Awakening - By Kate Hewitt Page 0,5
in her mind all evening?
‘The Count of Cazlevara has returned,’ she explained lightly. ‘He made an appearance tonight. Did you know he was back?’
‘Yes,’ Enrico said after a moment and, to Ana’s surprise, he sounded both thoughtful and guarded. ‘I did.’
‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows, tucking her feet under her as she settled deeper into the armchair of worn, butter-soft leather. ‘You never told me.’ She couldn’t quite keep the faint note of reproach from her voice.
Her father hesitated and Ana had the distinct feeling he was hiding something from her. She wondered how she even knew it to be a possibility, when their relationship—especially in the years after her mother had died—had been so close, so open. It hadn’t always been that way, God knew, but she’d worked at it and so had he, and yet now…? Was he actually hiding something from her?
She gave a little laugh. ‘Well, Papà?’
He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem important.’
Ana nodded, accepting, because of course it shouldn’t be important. She barely knew Vittorio. That one moment by her mother’s graveside shouldn’t even count. ‘Well, it’s late,’ she finally said, smiling. ‘I’m tired, so I think I shall go to bed.’
Ana scooped up her shoes, letting them dangle from her fingers as she walked slowly from the library through the darkened foyer and up the marble stairs that led to the second floor of the villa. She walked past darkened room after darkened room; the villa had eight bedrooms and only two were ever used. They rarely had guests.
Vittorio’s few words had unsettled her, she realized as she entered her room and began to undress for bed. They shouldn’t have—what a meaningless conversation it had been! Barely two sentences, yet they reverberated through her mind, her body, their echoes whispering provocatively to her.
She hadn’t expected to have such a reaction to the man when she’d barely spared him a thought these last years. Yet the moment he’d entered the castle, she’d been aware of him. Achingly, alarmingly, agonizingly aware, her body suddenly springing to life, as if it had been numb or asleep, or even dead.
She slipped on her pyjamas and let her hair out of its restraining clip.
Outside her window, the moon bathed the meadows in silver and she could just make out the shadowy silhouettes in the vineyard that gave Villa Rosso both its name and fortune—rosso for the colour of the wine those grapes produced, a rich velvety red that graced many a fine table in Italy and, more recently, abroad.
Ana sat in her window seat, her legs drawn up to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. The wind from the open window stirred her hair and cooled her cheeks—she hadn’t realized they’d been heated. Had she been blushing?
And what for? If she had any sort of social life at all, that tiny exchange with Vittorio would have meant less than nothing. Yet the hard fact was that she didn’t, and it had. She was twenty-nine years old, staring at her thirtieth birthday in just a few months, without even the breath of hope of a social life beyond the winemaking events and tastings she went to, mostly populated by men twice her age. Not exactly husband material.
And was she even looking for a husband? Ana asked herself sharply. She’d given up that kind of dream years ago, when it had been pathetically, painfully obvious that men were not interested in her. She’d chosen to fill her life with business, friends and family—her father, at least—rather than pursue romance—love—that had, over the years, always seemed to pass her by. She’d let it go by, knowing those things were not for her. She’d accepted it…until tonight.
Still, she wished now that Vittorio hadn’t come back, wished his absurd flattery—false as it so obviously was—hadn’t stirred up her soul, reminded her of secret longings she’d forgotten or repressed. She’d been ignored so long—as a woman—that she’d become invisible, even to herself. She simply didn’t think of herself that way any more.
She leaned her head back against the cool stone, closing her eyes as the wind tangled her hair and rattled in the trees outside.
She wanted, she realized with a sharp pang, Vittorio Cazlevara to look at her not with disdain or disgust, but with desire. She wanted him to say the things he’d said to her tonight—and more—and mean them.
She wanted to feel like a woman. For once.
Chapter Two
‘SIGNORINA VIALE, YOU have a visitor.’
‘I do?’ Ana looked up from the vine she’d been