Under a Siena Sun (Escape to Tuscany #1) - T.A. Williams Page 0,27

he just wanders around the estate if he’s out on his own. It’s twenty-five hectares in total and that’s pretty big, after all. It’s just that his master has been away these last few days and I’ve been very busy so Boris hasn’t had his usual long walks.’

‘So he’s not your dog?’

‘No, he belongs to the master.’

Lucy wondered why her landlord’s wife hadn’t been able to give the dog his walks, but she decided it had nothing to do with her. ‘Well, if I see him wandering out on the road again, I’ll give you another call.’

‘Thank you, but hopefully he shouldn’t come all the way down here again. His master is due back home this afternoon so Boris can return to his normal routine.’

It sounded strange to Lucy to hear him referring to his master, rather than by the man’s name, and it reminded her of a Dracula movie she had once seen where the old butler had always referred to the vampire lying in the coffin in the crypt as the ‘master’. Hopefully she wasn’t living next to a vampire. There had been big bats in the Congo, but none of them addicted to human blood as far as she knew, and none of them dressed in a sinister black cloak. In spite of herself, she shivered.

Chapter 8

As it turned out, Lucy came within just a few feet of meeting the dog’s reclusive owner the very next morning, but at that point she was in no fit state to greet him properly.

It was another fine, sunny morning and she woke up feeling relaxed after the third night on the trot without any bad dreams. The weather forecast was warning of rain on the way later in the day so she decided to go for a long walk around the area to get her bearings before the ground got too sodden. She set out at ten, determined to do a circular tour around the perimeter of the Castelnuovo estate to see if she could at least get a glimpse of the remains of the ruined castle. The previous night she had checked it out on Google Earth and had located what looked like the rough outline of a rectangular shape in the trees alongside the sizeable red-roofed villa but, as both the shopkeeper and Armando had said, it was very overgrown and there was precious little of it left to see. Interestingly, there was a bright red luxury sports car visible parked outside the villa and that confirmed her conviction that the owners of a place like that must be of the rich and flashy variety. Still, if they kept themselves to themselves, so much the better.

She stuck a bottle of water and a banana in her bag, slung it over her shoulder and set out. The air was more humid today and she felt sure the TV weatherman had got it right. She walked up a steep, narrow path through the middle of a grove of gnarled old olive trees, their grey-green leaves covered in dust. As she did so, she reflected that everything around here looked extremely dry, in spite of it only being late May. No doubt the olives, vines and other crops could all do with the predicted rain and would enjoy a good soaking.

As she climbed, the view around her broadened until she was looking beyond the valley and across row after row of tree-clad hills in all directions. In the far distance she saw what might have been the towers of San Gimignano – one of the must-see places in Tuscany that she had visited several times as a girl. Even back in those days the little town had been crowded with tourists and she had no doubt that visitor numbers could only have increased with the passing of the years. Up here there was a little bit more breeze and she could well understand why the builders of first the castle and then the villa had chosen to come up this high. As she knew from experience, Tuscany could become swelteringly hot in the summer months and the breeze would have been very welcome indeed – particularly back in the days before air con.

She was roughly following a new-looking wire fence, taller than she was, that surrounded the Villa Castelnuovo estate. She wondered if this had been put up to keep out animals or humans, and decided it was probably both. Peering through the mesh from time to time, she was unable