He thrust aside the foliage and located the latch on the gate. At this moment he barely resembled a civilised man. She could see his muscles moving under the material of his suit and felt another disconcerting pulse of awareness in her lower body. Totally inappropriate and unwelcome.
He pushed open the gate and said in a grim tone, ‘Come on.’
Chiara had no choice but to follow him into the shadowed and dormant graveyard. Sunlight barely penetrated through the gnarled branches of the trees overhead and it was very still. She picked her way gingerly over the uneven ground, not even sure what she was walking on, hoping it wasn’t graves.
He had reached the far corner and was pulling leaves and branches away from something. When she got closer she saw that it was a headstone. He turned to face her with an intense look on his face, and for a moment she was almost blinded by his sheer raw beauty.
Then he took her arm and said impatiently, ‘Look.’
Chiara stood beside him, very aware of his hand on her arm and the disparity in their sizes. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did she could make out faint writing, her heart stuttered and stopped as a dawning dread moved through her.
There, etched in the stone, was the following:
Tomasso Santo Domenico, born and died at Castello Santo Domenico, 1830-1897
She couldn’t believe it. Castello Santo Domenico. Not Castello Caruso.
‘He was my great-great-grandfather.’
Chiara looked around, and now she could see the unmistakable shapes of headstones underneath foliage all around her. They seemed to loom at her accusingly in the gloom. The space closed in on her and claustrophobia rose swiftly. She pulled free of Nicolo Santo Domenico’s grip and turned and made her way out, her skin clammy with panic.
She almost tripped over a mound, and a small sob came out of her mouth, but then finally reached the gate and stepped into bright comforting sunshine, her head reeling.
* * *
Nico stood in the overgrown graveyard, only vaguely aware that Chiara had all but run out of the graveyard. This proof of his family’s legacy was almost too much to take in.
Standing in that grand room just a few moments ago, facing a stricken-looking Chiara Caruso, he’d actually felt a sliver of doubt. Could this grand, crumbling estate really have belonged to his family? Had they truly once been the most powerful family in southern Sicily? It had seemed almost too much to believe when all he could think of was his grandfather’s bitter countenance and then his father’s. Maybe they’d dreamed it up, frustrated by the struggles they’d faced. Their fall from grace.
But, no. This graveyard was cold, hard evidence that that they had existed in this place. That they had once lived, loved and died here. His ancestors had built it, stone by stone.
A cold sense of satisfaction filled Nico’s bones. He had a right to claim this place now. He was right to be here.
He knew it wasn’t necessarily compassionate to confront Chiara Caruso just days after her parents’ funeral, but he’d never been accused of having compassion.
Faced with this knowledge of how his family had been left to rot in an overgrown graveyard, on land that should have been returned to them decades before, he felt even less inclined to be merciful.
He walked out of the graveyard into the sun, undoing his tie, feeling constricted. Chiara Caruso had disappeared, and yet strangely he found that her stricken expression and those unusual green eyes stayed with him.
He could still feel her arm under his hand. It had been supple and slim, hinting at a more defined body beneath the shapeless clothes. To Nico’s shock, the awareness had exploded into more than a frisson, and still hummed in his blood. Disconcerting and not welcome. He put it down to his heightened emotions.
He walked over to the edge of a large uncultivated lawn that rolled down to the sea. There were pine trees along one side and gnarled bushes on the other.
His land.
It beat in his blood now, gathering force. Anger was still high as he thought of his ancestors lying in their cold graves, ignored and left to moulder.
It was one thing to have an intellectual knowledge that something belonged to you, but another thing entirely to experience it. From the moment he’d driven up towards the castello he’d felt a sense of ownership that went deeper than the sense of injustice he’d grown up with.
He wasn’t usually one to give any credence to intangibles, but right now, for the first time in his life, he felt a sense of home. It was as disconcerting as the awareness he felt for Chiara Caruso. It was also something he’d never thought he’d experience after growing up in Naples and being constantly reminded that it wasn’t his home.
But as he looked out on this view that the Carusos had stolen from the Santo Domenicos, things didn’t feel as clear-cut as they had just a short while before. Nico didn’t want to admit it, but Chiara Caruso’s reaction to the news had seemed like genuine shock. Either that or she was an undiscovered acting genius.
He’d come here today to present her with a deal she couldn’t refuse. A deal that would get him the castello within as short a space of time as possible: offering her enough money to sign over the castello to him and then go far away, somewhere she, the last of the Carusos, would fade into obscurity.
But that growing awareness of her in his blood and in his body was blurring the lines and making him hesitate for a moment.
A recent conversation with his solicitor came into his head, a well-worn refrain...
‘Nico, you’re an outsider, and that has served you well. You’ve made your fortune by upsetting the status quo and punishing those who’ve underestimated you. But now it’s time to consolidate and expand. It’s all very well to be the rogue operator once you have a more respectable life in the background. Right now you’re losing out on deals because people feel they can’t trust you. You’ve no family, nothing to lose...’
Nico scowled at the view. He’d been at an exclusive charity event in Manhattan recently, discussing a deal with one of Manhattan’s titans of construction. The man’s wife had come on to Nico, making her attraction obvious. And, even though Nico had rebuffed her advances, the next day when he’d followed up on a promise to meet and discuss things further, the construction giant had cut off all contact and Nico had lost out on a potentially hugely lucrative deal.
The truth was that he’d had marriage on his mind for some months now. Before his solicitor had even had to say anything it had become evident to Nico that the absence of a wife by his side was damaging his reputation amongst his more conservative peers. And so he’d been facing the unpalatable fact that he should make some adjustments to his very free lifestyle.
To his surprise, the prospect hadn’t been totally repugnant. Nico had lived a hedonistic existence for a long time and, to be perfectly frank, he’d been feeling more and more jaded. Tired of the games women played. Tired of the avaricious gleam in their eyes. Tired of not knowing what their agenda was.
While he might once have appreciated the need for a wife who knew how to navigate that world, the thought of a woman like that made something curdle inside him now. As did the idea of growing old amidst the soaring soulless buildings of New York or London.
That might have been where he’d made his fortune, and restored the Santo Domenico pride and name, but standing here on Sicilian land—the land of his ancestors—he knew that the final piece had to be in this place. Nowhere else.
With the evocative scent of the sea and earth all around him, he found that a new vision was coming to life inside him.
A vision of a future that would help him to achieve the kind of success that he’d only dreamed of up to this point. A vision