‘You’re speaking from experience?’ Marco taunted his grandfather, watching as the older man’s face turned a dangerously purple hue.
‘You dare to suggest that I would so demean myself?’
Marco looked at him.
‘Whilst Emily is here on Niroli she will be treated with respect and courtesy, she will be received at court and she will be treated in every way like the most highly born of royal mistresses,’ he told his grandfather evenly. ‘I have a long memory and those who do otherwise will be pursued and punished.’
He had spoken loudly enough for everyone else in the chamber to hear him, knowing that the courtiers would know as well as he did that he would soon be in a position to reprimand those who defied him now.
Before this he had never had any intention of bringing Emily to court, but he did not intend to tell his grandfather that. How dared the old man suggest that Emily was somehow less worthwhile as a person than some Nirolian nobleman’s wife? He’d back Emily any day if it came to having to prove herself as a person. She possessed intelligence, compassion, wit and kindness, and her natural sweetness was like manna from heaven after the falseness of the courtiers and their wives. He had seen the pleased looks that some of the flunkies had exchanged when his grandfather had flown into a rage over the generators. Of course, they couldn’t be expected to like the fact that there were going to be changes, but they were going to have to accept them, Marco decided grimly. Just as they were going to have to accept Emily. He was striding out of the audience chamber before he recognised how much more strongly he felt about protecting Emily than he had actually known…
Emily stared at her watch in disbelief. It was closer to lunchtime than breakfast! How could she have slept so late? The sensual after-ache of the night’s pleasure gave her a hint of a reason for her prolonged sleep.
Marco! She sat up in bed and then saw the note he had left for her propped up on the bedside table. She picked it up and read it quickly.
He was going to the palace to see his grandfather, he had written, and since he didn’t know when he would be back, he had given Maria instructions to provide her with everything she might need, and had also explained to her that Emily was going to be organising the interior renovation of the villa.
‘If you feel up to it, by all means feel free to have a good look around,’ he had written, ‘but don’t overdo things.’
There was no mention of last night, but then there was hardly likely to be, was there? What had she been hoping for? A love letter? But Marco didn’t love her, did he? The stark-ness of that reality wasn’t something she was ready to think about right now, Emily admitted. It was too soon after the traumatic recent see-sawing of her emotions from the depths of despair to the unsteady fragile happiness of Marco’s appearance at the shop and their intimacy last night.
But she would have to think about it at some stage, she warned herself. After all, nothing had changed, except that she now knew what living without him felt like. She mustn’t let herself forget that all this was nothing more than a small extra interlude of grace; a chance to store up some extra memories for the future.
It wouldn’t do her any good to dwell on such depressing thoughts, Emily told herself. Instead, she would get up and then keep herself occupied with an inspection of the villa.
If Maria was curious about her relationship with Marco, she hid it well, Emily decided, an hour later, when she had finished a late breakfast of fresh fruit and homemade rolls, which Maria had offered her when she had come downstairs. She had eaten her light meal sitting in the warm sunlight of a second inner courtyard, and was now ready to explore the villa, which she managed to convey with halting Italian and hand-gestures to Maria, who beamed in response and nodded her head enthusiastically.
Emily had no idea when the villa had first been built, but it was obviously very old and had been constructed at a time when the needs of a household were very different from the requirements of the twenty-first century. In addition to the dark kitchen Maria showed her, there was a positive warren of passages and small rooms, providing what Emily assumed must have been the domestic service area of the house. To suit the needs of a modern family, these would have to be integrated into a much larger, lighter and more modern kitchen, with a dining area, and possibly a family room, opening out onto the courtyard.
The main doors to the villa opened into a square hallway, flanked by two good sized salons, although the décor was old-fashioned and dark.
The bedrooms either already had their own bathrooms or were large enough to accommodate en suites, although only the room Marco was using was equipped with relatively recent sanitary-ware.
On the top floor of the villa, there were more rooms and, by the time she had finished going round the ground and first floors, Emily was beginning to feel tired. But her tiredness wasn’t stopping her from feeling excited at the prospect of taking on such a challenging but ultimately worthwhile project. The attic floor alone was large enough to convert into two self-contained units that could provide either semiseparate accommodation for older teenagers, staff quarters, or simply a bolt-hole and working area away from the hubbub of everyday family life. The courtyards to the villa were a real delight, or at least they had the potential to be. There were three of them, and the smaller one could easily be adapted to contain a swimming pool.
It was the second courtyard, which Marco’s bedroom overlooked, that was her favourite, though. With giant terracotta pots filled with shrubs, palms and flowers and a loggia that ran along one wall, it was the perfect spot to sit and enjoy the peaceful sound of its central marble fountain.
Standing in it now, Emily couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful holiday home the villa would make for a family. It had room to spare for three generations; with no effort at all she could see them enjoying the refurbished villa’s luxurious comfort: the grandparents, retired but still very active, enjoying the company of their great-grandchildren, the kids themselves exuberant, and energetic, the sound of their laughter mingling with that of the fountain; the girls olive-skinned, pretty and dainty, the boys strongly built with their father’s dark hair and shrewd gaze, the baby laughing and gurgling as Marco held him, whilst the woman who was their mother and Marco’s wife—Niroli’s queen—stood watching them.
Don’t do this to yourself, an inner voice warned Emily. Don’t go there. Don’t think about it, or her; don’t imagine what it would be like to be that woman. In reality, the home she had been busily mentally creating was not that of a king and a queen. It was the home of a couple who loved one another and their children, a home for the kind of family she admitted she had yearned for during her teenage years when she had lived with her grandfather. The kind of home that represented the life, the future, she wished desperately she would be sharing with Marco, right down to the five children. The warmth of the sun spilling into the courtyard filled it with the scent of the lavender that grew there, and Emily knew that, for the rest of her life, she would equate its scent with the pain seeping slowly through her as she acknowledged the impossibility of her dreams. If this were a fantasy, then she could magic away all those things that stood between her and Marco, and imagine a happy ending, a scenario in which he discovered that she loved him and immediately declared his own love for her. But this was real life and there was no way that was going to happen.
One day—maybe—there would be a man with whom she could find some sense of peace, a man who would give her children they could love together and cherish. But that man could not and would not be Marco, and those dark-haired girls and boys she had seen so clearly with her mind’s eye, that gorgeous baby, were the children that another woman would bear for him.
And, poor things, their lives would be burdened by the weight of their royal inheritance, just as Marco’s was, and that was something Emily knew she could not endure to inflict on her own babies. For them she wanted love and security and the freedom to grow into individuals, instead of being forced into the mould of royal heirs.
It was just as well that Marco had no intentions of wanting to make her his wife, on two counts, Emily told herself determinedly