What she didn’t have experience with was feeling so drawn in by one.
She moved her gaze to the paintings before she started acting besotted again. She was confronted by a cheeky nude—literally a gathering of young women in a walled garden showing their backsides to the viewer. The rest were serene seascapes, fruit bowls, and peasants haying a field.
“You mentioned your grandmother dealt in art? I don’t recognize these, but they’re obviously masterpieces.”
“My father was her only child. My mother pilfered everything from his family estate and brought it here. Her mother was next in line after Istvan. There was no one else to inherit this house.” He paused, daring her to contest that.
Rozi wasn’t here to make claims for Gisella’s mother, only asked, “Is the furniture reproduction? Or originals?”
“Both. Our most heavily used is reproduction.”
She noted the escritoire that was likely an authentic Louis Quinze. “I’m a nut for tiny drawers and hidden compartments,” she admitted, firmly grasping her hands behind her back as she examined it. “I’m going to let myself believe there’s a key to a secret passage in one of these.”
“We had to lock it. To keep the ghosts from haunting the rest of the house.”
After an exaggerated gasp of delight, she said, “Thank you.”
His mouth twitched, but their drinks arrived before she could coax any more humor out of him than that one dry comment.
As they took their drinks, she made herself meet his gaze, no matter how disturbing, and say, “Egészségére.”
He repeated it and they sipped.
“Is it too bold to ask you to tour me around?” she asked.
“You wish to case the place?”
“No.” Was he serious or joking? So hard to tell. “I’m an artist. I’m interested.”
“That’s a lot of hats. I thought you were a gemologist and a goldsmith.”
“I’m midway through a master of fine arts in metalwork and jewelry design.” Did she take satisfaction from the slight elevation of surprise in his brows? Heck, yes, she did. “I work full-time for my uncle, making custom jewelry he sells in the shop my grandfather started. Barsi on Fifth? It’s quite well-known in New York.”
It might not have been featured in the title of a movie, but it held a similar reputation and was frequented by the same upper-class clientele.
“I know who your uncle is,” he said blithely.
“Then you know he wouldn’t hire me on nepotism alone. He expects me to constantly fill the well, which is why I’m continuing my education. But all art is inspiration for my own work. I would hate to miss this opportunity to study the masters who came before me, even though their disciplines are different from my own.”
He cocked his head in a small nod, relenting, and waved toward the hall where they had entered. He took her first to a music room where the brass pipes of an organ reached toward the sixteen-foot ceilings. A wall of double doors opened into the adjacent ballroom, which was straight out of Beauty and the Beast.
“Wow.”
“In answer to your earlier question, we host charity events and the odd film crew shooting a period piece.”
“I love those.” She moved into the center of the parquet floor and turned a slow circle, taking in the white walls with gilded trim, blue velvet curtains over the leaded windows and the chandeliers dripping with crystal. “What a dizzying place to live.”
“It’s an expensive obligation. I’d be fine with a modest apartment.”
She bet his definition of modest was a lot different from the place she occupied. Even so, this was only one of his many homes. What were the rest like?
“I’m a romantic, I’m afraid,” she confessed as he led her out to a hallway of portraits and vases that were so colorful and ornate they should have been gaudy but were perfectly tasteful in this surrounding. There was a chill in the air, though, and a faint scent of disuse. “I never want to hear that it’s actually cold as Hades to live here, even in summer. Or that back in the day, they had to use outhouses and drank bad water.”
“Mmm. I don’t know whether you’ll be pleased with this room or not, then.” He took her into an enormous dining room. It was very stately and beautiful, but distinctly chilly and empty. It held only a circular table with eight chairs upon an enormous rug. The windows looked on to the front grounds. “There’s a compartment in the floor where a table for forty is kept. At different times, people have hidden there.”
“Like you? Playing hide-and-seek when you were young?” She came from a big, lively family, but recalled at the last second that he had lost his only sibling, an older brother, when they’d been young men.
“Or you meant in wartime?” she hurried to add, trying to smooth over her gaffe.
“Both of those.” His expression remained inscrutable. “And the odd lover.”
“Oh, I do enjoy hearing about skeletons in the family closet,” she said with relish.
“Never found one of those. They always seemed to get out.” He sipped the drink he carried.
She chuckled, more out of relief since his dry sense of humor gave her the impression he was relaxing a fraction. Not that she would call him affable. Not ever and certainly not to his face.
“They must be a consequence of arranged marriages. Lovers, I mean.” She was teasing him a little, but also wondering if he really planned to succumb to such a thing.
“A consequence of being human, I’d say.” He wasn’t standing that close, but she suddenly felt the heat of his body. The lazy half-lidded look he gave her made her pulse thrum in her throat.
Would he resort to that? she wondered. If he succumbed to an arranged marriage?
She pushed the rim of her glass against her unsteady mouth, wondering what he would think if she told him she was a virgin at twenty-four. That she had made a pact at thirteen with her cousin to wait until they found a man they could truly love. It had partly been inspired their grandmother’s great love for Istvan, but for Rozalia, it was more personal. She needed to be sure she gave herself to a man who wasn’t secretly wishing she was Gisella.
“You come from a love match, I presume?” he asked, leading her into a smaller breakfast room that had a view of the back garden. It was still a showpiece, but much warmer and lived-in with fresh flowers and cut-crystal salt and pepper shakers on the lace tablecloth.
“My parents are deliriously in love,” she said with a grin of affection, moving to the windows that likely caught the morning sun, making for a relaxed start to the day. “But I will concede such a thing to be impractical.” She threw that over her shoulder, then tilted her head to reconsider her words. “Actually, my parents are impractical people, so I don’t know if one correlates to the other.”
“Impractical how?” He came to stand next to her and pointed out the window to the hexagonal windows that formed the roof of a squat, round building. “Like that sort of folly?”
“Why is it a folly? What is it?”
“A conservatory. My mother insists the staff keep it up, even though we can buy orchids for a fraction of the cost of heating that monster.”
“May I see inside it?”
He drew her into a hall where casual jackets hung over a boot bench, then opened the door she suspected was referred to as the