who’d lost his fiancée and his friends that night and who, scarred and bereft, had walked away and turned his back on both a promising career as a concert pianist and society.
The media had pursued him for a while, she’d read, seeking exclusives and exposés, before apparently tiring of the fruitless chase and moving on to juicier, more obliging celebrity prey. And so, entrenched in his self-imposed exile on his island home, he’d slipped into obscurity.
Who could blame him for cutting himself off from the world after an accident like that? Maybe it was no surprise he was ‘difficult’. But it said something for the man that he hadn’t kept the discovery of the documents secret. He would have known the potential for the discovery to once again focus the world’s attention squarely on him. No wonder he’d insisted on only one specialist, and for the job to be completed inside a week.
Which was fine with her. She didn’t want to hang around a crotchety old hermit and his crumbling castle a moment longer than necessary. She wouldn’t get in his way and hopefully he’d stay out of hers.
Her guide came to an abrupt halt, rapping briefly on a pair of doors before poking his head inside one of them, leaving her no choice but to cool her heels behind him. ‘She’s here but it’s not the Professor,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told the boat not to leave until you’re ready.’ And then he swept back past her without a glance, as if fleeing in case he was blamed for collecting the wrong baggage.
So that was why he hadn’t brought her bag in and she’d had to lug it herself—because he thought she wasn’t staying.
If she’d needed anything to dispel any remaining shred of apprehension, her introduction as some kind of afterthought fitted the bill perfectly. She pushed open the door he’d left ajar.
‘My name is Grace Hunter and I have a letter of introduction from Professor …’ Her words shrivelled up in a throat suddenly drier than the fountain outside, and it might very well have been clogged with stranded sea nymphs and beached dolphins.
Where was the crotchety old hermit she’d been expecting? The modern-day Robinson Crusoe complete with beard and tattered clothes? Someone who matched the air of neglect that shrouded the rest of this barren island and its crumbling castle? But there was nothing tattered about the man who stood looking out of the window across the room from her now, nothing neglected.
‘ … Rousseau.’
The name fell heavily into the empty space between them. He stood still as a statue, his hands clasped behind his stiff back, clad in a suit tailored so superbly to his tall, lean body it almost looked part of him.
But it was his profile that captured her attention, and the clear similarities to his forebears lining the portrait gallery. His strong nose and resolute jaw, and the unmistakable mark of the Counts of Volta, the clearly defined dark hairline that intruded in sharp points at his temples. And he was every bit as powerfully beautiful as those who had gone before. Which made no sense at all.
She swallowed. ‘Count Volta?’
CHAPTER THREE
ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, confronted her full-on.
A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.
She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.
His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’
Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you