The Count's Blackmail Bargain by Sara Craven Read Free Book Online

was any judge. Not, she supposed, that she was.
    As for the rest of him—well, his face was more striking than handsome, with a high-bridged beak of a nose, a frankly cynical mouth, and eyes as dark as midnight that looked at the world with bored indifference from under their heavy lids. Or at least, she amended, that was the way he’d looked at her.
    And he wasn’t his aunt’s greatest admirer either, as Paolo had suggested. She hadn’t understood their brief exchange, but she’d detected a certain amount of snip, all the same.
    But, if that was how he felt about his visitors, why was he here, when he wasn’t expected and it was clear that he had better places to go? It seemed to make no sense.
    Whatever, she could not imagine him being pleased to find he was entertaining a very minor cog from his London branch’s PR
    machine. All the more reason, she told herself, for her connection with Harman Grace to remain a closely guarded secret. So—she’d continue to be the girl Paulo had met in a bar, and let his noble relative pick the bones out of that.
    But her troubled musings ceased when Emilia, a comfortably built woman with a beaming smile, flung open a door with a triumphant,
    ‘Ecco, signorina,’ indicating that this was her bedroom.
    Laura took a step inside, and looked round, her eyes widening with delight. It couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to the opulent and cluttered apartment where she’d stayed yesterday. For one thing, it was double the size of the room she’d occupied there, she realised, with a floor tiled in a soft pink marble, while the white plaster walls still bore traces of ancient frescos, which she would examine at her leisure.
    But that was the only suggestion of the villa’s age. For the present day, there was a queen-sized bed, prettily hung with filmy white curtains, which also graced the shuttered windows. A chest of drawers, a clothes cupboard, and a night table comprised the rest of the furniture, and a door led to a compact but luxurious shower room, tiled in the same shade of pink. The only other additions to the bedroom were a lamp beside the bed, and a bowl of roses on the chest.
    She turned to Emilia. ‘Perfect,’ she said, smiling. And, managing to ignore Signora Vicente’s disdainful glance, ‘Perfetto.’
    When she was alone, she went over to the window, and pulled it wide. It opened, she saw, onto a three-sided courtyard, bordered by a narrow colonnade, like a medieval cloister, and she stepped through, gazing around her. There was a small fountain in the centre of the paved area, with a battered cherub pouring water from a shell into a shallow pool, while beside it stood a stone bench.
    Directly ahead of her, Laura saw, the courtyard itself opened out into the sunlit grass and flowers of the garden beyond, and from somewhere not too far away she could hear the cooing of doves.
    But it wasn’t all peace and tranquillity, she realised wryly. From even closer at hand, she could hear the raised autocratic tones of the Signora, mingled with Emilia’s quieter replies.
    A salutary reminder that this little piece of Eden also had its serpents, not to mention wolves and bears, she thought, gazing up at the thickly forested slopes that brooded above her.
    Suddenly, she felt tired, sticky and a little dispirited. She’d seen that there were towels and a range of toiletries waiting in the shower room, so decided she might as well make use of them.
    She stood under the powerful jet of warm water, lathering her skin luxuriously with soap that smelt of lilies, feeling as if her anxieties were draining away with the suds and she were being somehow reborn, refreshed and invigorated.
    Most of the towels were linen, but there were a couple of fluffy bath sheets as well, and when she was dry she wound herself in one of them, and trailed back into the bedroom.
    While she’d been occupied, her case had arrived and was waiting on the bed, so she busied herself with unpacking.