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Miranda lifted her chin. ‘Just because I’ve sworn a vow of celibacy doesn’t mean I expect those around me to follow my example.’
He studied her for an infinitesimal moment, his eyes going back and forth between each of hers in an assessing manner that was distinctly unnerving. Why was he looking at her like that? What was he seeing? Did he sense her body’s reaction to his? She was doing her level best to conceal the effect he had on her but she knew most body language was unconscious. She had already licked her lips three times. Three times!
‘Do you think Mark would’ve sacrificed his life like you’re doing if the tables were turned?’ he said at last.
Miranda pursed her lips. At least it would stop her licking them, she thought. She knew exactly where this was going. Her brothers were always banging on about it. Jaz, too, would offer her opinion on how she was missing out on the best years of her life, yadda-yadda-yadda.
‘I’ll make a deal with you, Leandro,’ she said, eyeballing him. ‘I won’t tell you how to live your life if you don’t tell me how to live mine.’
His mouth took on a rueful slant. ‘Put those kitten claws away, cara,’ he said. ‘I don’t need any more enemies.’
He had never used a term of endearment when addressing her before. The way he said it, with that hint of an Italian accent all those years living in England hadn’t quite removed, made her spine tingle. But why was he addressing her like that other than to tease her? To mock her?
Miranda threw him a reproachful look. ‘Don’t patronise me. I’m an adult. I know my own mind.’
‘But you were just a kid back then,’ he said. ‘If he’d lived you would’ve broken up within a couple of months, if not weeks. It’s what teenagers do.’
‘That’s not true,’ Miranda said. ‘We’d been friends since we were little kids. We were in love. We were soul mates. We planned to spend the rest of our lives together.’
He shook his head at her as if she was talking utter nonsense. ‘Do you really believe that? Come on. Really?’
Miranda aligned her spine. Straightened her shoulders. Steeled her resolve to deflect any criticism of her decision to remain committed to the promises she had made to Mark. She and Mark had become close friends during early childhood when they had gone to the same small village school before she’d been sent to boarding school with Jaz. They’d officially started dating at fourteen. Her friendship with Mark had been longer than that with Jaz who had come to Ravensdene when she was eight.
Along with Mark’s steady friendship, his stable home life had been a huge draw and comfort for Miranda. His parents were so normal compared to hers. There’d been no high-flying parties with Hollywood superstars and theatre royalty coming and going all hours of the day and night. In the Redbank household there’d been no tempestuous outbursts with door-slamming and insults hurled, and no passionate making up that would only last a week or two before the cycle would begin again.
Mark’s parents, James and Susanne, were supportive and nurturing of each other and Mark and had always made Miranda feel like a part of the family. They actually took the time to listen to any problems she had. They were never too busy. They didn’t judge or dismiss her or even tell her what to do. They listened.
Leandro had no right to doubt her convictions. No right to criticise her choices. She had made up her mind and nothing he or anyone could say or do would make her veer from the course her conscience had taken. ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘I believe it with all my heart.’
The humming silence tiptoed from each corner of the room.
Leandro kept looking at her in that measuring way. Unsettling her. Making her think of things she had no right to be thinking. Erotic things. Forbidden things. Like how his mouth would feel against hers. How his hands would feel against her flesh. How their bodies would fit together—her slight curves against his toned male hardness. How it would feel to glide her mouth along his stubbly jaw, to press her lips to his and open her mouth to the searching thrust of his tongue.
She had never had such a rush of wicked thoughts before. They were running amok, making a mockery of her convictions. Making her aware of the needs she had for so long pretended weren’t there. Needs that were moving within that dark, secret place in her body. The way he was looking at her made her ache with unspent passion. She tried to control every micro-expression on her face. Stood as still as one of his father’s cold, lifeless statues downstairs.
But, as if he had seen enough to satisfy him, he finally broke the silence. ‘I’ll be in the study downstairs. We’ll eat out once you’ve unpacked. Give me a shout once you’re done.’
Miranda blinked. Dining out? With him? In public? People would assume they were dating. What if someone took a photo and it got back to Mark’s parents? Even though they had said—along with everyone else—she should get on with her life, she knew they would find it heartbreakingly difficult to watch her do so. How could they not? Everything she did with someone else would make their loss all the more painful. Mark had been their only son. Their only child. The dreams and hopes they’d had for him had died with him. The milestones of life: dating, engagement, marriage and children would be salt ground into an open wound.
She couldn’t do it to them.
‘You don’t want me to fix something for us here?’ Miranda said.
Leandro gave a soft sound that could have been his version of a laugh. ‘You’re getting your fairy tales mixed up,’ he said. ‘You’re Sleeping Beauty, not Cinderella.’
Miranda felt a wick of anger light up inside her. What right did he have to mock her choice to remain loyal to Mark’s memory? ‘Is this why you’ve asked me here? So you can make fun of me?’
‘I’m not making fun of you.’
‘Then what are you doing?’
His gaze dipped to her mouth for a nanosecond before meshing with hers once more. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Miranda frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
He came over to where she was standing. He stopped within a foot of her but even so she could feel the magnetic pull of his body as she lifted her gaze to his. She had never been this close to him. Not front to front. Almost toe to toe.
Her breathing halted as he placed a gentle but firm fingertip to the underside of her chin, lifting her face so her eyes had no possible way of escaping the mesmerising power of his. She could feel the slow burn of his touch, each individual whorl of his blunt fingertip like an electrode against her skin. She could smell the woodsy and citrus fragrance of his aftershave—not heady or overpowering, but subtle, with tantalising grace notes of lemon and lime.
She could see the dark pinpricks of his regrowth along his jaw, a heady reminder of the potency of his male hormones charging through his body. She could feel her own hormones doing cartwheels.
Her tongue sneaked out before she could stop it, leaving a layer of much-needed moisture over her lips. His gaze honed in on her mouth, his eyelashes at half-mast over his dark-as-pitch eyes.
Something fell off a high shelf in her stomach as his thumb brushed over her lower lip. The grazing movement of his thumb against the sensitive skin of her mouth made every nerve sit up and take notice. She could feel them twirling, pirouetting, in a frenzy of traitorous excitement.
His large, warm hand gently slid along the curve of her cheek, cupping one side of her face, some of her hair falling against the back of his hand like a silk curtain.
Had anyone ever held her like this? Tenderly cradled her face as if it were something delicate and priceless? The warmth of his palm seared her flesh, making her ache for him to cup not just her face but her breasts, to feel his firm male skin against her softer one.
‘I shouldn’t have brought you here,’ he said in a deep, gravelly tone that sent another shockwave across the base of her belly.
A hummingbird was trapped inside the cavity of Miranda’s chest, fluttering frantically inside each of the four chambers of her heart. ‘Why?’ Her voice was barely much more than a squeak.
He moved his thumb in a back-and-forth motion over her cheek, his inscrutable eyes holding her prisoner. ‘There are things you don’t know about me.’
Miranda swallowed. What didn’t she know? Did he have bodies buried in the cellar? Leather whips and chains and handcuffs? A red room? ‘Wh-what things?’
‘Not the things you’re thinking.’
‘I’m not thinking those things.’
He smiled a crooked half-smile that had mockery at its core. ‘Sweet, innocent, Miranda,’ he said. ‘The little girl in a woman’s body who refuses to grow up.’
Miranda stepped out of his hold, rubbing at her cheek in a pointed manner. ‘I thought I was here to look at your father’s art collection. I’m sorry if that seems terribly naïve of me but I’ve never had any reason not to trust you before now.’
‘You can trust me.’
She chanced a look at him again. His expression had lost its mocking edge. If anything he looked...sad. She could see the pained lines across his forehead, the shadows in his eyes, the grim set to his mouth. ‘Why am I here, Leandro?’ Somehow her voice had come out whispery instead of strident and firm.
He let out a long breath. ‘Because when I saw you in London I... I don’t know what I thought. I saw you cowering behind that pot plant and—’
‘I wasn’t cowering,’ Miranda put in indignantly. ‘I was hiding.’
‘I felt sorry for you.’
The silence echoed for a moment with his bald statement.
Miranda drew in a tight breath. ‘So you rescued me by pretending to need me to sort out your father’s collection. Is there even a collection?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then maybe you’d better show it to me.’
‘Come this way.’
Miranda followed him out of the suite and back downstairs to a room next door to the larger of the two sitting rooms. Leandro opened the door and gestured for her to go in. She stepped past him in the doorway, acutely conscious of the way his shirt sleeve brushed against her arm. Every nerve stood up and took notice. Every fine hair tingled at the roots. It was like his body was emitting waves of electricity and she had only to step over an invisible boundary to feel the full force of it.
The atmosphere inside the room was airless and musty, as if it had been closed up a long time. It was packed with canvasses, on the walls, and others wrapped and stacked in leaning piles against the shrouded furniture.
Miranda sent her gaze over the paintings on the walls, examining each one with her trained apprentice’s eye. Even without her qualifications and experience she’d have been able to see this was a collection of enormous value. One of the landscapes was certainly a Gainsborough, or if not a very credible imitation. What other treasures were hidden underneath those wrapped canvasses?
Miranda turned to look at Leandro. ‘This is amazing. But I’m not sure I’m experienced enough to handle such a large collection. We’d need to ship the pieces back to London for proper valuation. It’s too much for one person to deal with. Some of these pieces could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe even millions. You might want to keep some as an investment. Sell them in a few years so you can—’
‘I don’t want them.’
She frowned at his implacable tone. ‘But that’s crazy, Leandro. You could have your own collection. You could have it on show at a private museum. It would be—’
‘I have no interest in making money out of my father’s collection,’ he said. ‘Just do what you have to do. I’ll pay for any shipment costs but that’s as far as I’m prepared to go.’
Miranda watched open-mouthed as he strode out of the room, the dust motes he’d disturbed hovering in the ringing silence.
CHAPTER THREE
LEANDRO WORKED THE floor of his father’s study like a lion trapped in a cat carrier. It had been a mistake to bring Miranda here. Here to the epicentre of his pain and anguish. He should have sold the collection without consulting anyone. What did it matter if those wretched paintings were valuable? They weren’t valuable to him. Making money out of his father’s legacy seemed immoral somehow to him. He didn’t understand why his father had left everything to him.
Over the last few years their relationship had deteriorated to perfunctory calls at Christmas or birthdays. Most of the time his father would be heavily inebriated, his words slurred, his memory skewed. It had been all Leandro could do to listen to his father’s drunken ramblings knowing he had been the one to cause the destruction of his father’s life. Surely his father had known how difficult this trip back here would be? Had he done it to twist the knife? To force him to face what he had spent the last two decades avoiding? Everything in this run-down villa represented the misery of his father’s life—a life spent drinking himself to oblivion so he could forget the tragedy of the past.
The tragedy Leandro had caused.
He looked out of the window that overlooked the garden at the back of the villa. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to go out there yet. It had once been a spectacular affair with neatly trimmed hedges, flowering shrubs and borders filled with old-world roses whose heady scent would fill the air. It had been a magical place for he and his sister to scamper about and play hide and seek in amongst the cool, green shaded laneways of the hedges.
But now it was an overgrown mess of weeds, misshapen hedges and skeletal rose bushes with one or two half-hearted blooms. Parts of the garden were so overrun they couldn’t be seen properly from the house.
It reminded Leandro of his father’s life—sad, neglected, abused and abandoned. Wasted.
How could he have thought to bring Miranda here? How long before she discovered Rosie’s room? He couldn’t keep it locked up for ever. Stepping in there was like stepping back in time. It was painfully surreal. Everything was exactly the same as the day Rosie had disappeared from the beach. Every toy. Every doll. Every childish scribble she had ever done. Every messy and colourful finger-painting. Every article of clothing left in the wardrobe as if she were going to come back and use it. Even her hairbrush was on the dressing table with some of her silky dark-brown hairs still trapped in the bristles—a haunting reminder of the last time it had been used.
Even the striped towel they had been sitting on at the beach was there on the foot of the child-sized princess bed. The bed Rosie had been so proud of after moving out of her cot. Her ‘big-girl bed’, she’d called it. He still remembered her excited little face as she’d told him how she had chosen it with their mother while he’d been at school.
It was a lifetime ago.
Why had his father left the room intact for so long? Had he wanted Leandro to see it? Was that why he’d left him the villa and its contents? Knowing Leandro would have to come in and pack up every single item of Rosie’s? Why hadn’t his father seen to it himself or got someone impartial to do it? It had been twenty-seven years, for pity’s sake. There was no possibility of Rosie ever coming home. The police had been blunt with his parents once the first few months had passed with no leads, no evidence, no clues and no tip-offs.
Leandro had seen the statistics. Rosie had joined the thousands of people who went missing without trace. Every single day families across the globe were shattered by the disappearance of a loved one. They were left with the stomach-churning dread of wondering what had happened to their beloved family member. Praying they were still alive but deep down knowing such miracles were rare. Wondering if they had suffered or were still suffering. It was cruel torture not to know and yet just as bad speculating.
Leandro had spent every year of his life since wondering. Praying. Begging. Pleading with a God he no longer believed in—if he ever had. Rosie wasn’t coming back. She was gone and he was responsible.
The guilt he felt over Rosie’s disappearance was a band around his chest that would tighten every time he saw a toddler. Rosie had been with him on the pebbly beach when he was six and she was three. He could recall her cute little chubby-cheeked face and starfish dimpled hands with such clarity he felt like it was yesterday. For years he’d kept thinking the life he was living since was just a bad dream. That he would wake up and there would be Rosie with her sunny smile sitting on the striped towel next to him. But every time he would wake and he would feel that crushing hammer blow of guilt.
His mother had stepped a few feet away to an ice-cream vendor, leaving Leandro in charge. When she’d come back, Rosie had gone. Vanished. Snatched from where she had been sitting. The beach had been scoured. The water searched. The police had interviewed hundreds of beach-goers but there was no sign of Rosie. No one had seen anything suspicious. Leandro had only turned his back for a moment or two to look at a speedboat that was going past. When he’d turned around he’d seen his mother coming towards him with two ice-cream cones; her face had contorted in horror when she’d seen the empty space on the towel beside him.
He had never forgotten that look on his mother’s face. Every time he saw his mother he remembered it. It haunted him. Tortured him.
His parents’ marriage hadn’t been strong in the first place. Losing Rosie had gouged open cracks that were already there. The divorce had been bitter and painful two years after Rosie’s disappearance. His father hadn’t wanted custody of Leandro. He hadn’t even asked for visitation rights. His mother hadn’t wanted him either. But she must have known people would judge her harshly if she didn’t take him with her when she went back to her homeland, England. Mothers were meant to love their children.
But how could his mother love him when he was responsible for the loss of her adored baby girl?
Not that his mother ever blamed him. Not openly. Not in words. It was the looks that told him what she thought. His father’s too. Those looks said, why weren’t you watching her? As the years went on his father had begun to verbalise it. The blame would come pouring out after he’d been on one of his binges. But it was nothing Leandro hadn’t already heard echoing in his head. Day after day, week after week...for years now the same accusing voice would keep him awake at night. It would give him nightmares. He would wake with a jolt and remember the awful truth.
There wasn’t a day that went past that he didn’t think of his sister. Ever since that gut-wrenching day he would look for her in the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Hoping that whoever had taken her had not done so for nefarious reasons, but had taken her to fulfil a wish to have a child and had loved and cared for her since. He couldn’t bear to think of her coming to harm. He couldn’t bear to think of her lying cold in some grisly shallow grave, her little body bruised and broken. As the years had gone on he imagined her growing up. He looked for an older version of her. She would be thirty now.
In his good dreams she would be married with children of her own by now.
In his nightmares...
He closed the door on his torturous imaginings. For twenty-seven years he had lived with this incessant agony. The agony of not knowing. The agony of being responsible for losing her. The agony of knowing he had ruined his parents’ lives.
He could never forgive himself.
He didn’t even bother trying.
* * *
Miranda spent an hour looking over the collection, carefully uncovering the canvasses to get an idea of what she was dealing with. Apart from some of the obvious fakes, most of the collection would have to be shipped back to England for proper evaluation. The paintings needed to be x-rayed in order to establish how they were composed. Infrared imaging would then be used to see the original drawings and painting losses, and Raman spectroscopy would determine the identity of the varnish. It would take a team of experts far more qualified and experienced than her to bring all of these works to their former glory. But she couldn’t help feeling touched Leandro had asked her to be the first to run her eyes over the collection.
Why had he done that?
Had it simply been an impulsive thing, as he had intimated, or had he truly thought she was the best one to do it? Whatever his reasons, it was like being let in on a secret. He had opened a part of his life that no one else had had access to before.
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