The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress

The dark eyebrows snapped towards the bridge of his arrogant, aquiline nose, the grey eyes turning molten platinum as he gave her an arrogantly lofty look and told her, ‘It is not Signor anything, Ms Wareham. I am Raphael Della Striozzi—Duce di Raverno. Il Duce is the form of address most people of the town use to address me—as they have addressed my father and his father before him, going back for many centuries.’

Il Duce? He was a duke? Well, she wasn’t going to let herself be impressed, Charley told herself, especially since he was obviously expecting her to be.

‘Really?’ Charley stuck her chin out determinedly—a habit she had developed as a child, to defend herself from parental criticism. ‘Well, I should point out to you that this whole area is strictly off-limits to the general public, titled or untitled, for their own safety. There are notices in place. If you have issues with the restoration work which Kentham Brothers has been commissioned to do, I suggest that you take them up with the authorities,’ she told him briskly.

Raphael stared at her in furious disbelief. She, this Englishwoman, was daring to attempt to deny him access to this garden?

‘I am not the general public. It was a member of my family who originally bequeathed this garden to the town.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Charley agreed. She had done her research on the garden very thoroughly when she had first been told about the contract. ‘The garden was a gift to the townspeople from the wife of the first duke, in thanks to them for praying for the birth of a son after four daughters.’

Raphael’s mouth hardened into a grim line, as he returned, ‘Thank you, I am well aware of the history of my family.’

But it was only when he had looked into the matter more thoroughly that he had discovered the ornamentation this woman intended to replace with hideous examples of modern mass production had originally been created by some of the Renaissance’s most gifted artists. Now abandoned, damaged and forgotten, the garden had been designed by a foremost landscaper of the day.

The realisation of how magnificent the garden must have been had stirred within him a sense of responsibility towards the current project. A responsibility he should have been aware of earlier, and which he now blamed himself for not shouldering before. The town might own the garden, but they carried the name of his family, and next year, when it was reopened to the public in celebration of its five hundredth year of existence, that connection was bound to be publicly referred to. Raphael took pride in the proper artistic maintenance of all the historic buildings and art treasures that had come down to him through his family, and the thought of the garden to which his family was connected being given a makeover more suited to an English suburban plot owned by people with dubious taste filled him with an anger that was currently directed towards Charlotte Wareham—with her makeup-less face, her sun-streaked mud-brown hair, and her obvious lack of interest or pride in her appearance. She was as ill equipped to match the fabled beauty of her renaissance peers as her revolting statues were of matching the magnificence of the originals that had once graced this garden.

He looked again at Charley, frowning as a second look forced him to revise his earlier assessment of her. Now he could see that her pink, lipstick-free mouth was soft, her lips full and well shaped, her nose and jaw delicately sculpted. He had initially thought her eyes, with their thick dark lashes, above cheekbones currently stained with angry colour, a light plain blue, but now, with her anger aroused, he could see they had become the extraordinarily brilliant blue-green of the Adriatic at its most turbulent.

It didn’t matter what she looked like, Raphael told himself grimly.

Charley could feel her face starting to burn with memories of her parents warning her about thinking before she spoke or acted, and the unfeminine hastiness of her desire to answer back when challenged. She had believed that she had learned to control that aspect of her personality, but this man—this…this duke—had somehow or other managed to get under her skin and prove her wrong. Now she felt as though he had wrong-footed her, but she wasn’t going to let him see that.

‘Well, you may be the Duke of Raverno, but it says nothing in the paperwork I have seen about a duke having any involvement in this project. As I understand it, no matter what part your ancestors may have played in the garden in the past, it is the town that is now responsible for them and their restoration. You have no right to be here.’

She wasn’t going to let him bully her, not for one minute—title or no title. She had had enough of that over these last few weeks, with her employer making her life such a misery that she longed to be able to hand in her notice. But she had to grin and bear it in the current financial climate. Her small household, which included her elder sister, her younger sister and her twin sons, desperately needed the money she earned—all the more so since her elder sister’s interior design business was on the verge of collapse.

With so many people unemployed, she was lucky just to have a job—something her employer continually pointed out to her. She knew why he was doing that, of course. Times were hard; he wanted to cut back on his staff, and he had a daughter fresh out of university, working as an intern within the business, who’d thrown a complete hissy fit when she’d learned that Charley was going to be overseeing this new Italian contract.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that she spoke Italian, and her boss’s daughter did not, Charley knew she would already have lost her job. She would probably lose it anyway once this contract had been completed. So, she might have to let her employer treat her appallingly, because she desperately needed to keep her job, but she wasn’t going to let this arrogant Italian do the same thing. Not when it was the town council she was answerable to and not him. And besides, challenging him made her feel much better about her unwanted awareness of him.

Raphael could feel the fury building up inside him—burning and boiling inside him like molten lava.

When the town council had announced that they planned to restore the dangerously dilapidated pleasure garden ju

st outside the town walls, he had instituted a search of the ducal archives for copies of the original plans for the garden, initially simply out of curiosity, thinking they might assist with the renovation. However, when he had returned from Rome to discover that for financial reasons the town had decided to replace the statues and other features originally designed and created by some of Florence’s greatest renaissance artists he had been appalled—and his temper had been left on edge by the council’s assertion that the garden would either have to be restored within the small budget available or the site completely flattened, because in its present state it constituted a danger to the public. And now here was this Englishwoman, whose challenge to him was igniting his fury to near uncontrollable levels.

Raphael might not welcome what was planned for the restoration of the garden, but he welcomed even less the effect this young woman responsible for managing the restoration was having on him. Such was the intensity of his anger that it was fostering within him a desire to punish her for daring to provoke it in him. And that could not be allowed. Not now or ever.

Anger and cruelty were the twin demons that together created men whose savage legacy could never be forgotten or forgiven. And the propensity to exhibit them flowed as surely through his veins as it had done through the ancestors who had passed down that legacy to him—but with him that inheritance would end. He had vowed that as a thirteen-year-old, watching as his mother’s coffin was placed in the family vault in Rome to join that of his father.

Raphael looked unseeingly towards the padlocked entrance to the gardens. He could feel the heavy, threatening shadow of those twin emotions at his back, following him, out of sight but always there, over his shoulder…

They ran through his family like a dark curse, waiting to escape. He had taught himself to imprison them with reason and ethical awareness, to deny them the arrogance and pride that were their life blood, but now, out of nowhere, simply by being here this Englishwoman had brought him to such a pitch of fierce passion, with her tawdry, ugly replicas, her lack of awareness of what the garden should be, that the key to freeing them was now in the lock without him even being aware of putting it there. Forcing back his urge to physically take hold of her and force her to study the original plans of the garden, to see the damage she would be doing to such a historical asset, was like trying to stem a river in full flood, straining every emotional and mental sinew he had.

The walls of his self-control had already been tested by his meeting with the town council as he had studied the plans they had so proudly showed him, while telling him what a bargain they had secured. And now here was this…this woman, so slender that he could have broken her with his bare hands, daring to deny him access to the garden his ancestor had originally created, expecting him to accept the shoddy, tawdry mockery of the artistic elegance and beauty that had once been.

‘You have no right…’ she had said. Well, he would make it his right—he would make the garden what it should be, and he would make her…

Make her what? A sacrifice to the darkness within his genes?

No! Never that. Nothing and no one would be allowed to threaten his control over that dark, dangerous capacity for savagely violent anger that ran through his veins and was patterned in his DNA.

He needed to speak to the local authorities and put before them the plan he was now formulating—for him to take control of the restoration project, so that it could be placed in more appropriate hands, and the sooner the better.

Unaware of what Raphael was thinking, Charley was both surprised and relieved when he started to stride away from her, moving to climb into a sleek, expensive-looking car parked several yards away, its bodywork the same steel-grey colour as his eyes.

CHAPTER TWO