Diego Saez was walking into the courtyard.
She felt her body sway and found herself clutching at the doorjamb. The breath was sucked from her body.
It can’t be him! It can’t be!
But it was—his height, his broad shoulders, his dark hair, his features. Him. Diego Saez.
Frozen, the blood draining from her, she leant motionless against the doorway.
Sweat was running down his back, soaking his shirt and his waistband. It was just as soaked at the front, and his hair was damp. Father Tomaso’s dig about health clubs might have been accurate, but there was a definite difference between working out in an air-conditioned gym on top-of-the-range equipment and labouring on a sun-drenched, baking hot building site. Yet he wasn’t about to complain. Not when he was working hard so to keep pace with a bunch of denim-clad students, some grizzled locals and a bunch of eager kids.
But by the time the signal to down tools was called he’d been ready for a break.
As he came into the courtyard—which, judging by the rusting basketball hoop on one of the walls, still served as the children’s playground as well—he found himself wondering what other surprises Father Tomaso had up his sleeve for him.
His mood was strange. Overriding everything was a sense of physical depletion from two hours of unaccustomed labouring. But there was more than that. There was a sense, he knew, of cussed satisfaction that he had kept up with the other labourers. And there was more as well. There was a sense of satisfaction—completely alien to him—from working in harness with others, of his own free will, for something that was important.
The others were wary of him, he could see—the local hired workers were openly chary, and even the volunteers had been awkward about his presence at first. But there was nothing, he realised, like working with people on a task for breaking down barriers. Especially when some of them were children. Now, as he headed across the courtyard, he looked down to answer something that one of them was saying to him.
As he looked up again his eyes roamed around the buildings. Again that crushing sense of time
collapsing in on itself came over him, of the past rushing up to collide with the present. For a second he felt the years dissolve, like copper sheet in acid, etching out the contours of the boy he’d once been, so long ago, in a different lifetime.
He could feel his heart thump in his body—and not just because of the physical labour he had done.
And then, as his gaze swept past the open door leading into the classrooms, it stopped altogether.
Portia Lanchester was standing in the doorway.
He stood rooted to the spot, and slowly, very slowly, lifted up his arm to wipe away the sweat running into his eyes.
He was seeing things. Hallucinations. Visions.
Memories.
Ghosts that haunted him, tormented him.
It could not be Portia. It could not. She was six thousand miles away, in that beautiful eighteenth-century house where she belonged. As distant from him as if she had been locked away behind glass—like a precious jewel that was forever beyond his reach.
Then, as he stared, he watched the figure in the doorway that looked so like Portia but could not be—could not be—turn and grope her way indoors and disappear.
And in that instant he moved.
She staggered back indoors. Dear God, it was him!
Not a vision, not a mirage. But Diego Saez. Here. Now.
Blindly she walked back down the corridor that ran alongside the row of classrooms. Her heart was pounding, her breath short.
Disbelief still flooded through her.
‘Portia!’
She stopped dead.
It was his voice.
Harsh, demanding.