‘Good. Mr St Saviour thinks you’re a very classy looking lady...’ Ella told her. ‘But he did beat me down on your usual fee—’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone else must have dropped out last minute,’ Ella asserted. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t be wanting you airborne by tomorrow afternoon—’
Kelda frowned. ‘That soon?’
‘You’re free until Monday,’ Ella reminded her. ‘The shoot is in Italy...you should be home by Saturday. They’re using a photographer I’ve never heard of but you can’t afford to quibble. The other models are Italian.’
Kelda replaced the phone after Ella had finished advancing flight details. Italy...tomorrow. She’d have gone for the cost of the flight, she acknowledged inwardly, just to get away for a while. The next morning, she tried to phone her mother but Daisy was out. She called Tim at work instead and told him where she would be.
* * *
It was late when her flight landed at Pisa. Her name was called out over the public address system and she was greeted at the desk by a morose little man, who merely verified her identity and his own before sweeping up her case and leaving her to follow him out to the taxi.
Their destination was a villa complex in the La Magra Valley, somewhat off the tourist track as befitted an exclusive development. Kelda had never been to Tuscany before in the past, she had had assignments in both Rome and Milan but, tightly scheduled as her timetable had been then, she had never had the opportunity to explore. Her expressive mouth tightened ruefully. It was a little late to wish that she had taken more time off at the height of her popularity. Now she no longer had the luxury of choice. She would have to take any work that came her way just to survive.
It was too dark for her to appreciate the scenery and she rested back her head and dozed, waking up with a start when the door beside her opened and cooler air brushed her face.
Her driver, surely the most unusually silent Italian male she had ever met, already had her case unloaded. Climbing out, Kelda stared up at the dim outline of what looked like a medieval wall towering above them. A huge studded oak door was set into the wall. Kelda frowned. The door looked more like it belonged to a convent than a hotel. Her driver tugged the old-fashioned bell and headed back to his car.
An old woman appeared in the dark doorway.
‘Signorina Wyatt,’ Kelda introduced herself.
‘Sorda.’ The woman smiled and touched one ear and shrugged. Then she pointed to herself and said, ‘Stella.’
Did she mean that she was deaf? Grabbing her case up, Kelda followed her across a vast unlit courtyard. A huge building loomed on three sides. Her companion ushered her into a big tiled hall that looked mercifully more welcoming than what she had so far seen. No reception desk though...and it was so silent.
As she climbed a winding stone stair in the older woman’s wake, she smiled to herself. For sheer character, this place beat all the luxury hotels she had ever stayed in! As for the silence, this was not high season and they were off the beaten track. It was also pretty late and the other models were undoubtedly in bed, preparing themselves for the shoot at some ungodly hour of the morning.
Stella showed her into a panelled room of such impressive antiquity and grandeur that Kelda hesitated on the threshold. A giant four-poster bed, festooned with fringed damask hangings, dominated the room. A door in the panelling was spread wide to display a bathroom of reassuringly modern fixtures. French-style windows opened out on to a stone balcony, furnished with a lounger and several urns of blossoming flowers.
The bathroom was hung with fresh fleecy towels, furnished with soap and an array of toiletries such as were the norm in any top-flight hotel. The sight was indefinably reassuring. Kelda found herself looking for the list of rules that every hotel had somewhere and, while she was glancing behind the bathroom door, Stella disappeared.
With a rueful laugh, Kelda frowned at the closed bedroom door through which Stella had wafted herself at supersonic, silent speed, and then her attention fell on the tray of hot coffee and sandwiches sitting on a cabinet beside the bed.
She didn’t like to drink coffee last thing at night and she looked for a phone. There wasn’t one. She went to the door and then hung back. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go demanding mineral water to drink at this hour if Stella was the only member of staff on duty.
Undressing, she treated herself to a quick shower to freshen up. With a sigh, she allowed herself one sandwich and two sips of coffee before climbing into the gloriously comfortable bed. She thought it funny that nobody from the crew had come to greet her, not even the photographer, keen to issue instructions for the shoot in the morning. Maybe a taste of fame had made her too self-important, she scolded herself. And she certainly couldn’t complain about the standard of accommodation allotted to her. Within minutes of switching out the light, she was fast asleep.
* * *
‘Buon giorno, signorina...’
‘Buon whatever,’ Kelda mumbled, stretchi
ng sleepily and opening her eyes as the curtains were pulled back, flooding the dark room with brilliant sunshine. As she sat up, she registered that the voice had been male and hurriedly hauled the sheet higher, thinking that if someone had to come into her room when she was asleep, she would have infinitely preferred a maid to a waiter.
‘Giorno,’ he sounded out with syllabic thoroughness.
And a blasted irritating waiter come to that, set on educating her, she thought grumpily or maybe what was really irritating her was the fact that the unfortunate man sounded horrendously like Angelo. One of those growlingly sexy accents all Italian males were probably born with. Like a cut-throat razor wrapped up in smooth black velvet, contriving to be both riveting and unnerving simultaneously.
She shaded her eyes to focus on the offender and nearly dropped the sheet. Her emerald-green eyes incandescent with disbelief, she gasped, ‘A-Angelo?’
CHAPTER THREE
‘WELCOME to my lair in Tuscany.’ Angelo uncoiled himself from his inexpressibly relaxed lounging stance against the French windows he had thrown wide and strolled to the foot of the bed.