Page 7 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)

She’d been given a room any princess would be thrilled with.

It wasn’t that its size rivalled her entire flat and came equipped with its own dining area and dressing area or even that a crystal chandelier hung from the frescoed ceiling.

Those things were trivialities compared to the overall feel of the room, which was of opulent sensuality.

All the soft furnishings were velvet, and that included the heavy dusky-pink drapes that matched the curtains hanging on the enormous four-poster bed.

The dusky-grey sheets spread over it were clearly silk.

It was the most beautiful bed she could have dreamed existed, and she’d needed all her strength not to gawp at it when Dante had been in the room because, for those few short minutes, her awareness of him as a man had rocketed.

She would not, under any circumstance, imagine herself sharing that bed with him. He was the villain of the fairytale she found herself in, not the Prince Charming sweeping in to rescue her. No one was coming to rescue her.

Callie was going to have to rescue herself.

“You decided not to bother freshening up?” Dante observed when Callie joined him in the library for dinner. Still in the same tight jeans and plain dark green t-shirt, the only noticeable change to her appearance was her hair being tied back into a ponytail.

“Freshen up into what?” she asked coolly, taking the seat he held out for her. “I packed clothes for an overnight stay in Accardiano, not for a five-day abduction in Tuscany.”

He sat across the table facing her. “Then I shall have clothes couriered over for you.”

“Don’t bother. I won’t wear them.”

“Are you always this antagonistic?”

“Only when I’ve been kidnapped… sorry, abducted .” Her eyes… currently blue… shot flames at him. “I want nothing from you but my freedom.”

“And you will have it. On Sunday. Until then, I suggest you try to make your stay in the castle pass pleasantly, which is why I thought we should dine in here tonight. As you can see, my library contains a treasure trove of reading material.” He swept an arm out for emphasis.

“Not much of it is in English, but for a historian such as yourself, there is a lot to enjoy. Do you see that door beneath the stairs?”

She followed his stare and reluctantly nodded, as if agreeing with him on anything, even a door, was repugnant to her.

He could see from her body language, too, that she was as fascinated with his library as she was with the rest of the castle but determined not to give him the satisfaction of showing it.

“That leads into the archive vaults. The castle’s rarest and most precious manuscripts and letters are kept there – there are originals dating back to the thirteenth century, before the printing press had even been invented.”

He savoured the widening of those expressive large eyes.

“You are welcome to read any book or manuscript in this library that catches your eye,” he continued. “And you are welcome to explore the vaults too, although I’m sure you can appreciate why none of the manuscripts contained in it can be taken out.”

She turned her gaze to the vault’s entrance. “You would trust me loose amongst books that old?” That was definitely a touch of longing in the husky, musical voice.

He gave a half-smile. “You won’t be let loose on your own – I employ a team of librarians and archivists.

They’re the ones who ensure the manuscripts’ preservation.

Emmaline will go through the procedures necessary for you to handle any of the works that catches your eye.

I don’t imagine a historian like yourself would destroy such rare works out of spite towards the owner even if the opportunity presents itself. ”

Her stare landed back on him, a slight furrow on her forehead. “But I’m a history teacher, not a historian.”

“For sure, but there is a reason you chose to teach history. In any case, I’m not being entirely altruistic – if you’re kept occupied, you’ll be less inclined to try to escape. There are works of such rarity in there that not even the Vatican has copies of them. Wine?”

“Yes… No, thank…”

He grinned at the way she cut herself off from saying thank you. “You’re sure? It’s made from the grapes you won’t be buried beneath come Sunday.”

There was the slightest twitching of her lips before her chin jutted. “Just water for me.”

He shrugged and poured a glass of water from the jug for her, then topped his glass with the opened bottle of red wine and placed the bottle within easy reach of her.

He knew perfectly well Callie had refused it on principle.

Dante had always been good at reading people, a major factor he attributed to his business success.

If you couldn’t read people, it became difficult, if not impossible, to judge those you would employ or go into business with.

Niccolo was the same. One of the reasons Niccolo had found himself in his current mess of having to marry a woman he didn’t love was down to ignoring his own reading and judgement of the bride’s father.

Dante suspected his current house guest had no idea how dangerous Lorenzo Esposito was or the danger she’d put herself in by coming to Italy.

He would tell her before he set her free on Sunday, just to stop her from getting any more mad ideas, but for now, he thought it best to keep it from her.

Ignorance, as the British liked to say, was bliss, and Callie had enough to be contending with for the moment.

For all his experience and instincts when it came to reading people, Dante had never come across anyone he could read so well and so quickly as Callie.

It was those incredible large eyes. However contained – or uncontained, as she’d proved numerous times that day – her body language, those incredible eyes gave away exactly what she was thinking and feeling at any given time.

She was fascinating. And seriously, seriously attractive.

“Please, help yourself to antipasti.” He swept a hand over the array of cold meats, olives, cheeses, tomatoes, figs, nuts and breadsticks laid out on a platter between them.

“I’m not hungry.”

“All the more for me then.” Without taking his eyes off her, Dante helped himself to a breadstick and broke it in half with a satisfying snap. “I’m starving.”

And Callie must be too. She hadn’t eaten in at least six hours.

Callie tried to tune out the fact of Dante devouring the cold food, tried to tune out the delicious scents emanating from the platter, and especially tried to tune out the rumbling in her stomach.

She hadn’t eaten a scrap of food all day; her plan to grab some breakfast at the airport smothered by the tight knots the blazing row with Georgia had caused in it.

After swallowing what had looked like a ball of mozzarella topped with a sun-blushed tomato, her captor nodded again at the platter. “Please, don’t starve yourself to make a point.”

“I’m not,” she lied.

“Good.” He helped himself to a plump green olive and gave that hateful yet butterfly-inducing smile. “Because if you were, the only person you would be hurting is yourself.”

Callie had never been a particularly stubborn person, had often thought Georgia, dreamer though she was, had been born with enough stubbornness for them both, but she was damned if she was going to give so much as an inch to Dante Coscarelli.

This was a thought she clung stubbornly to until she was served vegetable soup that smelt so fresh and fragrant and came with a bread roll that smelt as if it had come straight out of a baker’s oven that her rumbling stomach could bear the torture no more.

Cutting into the roll and slathering it with a shell-shaped pat of butter, Callie dipped it into the steaming soup, took a bite… and fell straight into tastebud heaven.

“It is to your liking?” her captor asked.

“It’s okay.”

If she wasn’t so busy filling her starving belly, she would have cheerfully smacked the knowing smile off his face.

“How did you find Geppa?” he asked a short while later.

“Sweet,” she admitted. Her personal maid, a young girl barely older than the sixth-formers she taught, had been as intractable as the butler in refusing to help her escape or give her the means to escape or call for help with, but she’d been so sweet with it that Callie had found it impossible to dislike her or blame her.

The poor thing probably had a crush on Dante.

If there was one thing anyone who taught adolescents knew, it was that when an adolescent was in the throes of a crush, the object of their desire could do no wrong.

She imagined most women who came face-to-face with Dante Coscarelli developed a crush on him.

She’d come close to developing one herself in that short drive from the airport to his helicopter field, and she had the most awful feeling he knew it, had the even worse feeling that he could read her like a book.

His dark eyes danced. “Something you approve of here? I am making progress.”

“She’s very young, though. Shouldn’t she be in school?”

“She is twenty and has worked for me since the day she left school. She’s from the local town and is as fascinated by the castle as you pretend not to be.”

She ruddy well knew it.

Pretending to herself that her cheeks hadn’t turned red, she said, “And where is this local town?”

‘Nine kilometres from the estate. If you manage to escape, follow the road off the main driveway east and you will eventually find it.”

“I don’t suppose you have a map in case I get lost, do you?”

His perfect teeth flashed. “I’m afraid not.”

“Shame.”

“I can draw you one if you like?”

“Yes, please.”

He beckoned the unobtrusive server on duty by the main door and, speaking in his native tongue, asked for a pen and some paper, something Callie only realised when the server crossed the room to a large bureau and removed those items from it and handed them to him.

“ Per favore ,” he said to the server, who then cleared their empty soup dishes away.

Shifting his knife and fork to one side, Dante bowed his head and got to work.

“I’m going to take a look at the books,” she muttered. No point pretending not to be interested in them – he already knew she was itching to study them.

“Go ahead,” he replied, not looking up from the sheet of paper he was scribbling on .

With Dante’s attention finally away from her, Callie crossed the room to the far side of the library and, keeping her back to him, expelled her first proper breath since joining him in it.

She had to be fifty feet away from him, and yet his scent had followed her because her first proper inhalation came with a hint of spicy citrus that made her mouth water and her head try to do a 180 to look back at him.

Just breathe, she told herself as she perused hard-bound Italian titles that were older than her local church and filled her nostrils with their scent and the scent of the dark wood floor-to-ceiling shelves they were encased in, all in the hope it would drive out the scent of Dante.

She would eat her main course, and then she would go to her room and sleep like a princess for the night in preparation for her long walk the next day.

The inscription on a brown hardback book suddenly caught her attention. Divina Commedia . She peered closer at it, had just wrapped her fingers around its spine when the hairs on the nape of her neck lifted and a spicy citrus scent became trapped in her airwaves.

“That is an original of the first translation into English of the Divine Comedy from the early nineteenth century,” a deep voice murmured, close enough behind her for every cell in her body to lift and her lungs to close back up.

“There is an illustrated handwritten version that dates to around 1450 in the vault.”

He wasn’t even touching her, and yet her lifted cells were vibrating with the same awareness as if he’d pressed his body against hers, and she had to swallow hard to say, “Were you named after him?”

“After Dante Alighieri? No, I was named for my paternal grandfather. ”

“A very fitting name, though, seeing as you’ve pulled me into hell.”

She sensed rather than heard him take a step closer. “You think you are in hell when you are surrounded by such history and beauty?”

“A prison is still a prison, however big its cells.”

Warm breath danced into the roots of her hair. “Then you will be pleased to know I’ve finished your map for when you attempt your escape.”

Knees weakening at the unfamiliar sensations in her hair and skull, Callie held tighter to the ancient book still in her clasp.

Coldness flushed through her skin before she even registered Dante moving away to stand beside her. He held a folded piece of paper to her.

“Your escape map, my little spitfire.” His dark eyes swept over her with a gleam that told her he knew exactly the effect he was having on her, that he knew it and was enjoying it.

She snatched the paper from his hand and then took such a hasty step backwards to move out of his orbit that she tripped over her own feet, would have gone tumbling to the floor if he hadn’t shot an arm out.

In less than a second, the arm was hooked around her waist and she was being pulled against him.

Within even less time, the entirety of her senses was filled with his heat and scent, the beats of her heart a thrash pounding hot blood into her head as she found herself trapped in Dante Coscarelli’s gorgeous stare.

For the beat of a moment, time hung suspended.

Slowly, the gleam of knowing amusement ringing down at her melted into something dark and swirling… hypnotising…

Suddenly terrified of what she was reading, even more terrified at all the sensations filling her in reaction to it, Callie pulled herself out of his hold. With a muttered, “Thank you,” she pegged it back to the table with as much dignity as she could muster.

By the time he’d joined her, she’d downed two glasses of iced water in an effort to douse the heat pulsing through her and cool the colour on her cheeks.

It was a futile effort.

The end of the meal could not come quickly enough.