LITMIR.BIZ

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      The media had pursued him for a while, she’d read, seeking exclusives and exposés, before apparently tiring of the fruitless chase and moving on to juicier, more obliging celebrity prey. And so, entrenched in his self-imposed exile on his island home, he’d slipped into obscurity.

      Who could blame him for cutting himself off from the world after an accident like that? Maybe it was no surprise he was ‘difficult’. But it said something for the man that he hadn’t kept the discovery of the documents secret. He would have known the potential for the discovery to once again focus the world’s attention squarely on him. No wonder he’d insisted on only one specialist, and for the job to be completed inside a week.

      Which was fine with her. She didn’t want to hang around a crotchety old hermit and his crumbling castle a moment longer than necessary. She wouldn’t get in his way and hopefully he’d stay out of hers.

      Her guide came to an abrupt halt, rapping briefly on a pair of doors before poking his head inside one of them, leaving her no choice but to cool her heels behind him. ‘She’s here but it’s not the Professor,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve told the boat not to leave until you’re ready.’ And then he swept back past her without a glance, as if fleeing in case he was blamed for collecting the wrong baggage.

      So that was why he hadn’t brought her bag in and she’d had to lug it herself—because he thought she wasn’t staying. If she’d needed anything to dispel any remaining shred of apprehension, her introduction as some kind of afterthought fitted the bill perfectly. She pushed open the door he’d left ajar.

      ‘My name is Grace Hunter and I have a letter of introduction from Professor …’ Her words shrivelled up in a throat suddenly drier than the fountain outside, and it might very well have been clogged with stranded sea nymphs and beached dolphins.

      Where was the crotchety old hermit she’d been expecting? The modern-day Robinson Crusoe complete with beard and tattered clothes? Someone who matched the air of neglect that shrouded the rest of this barren island and its crumbling castle? But there was nothing tattered about the man who stood looking out of the window across the room from her now, nothing neglected.

      ‘… Rousseau.’

      The name fell heavily into the empty space between them. He stood still as a statue, his hands clasped behind his stiff back, clad in a suit tailored so superbly to his tall, lean body it almost looked part of him.

      But it was his profile that captured her attention, and the clear similarities to his forebears lining the portrait gallery. His strong nose and resolute jaw, and the unmistakable mark of the Counts of Volta, the clearly defined dark hairline that intruded in sharp points at his temples. And he was every bit as powerfully beautiful as those who had gone before. Which made no sense at all …

      She swallowed. ‘Count Volta?’

      CHAPTER THREE

      ACROSS the room she saw the flare of his nostrils. She heard his intake of air. She was even convinced she saw the grind of his jaw as he stared seemingly fixedly through the window. And then he turned, and the truth of his scars, the horror of his injuries, confronted her full-on.

      A jagged line ripped down one side of his face from the corner of his eye through his jaw and down his neck, where it thankfully disappeared under the high collar of his jacket.

      She gasped. She’d seen scars before. She’d witnessed the results of man’s inhumanity to man during a year where youthful idealism had sent her to one of the world’s hellholes and spat her out at the end, cynical and dispirited. She’d thought she’d seen it all. And she’d seen worse. Much worse. And yet the sheer inequality of this man’s scars—that one side of his face would be so utterly perfect and the other so tragically scored by scars—it seemed so wrong.

      His eyes narrowed, glinting like water on marble. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’

      Chastened, she blinked and scrabbled for the pocket of her briefcase and the letter from the Professor she’d come armed with. ‘Of course. Count Volta, Professor Rousseau apparently tried several times to contact you last night to tell you that she couldn’t make it.’ She pulled the envelope free and crossed the floor to hand it to him.

      He looked down at the letter in her hand as if it was a poisoned chalice. ‘You were not invited here.’

      ‘Professor Rousseau’s letter will, I’m sure, explain everything.’

      ‘You are not welcome.’ He turned back to the window, putting his back to her. ‘Bruno will arrange for your immediate return to the mainland.’

      His decision was so abrupt—so unjust!—that for a moment she felt the wind knocked out of her sails. He was dismissing her? Sending her away? Denying her the opportunity of working on the most important discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls for no reason?

      No way! ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ The words burst from her lips before she’d had a chance to think, a chance to stop them. ‘I am here to do a job and I will not leave until it is done.’

      He spun round and once again she was confronted with the two sides of him—each side of his face so different, each side compelling viewing, the masculinely perfect and the dreadfully scarred. Beauty and the beast, it occurred to her, co-existing under the one skin.

      ‘Did you hear me? I said Bruno will arrange for your return.’

      It was all she could do not to stamp her foot. ‘And I said I’m not leaving!

      One arm swept in a wide arc. ‘I have no dealings with you. My arrangement was with Professor Rousseau.’

      ‘No. According to the documents, your arrangement was with her business, Archival Survival. When the Professor was unable to come, she contracted me.’

      He grunted, no way about to concede the point. ‘So what is her excuse for being unable to fulfil her contractual obligations herself?’

      ‘If you’d read this letter you’d know. Her mother is in hospital after suffering a major stroke and she’s rushed to be with her while she clings to life. Admittedly, as excuses go, that’s pretty thin. Clearly it’s more about inconveniencing you.’

      If his eyes were lasers, she figured, with the heated glare he gave her she’d be wearing holes right now, and she wondered if she’d overstepped the mark. She’d grown up in a family that prided itself on being straight-talking. Over the years she’d learned to curb that trait while in civilised company. The Count, she’d already decided, for all his flash clothes and a portrait gallery full of titled ancestors, didn’t qualify.

      ‘I expected an expert. I do not intend spending a week babysitting someone’s apprentice.’

      She sucked in air, hating the fact it was tinged with a hint of sandalwood and spice, with undertones of something else altogether more musky, hating the possibility that it might come from him, hating the possibility that there might be something about him she approved of when the rest of him was so damned objectionable.

      But that was still okay, she figured, because finding something she might possibly like only made her more resentful towards him. ‘Seeing you refuse to read this letter, where all the facts are set out in black and white, perhaps I should spell it out for you? I have a Masters in Fine Arts from Melbourne University and a PhD in Antiquities from Oxford, where my thesis was on the preservation and conservation of ancient texts and the challenge of discerning fraud where it was perpetrated centuries ago. So if there’s an apprentice on this island right now, I don’t think it’s me. Does that make you feel more comfortable?’

      He arched one critical eyebrow high. ‘You look barely out of high school.’

      ‘I’m twenty-eight years old. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’d like to check my passport?’

      Dust motes danced on the slanted sunlit air between them, oblivious of the tension—dust motes that disappeared with

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