Chapter Four #3
There was nowhere to sit but the wide divan bed and Zia planted herself on the edge of it, her skirt pooling on the polished wooden floor.
‘If it’s any consolation…er, as far as I know the theft thing isn’t still hanging over me.
Massimo Caccia got me out of trouble. It was like magic.
One minute it was all hovering over my head…
and the next minute it was gone. He swore it would be buried and forgotten and at the time I was so grateful I didn’t question that statement. ’
‘Massimo… Massimo Caccia? He knows about this? He got you out of this mess?’ Orazio fired at her with incredulous bite. ‘How can he have been there with you when it happened?’
‘I have no idea…but he did help me.’
In miserable silence, Zia suppressed a sigh, wondering at the flash of furious disbelief that had tightened his lean, strong face. Why shouldn’t Massimo have been there when he had purported to be working at the embassy at the time?
Raz paced away a few steps. If she had believed her cabin was big, his was far bigger and positively grand.
He swung back to her, caramel-blond hair flopping untidily over his brow that he brushed back with an impatient hand.
‘Tell me everything,’ he urged intently.
‘Leave nothing out, no matter how trivial it might seem now.’
And she told him the whole story then, including the identity of the rich hotel guest, at whose name he literally winced, before she concluded with Massimo’s arrival in the proceedings when he had taken over the hotel manager’s office.
‘Massimo Caccia has nothing to do with the embassy in London,’ Raz told her with a frown as he continued to pace. ‘I don’t know why you would assume he could work there or why he would let you believe that.’
Zia outlined the proposal that Massimo had made to her in which he had promised to make the theft charge go away.
‘You see, I didn’t have a choice about whether or not I came to Mandovia,’ she admitted shamefacedly then, certain that that truth would make him think less of her character.
‘That theft charge would’ve ruined my life. ’
‘Of course, it would’ve done,’ Raz gritted, his shrewd brain working on the facts she had given him and his own knowledge of the situation.
Caccia and the government had wanted the lost Princess of Upper Mandovia to return to represent the former republic as an important reminder of their heritage and to, hopefully, unite her people.
Had they wanted her at any cost? Caccia certainly had.
But the government would never have given him permission to entrap her in such a manner.
Very probably, Caccia had pulled off her miraculous return entirely on his own by plotting and planning to put her within his power.
Scorching anger gripped Orazio, who rarely got that angry about anything.
Even so, the conviction that Massimo Caccia had treated Zia unpardonably, and put her through hurt and humiliation simply to suit his own ends and show what a slick operator he could be at her expense, remained uppermost. ‘I suspect that you were manipulated and blackmailed! It’s too neat to have been anything other than a set-up to ensnare you.
No way was Massimo hanging about on the spot to step in and save you by sheer good luck!
’ he asserted with pure rage biting through his dark, deep drawl.
‘I’m very relieved that you told me. Don’t worry about it any more. I will deal with this.’
Zia was shocked by his change of attitude. ‘So, you don’t think that I’m a thief, then?’ she pressed hesitantly, that being the only element that seemed truly important to her.
Raz paused in his pacing to turn back to her. ‘Obviously not, piccola mia. I believe that Massimo wanted you back in Mandovia no matter what it cost and he acted accordingly to make that possible.’
Release from the terrible fearful tension that had been holding Zia rigid sliced through her and an inevitable weakness followed, loosening all her taut muscles.
Her shoulders dropped and the flood of relieved tears that followed was unstoppable, streaming down her face as she stifled a choked sob of reaction.
It had seemed for a few terrifying moments that Orazio believed that she was a thief and that fear had horrified her, which she supposed only proved how na?ve she could still be.
After all, why would he have faith in her honesty when he barely knew her?
Why would he trust her word? Assume her to be innocent just because she said she was?
Orazia studied her shaking shoulders in consternation.
He didn’t know what to do with a crying woman.
He had grown up with a mother who regularly threw hysterical scenes when she was upset and his intervention had only ever made matters worse.
A sympathetic audience only stoked his mother to greater heights of bitterness and resentment.
He had learned to walk away and allow her to get it out of her system.
He could scarcely have emulated his grandfather, who had once slapped his daughter’s face in an effort to calm her down.
In any case that intervention hadn’t worked either and the older man had had to grovel for months afterwards to win his daughter’s forgiveness.
But strangely enough, leaving Zia to cry alone struck him as unforgivably cruel and something stronger than he was seemed to propel him across the room to offer her comfort.
He sank down on the bed beside her and closed a supportive arm round her tiny frame.
‘It’s all right. It’s over now. Don’t worry about it,’ he muttered uncertainly while questioning what he was doing when he had already decided to keep his distance from Zia.
Zia drew strength from his support and unexpected warmth. ‘I can’t help worrying about it. What happens if I’m introduced to this Sofia Marone and she recognises me?’
‘Massimo’s far too wily not to have taken care of that potential problem,’ Orazio opined.
‘I’m not sure that she would even recognise me. She had no reason to know I was from Mandovia and I never spoke to her in Italian. My hair was covered as well because the hotel thinks it’s more hygienic and I didn’t have any make-up on either—’
‘By the sound of it, I think it’s highly unlikely that she would recognise you.
Put it behind you now and I will look into the matter for you…
discreetly,’ he told her gently, squeezing her slim shoulders, and he was momentarily stunned by the comfort he was carefully administering.
But then he had upset her and he should have been more tactful to begin with, he reasoned self-critically.
The more he understood about the life she had led to date, the more spoiled he felt himself to have been.
The only adversity he had ever faced had been in tough business deals and neither his reputation nor his wealth had ever depended on them.
He no longer marvelled at the maturity beyond her years that Zia demonstrated or her self-control and feistiness.
She had learned the hard way that she needed to put on a tough front to protect herself.
‘Thanks…you’ve been much kinder than I expected,’ Zia told him truthfully, and as she stood up she dabbed a light kiss on his cheek, only to find both of his arms closing round her and dragging her back to him again.
‘Oh, I think that we can do better than that, piccola mia,’ Orazio quipped, drinking in the scent of coconut and orange blossom that emanated from her hair and her skin. She smelled like a very tempting and stimulating fruit bowl on a hot day.
‘But we shouldn’t,’ Zia reminded him cautiously.
‘We won’t do anything to frighten the horses,’ he teased wickedly, tilting her back down to him with easy strength.