Rumours: The Ruthless Ravensdales. Melanie Milburne
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close to where she was standing. Holly held her breath as he sent a fingertip down the length of her arm, from the top of her shoulder to her wrist. The nerves fluttered like moths beneath her skin. Her heart skipped a beat. Her stomach tilted. ‘Are you sure I didn’t hurt you?’ His voice was low, a deep burr of sound that made the base of her spine fizz.
‘I’m sure.’
He sent the same fingertip down the curve of her cheek, outlining her face from just behind her ear to the base of her chin. ‘I think underneath that brash exterior is a very frightened little girl.’
Holly quickly disguised a knotty swallow. ‘Keep your day job, Julius. You’d make a rubbish therapist.’
His eyes held hers for another long moment. ‘I’ll see to the rest of the windows,’ he said. ‘You go on up to bed. Sleep well.’
Like that’s going to happen, Holly thought as she turned and slipped out of the room.
* * *
Holly didn’t see Julius for over a week. He hadn’t informed her he was leaving at all. She heard it from Sophia, who told her he was working on some important software and had to attend meetings in Buenos Aires, as well as flying to Santiago in Chile. It annoyed Holly he hadn’t bothered to tell her what his schedule was. He could have done so that night in the library, especially as she’d heard him leave the very next morning. But then, she reminded herself, she was just a temporary hindrance for him. The more time away from the villa—away from her—the better. The bruises on her arms had faded but the bruise to her ego had not. Why couldn’t he have talked to her in person? Told her his plans?
The fact was, it was dead boring without him. Sophia was kind and sweet and did her best to make sure Holly had plenty to do without exploiting her. But spending hours with a middle-aged woman who reminded her too much of the mother she no longer had was not Holly’s idea of fun. The more time she spent with the gentle and kind housekeeper, the more she ached for what she had lost. Sophia had a tendency to mother her, to treat her like a surrogate daughter. Holly appreciated the gesture on one level but on another it made her feel unutterably sad.
Which was all the more reason she missed the verbal sparring she’d done with Julius. She missed his tall figure striding down the corridors with a dark frown on his handsome face. She missed the sound of his cultured accent in that mellifluous baritone that did such strange things to her spine. She missed the excitement in her body, the buzzing, thrilling sensation of female desire he triggered every time he looked at her. Her body felt flat and listless without him around to charge it up with energy.
The days dragged with an interminable slowness that made Holly’s restlessness close to unbearable. Although she enjoyed the tasks Sophia set her, as the villa was beautiful and full of exquisite works of art and priceless collector’s pieces, it just wasn’t the same without Julius there. The nights were even worse. Sophia usually went to bed early, which meant there was no one to talk to. The rest of the villa staff—the gardener and the man who looked after the horses on the property—lived in accommodation separate from the villa. There was only so much television Holly could watch and, even though she enjoyed reading, the evenings were particularly tiresome.
The one thing Julius had done for her since he’d gone away, however, was have some clothes delivered to the villa for her. They were mostly smart-casual separates, as well as a couple of dresses, including a long, slinky formal one made of navy blue silk. There were shoes and underwear the likes of which she had never seen before: cobweb-fine lace, some with fancy little bows and embroidered rosebuds or daisies. There were bathing suits as well, a one-piece black one and a fuchsia-pink bikini.
Make-up and perfume arrived in neat little packages. A hairdresser arrived at the villa and worked on Holly’s hair until she barely recognised herself in the mirror. Gone were the pink streaks and split ends. Her wild curls were toned, tamed and cut in a shoulder-length style that could be worn up or down, depending on her mood or the occasion.
But for all the finery Holly felt dissatisfied. What was the point of all these gorgeous clothes if she had no one to see her in them? She didn’t even have anywhere to go because she wasn’t allowed to leave the premises unless Julius accompanied her as her official guardian. It was part of the diversionary programme’s fine print.
Late on Sunday, well after Sophia had retired for the night, Holly turned off the show she had been only half-watching on television and made her way to her room. But on the way past Julius’s suite she stopped. She had been in a couple of days ago with Sophia to do a light clean. His suite had a balcony but the doors had been closed and Holly had kept her back to it. She had worked briskly and efficiently with the minimum of talk, desperate to stave off a panic attack if Sophia asked her to dust or sweep out there. If Sophia had sensed anything was amiss, she hadn’t said, although Holly suspected there was not much that would escape the housekeeper’s attention.
Before Holly could change her mind she turned the handle on the door of the suite and stepped inside. The balcony doors were closed and locked, the gauzy curtains pulled across the windows. Even though the room had been empty for days, Holly could still smell the lemon and lime notes of Julius’s aftershave. She turned on one of the bedside lamps rather than the top light in case Sophia saw the spill of light from her room on the top floor.
The forbidden nature of what Holly was doing made a frisson of excitement shiver over her flesh. This was where Julius slept. This was where Julius made love with his occasional lovers. The lovers Sophia stalwartly, stubbornly, refused to comment on or reveal any information about. Holly had looked on the internet on the library’s computer for any press items on him but there was virtually nothing about his private life. There was stuff about Julius’s work in astrophysics and about his software company that had come about after he had designed a special computer programme used on the space telescopes in the Atacama Desert and which had turned him into a multi-millionaire overnight.
There was plenty of stuff about his father’s love-child scandal. Every newsfeed was running with it. There was also plenty of information on Julius’s twin, Jake. Jake was the epitome of the ‘love them and leave them’ playboy: the ‘Prince of Pickups’ as one article described him. It was uncanny seeing the likeness to Julius. They were mirror images of each other. She wondered if she met them together if she would be able to tell them apart. The only slight difference she could see was in every photo Jake was smiling as if that was his default position. Julius, on the other hand, was not one to smile so readily. He was serious in demeanour and nature. He was conservative where, from what some of the photos suggested, his twin was a boundary-pusher—a born risk-taker.
Holly wandered about Julius’s suite, stopping to check out a photo of his younger sister on his dressing table. Miranda was pretty in a pixyish, girl-next-door sort of way. She was petite with porcelain-white skin and auburn hair. Nothing like her extraordinarily beautiful mother, Elisabetta Albertini, Holly duly noted. She put the photo down and stepped over to the walk-in wardrobe, hesitating for a nanosecond before she slid the door back and walked inside.
All of his shirts, suits and jackets were in neat rows. His sweaters were folded in symmetrical colour-coordinated stacks. His shoes were all polished and paired and perfectly aligned on the tiered shoe rack.
She picked a pair of cufflinks up from the waist-high shelf above a bank of drawers. The cufflinks were a designer brand with diamonds in the shape of a J. She wondered if he had bought them for himself or whether they had been a gift from a member of his family. Miranda, perhaps? The photo of her in his room suggested he adored her. It was the only photo she had seen of any of his family in the villa.
The sound of a footfall in the bedroom startled Holly so much she felt her flesh shrink away from her skeleton. She slipped into the shadows of Julius’s suits, using them as a shield to hide behind. Her heart hammered. Her breath halted. She couldn’t allow Julius to find her in here. But how on earth was she going to get out? Why hadn’t he told her and Sophia he was coming home tonight? Why turn up unannounced? What if he went to bed while she was stuck here, hiding in his wardrobe? She would have to hope and pray he’d go to the en suite and have a shower or something so she could sneak out without being detected.