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were his wife and son? she wondered. Why didn’t they live at the castle with him?
    Her arms were aching from holding Sophie. Aware that the baby would wake again soon and need a bath and feed, she tried to dismiss the enigmatic master of the Castello del Falco to the back of her mind as she laid Sophie in the cot and went to inspect the room where she was to sleep.
    Her room was smaller than the nursery, but no less charming, with pale walls and soft green curtains and bedspread. She would love a cup of tea, Beth thought wearily. And something to eat would be good; the hollow feeling in her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten anything since the piece of toast she’d had before she’d left her flat in East London that morning.
    She wondered if she dared pull the bell rope to summon the maid, but she felt like a fraud. She had worked as a nanny for several rich families, and although she had shared a certain amount of intimacy with her employers’ lives she had never forgotten that she was a member of thehousehold staff—and she’d certainly never had a maid wait on her before.
    Maybe a shower would take her mind off her hunger pangs? And there was still that half-eaten cheese sandwich she had bought on the plane in her handbag, she remembered. She would make do with that.
    The heartrending cries of a baby drifted along the corridor. Pausing at the top of the stairs, Cesario felt his mind fly back to the first months after Nicolo had been born, when he and Raffaella had taken it in turns to pace the nursery, trying to soothe their restless son.
    He had once read that becoming parents for the first time often put a strain on a marriage. But the birth of their son had resulted in an unexpected closeness between him and Raffaella, he brooded. Their devotion to Nicolo had created a bond between them. But their harmonious relationship had been short-lived, and by the time of Nicolo’s second birthday Raffaella had started an affair with an artist who had been employed to carry out restoration work on the Castello del Falco’s antique paintings.
    ‘You cannot blame me for falling in love with another man,’ she had told Cesario when he had confronted her. ‘Our marriage was a business arrangement and there has never been any love between us. I’m not sure you are even capable of loving someone. Your heart is made of the same impenetrable stone as the walls of this castle.’
    ‘I love my son,’ Cesario had replied fiercely. ‘Go to your lover if that’s what you want, but you will not take Nicolo. I will never give him up.’
    Unable to bear the thought of being separated from Nicolo, of the little boy growing up with a stepfather, he had immediately applied to the courts for custody of hisson. He had agreed that Raffaella should have access visits. Remembering how devastated he had been when his own mother had left, it had never been his desire to prevent Nicolo from seeing his mother.
    But he had underestimated the power of love, Cesario thought bitterly. Raffaella had been torn between her lover and her son. Her plan to snatch Nicolo from the castle would have been successful but for the fact that Cesario had returned home from a business trip a day earlier than expected. The ensuing row had been acrimonious—a furious exchange between two people who had never loved each other but who both loved their child.
    If only he had not lost his temper. If only he had tried to reach an amicable agreement with Raffaella instead of angrily threatening to stop her visiting Nicolo. Regret burned like poison in Cesario’s gut.
    In an attempt to calm the situation between them he had left her alone to say goodbye to Nicolo, but while he had been in his study she had bundled the little boy into her car and driven away.
    The screech of tyres on the twisting, wet mountain road still haunted his dreams. The terrifying silence that had followed still tortured his soul. He had run. Dio , he had run as he had never run