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'By both our families, for a start!'

His face softened. 'Would such a match be enough for you, Sandra? Is there to be no love in your life?'

'I love God! And I have been brought up to know that only by doing one's duty can one achieve happiness. I have few romantic notions, as you very well know.'

'You love God,' he repeated. 'You would be happier if you took the veil.'

'Without doubt. But it's my
duty '

'And mine too, it would seem. Unfortunately, I have inherited as much, if not more, from my mother than from my father. Duty and I are often strangers to one another. Don't rely on me, Alessandra, when it comes to duty!'

But Alessandra was no longer listening. She rearranged her clothing into immaculate order and smiled the smile of one who knows with absolute certainty that she is right. 'But I do,' she murmured. 'I always think the best of people if I possibly can. Mamma may think you weak, Domenico, but I would never allow such a thought to enter my mind!'

Domenico's face tightened. 'Your mother will be wondering where you are,' he said quite kindly. 'Do you mind if I don't see you to the door? Deborah has waited long enough for her viewing of the Manzu collection.'

Alessandra didn't mind at all. She nodded towards Deborah, making no attempt to take her outstretched hand. 'I shall probably not see you again,' she said, 'but I hope you have a good journey back to England. Goodbye.'

Deborah watched her go, fighting with a strong desire to kick Domenico on the shins. How could he allow anyone to say such things to him, let alone that complacent creature? No wonder his mother and sister disliked her!

'Will you marry her?' she was horrified to hear herself demand of him, her mouth dry. Her tone was hard and brittle, and that shook her too. It was none of her business whom he married.

'She is, as she says, a most suitable bride,' he answered.

'I should hate to be anybody's duty!' Deborah declared. 'I don't believe in duty!' she added, wondering at the aching hurt inside her.

Domenico's eyes lit with sudden laughter. 'Don't you? When you marry, your husband may demand something of the kind from you! What will you offer him instead?'

Excitement stirred within her. 'Love?'

'That would be no more than your duty. He could demand your love!'

'Love is a gift, not a right,' she demurred.

'A man has a right to his wife's love,' he insisted. 'You can be sure my wife will be taught her duty in that respect!'

Was he laughing at her? She thought he was, but she couldn't be quite sure. If he intended marrying Alessandra he might wrest a kind of love from her, she supposed, but it would be a love of duty, never of himself!

'Poor Alessandra!' she sighed.

'Why? Most women are made for love. Why should she be poor when she is fulfilling what destiny has made her?'

'I don't think her view of love is the same as yours,' she pointed out.

'I have no doubt,' he agreed promptly, too promptly for Deborah's comfort. 'Love is like any other art, you can feel it in your flesh, or think it in your mind, or occasionally combine the two. Alessandra and I will never see eye to eye on the subject, any more than you and Michael do!'

Stung, Deborah glared at him. 'Michael and I understand one another perfectly. We always have!' she claimed, defying him to contradict her.

'But then you are not in love with Michael, and you never could be. If you were, you would soon come to hate him for being content with a few kisses and a lot of talk! Michael will never take the trouble to master you, body and soul, and you won't be content with anything else in a lover!'

'You know nothing about Michael!' she argued. 'He's a very fine person!' But then what did she know about Michael herself? She had thought she had known him, but in the last two days she had been a lot less sure of their friendship. 'The finest man I know!' she added sharply, seeking to convince herself even more than him.

'I don't have to know Michael,' he answered. 'I know you, Deborah Beaumont. I know a great deal about you! You have a very revealing face,
carina,
and you don't like Alessandra dell'Ameglia one bit. Now, I wonder why not?'

She forbore to tell him that his family didn't like her either. 'I do like Michael, however,' she defended herself. 'And nobody has ever accused
him
of being weak I'

His smile accentuated the sensual cruelty of his mouth. 'Nor me, in any way that matters,' he dismissed Alessandra's implication with contempt. 'Now, come and look at the collection before I'm tempted to give you a taste of my metal. Enjoyable as that might be, I am trying to remember you are a guest in my house!'

She was both excited and afraid. 'I may have lived a much freer life, but I'm every bit as moral as Alessandra ' she began, afraid that he, too, saw her as Alessandra saw her, as someone he had no need to consider as a person in her own right.

'But much more of a woman,' he agreed calmly. 'I never doubted it, Deborah
mia!'

And with that she had to be content. Only she couldn't help wishing that Alessandra had been less explicit about Domenico's future, or that she had been more so, and then, perhaps, Deborah would have a better understanding of what had driven Domenico into kidnapping herself. There were other things about him she would have liked to know too, but those things were better not examined too closely, not unless she wanted to find out something about herself at the same time—and that she did not! She preferred herself as she had always been, and that was the way she would stay. But there could be no going back to a time when she had not known Domenico. There lay the rub, she thought bitterly, and like any other blister it refused to go away or allow itself to be forgotten. She would have to put up with it as best she might, and she was very much afraid that her best was not going to be good enough. Whatever she did, it seemed to her, she was bound to be hurt—and badly. It was not a prospect that anyone but a fool would look forward to, yet the excitement lingered on in her heart for the rest of the morning, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the glories of the Manzu collection.

The paintings and sculptures were such as she had never seen before. She revelled in the variety of the pieces and how one work seemed to complement the others, building up into a satisfying whole that sent her imagination flying in all directions at once.

'You're lucky to have got to know the collection gradually,' she told Domenico. 'Seeing it all at once is enough to blow one's mind!'

'You're welcome to come here by yourself whenever you want to,' he said. 'One day, you may come and find one of your own works have been added to the collection!'

'My bust of you?'

'Perhaps. You have sold other pieces, though, haven't you?'

'A few,' she admitted. 'But not to the galleries you're likely to deal with.' She put her hands behind her back, frowning at a sculpture of a female nude with a fierce concentration. 'I've seen her before!' She searched her memory for where she might have seen it and came up with an unexpected answer. 'It can't be!'

'It is. Alessandra has reason to disapprove of many of my family's wilder moments. That was one of my mother's.'

Deborah laughed. 'Who could possibly disapprove of anything so beautiful?' she told him. 'What a good-looking family you are!'

'So we are!' he agreed at once. 'Only Gianetta is more like my father in looks. Mamma was a renowned beauty in her day.'

Deborah examined the tiny statuette more closely. 'I love beautiful people!' she said with satisfaction. 'I shall enjoy doing a bust of you. I think it could become the best tiling I've done—if it comes off. I have a feeling about it 1'

She was conscious of his eyes on her face and lowered the brim of her hat to hide her enthusiasm from him in case he didn't understand that she was always excited about any new work she tackled.

'I have a feeling about it too,' he said.

Deborah was disappointed in the Pantheon. She was willing to admit it was an architectural marvel when put in the context of its time. The concrete dome, with the hole in the centre, designed to bring sky and worshipper together, was a rather dreary shade of browny-grey. And the hole, the crowning achievement of a considerable feat of engineering, meant that the rain poured in on to the marble floor, adding to the gloom of the interior.

She tried to imagine how the people of the first century had crowded inside the building, freed from the usual columns needed to keep the roof up, and had worshipped their strange gods. Now it was a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs, but it had none of the atmosphere of a loved building. It was grand and remote and a little overpowering, but it failed to pull at her heart-strings. Not even the tomb of the painter Raphael, close behind that of his beloved fiancée, Maria da Bibiena, who preceded him by a few months into an early grave, could reconcile Deborah to the harshness of the great, circular empty space that dwarfed everything about it. Raphael was an artist she loved, but she could find no trace of him here to lighten her mood.

'I wish I liked it more!' she mourned, watching the rain descending in muddy puddles on the marble floor. 'Perhaps if it were better lit ?'

'I doubt it.' Domenico was plainly amused by her reaction. 'Its splendour is mathematical rather than emotional.'

She nodded. 'Michael would appreciate it,' she said before she had thought, and then wished she had not. 'Though let's hope he comes when it's not raining,' she added hastily. 'Sloshing about in the wet doesn't help, does it?'

Domenico shrugged. 'Rome is often wet in the winter,' he said.

That was putting it mildly, Deborah thought as they came out of the building again and ran through the pouring rain to where Domenico had left his car. The water splashed down the surrounding walls and ran over the pavements, forming into rivers across the streets that in places were inches deep. Deborah had never seen rain like it.

She settled herself into the car, studying her damp feet with resignation. 'Domenico, money wasn't the reason why you kidnapped me, was it?'

'Wasn't it?'

'No.'

'So why?'

'That was my question,' she reminded him. 'I've thought and thought about it, and I can't understand it!'

He smiled. 'I couldn't resist it!' He turned her face to his with a finger under her chin. 'Do you mind being my prisoner?'

'I shall still try to escape! You can't keep me a prisoner for ever!'

'Perhaps not.' He put his lips close to hers and the excitement burgeoned within her into a torrent that vied with the rain outside. 'How far will you run from me if I let you go?' he asked.

She shut her eyes. 'You'll find out!'

'But not today,' he mocked her. He let her go suddenly, putting both hands on the steering-wheel. 'Today we must pretend to be strangers, and you must see something of Rome. What do you think of my city?'

She nearly blurted out that she loved it, but she changed her mind. 'I'd like it better if the sun would come out,' she said.

'It will. I think we'll leave the Forum until it does, however. You'll have to content yourself with seeing more churches today. Shall we take a look at St Paul without the Walls?'

She nodded, not caring where they went. How far would she run? Her heart thumped within her as she considered the unwelcome truth that she didn't want to run at all.

'Did my father have anything to do with it?' she persisted. 'Domenico, there has to be some reason for you to—to take me away from my friends!'

'From Michael,' he put in carefully. 'But you don't need Michael as much as you thought you did, do you?'

'Then '

'Forget it, Deborah. I saw you, I wanted you, and I took you! Isn't that enough for you?'

He put his hand over hers. 'I shall do my best not to hurt you,
piccina.
And I shan't let anyone else hurt you either! Does that make you feel better?'

'No. It may be you who gets hurt! Kidnapping is against the law and—and my father isn't a particularly forgiving man, at least, not according to my mother,

and if he does give you any money, he'll make jolly sure he gets it back
and
that you pay through the nose for taking it in the first place.'

'You don't have to worry about me,' he answered her. 'Believe me, I know what I'm doing.'

'It sounds like it,' she told him wearily. 'Especially as you can't possibly
need
the money! In fact, I don't believe you want money at all! So what is it? Are you going to fix up a business deal with my father? Is that it?'

'That's a rather medieval way of putting it!' he smiled. 'I think we may come to some agreement, shall we say?'

'Yours is a medieval family,' she reminded him.

He smiled. 'Because we can trace our ancestry back to the coming of the Goths on a piece of paper? You had ancestors alive then too, my love, even if you can't put a name to them.'

'Alessandra wouldn't agree with you!'

'Alessandra has her own cross to carry,' he said ironically, 'and I am no Simon to help her with it. I find it sufficiently taxing not to be deliberately unkind.' He glanced at Deborah's puzzled expression. 'You don't understand what I'm talking about, do you?'

'No,' she admitted. 'What has Simon got to do with it?'

'
Dio mio!
I have found someone more pagan than myself!' he teased her. 'You would be better occupied in reading the Gospels than in worrying about my future and your own miseries, little one. Alessandra would certainly agree with that!'

Deborah bent her head. 'If you were talking about Simon of Cyrene, why didn't you say so?'

His eyes glinted with laughter. 'Perhaps because I see you more in terms of Venus and the legendary gods of old?'

'I don't see you as Jupiter!' she retorted. 'More as Caesar, with his preoccupation about his wife having to be above suspicion!'