To Deceive a Duke Read Free Page A

where offerings of flowers and fruit were often left at its base, seemed to confirm that. As did mysterious holes she found in the ground when she had first arrived, which seemed to indicate previous, illegal excavations.
    Demeter never disturbed Clio when she was there. Nor did Persephone and her dark husband. They seemed to know Clio was one of them, that she did their work to bring them back to life.
    She passed the tree, giving it a respectful nod. There were fresh lemons piled in a basket in its shade. There was a wide road nearby, a way for horses to get to the village, but she ignored it. Along another path, barely marked in the clover, she hurried her steps until she found what she sought. Her own perfect place.
    While her father worked on the villa, once the dwelling place of rich men, and Thalia revived Antigone in the theatre, Clio looked for less exalted remains. Her explorations had brought her here, to this quiet little meadow, where she had found her farmhouse.
    She paused at the edge of the site, as she always did when she arrived, drinking in the peaceful, quiet vision. It was not the ancient holiday house of a wealthy family, as the villa was. The people here had been prosperous, but they also worked for their coin. Lived off the fruit of their labour and their land. Once, this clover-covered valley had been fields of wheat and barley, with fruit orchards and groves of olives.
    Until it all came to an end, one violent day in the second century BC. Now there were just some waist-high walls of small, uneven pieces of tan-coloured limestone, weather-beaten and crumbling, to mark where their house once stood. But Clio intended to find more. Much more.
    She hurried to the walls, pulling out her stash of tools wrapped in oilcloth and tucked into a sheltered niche. The wooden handle of the small spade fit perfectly into her hand, as a soldier’s sword hilt would in battle. Maybe she did not belong in London, not really, but she did belong here. When she worked, she forgot the world outside. She even forgot Averton—for a time.
    All the passion she had once poured into the Lily Thief was now given to her farmhouse. To finding the voices of the people who once lived here.
    She went to work.

Chapter Two
    ‘I s it quite satisfactory, your Grace?’ the agent asked, his voice quivering slightly. ‘Truly, it is the finest palazzo to be had in all of Santa Lucia. The views are most exquisite, and it is quite near the cathedral and the village square. And there is a hunting cottage, too, in the hills, if you require it. The baroness is usually very reluctant to leave her furnishings for the tenants, but for you, of course, she is only too happy…’
    Only too happy to have an English ducal arse touch her couches? Edward Radcliffe, the Duke of Averton, examined the flaking, worn gilt of the apricot velvet chairs with some amusement. They looked as if the slightest touch would reduce them to a pile of splinters and shredded upholstery. The baroque flourishes of the place, plaster cherubs peering down from the ceilings and faded apricot-coloured silk wallpaper, seemed no better. Chipped and crumbling away, like an abandoned wedding cake.
    It could certainly use a thorough cleaning, as well, for the scuffed marble floor was covered with a fine layer of silvery dust. Cobwebs spun from the elaborate frames of old portraits,where the baroness’s exalted Sicilian forebears gazed down at him in disapproval.
    Well, they were not the only ones who disapproved , to be sure. Old Italian barons and their long-nosed wives had nothing on one Englishwoman’s contempt-filled emerald eyes.
    Edward turned away from them, away from that cool green gaze that haunted him everywhere he went. He leaned his palms on a chipped marble windowsill, peering down at the scene below. The baroness’s palazzo perched at the edge of the hilltop where the village of Santa Lucia gazed out over the valley. The tall, narrow windows, curtained in dusty