Secrets of Castillo del Arco by Trish Morey

thought ever since she’d arrived, yet there must be news by now. Even if he could not answer her messages, someone must know what was happening to him. Raoul had intimated there was nothing she could do, but there had to be something she could do to help. She was a friend, after all, and he would do the same for her; she was sure of it.
    She was just about to descend the ladder when she saw it—the slim volume wedged tightly between two others. Even with her imperfect Italian she could make out the title:
Ghostly Tales of Venice
.
    Thinking it must have been the source of Raoul’s story, she pulled it out, curious, leafing through the pages and searching for his story of the wealthy merchant who was haunted by his lost love. She flipped the pages, just able to decipher a few words here and there. One was a story of children lost in the mist who had disappeared for ever, their gondola found floating listlessly the next day. Another was of a murdered soul who haunted the bridge where he was brutally killed, and yet another told of a woman lost at sea whose unearthly casket could be seen floating on the lagoon on mist-shrouded nights.
    Maybe Raoul had been right, she thought as she flipped through the book, her blood running cold with even just a snatched word here and there and a pencil-sketch illustration. Maybe there really were ghosts inVenice’s mist-shrouded waterways. She had felt something last night; she was sure of it.
    But she reached the last page of the slim volume and closed the book without finding what she had been looking for. There was no mention of Raoul’s wealthy merchant, nothing that came close to the story he had told her, of the wife lost with her lover who had haunted her merchant husband ever since.
    And like the cold slice of steel through flesh an idea came to her and she wondered …
    Had it been a legend?
    Or had Raoul been telling his very own ghost story?
    The lost wife, the tragic death, the darkness he seemed to carry around with him as if the past still had hold of him, weighing him down, refusing to let him go. Was Raoul that haunted merchant?
    She clutched the small book to her chest and shivered as she remembered the cool detachment with which he had related the tale, as if it had had nothing to do with him. But Raoul too had lost his wife in tragic circumstances. And he had cut Gabriella off earlier when she had expressed her sympathy, changing the subject. Had the story been his way of explaining something he found too difficult to talk about?
    Her heart went out to him. Hadn’t they both suffered enough when they had lost their parents? Yet Raoul had suffered another blow by losing his wife not long after.
    She started down the ladder, the book still clutched in her hand. It was so unfair.
    It would be enough to drive any man to despair.
    She resolved that she would not cause him more pain.As he had come to her rescue with Umberto’s death, rescuing her from her sudden loneliness, so she too would do everything she could to ease his suffering so that he would never rue the day he had invited her here.
    She was almost at the last step when the door swung open behind her. One-handed, she turned and lost her footing, and would have fallen, but he was there to steady her, his hand like a steel clamp around her wrist, the other at her waist, easing her gently down to the floor. ‘Bella, what are you doing?’
    She looked up at him, breathless and grateful, intending to find him a sympathetic smile, to let him know she understood about his pain and his loss. But just the very sight of him warmed her soul so much—his dark features, the angles, planes and dark recesses that combined to stir her senses—that her smile became so much more besides. ‘Raoul,’ she said as he bent down to kiss her cheeks, leaving her almost breathless as his evocative scent filled her lungs. ‘I thought I would get started on your library. To earn my keep.’
    ‘I have a better way,’ he suggested.