Juliet Landon - The Mistress And The Merchant

‘Which you are about to remind me of, naturally,’ she said, laying down the pencil.

‘Naturally. I promised to assist you with estate matters. I owe you that, at least.’

‘You don’t owe me anything, signor,’ she said, looking beyond him, arching her back against the strain of bending. Her white coif lay on the table where she had been resting her elbow on it, squashing it flat. ‘Was the map useful to you?’

He brought the roll of parchment forward and waited as she found weights to hold its corners. ‘“The Priory of Sandrock and its Estates,”’ he read, ‘“at its Acquisition by Sir Walter D’Arvall in the Year of Our Lord 1540, with Revisions made in 1559.” That’s only last year,’ he added.

His hands smoothed over the fields and woodlands to show her how some boundaries had been moved. The fields and grand house of Master Pearce were given some attention, too, though Santo suspected that Aphra’s attention lay elsewhere.

He was correct. ‘If you leave this with me,’ she said, tonelessly, ‘I can memorise it by suppertime.’ She looked up at him, surprising him with a shadow of guilt in her eyes, like those of a child caught with its mind wandering off the subject. Her long fair hair, freed from the linen coif, had fallen over her face as they had pored over the map, her eyes meeting his through a veil of pale gold that she seemed in no hurry to rearrange.

In the fading light, he found it difficult to be certain of the message sent from beneath drowsy lids, but her uninterest, together with her parted lips, her seductively tousled hair and her fragility combined to knock him off course in the same way, he supposed, his brother had been when he’d offered her his entire world. Was this how Leon had seen her before they’d made love, or after? Had she looked at him like this, driving him mad with desire? Did she know how she looked? He would swear she did not, having consistently shown him her coldest demeanour and, anyway, she was not the kind of woman to care overmuch about the effect she had on men. It was one of her attractions. Her naturalness. Her artlessness. A woman completely without guile.

‘Madonna?’ he said, gently.

She blinked, breaking the spell with a sudden surge of activity, brushing her hair back with an impatient gesture, embarrassed to have been caught daydreaming. ‘Yes? What?’ she said. ‘I should be clearing this away.’ Closing the notebooks and covering the paints, her methodical hands gave no hint of the confusion in her mind and the wanton thoughts that had sneaked across the map as his hands had smoothed and stroked, tenderly caressing the parchment to the musical murmurs of his deep velvety voice. Some distant ache around her heart made her frown and turn away quickly before he saw something she did not know how to explain, not even to herself.

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