Louise Fuller - Vows Made in Secret

He knew what his grandfather really wanted, and why he had inveigled Jakob into suggesting it. Janos secretly longed to see his only grandchild married—to see Laszlo sharing his life with a soulmate. And why wouldn’t he? After all, Janos himself had been blissfully happy during his forty-year marriage.

Laszlo’s fingers curled into his palms. If only he could do it. If only he could marry a perfectly sweet, pretty girl like Agnes Szecsenyi. That would be worth more than fifty art collections to Janos.

But that was never going to happen. For he had a secret, and no matter how many dinner dates his grandfather engineered, a wife was most certainly not going to result from any of them.

* * *

‘Now, you have read my notes properly, haven’t you, Prue? Only you do have a tendency to skim...’

Pushing a strand of pale blonde hair out of her cloud-grey eyes, Prudence Elliot took a deep breath and counted slowly up to ten. Her plane had landed in Hungary only an hour ago, but this was the third time Uncle Edmund had rung her to see how she was doing: in other words, he was checking up on her.

Edmund paused. ‘I don’t want to sound like a nag, but it’s just... Well, I just wish I could be there with you...you do understand?’

His voice cut through her juddering, panicky thoughts and her anxiety was instantly replaced by guilt. Of course she understood. Her uncle had built up the auction house that bore his name from scratch. And today would have undoubtedly been the most important day of his career—the pinnacle of his life’s work: cataloguing reclusive Hungarian billionaire Janos Almasy de Zsadany’s legendary art collection.

With a lurch of fear, Prudence remembered the look of excitement and terror on Edmund’s face when he’d been invited to the de Zsadany castle in Hungary. His words kept replaying in her head.

‘The man’s a modern Medici, Prue. Of course no one actually knows the exact contents of his collection. But a conservative valuation would be over a billion dollars.’

It should be Edmund with his thirty years of experience sitting in the back of the sleek, shark-nosed de Zsadany limousine. Not Prudence, who felt she could offer little more than her uncle’s reputation by proxy. Only Edmund was in England, confined to bed, recovering from a major asthma attack.

Biting her lip, she glanced out of the window at the dark fields. She hadn’t wanted to come. But she’d had no choice. Edmund owed money, and with debts mounting and interest accruing on those debts the business was in jeopardy. The fee from the de Zsadany job would balance the books, but the de Zsadany family lawyer had been adamant that work must start immediately. And so, reluctantly, she’d agreed to go to Hungary.

She heard Edmund sigh down the phone.

‘I’m sorry, Prue,’ he said slowly. ‘You shouldn’t have to put up with my nagging when you’ve been so good about all this.’

Instantly she felt ashamed. Edmund was like a father to her. He had given her everything: a home, a family, security and even a job. She wasn’t about to let him down now, in his hour of need.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to inject some confidence into her voice. ‘Please try not to worry, Edmund. If I need anything at all I’ll ring you. But I’ll be fine. I promise.’

He rang off and gratefully Prudence leant back against the leather upholstery and closed her eyes until, in what felt like no time at all, the car began to slow. She opened her eyes. Two tall wrought-iron gates swung smoothly open to let the limousine pass, and within minutes she was looking up at a huge, grey stone castle straight out of a picture book.

Later she would realise that she had no memory of how she got from the car to the castle. She remembered only that somehow she had found herself in a surprisingly homely sitting room, lit softly by a collection of table lamps and the glow of a log fire. She was about to sit down on a faded Knole Sofa when she noticed the painting.

Her heart started to pound. Stepping closer, she reached out with one trembling hand and touched the frame lightly, and then her eyes made a slow tour of the walls. She felt light-headed—as though she had woken up in dream. There were two Picassos—pink period—a delightfully exuberant Kandinsky, a Rembrandt portrait that would have sent Edmund into a state of near ecstasy, and a pair of exquisite Lucian Freud etchings of a sleeping whippet.

She was still in a state of moderate shock when an amused-sounding voice behind her said softly, ‘Please—take a closer look. I’m afraid the poor things get completely ignored by the rest of us.’

Prudence turned scarlet. To be caught snooping around someone’s sitting room like some sort of burglar was bad enough, but when that someone was your host, and one of the richest men in Europe, it was mortifying.

‘I’m so—so sorry,’ she stammered, turning round. ‘What must you...?’ The remainder of her apology died in her throat, the words colliding into one another with a series of shuddering jolts as her world imploded. For it was not Janos Almasy de Zsadany standing there but Laszlo Cziffra.

Laszlo Cziffra. Once his name had tasted hot and sweet in her mouth; now it was bitter on her tongue. She felt her insides twist in pain as around her the room seemed to collapse and fold in on itself like a house of cards. It couldn’t be Laszlo—it just couldn’t. But it was, and she stared at him mutely, reeling from the shock of his perfection.

With his high cheekbones, sleek black hair and burning amber eyes, he was almost the same boy she had fallen in love with seven years ago: her beautiful Romany boy. Only he most certainly wasn’t hers any more; nor was he a boy. Now he was unmistakably a man: tall, broad-shouldered, intensely male, and with a suggestion of conformity that his younger self had lacked. Prudence shivered. But it was his eyes that had changed the most. Once, on seeing her, they would have burnt with the fierce lambent fire of passion. Now they were as cold and lifeless as ash.

She felt breathless, almost faint, and her hand moved involuntarily to her throat. Laszlo had been her first love—her first lover. He had been like sunlight and storms. She had never wanted anything or anyone more than him. And he had noticed her . Chosen her with a certainty that had left her breathless, replete, exultant. She had felt immortal. The knowledge of his love had swelled inside her—an immutable truth as permanent as the sun rising and setting.

Or so she’d believed seven years ago.

Only she’d been wrong. His focus on her—for that was what it had been—had burnt white-hot, fire-bright, and then faded fast like a supernova.

Prudence swallowed. It had been the ugliest thing that had happened to her. After the fierce bliss of what she’d believed was his love, that disorientating darkness had felt like death itself. And now, like a ghost from paradise lost, here he was, defying all logic and reason.

Surely he couldn’t be real? And if he was real then what was he doing here ? It didn’t make any sense. She stared at him, groping for some kind of answer. Her stomach lurched as she remembered the last time she’d seen him: being pushed into the back of a police car, his face dark and defiant.

Laszlo didn’t belong in a place like this. And yet here he was. Standing there, as though he owned the place.

She felt her stomach lurch. In the back of her mind, pushed down in the darkness, she’d always imagined that he’d drifted into bad ways. So to watch him saunter into the room was almost more than her brain could fathom. Helplessly, she racked her brain for some shred of explanation.

‘Wh—what are you doing here?’ she stammered, her voice sounding small and shrunken, like a soul facing purgatory.