To Kiss a Count. Amanda McCabeЧитать онлайн книгу.

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       Prologue

       Sicily

      ‘Oh, Miss Thalia! We’ll never be able to leave tomorrow, there’s still ever so much to do.’

      Thalia looked up from the books and papers she was packing away to see her maid Mary dashing around the chamber, her arms filled with gowns. Open trunks dotted the floor, half-full. Clothes and shoes spilled from the armoire and drawers.

      ‘Really, Mary,’ Thalia said with a laugh, ‘we have been moving about so much of late, I’m surprised you don’t have the packing down to an exact science.’

      ‘Well, we’ve never left in such a hurry before, either. There is no time to do things properly!’

      Thalia agreed with her there. Her father, Sir Walter Chase, was not usually one to rush his travels. They had moved leisurely through Italy, seeing all the sites and meeting all Sir Walter’s scholarly correspondents before coming to rest in Sicily. But now his work here was nearly done. His ancient town site was thoroughly excavated, studied, and turned over to local antiquarians. Thalia’s older sister Clio was married to her true love, the Duke of Averton, and off on her honeymoon to lands east.

      Sir Walter himself was now married again, to his longtime companion Lady Rushworth, and ready to see new places. They were headed to Geneva for the summer, along with Thalia’s younger sister Terpsichore, called Cory. It had been assumed that Thalia, too, would go with them. But after all that had happened in the last weeks, all that she had seen and felt and done, she was weary of new places. So, she was for home. England.

      Her eldest sister, Calliope, Lady Westwood, was expecting her first child, and her recent letters were uncharacteristically plaintive. She asked when they would return home, when she would see them again. Thalia suspected Calliope would prefer Clio’s company. As the two oldest of the Chase Muses, they were very close. And no one was stronger, more capable than Clio.

      But Clio was gone, and Calliope would have to make do with Thalia. Thalia, the one they all thought of as so flighty and dramatic. Perfectly adequate for visits to the modiste or amateur theatricals, but not for delivering babies.

      Not for catching villainous thieves.

      Thalia caught sight of herself in the dressing-table mirror. The Sicilian sunlight poured from the windows, turning her loose hair to the buttery shade of summer jonquils. Her heart-shaped face and wide blue eyes, her roses-and-cream skin, were pretty enough, she supposed. They certainly gained her admirers, silly, brainless suitors who wrote her bad poetry. Who compared her to porcelain shepherdesses and springtime days.

      Her own family seemed to share that view. They praised her prettiness, smiled at her, indulged her, yet they seemed to think there was nothing behind her blue eyes. Nothing but ribbons and novels. Cal and Clio were the scholars, the heirs to their father’s work; Cory was a budding great artist, a serious painter. Thalia was an amusement, the one their mother used to call her ‘belle fleur’.

      Oh, they never said that to her, of course. They applauded her theatricals, indulged her writing. But she saw it there when they looked at her, heard it in the tone of their words.

      She was different. She was not quite a Chase.

      Thalia turned away from the mirror, tugging her shawl closer around her shoulders, as if the thin cashmere offered some armour. Some protection against disappointment.

      She had hoped that the strange events of the last weeks would change their minds. Would show them her true strength, what she was really capable of. When Clio had come to her and asked for her help in catching Lady Riverton, who had stolen a rare and sacred cache of Hellenistic temple silver, Thalia was overjoyed. Here at last was something useful she could do!

      Something that would prove she was a Chase.

      Her play had seemed to work, drawing out Lady Riverton’s accomplice, but then it had all gone wrong. Lady Riverton had escaped, presumably with the silver, and now Clio and her husband had to try to find her. A pursuit in which Thalia had no part. She had not helped her sister, or her father.

      Or the one person she found she most wanted to impress. Count Marco di Fabrizzi. Her partner in the theatricals—and in quarrelling. The Italian antiquarian and aristocrat. The most handsome man she had ever met. The man she was certain must be hopelessly in love with Clio.

      Her sisters teased her for rejecting all her suitors. But none of them had ever been at all like Marco. It was entirely her luck that when she did find