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Michael!'
    He smiled an ironic smile. 'You think not? I think I could, but I won't—not yet!' He opened the door for her and bowed to her as she preceded him out the door. 'Shall I take you back to your room?'
    Deborah shook her head and fled. When she reached her room she tore off her clothes and climbed back into her brand new nightgown, burying her face thankfully into the soft pillows. But it was a long time before she slept. She turned on her side and wept bitterly for her lost illusions about Michael and men in general.
     

CHAPTER FIVE
    It was raining in the morning. Deborah looked out at the dripping skies and marvelled inwardly that they should have caught her mood so exactly. How was she going to face Domenico Manzu? Her spirits quailed at the prospect. Domenico was like no one else she had ever met, or was ever likely to, and she hadn't the remotest idea how to cope with him.
    It was easier to imagine Michael's reaction to the unpromising weather. He would take the pouring rain as a personal insult to himself, and there was something rather loveable about that. Domenico had no such comfortable idiosyncrasies for her to dwell on. He was as unyielding and as arrogant as the side of a mountain and she had never had much of a head for heights. If she had a little of his devastating confidence in himself she might have found an equal ability to deal with her own rebellious emotions before he had taken any desire to do so out of her hands with a masterful ease that made her breathless just to think about. No one had ever kissed her with such appalling effect, demanding a surrender her traitorous body had exulted in making. It was that that threatened to destroy her. A physical response to his lovemaking she could have understood, but she, unasked and unsought, would have presented him with her heart and mind as well. Only her pride had saved her from revelling in the new allegiance her whole being had discovered in his embrace—and this when she knew he was more than half engaged to marry Alessandra and that he was only passing the time of day with herself.
    Be that as it may, somehow or other he had to be faced, and there seemed to be only one answer to that particular problem. She would pretend to herself that she was playing a part and was not really herself at all. She had all the props to hand: a palace, new clothes such as she had never worn before, and a prevailing sense of unreality that had persisted even in her dreams all through the long night that had followed her unsuccessful attempt to escape from the custody of Domenico Manzu! Domenico Manzu, she repeated dreamily to herself. Ah, there was a name to conjure with! It would take a poorer spirit than hers to have much difficulty in pretending that he, too, was nothing more than part of this episode of fantasy in which she had somehow become involved.
    She wore a dress of navy-blue, with a Quaker collar and cuffs on the short sleeves. In it she looked slimmer than she did in jeans and, she was pleased to see, much less young and vulnerable than she had feared. Only her sea-green eyes, deep and mysterious, betrayed a lack of sophistication that at that moment she could only deplore. When she looked back at herself in the looking-glass, she looked scared stiff.
    'Dio mio!' she taunted herself, remembering Domenico's exclamation of the night before. 'What more can he do to you?'
    The unspoken answer brought a hot wave of colour to her face. Deborah didn't see herself as pretty at all in that moment. She was filled with exasperation that she couldn't better control her inner self. It had seen a governor it liked far better and her own inadequate measures to restore order were dismissed with the contempt they deserved.
    'What am I going to do?' she asked herself.
    Her mirror-image had no suggestions to make, except what amounted to cowardice in the face of the enemy, to ring for the maid and to ask to have her breakfast brought to her room. But, if she did that,