The Conte had reluctantly agreed to a detour to the Highlands.
Isobel had never traveled in a carriage so fine, but its well-sprung wheels and deeply cushioned benches were no match for the muddy and pitted roads that stood between them and their destination. Especially when it began to rain again.
When the roads became nearly impassable as the weather deteriorated, the old man’s temper went with it. Glaring at Isobel from his corner of the coach, he would shift restlessly and loudly. The volume of his sighs would increase if she was in any danger of nodding off.
Matteo did his best to keep his father’s spirits up in the beginning but eventually gave up the effort. Instead, he would ask Isobel detailed questions about her life.
He didn’t just want to know about her childhood, or the training she’d received at her grandmother’s knee. He also wanted to know about her life after that, about her parents and time in service.
Despite her suspicion of him, she couldn’t help but find his curiosity oddly sweet. Nevertheless, she kept her answers brief when in the presence of the count. Aldo didn’t need to know anything about her. But it was harder to maintain her distance when she and Matteo were alone.
She could feel her own confusion around him. Matteo was so earnest and eager. It wasn’t childlike in the least, but his manner struck her as that of an innocent, a youth with little experience of the world. Which was ridiculous. He was a wealthy lord in Italy, with all the privileges and freedoms money could buy. There was no way he hadn’t experienced at least some of the same excesses of life that occupied the ton in London.
But if he had, he didn’t seem touched by it.
Isobel could feel her determination to keep the young lord at bay waning every day. She tried to hold onto her resentment and distrust, but it was difficult when he was being so kind and solicitous.
At every stop, Matteo would do anything and everything to ensure her comfort. He made the coach stop in Edinburgh long enough to buy her a warmer cloak, despite the count’s vociferous complaints. When they would change horses on the road, he would make sure she ate and drank her fill before they continued and would order hot bricks wrapped in flannel for her feet and hands before they departed.
The first few times he forgot to ask for additional bricks for his father, an oversight the Conte let him know displeased him in blistering Italian as soon as they left the coaching inn.
Isobel had tried to hand over her second brick to the man, but Matteo grew agitated, claiming that she needed to be at her best when they arrived in Carrbridge to take possession of her library. His logic silenced the count’s complaints, but he still glared and sulked openly. At the next inn, Aldo ordered his own bricks.
She was going mad cooped up in the carriage all day, but it was the nights that filled her with tension.
Every night, the coach would stop at the best inn available. They would eat a relatively silent meal and then she and Matteo would be shown upstairs to the same chamber.
Once inside the room, Matteo would give her privacy to change by turning his back if there was no screen available. Then he would make a pallet on the floor and stretch out. She knew he had to be sore and uncomfortable after being in the coach all day, but he never complained. He seemed content to talk with her from his prone position on the floor, his hands behind his head.
Outside of the count’s oppressive company, Isobel answered more of Matteo’s questions in greater detail and in turn he would tell her stories, mostly about his childhood—especially the months spent on the shores of the Lago di Bolsena at one of their country estates.
He also described the famous sights of his homeland, interweaving what he knew of their history to entertain her. Though she was often tired when she heard them, his anecdotes blended in her mind until the image of the Tuscan countryside solidified and became real—a place of heated beauty and a noble, if somewhat frenzied, history.
In time she grew bold enough to make some inquiries of her own. Envious of the freedom his sex and wealth afforded him she asked him about his travels. Pleased to have found a subject of interest to her, he spoke of the crumbling Colosseum in Rome and the ancient sites of Greece, as if he would show them to her someday.
And every night he would promise to do whatever he could to ensure her safety and future happiness until she almost started to believe him.