The House of Adriano by Nerina Hilliard Page A

the house. For the moment though they passed into a cool, shady room with ancient, polished furniture upon an inlaid marble floor, exquisite curtains at the windows - later she learned that those curtains had been painstakingly hand-embroidered - a damask-covered settee and a couple of Persian rugs on the floor, but it was the elderly lady, sitting in a straight-backed chair by an occasional table encrusted with mother-of-pearl, who caught her attention immediately she entered, more than the appointments of the room.
    Dona Teresa Balgare had a Spanish correctness on the surface, but a little twinkling light in her dark eyes that made it quite obvious that her years in Ireland with her late husband had left their mark on her.
    When Duarte introduced them, Aileen saw her eyes go almost hungrily to Peter, and for the first time she felt some of her antagonism against the man begin to ebb away. Had he realised how much Dona Teresa had missed her son and might find him again in the child he had left behind?
    Peter looked up at her, seemingly quite intrigued by the fact that he had a grandmother.
    “Are you really my grandmother?” he asked naively, and when Dona Teresa assured him that she was indeed his grandmother, he nodded approvingly. “That’s good. I like you.”
    It was at that moment that Aileen intercepted a rather dry glance from Duarte, and she flushed and looked away hastily, surprised to find that her antagonism was lessening even more. It was this meeting with Dona Teresa that was doing it. She had been thinking of herself, all along ; of what Peter meant to her, and not dreaming that there might be someone else to whom he could mean just as much.
    After a little while coffee was served, with a fruit drink for Peter, then, when it was cleared away, Duarte left them with some murmured excuse. Aileen suspected that it was to give Dona Teresa an opportunity to talk to them alone, to ask all those questions that must be trembling on her lips.
    “You knew my son well, senorita ?”
    “I knew both Eric and Mandy, his wife,” Aileen told her, and went on to recount how she had come to live with them when she was still only a child. “He used to talk about you quite often,” she finished gently.
    It was strange how very much at ease she felt with this aristocratic old lady, even though they had met so very recently and despite the fact that she was also very obviously an Adriano. That same pride she had noticed in Duarte was in every line of Dona Teresa’s old but upright body, in the sleek head covered with the old-fashioned black mantilla. That poise and pride of family did not antagonise her as it did in Duarte - perhaps because there was none of the masculine virility that the other Adriano possessed, some little demon whispered at the back of her mind, and she sharply told it to be quiet. It was nothing at all to her that Duarte Adriano might possess a dangerous kind of personal magnetism when he chose to assert that urbane, aloof charm of his, or that he was quite exceptionally good-looking.
    “He found happiness in your Australia?” Dona Teresa asked, bringing Aileen’s thoughts back from their most unwelcome preoccupation with a man she still told herself she disliked intensely.
    “I’m sure he did. He and Mandy were the most perfectly happy couple I’ve ever seen.”
    “They went away,” Peter told her gratuitously. “So I came to live with Auntie Aileen.”
    He seemed to have taken one of his mercurial likes - and his dislikes could be just as quick and pronounced - to Dona Teresa, chattering away in the free-and-easy manner he had when he liked anyone, and Aileen was on tenterhooks all the time in case he should make some remark that would have better remained unspoken. She did not know how much Duarte had told his aunt. Luckily, however, nothing passed his childish lips that should have remained behind them, and a little later a young girl came to lead them to the rooms that had been prepared