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Her hair was washed, cut alarmingly short with a razor, and blown dry in a matter of half an hour. When it was done she looked completely different. She would have been hard put to it to have recognised herself in a crowd. It was very stylish and completely feminine, framing her face with a softness that her long hair had never given her. Then her eye caught sight of the prices they were to be charged for the transformation and she visibly blenched.

'I can't think what my father will say!' she exclaimed, She turned her head to look up at Domenico. 'He is going to pay, isn't he?'

'Of course.'

'I think I ought to thank you all the same,' she said. 'Do you think I look nice?'

Amusement tugged at the corners of his lips. 'Very nice.'

They left the establishment in a glow of mutual goodwill. Not that he was going to have his own way in everything, Deborah mentally decided, but it pleased her to know as certainly as if he had told her so that he too was surprised at how well it had turned out and that he was looking at her with a new respect and significance. Before his very eyes she was turning from a pretty girl into a very lovely woman. There were dangers attached to that, Deborah suspected, but she couldn't bring herself to regret the transformation whatever might happen to her in the future.

Coming out of the hairdressers, Domenico took her arm and led her down towards the river.

'There is something here I want to show you,' he said. 'You remember I asked you if you had ever heard of the Mouth of Truth?'

'Yes, but I don't know anything about it. I told you I didn't.'

'It has a charming legend. If you put your hand in the mouth and tell a lie it will nip your fingers.'

Deborah put her hands behind her back. 'I'd like to see it '

'But you're not going to try it out?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know what you may ask me. I might not want to tell the truth—not to you,' she said.

'At least you don't mock such an ancient institution! There was a man who did so, way back in the eighteenth century, and he put his hand in the mouth and was stung by a scorpion.'

Deborah's eyes opened wide. 'Did he die of it?'

Domenico shrugged. 'History doesn't relate. I doubt he mocked La Bocca della Verita again.'

'No,' Deborah agreed with feeling. 'Have you ever tried it out yourself?'

'Never personally. Through the years my family have been known to make use of it to test the virtue of their wives. It has never been known to fail to detect an adulteress, which has always been the most popular test to which it has been put.'

Deborah shivered. 'Were the penalties very severe?' she asked. 'They can't have loved their wives much to put them to such a test.'

'Ah, but in those days it was a terrible disgrace to be cheated by one's wife. Suppose I had not been my father's son? Should I then have inherited his place in society and his possessions?'

'I don't know,' she admitted.

He smiled at her serious tone. 'Nowadays it's a joke, no more than that,
piccina
. Besides, it has never been known to punish the innocent!'

He led the way into the portico of St Mary in Cosmedin, one of the gems of medieval Rome. Deborah judged the austere but charming interior to date from about the eighth century, but she was not the expert that Michael was in ecclesiastical architecture. The Romanesque bell-tower was much later but, she thought, equally charming.

The Mouth of Truth stood on the left-hand side of the portico. Some time in its history a third of it had broken away and it had been cemented back together again, giving the marble mask a sinister look it had probably not had originally.

'What was it in the beginning?' she asked Domenico.

'A drain cover. Before there was a church here there was a temple dedicated to Ceres. Who knows all that the face has seen in the past?'

Deborah touched the nose and the flaring nostrils, carefully avoiding the entrance to the mouth. 'It's a pagan thing to have in a church,' she remarked.

'We're a pagan people.'

'Are you?' She wondered that he should say such a thing. 'Because you believe in such things?'

He took her hand in his. 'So do you! Here, put your hand inside and tell me you would still prefer to be with your friends?'

But Deborah would not. 'Tomorrow I shall go back to them,' she declared. 'They'll be worried sick about me! What will you do if they've gone to the police and reported me missing?'

He spread his fingers against hers, noting how much smaller her hand was than his. 'I'm not afraid of the police—or your friends—not now I know you are content to be my prisoner for the time being.' He watched the indignation flare in her eyes. 'You must be content with your fate or you would not be afraid to put your hand in the mouth when you deny it!'

She was tempted to prove him wrong, but her courage failed her and she turned her back on the marble mask, refusing to contemplate its powers any longer.

'I thought we were going shopping?' she said stiffly.

Domenico put his own fingers into the Mouth of Truth. 'I have no difficulty in saying that I am enjoying having you as my prisoner. Will you really try to run away from me?'

She nodded violently. 'As soon as I possibly can!'

'Back to Michael?'

'Of course!'

His voice rang in her ears, gladdening her heart. 'You may try,
carina mia
, but what I have, I hold! Run as fast and as far as you can, but you will never escape me!'

For that afternoon, at least, she was not going to try. Out of sight of the Bocca della Verita, she wondered that she had not told the lie direct and flatly denied that she preferred Domenico's company to that of her friends. What could a piece of marble do to her? Did she think another scorpion might be lurking in its depths waiting for her to tell such a small fib and one which could only be expected from her under the circumstances?

Her new clothes delighted her. Domenico had allowed her to hover between one dress and another for a matter of moments and then recommended her to have the two. And he had added to her choices with a profligate hand, pulling out clothes at random from the racks until he was satisfied that she would be adequately clad on every possible occasion. He had done exactly the same in the shoe department. To Deborah, who had been shocked to discover that the lowest priced were at least thirty pounds, it had been a novel experience to walk out of the shop with at least six pairs neatly packaged for her future use.

'I'll never wear them all!' she had exclaimed, awed that he should think she might.

'Why not?' he had retorted.

'They're all beautiful, but
six
pairs!'

'It's all part of the plot,' he had told her. 'If you do run away, your six pairs of shoes will slow you up and it won't take me so long to find you!'

She was silent for a long moment after that. It would be hard to part with her new possessions, but she would have to if she wanted to reassert her independence— and she did! She had to if she wanted to retain her self-respect!

She got into the car and screwed herself round to gaze on the packages Domenico had spread on the back seat. In her new clothes, she thought, she was a different person, someone whom one would not be surprised to see emerging from a palace, and yet inside she was just the same.

'Why did you kidnap me?' she asked. 'Whatever the ransom, it won't even begin to pay for all these things! Agnes will be simply furious!'

'Your father is known to be a very rich man. We have had a great deal about him in our papers recently.'

'But that has nothing to do with me!'

His eyes flickered over her shadowed face. 'Who is Agnes?'

She was surprised that he didn't know. 'She's my father's wife.' A gleeful look crossed her face, lighting up her eyes with laughter. 'I wish she could see me in my new clothes! Her eyes would fall out with sheer envy!'

Domenico started up the car. 'I gather you don't care much for your stepmother,' he said dryly.

'No, I don't. She's very beautiful, of course, but she's as hard as nails. I don't see her very often.'

'Nor your father either?'

She shook her head. 'He has a second family. I'm a part of his first marriage which he'd very much like to forget all about. That's why he won't pay any ransom for me. Why should he? Would you in his position?'

'I can't imagine you as my daughter, but if you were, yes, I should pay anything I was asked to get you safely back. So will your father when he fully understands the situation. Though does it matter so much if he doesn't?'

Deborah thought of the cost of her new wardrobe. What would happen, she wondered, if he didn't pay? 'It matters to me,' she said.

'Why? The clothes are yours '

'But I can't accept them from
you!
It wouldn't be proper!'

He laughed, putting his hand on hers which as well as giving her a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach, made her doubly nervous of his ability to steer his way through the quick-moving Roman traffic.

'Proper or not, the risk is mine,
piccina.
You may accept your new clothes with a clear conscience! How they are paid for is between your father and myself and is nothing to do with you. How could it be? You are the victim of the dastardly plot, not the villain of the piece!'

No, he was that! But he made a very charming villain, she thought, and the hero, if the hero was Michael, hadn't done much for her so far. §he touched her newly cut hair and marvelled at herself. As a child she had always preferred the villain to the hero, but she wasn't a child any longer. She was a fully grown woman, and while Domenico Manzu might have captured her person, she would be a fool indeed if she allowed him to capture her heart.

Gianetta
, Domenico's sister, was overjoyed to find Deborah was staying with them.

'We have been so dull these last few days!' she complained to the English girl. Her eyes sparkled with laughter at her own foolishness. The truth is that Cesare has been away.'

'Cesare is my future son-in-law,' her mother supplied. She looked Deborah up and down, carefully assessing her appearance. 'I thought you a pretty girl at lunchtime, but now I see you are beautiful,
signorina.
But I expect my son has already told you that! What are your plans for tomorrow?'

Deborah hesitated before replying. She was painfully conscious of her new appearance. Her long emerald skirts clung to her legs, revealing her shape in a way her jeans had never done. She knew she was looking extremely well, but she couldn't enjoy the feeling, not while she felt she had accepted her new glamour under false pretences. What would happen to all these clothes if her father refused to pay for them? Would Domenico be able to return them to the shops they had come from? She doubted it, not once they had been worn, and he had insisted that she should change for the evening meal as the rest of the household did. But she still felt guilty at obeying him with scarcely a protest passing her lips. She had wanted to wear her new things, and that, she knew, was a vanity she might rue dearly in the time to come. She knew her father and Domenico did not!

'I may not be here,' she said in reply. 'My friends will expect me to spend some of my time with them.'

'Friends?' the Signora repeated. 'You have friends in Rome?'

'I travelled with them,' Deborah told her, 'I didn't know I was going to stay here.'

'But if your father had arranged that you should stay with Domenico, why did no one think to tell you?' the Signora insisted.

'Deborah doesn't live with her father,' Domenico put in smoothly, not really explaining at all, but successfully diverting his family's attention from the point in question.

'Where
do
you live, child?' Signora Manzu's worst expectations of English family life seemed suddenly realised and she was plainly torn between triumph that the Italian way was so much better and genuine concern for her young guest who must have suffered the nameless horrors of a broken marriage.

'I live with my mother,' Deborah answered her.

'The poor soul!
I
feel for her in her loneliness!
Id
my own case, my husband was taken from me by death, but I can understand her loss. You must be a great consolation to her.'

'My mother is fond of me,' Deborah agreed. 'But I think she was relieved to be free of my father when they decided to part company. I was too young to remember anything about it, but my mother has always been a happy sort of person '

'Like her daughter?' Domenico interposed.

'I've always felt much more sorry for my father,' she added quickly.

'Ah yes,' Domenico said wisely. 'He has to live with the abominable Agnes!'

She was disconcerted. 'Well, yes,' she admitted. She remembered that her father was a business acquaintance of his and went on hastily, 'Not everyone dislikes her. She—she can make herself very pleasant. Perhaps you have met her?'

'I? No, never! I am content to have met your father's daughter. She is much more to my taste than his present wife, damned as she is with faint praise. The daughter interests me greatly, on the other hand, as I think she knows?'

Deborah shook her head. Her breath caught in her throat. The confidence of the man, to flirt with her under his mother's eyes, just as though she were an ordinary guest of the family, introduced by him because he wanted them to get to know her! Oh, how could he? How could he raise his mother's expectations as to her possible importance to him, when they both knew

'She is not your usual style,' Gianetta said frankly, surveying her brother with a mockery so like his own that Deborah almost laughed.

'I have been taking a leaf out of her own book,'
Domenico returned with a calmness Deborah could only envy. 'Didn't Michelangelo say the sculptor releases his statue from being imprisoned in the stone? He sees the finished result right from the start of the work? Well, so it has been with me and Deborah. I had only to see her to know what she could be, and now I have begun to create my vision of her, as we have spent the afternoon beginning to do.' He paused, smiling. 'Did you know that Deborah is a sculptor?'