But always had not lasted long.
As far as he had ever been able to tell, love had died along with her, just as his grandfather had said.
Something he’d been perfectly happy with all these years.
Until now.
When it was too late.
Because he knew how this scene between them was about to go. He played the monster and his wives believed it, and he’d been satisfied with that system since the start. There was only ever one way this could go.
He had always liked it. Before.
He raked his hair back from his face, and wished that he could do something about the way his heart kicked at him. Or better yet, about the fact he had a heart in the first place, despite everything.
Surely if he could rid himself of the thing the way he thought he had a lifetime ago, all of this would be easier.
“I am not going to kill you,” he told her, his voice severe as he tried to draw the cloak of his usual remoteness around him. But he couldn’t quite get there. “Nonetheless, you have a choice of deaths before you. You can consider this chamber a passageway, of sorts. A bridge between the life you knew until today, and one in which you can be anyone you choose. Assuming you meet the criteria, that is.”
She swayed slightly on her feet. “The criteria?”
And he had done this so many times. It should have come as easily to him as breath.
But his chest was too tight. That damned heart of his was too big. “The criteria for escape is simple, Angelina. If you meet it, we will create a new identity for you. You can go anywhere you wish in the world under this new name. You will not have to worry about supporting yourself, because I will take care of your financial arrangements in perpetuity.”
“Wait...” Angelina shook her head slightly. “Does that mean...?”
He nodded. “My third wife runs a scuba diving business on an island you would never have heard of, off the coast of Venezuela. My fourth wife lives a nomadic lifestyle, currently traveling about mainland Europe in a converted van. It looks modest from the outside but is, I am assured, the very height of technology within. My fifth wife prefers the frenetic pace of Hong Kong, where she runs a spa. And Veronica, my most famous wife, never able to have a moment to herself in all her days, has settled down on a farm in a temperate valley on the west coast of America. Where she tends to grapes on the vine, raises goats, and makes her own cheese.” His smile was a grim and terrible thing. He could taste it. “You can have any life you wish, Angelina. At my expense. All you need to do is disappear forever.”
“But if they’re not... If you didn’t...” She pulled in a visible breath with a ragged sound. “Are you married to all these women at the same time?”
He actually laughed at that. “That is not usually the first question. No, I’m not a bigamist, though I commend you for adding yet another sin to my collection. Murderer and bigamist, imagine! I’m almost sorry to tell you that my marriages have all been quietly and privately annulled. Save the first.”
Angelina shifted, hugging herself she stared back at him. “I don’t understand. Why would you set yourself up to be some sort of...one-man smuggling operation for women in search of better lives? When you know that the whole world thinks the worst of you?”
“Who better?” Benedetto shrugged. “I don’t care in the slightest what the world thinks of me. And you’ve spent two months acquainting yourself with this castle. It is the tip of the iceberg of the kind of money I have. I could marry a hundred women, support them all, and never feel a pinch in my own pocket.”
“So it’s altruism then?” She looked dubious, and if he wasn’t mistaken, something like...affronted. “If that was true, why not give all that money to charity? Shouldn’t there be a way to do it that doesn’t brand you the monster beneath every bed in Europe?”
“What would be the fun in that?”
This was the part where normally, the women he’d married—despite their cynicism or inability to trust a word he said because they feared him so deeply, yet not quite deeply enough to refuse to marry him—began to waver. Hope began to creep in. He would watch them imagine, as they stood there before him, that he might be telling them the truth. And if he was, if he could really give them what he was offering, did that mean that they could really, truly be free?
Of him—and of everything else that had brought them here?
But Angelina was staring at him as if what he was telling her was a far worse betrayal than games with his fearsome housekeeper and a key to a locked tower door.
“What do I have to do to qualify for this extraordinary death?” she asked.
He wanted to go to her. He wanted his hands on her. But the point of this, all this, was that Benedetto wasn’t supposed to want such things.
He never had before.
“I already told you that the primary purpose of my existence is to produce an heir,” he told her stiffly. “It was why I married Carlota and why we planned to consummate a union that was never passionate.”
“I remember the story. But that hardly sounds like reason enough to inflict your unhappy childhood on another baby.”
“My childhood wasn’t unhappy.” He heard the outrage in his voice and tried to rein it in. “My grandmother—” But he stopped himself. Because Angelina already knew too much about him. He had already given her too much. Benedetto gritted his teeth and pushed on. “Ordinarily, this is when I offer my wives the opportunity to produce the Franceschi heir themselves.”
“Surely they signed up for that when they said, ‘I do’?”
He ignored that, and the flash of temper in her blue gaze. “Should you choose that route, life here will continue as is. At the end of a year, if no heir is forthcoming, the same offer for a new life will be made to you. If you’re pregnant, however, the expectation would be that you remain until the child is five. At which point, a final offer will be made. If you choose to go, you can do so, with one stipulation. That being, obviously, that you cannot take the child with you. If you choose to stay, we will have contracts drawn up to indicate that you may remain as much a stranger to the marriage as you wish.”
He cleared his throat, because this was all standard. This was the labyrinthine game he and his grandfather had crafted and it had served him well for years. But Angelina was staring at him as if he’d turned into an apparition before her very eyes. When this was usually when that sort of gaze faded and a new one took its place. The sweet, bright gleam of what if.
“Of course, in your case, everything is different,” he said, forcing himself to keep going. “I always leave after the wedding. Usually while they are locked in the bathroom, pretending not to be terrified that I might claim a wedding night. Then I wait to see how long it takes each wife to open the door to this tower. Once she does, we have this discussion.”
Again, the way she looked at him was...different.
He cleared his throat. “But your choices might be more limited, regrettably, because you could already be pregnant. I’ll confess this has never happened before.”
Her lips parted then, and she made a sound that he couldn’t quite define. “Are you telling me...? Are you...? Did you not sleep with all your wives on your wedding night? On all your wedding nights?”
“Of course not.” He belted that out without thinking. “Nor do I touch them beforehand. I may be considered a monster far and wide, Angelina, but I do try not to act like one.”
She let out a laugh, a harsh sound against the storm that battered at the windows outside. “Except with me.”
Benedetto ran a hand over his face, finding he was only more unsettled as this conversation wore on. Instead of less, as was customary—because he always knew what his wives would choose. He always knew none of them had married him. They’d married his money and hoped for the best, and this was him giving it to them.
“The truth is that yo
u were different from the start,” he told Angelina, grudgingly. “I had no trouble whatsoever keeping my hands to myself with the rest. It was all so much more...civilized.”
He found himself closing the distance between them, when he shouldn’t. And he expected her to flinch, but she didn’t. She stood her ground, even tilting up her chin, as if she wanted him to do exactly this. As if she wanted him to make it all worse.
Benedetto slid his hand along her cheek, finding it hot and soft, and that didn’t solve a single one of his problems. “But you played for me, Angelina. And you wrecked me. And I have been reeling ever since.”
Her mouth moved into something far too stark to be a smile. Far too sad to be hers. “That would sound more romantic if you weren’t threatening to kill me, one way or another.”
“No,” he gritted out. “As it happens, you are the only wife I have slept with on a wedding night.”
Her eyes seemed remarkably blue then. “What about your second wife? Your mistress? Surely she—”
“She was paralytically drunk after our reception,” he said, not sure if that darkness in him was fury, anticipation, or something else he’d never felt before. Something as overwhelming and electric as the storm outside. “And I was little better. I am afraid, Angelina, that you are unique.”
“I feel so special,” she whispered in that same rough tone, but she didn’t jerk her cheek away.
Even so, Benedetto dropped his hand. And for a moment, they stood there, gazing at each other with all these secrets and lies exposed and laid out between them.
He could feel the walls all around him, claiming him anew. For good this time.
When she left him, as he knew she would because they always did, perhaps he would give up the fight altogether. In another year he could be nothing more than another statue, right here in this room. Another stop along the tour.
There was a part of him that longed for the oblivion of stone.
There was a part of him that always would.
“Why?” she asked, her voice a quiet scrape of roughness that reminded him, forcefully, that there was no part of him that was stone. That there never had been, especially where she was concerned. “Why would anyone go to all this trouble?”
“I will answer any and all questions you might have,” he told her, sounding more formal than he intended. Perhaps that was his last refuge. The closest he could get to becoming a statue after all. “But first you must choose.”
“As you pointed out, I might already be pregnant,” she replied, her arms crossed and even the wildness of her long blond hair a kind of resistance, silver and bright against the bare walls.
Why did he want nothing more than to lose himself in her—forever? How had he let this happen?
“It is true. You might be. I used nothing to prevent it.”
“Neither did I. There seemed little need when my life expectancy was all of three months.”
And she stared at him, the rebuke like a slap.
He felt it more like a kick to the gut.
“What if I’m pregnant and still choose to disappear tonight?” she asked after a moment, sounding unnervingly calm. “What then? Will you surrender your own child? Or will you force me to stay here despite the choice I make?”
He shook his head, everything in him going cold. “I told you, you are unique. This has never happened before. That doesn’t mean that the possibility is unforeseen. Your choice will hold, no matter your condition.”
“You would give up your own child,” she murmured. Her eyes widened. “But I thought I was the martyr here.”
Benedetto realized his hands were in fists. He didn’t know which was worse, that he would have to live without her, which he should have figured out how to handle already, or that it was distinctly possible that she would go off into whatever new life she wished and raise his child without him.
But the rules to this game had been always been perfectly clear.
He and his grandfather had laid them out together.
Half in penance, half for protection. He had already lost two wives. Why not more?
Benedetto had never imagined his heart would be involved. He’d been certain he’d buried that along with his grandmother.
“You must choose,” he gritted out, little as he wanted to.
And for moment, he thought maybe they were dead, after all. Two ghosts running around and around in this terrible castle, cut off from the rest of the world. That the two of them had done this a thousand times before.
Because that was the way she looked at him. As if she’d despaired of him in precisely this way too many times to count already.
He could have sworn he heard her playing then, though there was no piano in sight. Still, the blood in his veins turned to symphonies instead, and he was lit up and lost.
For the first time since he’d started this terrible journey, he honestly didn’t know if he could complete it. Or even if he could continue.
And all the while, his seventh wife—and first love, for all the good it would do him in this long, involved exercise in futility—gazed back at him, an expression on her face he’d never seen before.
It made everything in him tighten, like hands around his throat.
“What if I choose a third option instead?” she asked.
Quietly. So very quietly.
Outside, the sea raged and the sky cracked open, again and again. But all he could focus on was Angelina. And those unearthly blue eyes that he was sure could see straight through him and worse, always had.
“There is no third option,” he gritted out.
“But of course there is,” she said.
And she smiled the way she had when he’d been deep inside her, on that night that shouldn’t have happened. The night he couldn’t forget.
He heard a great roaring thing and knew, somehow, that it was happening inside him.
“I could stay here,” Angelina said with that same quiet strength. “I could have your babies and truly be your wife. No games. No locked towers or forbidden keys. Just you, Benedetto. And me. And whatever children we make between us.”
He couldn’t speak. The world was a storm, and he was a part of it, and only Angelina stood apart from it all. A beacon in all the dark.
“We don’t have to play games. We don’t have to do...whatever this is.” Angelina stood there and shined at him. He’d never seen that shade of blue before. His heart had never felt so full. “We can do what we want instead.”
No one, in the whole of Benedetto’s life, had ever looked at him the way she did. As if he was neither her savior nor her hero nor even her worst nightmare. He could have handled any of those. All of them.
But Angelina looked at him as if, should he only allow it, he could be a man.
He didn’t know how he stayed on his feet when all he wanted was to collapse to his knees. To beg her to stop. Or to never stop. Or to think about what she was doing here.
To him.
“Angelina,” he managed to grit out. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“But I do.” And this time, when her lips curved, it looked like hope. “Benedetto, you asked me to marry you, and I said yes. Now I’m asking you the same thing.”
“Angelina...”
“Will you marry me? And better yet—” and her smile widened, and it was all too bright and too much and his chest was cracking open “—will you stay married to me? I’m thinking we can start with a long, healthy lifetime and move on from there.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“YOU MUST BE MAD,” Benedetto said, his voice strangled.
Angelina couldn’t say she wasn’t. Maybe the next step was searching out convicted killers and making them her pen pals, as he’d suggested. But she rather thought the only killer who interested her was this one, who’d only ever been convicted in the co
urt of public opinion. And who hadn’t killed anyone.
“There is no third option,” he said, his voice like gravel. But there was an arrested look on his face that made her heart lurch a bit inside her chest. “I made certain promises long ago. Whether you carry my child now or not is immaterial.”
She’d been talking about babies as if she was talking about someone else, but the possibility that it had already happened, that it was happening even now, settled on her, then. She slid a hand over her belly in a kind of wonder. Could it be?
This whole night so far had been like one of her favorite pieces of music. A beautiful journey—a tour of highs and lows, valleys and mountains, storms and sunlight—and all of it bringing her here. Right here.
To this man who was not a monster. No matter how badly he wanted to be.
Her heart had known all along.
“I could do it your way,” she said softly. “I could sign up for the heir apparent program. I could keep signing up. We could make it cold-blooded and chilly, if you like. Is that what you want?” There was something so heartbreaking about that, but she knew she would accept it, if it was what he had to offer. She knew she would accept anything if it meant she could have him, even the smallest part of him—but she saw something like anguish on his hard face, then. “Or is it what you think you deserve?”
And for a moment the anguish she could see in him seemed as loud and filled with fury as the storm outside. It was hard to tell which was which—but her heart knew this man. Her heart had recognized him from the start.
It recognized him now.
“It’s all right if you can’t answer me, Benedetto,” she said. She went to him then, stepping close and putting her hands on his chest, where he was as hot to the touch as she recalled. Hotter. She tipped her head back, searching that beautiful, forbidding face of his. “If you can’t bring yourself to answer, you don’t have to. But tell me how we got here. Tell me why you do all this.”
He made a broken sound, this dark, terrible man who was neither of those things.
Claimed In The Italian's Castle (Once Upon a Temptation, Book 4) Page 14