The October evening was cool, but dry. Guests had embraced the chance to cast off tuxedos and backless couture for something more exciting. Women twirled in overblown gowns with bell skirts, elaborate wigs and feathered headdresses. Men stalked in colorful brocade jackets with epaulettes and lace cuffs and short pants with stockings. Some even wore the traje de luces of a bullfighter with horned masks.
The masks were works of art. A few had cat ears and bird beaks, some covered an entire face, others were part of a jester hat with bells dangling from the cockscomb. Some were made from handblown Venetian glass, others were made of lace or satin and adorned with feathers and flowers, beads and sequins.
There were prizes for best costumes, but Pia had chosen to forfeit. She wore an understated gown in indigo topped with a purple velvet jacket. Her mask was a conservative cat’s eye in molded silk painted with musical notes and roses, ideal for blending in.
She wished now that she’d chosen a full face mask as she watched a gold-lipped cherry blossom porcelain canvas swirl by. It would have allowed her to hide her thoughts behind a physical mask, rather than having to maintain the aloof expression she had practiced in the mirror at boarding school, back when she’d been hiding hurt feelings over everything, most especially being noticed.
Even when girls had stuck up for her back then, saying, “She’s shy. Leave her alone,” Pia had blushed and burned behind her breastbone, wishing herself into a hole in the ground because someone had looked at her.
Misery did not love company, as it turned out. She’d been lonely her entire childhood, too awkward to make friends and ridiculously smart, which had made her an academic rival, bookish and superior on top of all the rest.
Her saving grace was her bloodline. She came from Spain’s aristocracy. Her parents were the Duque and Duquessa of Castellon, her father an innovator in industrial metals who had become a well-respected, elected member of parliament once his sons were old enough to take the reins on what was now a multinational corporation.
Pia was also reasonably attractive—not that she played it up. She eschewed makeup and designer wear, seeing little point in trying to attract a boyfriend when her mother would ultimately assign her a husband.
Which La Reina Montero was trying to do right now, turning a perfectly tolerable evening into something Pia struggled to bear.
“I’d prefer to wait until January, after I’ve defended my dissertation,” Pia said, and braced herself, but it still stung when she received the expected tsk of tested tolerance.
Pia’s brothers were chemical engineers, both unmarried until they were thirty, but Pia’s accelerated study pace and soon-to-be-achieved doctorate only “wasted her best years,” according to her mother.
“These things take time,” her mother insisted. “Signal your interest. Was that the Estrada heir?”
Please no. Sebastián was decent enough, but he talked nonstop.
“His outgoing nature would balance your introversion. You’ll have to work on that so you can host galas like this.”
Say it louder, Mother.
“Perhaps if we go into the marquee, we can match names to the silent auction bids.” La Reina tilted away her mask, which was mounted on a stick like a lorgnette. “I shouldn’t have agreed to anything so childish as a masked ball. Very inconvenient.”
“Most people seem to be enjoying themselves,” Pia said mildly, noting laughter and noises of surprise as they approached the bustling tent where guests mingled while perusing the fund-raising items.
Ever the observer of animal behavior, especially human, Pia considered why a disguise would instill such high spirits. Was it the nostalgia of youthful play? She wouldn’t know. Her childhood had been so rigid as to be a form of conditioned adulthood.
“Poppy is doing well.” La Reina acknowledged her new daughter-in-law with reluctant approval as she glanced over the bids for rare vintage wines, antique jewelry, spa packages and VIP tickets to shows on Broadway and London’s West End.
Did the masks reduce caution and provoke a willingness to take risks, Pia wondered? Similar to the way social media provided a removal from face-to-face interactions, thereby emboldening people to behave more freely?
Pia certainly felt at liberty to stare more openly. From behind the screen of her mask, she watched a couple debate a bid for a certain item. The woman protested it was too extravagant while the man insisted he loved her and wanted her to have it.
Pia was fascinated by interactions like that. They reminded her of the tenderness and indulgence that existed between her older brothers and their wives. They had both started their marriages in scandal, but had turned them into something meaningful, making her yearn for something like it for herself—as she repaired the family name by way of a low-drama, civilized marriage that was more a contracted merger with a dynasty of equal rank and prestige.
She bit back a sigh. Taking up the mantle of duty wasn’t a sacrifice, she assured herself. It was a sensible course of action that benefited everyone, including herself. Her few attempts at dating had been failures, something the perfectionist in her loathed. Love and passion were foreign concepts. She wouldn’t recognize either if she tripped over them.
She turned from spying on the couple and ran straight into a man setting down a pencil.
Physically the impact was light. With wistfulness blanketing her, however, the collision felt monumental. Life altering.
His opera cloak opened like dark wings that threatened to engulf her as his hands came up to grasp her upper arms and steady her.
Their masks had caused this, her confused mind quickly deduced. They interfered with peripheral vision. She wasn’t clumsy or blind and doubted he was, either. He was too vital and controlled.
She recognized those traits in him instinctively, even though she wasn’t usually sensitive to such things. Or sensual either, but she found herself taking in nonvisual elements even more swiftly than the sight of him. The heat of his body radiated around her. The strength in his hands was both gentle and firm. The scent of fresh air and orange blossoms clung to his clothing as though he’d arrived from a long walk through the grove, not from the stale air of a car.
Who was he?
His black tricorn hat had simple white trim. She glanced down to his black-on-black brocade vest over a black shirt, his snug black pants tucked into tall black boots.
A pirate, she thought, and looked back to his porcelain mask, white, blank and angular. It cast a shadow onto his stubbled jaw, his beard as black as the short hair beneath his hat.
She couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, but as he looked straight into hers, her pulse shot up with the race of a prey animal. She held that inscrutable stare, arms in his talon-like grip, skin too tight to contain the soar of emotion that rose in her.
Most people skipped past her in favor of more interesting folk, which she preferred. Sustained eye contact was never comfortable, but her mask gave her the confidence to stare back. To stare and stare while her whole body tingled in the most startling and intriguing way.
Sexual attraction? He possessed the attributes that typically drew female interest—height and broad shoulders, a firm physique and a strong jaw. She was stunned to learn she was human enough to react to those signals. In fact, as the seconds ticked by, the fluttering within her grew unbearable.
“Excuse me.” Someone spoke behind her, jolting her from her spell.
A woman wanted to place a bid on Poppy’s framed, black-and-white photo.
The black satin lining of the man’s cloak disappeared as he dropped his hands from her arms. The noise around them rushed back, breaking her ears.
Pia moved out of the way. When she looked back, the man was leaving the tent.
Still trying to catch her breath, she moved to the bidding sheet where he’d left his pencil. She knew all the names on the list and none of those men had ev
er provoked a reaction like that in her.
At the bottom, in a bold scratch, was a promise to quadruple the final bid. It was signed Anonymous.
“How does this work?” Pia pointed to it as her mother finished speaking to someone and caught up to her. Pia’s hand was trembling and she quickly tucked it into the folds of her skirt.
“It happens occasionally,” her mother dismissed. “When a man wants to purchase something to surprise his wife.”
Or didn’t want his wife to know at all, Pia surmised. She wasn’t a cynic by nature, but nor was she naive about the unsavory side of arranged marriages.
“He’ll leave his details with the auctioneer,” her mother continued. “It’s a risky move that becomes expensive. Other guests will drive up the bid to punish him for securing the item for himself.”
“The price one pays, I suppose.” Pia’s witticism was lost on La Reina.
“This is one of the paintings from the attic,” La Reina said. “A modest artist. Deceased, which always helps with value, but not the sort of investment I would expect to inspire such a tactic.”
Pia studied the portrait. The young woman’s expression was somber. Light fell on the side of her round features, highlighting her youth and vulnerability.
“Do you know who she is?” Pia picked up the card.
“Hanging pictures of family is sentimental.” Her mother plucked the card from her hand and set it back on its small easel. “Displaying strangers in your home is gauche.”
“The final bid is sewn up,” Pia pointed out. “I was merely curious.”
“We have other priorities.”
A husband. Right. Pia bit back a whimper.
* * *
Angelo Navarro nursed a drink as he clocked the rounds of the security detail, picking his moment for the second half of his mission.
He could have sent an agent to bid on the portrait, but along with not trusting anyone else with the task—loose lips and all that—the opportunity to slip onto the estate undetected had been far too tempting.
He hadn’t expected such a bombardment of emotions as a result of visiting his birthplace, though. Anger and contempt gripped him; fury and injustice and a thirst for vengeance that burned arid and unquenchable in the pit of his belly.
These people prancing like circus clowns, making grand gestures with extravagant bids to benefit victims of violence, were the same ones who had ignored a young woman’s agonizing situation. They hadn’t interfered when her child had been taken from her and had continued to revere her persecutors.
Angelo felt no compunction whatsoever at infiltrating this private fund-raiser with the intention of retrieving what his mother had stolen. Or been given. He’d never been clear on how she had obtained the jewelry or exactly which pieces had gone missing. That part didn’t matter. He would happily have gone to his grave with the knowledge that she’d fought back in her own way.
However, when this chance to add a fresh blow had arisen, he hadn’t been able to resist it.
Did it make him as soulless as his father that he was willing to commit a criminal act to continue her retaliation? So he could show his half brothers how it felt to be toyed with and abandoned to poverty?
Perhaps.
The thought didn’t stop him. He casually made his way to the corner of the house, waited for the guard’s attention to turn and slipped into the dark beyond.
He came up against a Family Only sign on the first step of the spiral staircase and smirked with irony as he slipped past it to climb to the rooftop patio.
The stairs gave a nostalgically familiar creak as he reached the top—where he discovered someone had arrived ahead of him.
The sound and light from the party were blocked by the rise of the west wing of the house, casting the space into deep shadow. He could only see a silhouette and the lighter shadow of her mask as she turned from gazing across the moonlit Mediterranean. Even so, he recognized her as the woman who had careened into him as he was bidding on the portrait of his mother.
For one second as he’d steadied her, he had forgotten everything—his thirst to punish, his purpose in coming here. Something in her uninspired costume gave him the impression she didn’t belong here any more than he did. That she was hiding in plain sight. His male interest had been so piqued, he had nearly asked her to dance.
“Oh.” The lilt in her voice told him she had identified him from their brief encounter as well, which also told him she had found it as profound as he had.
“Were you expecting someone else?” He adjusted his mask to peer harder into the shadows. The rickety bench where his mother used to read to him was gone, replaced by a dark shape that suggested a comfortable, L-shaped sectional.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
That was good news. On many levels.
“Did you follow me?” she asked.
“No.” He would like to think he would have timed things differently if he had known she was up here, but he wasn’t sure. Nor was he as dismayed as he ought to have been that she was now an obstacle to his goal.
“Did you invite someone to join you?” she asked, vaguely appalled.
He should have said, Yes. She sounded so uncomfortable at intruding, she probably would have hurried away, but something in him balked at letting her think he was involved with anyone.
He heard himself say a throaty and inviting, “Not yet.”
Her silhouette grew more alert. The air crackled between them.
“Who are you?” Her voice sharpened and her mask tilted as she cocked her head.
It struck him that he couldn’t tell her. Damn.
“I think the purpose of a night like this is to maintain the mystery.”
“And telling me would identify you as the buyer of that portrait you bid on so generously. And anonymously.”
“True.” The peril he was in began to impact him. She could place him with the painting and here on the rooftop. Maybe she didn’t know his name, but there was a chance she could find out.
Dared he linger? Was it worth the risk?
He couldn’t tell whether this rooftop patio had been repaved or the old bricks merely pulled up and reset, exposing the hidey-hole he had discovered as a child. He doubted his half brothers had ever found it. If they had, they wouldn’t have been so sly in their sale of this estate. There was every chance the new owners had found the treasure, though, and kept the contents without mentioning it. Angelo had very little faith in humanity, particularly those who sat like cream on the top of society without having worked to get there.
He couldn’t leave until he knew for sure. He had come this far, and so decided to wait her out.
He joined her at the wall. The last time he’d been here, he’d barely been tall enough to peer over. His distant memory of that time was swept away by the breeze off the water and the woman’s voice beside him.
“If you didn’t follow me or come to meet someone, why are you here?”
“Curiosity.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He was definitely intrigued by her. “You?”
“To think.”
“About?”
“The nature of happiness. Whether it’s a goal worth pursuing when there are no guarantees I’ll find it. That it would come at the expense of others if I did.”
“Nothing too heavy, then,” he drawled. Her hand was close to his on the wall, pale and ringless. “In my experience, happiness is a fleeting thing. A moment. Not a state of being.”
“And if a moment is all you have?”
His scalp prickled beneath his hat. He turned his head and tucked his chin, trying to see through the dark and the holes in his mask to read her expression, but it was impossible.
“Regret is also a moment. A choice not to seize happiness when it presents itself.”
“I would regret it if I didn’t take a chan
ce,” she agreed with a nod of contemplation.
“What kind of chance?”
She let a couple of seconds tick by with crushing silence, then said in a thicker voice, “An overture. Letting my interest in someone be known.” Her hand had been curled into a tense fist, but it unfurled, her pinkie finger splaying toward him.
His stomach knotted. “Are you married?”
“No.” Through the rush of relief in his ears, he heard her add, “But obligations to do so loom. And I don’t want to risk making a fool of myself when I don’t know if he’s even—”
“He is,” he cut in. His chest felt tight and his throat could barely form words. “He’s interested.”
Copyright © 2019 by Dani Collins
ISBN-13: 9781488044939
His Contract Christmas Bride
Copyright © 2019 by Sharon Kendrick
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