“I do not know what this is,” he said as sternly as he could, as if he could hide the way he was crumbling inside. “But it’s too late. Nothing you say to me, nothing you use to goad me with, will change the course of events. You will marry me.”
“You’re damn right I’m going to marry you,” she shot back. “Here’s a newsflash for you, Teo. I’m not my mother. I’ve loved one man, ever. And I have every intention of loving you for the rest of my life.”
“I cannot help you in such a futile endeavor.”
“And you will love me back,” she told him, again with that steady, demanding gaze. “Believe me. You will. I won’t accept anything else.”
“You will accept what you are given,” he told her, furiously. “Which in your case, is a great deal indeed.”
“The truth is,” she said softly, “I’m halfway to believing you already love me.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders, and her lips parted, and he could feel that awareness that was always between them sizzle. He knew what it meant. It would be so easy to follow it. To shift this conversation onto ground he understood.
Instead, he released her.
Though it cost him.
“I cannot love you,” he told her, stiff and formal, every inch of him the Duke of Marinceli he’d been trained to become. Handing down his word as law. “I’m not capable of it, don’t you understand? Nor do I wish to become capable of it. That is not who I am.”
Her eyes were still too wide, that impossible violet, and he had the terrible sensation that she could see everything. As if he was transparent.
“It is exactly who you are,” she said, fervently. “I’ll show you.”
“Like hell you will,” he threw at her. “I am the Duke of Marinceli, Amelia. This is not a coffee date with credit card debt to look forward to. This is an ancient dukedom and that is the prize. That is what you get. I would strongly suggest you work on gratitude, but if you do not, there is no need to worry. There is a reason the estate is as big as it is.” When she stared back at him without comprehension, his lips twisted. “There are ample alternative residences on the property to stash a duchess who has given herself over to bitterness. You should have paid more attention to the history books while you were here as a teenager.”
And then, before he lost control of himself completely and did something he couldn’t take back—like surrender to the emotions racking him that he wasn’t sure he even believed were real—Teo made himself walk away.
* * *
That night, for the first time since she’d come into his bedroom in the cabin, Teo did not share a bed with Amelia. Or touch her at all. He avoided the dinner he knew she was having with her mother, and lost himself instead in estate matters he could easily have put off if he’d wished.
He did not wish.
And another cold winter’s morning was dawning when he found himself wandering the halls of this place he knew too well, as if all the history his ancestors had lived out here had sunk into the floorboards. As if it could infuse him with the lessons they’d learned. Or not learned.
Teo found himself in the gallery, staring at portraits of the nineteen men who had come before him. Some who had fought wars to keep this land and this house in the family. Others who had fought their own inclinations, grasping kings and queens, and their own baser instincts.
He stood for a long time in front of the portrait of his own father.
Until yesterday, he would have said he knew his father at least as well as he knew this house, these lands. Strengths and weaknesses alike.
Now he felt he didn’t know anything at all. Least of all himself.
He braced himself when he heard a soft sound behind him, a footfall, expecting it to be Amelia.
But it was worse. It was her mother.
“Jet lag,” she said, smiling at him with too much familiarity. “I’ve been up since three o’clock.”
“My condolences, madam,” Teo said in as frosty a tone as he could manage.
“Only you can make that word sound like an insult. Madam.” She let out that bawdy, problematic laugh of hers that had bothered Teo for over a decade. “Marie will do just fine, thank you.”
Teo had no intention of spending enough time talking to this woman that it would matter what he called her. He inclined his head stiffly, then made to go.
“I know you think I broke his heart,” Marie said, shocking Teo into standing still. “It was the other way around.”
Teo decided he’d had enough of up being down. Inside being out.
Then and there.
“Is that what you call it?” he asked tightly, glaring at her. “Heartbreak? I’ve heard other terms used to describe what you do, Marie.”
If his tone ruffled her feathers, she didn’t show it. “Your father was exciting. Inventive in a variety of ways, though I don’t expect that’s something you’d like to hear any more about.”
It took Teo a moment to understand her meaning. Then he was appalled. “I cannot think of anything I would like to know less.”
“But he didn’t love me,” Marie said, very simply and distinctly. And there was something about the way she was looking at him. That clever face of hers that he saw too much of Amelia in, washed with something he was very much afraid was sadness. Real sadness. “Your father loved one thing and one thing only.”
“It wasn’t my mother,” Teo retorted. “If you mean the dukedom, that was his duty.”
Marie smiled, but that didn’t wipe away the sadness. “He cared for your mother, in his way. And he took the dukedom very seriously. But what your father truly loved was getting his way. That wasn’t a broken heart you saw when we were done. It was a temper tantrum.”
Teo shook his head, refusing to take her words on board. “You ruined him. He lost himself in a bender of scandalous women and—”
Marie reached over and tapped her finger against the ornate frame that held Luis Calvo’s portrait in place.
“Come now, Teo,” she said quietly. “When do you recall your father truly losing it? Ever?” She actually laughed at Teo’s expression, then. “It was his way or the highway. Always. I chose the highway. And here’s my advice to you, jet-lagged though it might be at this hour. You need to choose, Teo. Because a little-known truth in this world is that you usually have to choose between being right, or being happy.”
His heart was pounding again, but still he didn’t fall. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I have faith in you. You’ll figure it out. And if you break my little girl’s heart the way I think you will?” This time, Marie French’s famous gaze was as steady as her daughter’s, and far colder. “I’ll actually do to you what you think I did to your father. Public shame is a game I play entirely too well.”
Then she sauntered off and left him there, staring at the portrait of a man he could no longer recognize at all.
And if he didn’t know his own father... If he didn’t know the blood in his own veins when he had spent his life immersed in his own bloodline and what it meant and what it made him, then... Who was he?
Teo couldn’t seem to move, as if he’d already been committed to stone, made a statue and had been left here in this gallery to take his place with all the other ciphers who gazed back at him from the walls.
If he didn’t know who he was, how could he know who they had been? He’d studied their stories, taking notes on how best to be the Duke—but what kind of men were they? Had they loved anyone at all? Or were they all the same as his father? Powerful men who wanted their way above all things?
He couldn’t dispute what Marie had said, though he’d wanted to. His father had liked his own way. And had always gotten it, running roughshod over anyone who came near him, including over Teo’s mother—until he’d met Marie.
How had Teo managed to forget that?
T
eo thought of his own behavior since Amelia had turned up here, pregnant with his child. Something he’d acted as if she had done herself when he could remember what had happened between them in vivid detail all these months later.
He had abducted her, taken her away and kept her there—treating her like a servant, which she had taken to alarmingly well but certainly didn’t excuse him—until she’d agreed to come to his bed. He might as well be that warlord Duke from the early centuries, who had sacked whole cities in his zest to preserve his title.
Teo did not doubt that he could handle the dukedom. He’d been training for it his entire life.
But what kind of husband was he going to be? What kind of father? He wanted Amelia the way he’d had her in the cabin. The way he’d had her here, when they were alone. All that heat, intimate and raw.
And he wanted to be a better father than his own had been. He wanted to actually be a father—something more than a distant figure handing down pronouncements. Teo had no idea what that would look like, or what it would take, but he thought of that bump he liked to whisper to in the mornings and he wanted it. He wanted everything.
What was he willing to give it in return?
Amelia had offered him honesty. She had taken everything he’d thrown at her and handled it with an easy grace that humbled him. She’d come to him with soot on her face, thrown herself into his arms and dared him not to love her.
And that, right there, threatened to unman him entirely.
Love.
That was not what he would have called it, that night last fall. When he’d had his hands in her soft heat. When he’d taken her with such stark ferocity in that salon. She’d braced herself above him, and he’d held her there as she’d slowly impaled herself on him.
And he’d known her.
He’d denied it later, he’d called it a trick of the drink, but he’d known her.
Something on her face had changed as he’d lodged himself deep inside her, and a mask and red lipstick couldn’t hide it.
Her name had scraped through his mind like a whisper. Like a curse.
After she’d left, he’d told himself that it hadn’t happened. That he’d been mistaken.
And when she’d reappeared at his door, he’d told himself it was a coincidence. Even when she’d told him her news and confirmed what he’d already known, it had been easier to lose himself in the fury of her deception than it was to face the facts.
That he’d known. He’d suspected he knew who she was and he’d gone right ahead and done it anyway. As he’d sworn he wouldn’t do.
And far more stunning than his own self-deception was the fact that she knew it. She knew all of it. The lies he told himself, the lies he told her. And still she said she loved him.
Teo felt those walls inside him crumble all the more.
He stood here in this gallery, surrounded by the stern faces of the men who made up this bloodline he was sworn to protect. And would, to his dying day.
But God help him, he wanted to be a better man while he did it.
He wanted to be the man Amelia loved.
All her life. That’s what she had said.
And this house couldn’t help him. This glorious mausoleum to a highly curated past. He looked around this gallery at all those dark eyes so much like his and knew they couldn’t help him. These men knew how to hold things in tight fists, not how to open themselves up.
Nothing here could help him.
But Teo thought he knew what would.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NIGHT BEFORE the wedding was scheduled to take place, Amelia was giving herself a stern talking-to in the master suite that Teo had not entered since their confrontation in his study.
She wanted to rage about and throw things, the way her mother often did. But she wasn’t her mother. And much as she imagined it must be satisfying to shatter something, the truth was... She just missed Teo.
That was the problem. And this time, she doubted very much that red hair dye and a mask would do the trick.
She was contemplating an heirloom vase, thick with flowers, that would make a lovely mess when tossed against the ancient wall when she heard the clearing of a throat from behind her.
Amelia turned to find the butler there, staring back at her in that way of his that managed to be both condescending and obsequious at once. Now that she was going to be the Duchess of Marinceli in the morning, there was significantly more of the latter than the former. She was sorry that in her current state, she couldn’t even enjoy it.
Because it was one thing to throw in Teo’s face that she loved him, and would marry him as planned and continue to love him, and that she didn’t much care what his take on that was.
It was something else again to...do it. To psych herself up for that walk down an aisle in an old chapel toward a man who claimed he could not love her. For the life that came after that walk, locked away in the timeless splendor of this place, like one more pretty object cluttering up the vast house.
For the family she would create with him, one way or another, and would have to do whether he loved her—or their son—or not.
It was the or not part that was sloshing around inside her tonight, making her feel as nauseated as she had throughout her first trimester.
“Your presence is requested, madam,” the butler intoned, with excruciating courtesy.
Amelia didn’t really want to go anywhere. Or do anything but sit where she was, and perhaps break some crockery. The wedding in the morning was private, mostly so that Teo could manipulate the timeline later to suit his purposes. A quiet announcement in five months’ time to cover both the wedding and the birth of his heir, Teo had said.
Because the Duke of Marinceli did not explain himself to anyone. Much less perform for the masses. He was a de Luz, not a Windsor.
But, of course, a private wedding meant that her friends wouldn’t be there. The people she loved, who loved her, unreservedly. In theory, she understood why it had to be this way. In her heart, she knew her friends would understand, because they loved her unreservedly. And she knew with every part of her, heart and soul and body, that she loved Teo enough that it would all be worth it.
There was tonight to get through, that was all. A little dark night of the soul before a lovely morning after. Teo thought he couldn’t love anyone, least of all her, and she might have decided to ignore that—but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
Amelia, by God, would be a little blue if she felt like it.
But she got up and followed the butler anyway, because there was a point at which a little blue became full-on wallowing, and she was pretty sure she’d already passed it some ways back. And besides, she preferred her crockery intact.
The butler led her out through the house, processing in all his state down one meandering hallway to another. He took her out the grand front entry and handed her into a waiting car, then presented her with her coat with theatrical flourish.
Amelia shrugged into her coat as the car slid away from the front of the house. When the driver turned deeper into the property instead of down the drive, Amelia felt a little prickle of foreboding. Or premonition, anyway. Sure enough, the car delivered her to the waiting private jet out on the estate’s airfield.
And there seemed to be nothing to do but board it. Amelia climbed up the steps as the winter wind picked up around her, playing with her hair and sending icy fingers creeping down beneath the collar of her trusty peacoat.
Inside, she expected to find Teo lounging about, looking like royalty. But the jet was empty, save for the staff. She even checked the staterooms, but no. She had the sleek aircraft to herself.
And when the plane landed sometime later in that same remote airfield high in the Pyrenees that she knew all too well, Amelia had worked herself into a full-on temper.
“The Duke is waiting for you,
madam,” the captain told her when he emerged from the cockpit. He gestured deferentially toward the door.
Amelia considered refusing to leave the plane. But she had the feeling that wouldn’t go quite as she wanted it to. She imagined Teo would have no problem whatsoever storming onto the plane and collecting her, if he had a mind to. And she was in a righteous temper, thank you, and didn’t want him collecting her like a recalcitrant child.
She made herself get up. She stepped outside, gasping involuntarily at the slap of the cold, complete with dancing snow flurries. Something she found markedly prettier when she was indoors, preferably next to a crackling fire with something warm to drink. But the weather wasn’t the only thing that stole her breath.
At the bottom of the jetway steps, Teo waited.
Seemingly impervious to the weather.
Amelia forced herself to take a breath. She thought uncharitable things about the humanity of the average duke. And then she stormed down the metal stairs until she reached him.
“You must have truly lost your mind if you think that I’m going to play this Cinderella game with you again,” she threw at him, not caring if the captain was watching them. Not caring if he heard every word she said. “Cinderella only works when you know how it ends. The point isn’t the toiling away at all that menial labor. It’s when the charming prince rescues her and sweeps her away from all that. Prince Charming, Teo. Not...you.”
That muscle moved in his cheek, broadcasting his own temper. But he didn’t say a word. He only beckoned her to the SUV parked to the side of the runway with its engine running. He opened the door for her to get in, then waited. Watching her.
Daring her.
“I’m not kidding, Teo,” Amelia said crossly. “I will not—”
“Do you wish to argue with me here?” he asked in that silky, dangerous way of his that still did things to her she would’ve preferred not to acknowledge. “I am personally not interested in hypothermia in such a remote place, cariña. I cannot imagine it will suit our son. But for you, I will risk it.”
Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella Page 14