Wordlessly, furiously, she climbed into his SUV.
And even though she was prepared for it this time, the winding road still got to her. Around and around and around, lurching this way and that as he headed for the top of the mountain and the cabin that waited for them there.
Finally, they reached the summit, and Teo drove straight to the cabin door as he had the last time. The memories Amelia had of this cabin were fond, so it made something in her ache to see it again now, when she was so much less certain about where they were headed than she had been when they’d left here.
She added that to the fire inside her that was keeping her temper humming along nicely.
It was much snowier and much windier this high up. Amelia hunched her shoulders deeper into her coat as she got out, picking her way across the snowy yard to the heavy front door. She wasn’t dressed for this weather. The shoes she wore were better suited to a San Francisco winter, which was often wet and cold, but was certainly not a mountaintop blizzard, for God’s sake.
She was already simmering with fury about the fire he would make her build. The orders he would bark at her and the demands he would make. But this time, she had no intention of doing a thing. Not one thing. He could—
But what he did was swing open the door, and her breath—and temper—went out of her in a rush.
Because the fire was already built and crackling along nicely, heating up the cabin. The lanterns were lit. It was homey, bright.
It made her throat feel thick. Tight.
Amelia moved inside on legs that felt suddenly jerky and strange, and felt the jolt of it when he closed the door behind them.
“Did you bring your own maid this time?” she asked, and much as she might have wanted to pretend that she kept the bitterness from her voice, she could hear it herself.
“Only if you consider me a maid,” came Teo’s cool, amused voice. “And I must tell you, cariña, I do not.”
He moved past her, farther into the room. Toward those couches that loomed large in her head. She’d slept on one of those couches, in what she could see, now, had been an extended act of defiance. Because, against her will—and though she’d been so sure she’d exorcised him from her life, no matter that she carried his child—she had fallen in love with him. When she was sixteen. Again last fall.
And most certainly—permanently and irrevocably—here.
“I don’t understand why you brought me back here,” she managed to say, miserably. “Especially with all that snow out there. What if we’re trapped here? Have you forgotten that we’re to be married in the morning?”
“Are you afraid of being stuck here, Amelia?”
She was. She scowled at him. “It’s more accurate to say I would prefer not to be stuck anywhere.”
“It is our wedding, cariña,” he replied, and though his voice was soft, his expression was all stone and strength. “If we’re not there, they will simply have to wait until we are.”
He was over by the couches now, standing there as if he expected her to come and join him. But Amelia didn’t want to move from the door. She felt the same mess of things she always felt when it came to Teo. All tangled around each other, snarled and knotted and bent back on themselves. And it all grew inside her chest as she looked at him, and in her gut, like a terrible sob.
She understood that she would love him forever. She had accepted that. But she had wanted tonight—just tonight—to mourn what couldn’t be. To prepare herself for a wedding to a man who had vowed he would never love her. She might not believe he was right about that, but her belief didn’t make the reality any easier to bear.
But this was worse.
“I had hoped you might sit and talk to me awhile,” Teo said when all she did was glare at him. “But you don’t look as if you wish to step another foot inside this cabin.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.” That sob was inside her, growing all the while, but she fought valiantly to keep it there. “If it’s for me to act like a domestic servant the way I did before, you should know that I only ever took to that because it was temporary. And my choice. You can’t really think you’re going to haul me up here every time you need a floor mopped or a—”
“Amelia.”
It was the way he said it. His voice seemed to ring in her, loud and long. As if her name was a song all its own and he alone knew how to sing it.
And then he was prowling back across the floor toward her, never shifting that black-gold gaze from her face.
“I do not want you to clean my floor,” he said as he came closer. “I do not want you to do anything, unless you wish to do it.”
She pulled in a breath, but when she went to speak... She couldn’t.
Teo was before her. And then, while she watched—her heart in her throat and that sob so much of her that maybe it was her—he sank to his knees. Right there on the floor she’d once scrubbed on her hands and knees.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I have already ordered you to marry me,” Teo said, still holding her gaze, seeming unaware that if he was another man this might have been a humbling moment. But he looked proud. Certain. And he gazed only at her. “And you have graciously indicated that you would obey. Tonight I rather thought I would ask.”
It was as if the world stood still. Or turned too fast. Amelia couldn’t quite tell.
All she knew was that everything was different, impossible. And Teo, the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli, was on his knees.
Gazing up at her as if she was the world, still or spinning or both.
And, while she watched—stunned—he reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring.
There were no fancy boxes, no ribbons. But this was the sort of ring that needed no extra ornamentation.
It looked like the kind of ring that wars were fought over. And given who was holding it, Amelia assumed that was a distinct possibility.
“This belonged to the Twelfth Duchess,” Teo told her, holding the ring so the lantern light caught it and made it shine like a promise. “She had an eye for the finer things. But, more importantly, she is chiefly known for refusing the Twelfth Duke. Three times, or so the story goes. It was not until he took the time and trouble to abduct her, convince her and get her with child, that she condescended to accept his suit. Such as it was.”
“She sounds like my kind of girl,” Amelia managed to say, though her throat ached. And that sob she’d been trying to keep at bay had transferred too much heat to the back of her eyes. She was afraid that at any moment tears might tip over and betray her completely.
“The Twelfth Duke and his Duchess lived a very long time,” Teo replied in that same steady, certain way. “Together. And if the stories are true, they loved each other very much.”
He reached over then and took her hand in his, and Amelia stopped pretending that she could breathe through this.
“Amelia.” And again, her name was like a song in his mouth. “I’ve spent my whole life training how to become not just any duke, but the Duke of Marinceli. To live up to all these stories, all these august men in this world they built and left to me to protect. There is nothing I do not know about my land, my house, my history. But I neglected to make certain that I was also becoming a decent man.”
“Teo...” she tried to say.
“And I don’t know if I can be anything approaching decent,” he said as if she hadn’t spoke, his voice rougher now. “I don’t know if that’s possible, after all these years spent ignoring that part of me. But I will tell you this. I want to be him, for you. A better man, whatever that looks like. Whatever it takes. Because you deserve nothing less.”
And the tears fell then, but Amelia did nothing to wipe them away. She let them fall.
As if this was a kind of baptism, hers and his alone.
“I knew it was you,” he tol
d her then, his gaze so intense it almost burned. But she didn’t look away. She couldn’t bear to look away. “At the Masquerade. Your name was in my head, and I dismissed it. I told myself I was mistaken. But it was there.”
Amelia pulled one of her hands from his, and slid her palm along the hard line of his jaw. And then she held him there, this beautiful, powerful man, who seemed in no way diminished because he knelt before her.
On the contrary. He seemed raw. Sincere.
More powerful than ever before.
And he made her heart thump hard and wild inside her.
“I don’t know that my father truly loved anything but his own position,” Teo said in that same quiet way that rang in her, through her, until her bones seemed a part of that same ringing. “I had to go back generations to find the Twelfth Duke and Duchess, because as I told you, de Luzes do not marry for love. Not usually. But Amelia, I want nothing more. I want to marry you. I want to have this baby and raise him with you, with love. And I say this as a man who has no idea if I’m even capable of these things.”
“Of course you are,” she said then, fiercely. “You are the Duke of Marinceli, aren’t you? You’re capable of anything. By definition.”
“This is what I believe, with all that I am, Duke and man alike,” Teo said then, his face in her hand and that glorious, ancient ring between them. “If you believe in me, if you have this faith in me, I can be and do anything at all.”
And he held up the ring then, so it caught the dancing light from the lanterns. It was an impossibly large sapphire, ringed with perfect diamonds and scattered here and there with rubies. It didn’t look like a ring so much as it looked like a coronation.
And yet when Teo slipped it on her finger, it slid into place. And fit so perfectly it made a different sort of sob well up in Amelia’s chest.
“Amelia,” he said with that same intensity. “Will you marry me? Will you become my Duchess in every possible way? Will you teach me how to be a better man, point out when I stray too far into my title and remind me I am a husband and a father first?”
And she couldn’t believe this was happening. But there was the weight of that ring on her finger, and the shine of it, which paled into insignificance next to that brilliant gleam in his beautiful dark eyes.
“It would be my honor to love you forever,” Amelia said solemnly. “I already have, Teo. I always will.”
“I love you, Amelia,” Teo said, and that raw look on his face almost brought her to her knees, too. “I am not sure I have ever loved anyone or anything else. I know I never will.”
Then he smiled, and it was not that stern quirk of his austere lips.
Tonight, he smiled wide. Open.
And Amelia knew that this Teo was the better man he thought he needed help to become, not the Duke he already was and ever would be. And both of them were hers.
Forever.
“And I love you, too,” Teo murmured, spreading his hands over the thick swell of her belly and leaning close to press his mouth there, too, as if to speak directly to the baby. “Te adoro, hijo mío.”
And that time, Amelia really did sink down to her knees, so she could get close to him.
This man who had cast his shadow over the whole of her life, and only now, only here, had they turned that shadow into dancing light. The two of them, together.
“I love you, Teo,” she whispered, his face between her hands and all that bright light gleaming like hope around them.
And it was right there, on the floor that she had scrubbed on her hands and knees, that they stripped each other of their last remaining inhibitions—along with all their inconvenient clothes—and pledged themselves to their future.
As long as it was together.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT SNOWED FOR DAYS, stranding them at the cabin and pushing back their wedding a full week.
Neither the bride nor the groom appeared to care.
Teo stood at the head of the small aisle in the medieval chapel tucked away in the Marinceli estate near one of its private lakes, and felt his heart crack wide open as Amelia walked toward him with that gorgeous smile on her face. And nothing but love and happiness in her violet eyes.
She promised to be his forever.
He made the same promise.
And intended to keep it, if he had to dismantle every last stone of el monstruo to do it.
He would use his own two hands. Cheerfully.
The months passed, and Amelia grew big. Then bigger still. Then so truly enormous that she began to joke that she might need a golf cart to get around the sprawling house.
“It is beneath the dignity of the Duchess of Marinceli to zoom about the ancestral seat of the dukedom in a mechanized conveyance, cariña,” Teo told her in that cool, stuffy voice he liked to use. Because it always made her laugh.
And he loved to make her laugh.
“As you wish, Your Excellency,” she replied when her laughter faded, grinning at him. “I hope it is not beneath the dignity of the Duke of Marinceli, then, to cart me about from place to place upon command.”
“It is a very height of dignity, in fact. It is also a privilege.”
And then he showed her exactly how dignified he could be as he swept her into his arms, then carried her to their bed.
The much-anticipated, already beloved Twentieth Duke of Marinceli was born at home, in the guest suite that had been made over into a neonatal clinic for precisely this purpose. And the Twentieth Duke was not concerned with dignity. He was big, healthy and very, very loud.
“He’s suitably arrogant already,” Amelia declared as they lay on the bed together with their perfect, beautiful son between them. She was smiling down at the baby, and Teo couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten this lucky. “Can world domination be far behind?”
Teo laughed, overcome at the miraculous thing his wife had done. And at the tiny, shrunken, perfect creature with red fists and an unholy temper that was now his, too.
And he did not plan to raise another robot of a duke. He would raise a good man, first. And see to the dukedom afterward.
He swore it, there and then, on the bed where he and Amelia had brought a new life into the world—and this ancient house—and had become a family.
Over the years, he and Amelia did not always get along. They did not always see eye to eye. But they fought behind closed doors, so as not to inflict their turmoil on their children. And they made up behind those same closed doors, because whatever else they felt, and no matter how furious they were with each other, they always had that flame.
That beautiful need that had drawn them together, and kept them together.
And as the years passed, Teo and Amelia added considerably to the bloodline. But they called it their family. Three sons, two daughters, and Amelia always said she would stop when she grew tired.
So far, neither one of them was tired.
And when one or the other of them felt that tiredness coming on, or felt that things had gotten too distant between them, whether through intent or accident, they removed themselves from the dukedom. A weekend here, another ten days there, they went back to the cabin and reminded themselves who they were.
“I love you,” he said on one such morning, stripped out before the fire with his violet-eyed love. “It seems impossible, but it grows and grows. I love you more now than I did before. I keep waiting for it to diminish, but it keeps expanding.”
“That’s the magic of fairy tales,” she said, propping herself up on his chest and smiling down at him, the way she had in this very cabin so many years before. The way he hoped she always would, with precisely that smile, and that dancing light in her pretty eyes.
“I thought Cinderella was all toil, a spell and then a lot of carrying on with mice and a pumpkin.”
“Yes, but that’s not the most important part,” Am
elia said. Sternly, even.
And Teo looked over her smooth, naked shoulder to that door she had pushed open all those years before her, and opened herself up to him. That was the second gift he’d given her the night he proposed, like a man. Instead of the orders he’d given her as the Duke. Her sooty handprint had remained, so he had carved it into the door. Then blackened it. So it would always be there, reminding him that whole lives could change in an instant. All one had to do was reach out a hand.
“I thought the most important part was you,” he said. “It is certainly the most important part to me.”
“I love you, too,” she said. Her smile widened. “You know how fairy tales end. It’s happily ever after. Ever after, not, you know, a few years here and there, in a nasty divorce, and happy forever means that you have to keep falling in love. It’s right there in the rules. It has to grow, or doesn’t count.”
“Funny, I’ve never heard this law before.”
“Stick with me,” she told him, her violet eyes sparkling. “I’m the Duchess of Marinceli. My word is law.”
Her word was certainly his law, but as besotted as Teo might have been, he wasn’t quite so foolish as to say so.
Instead, he rolled her over, and smiled down at her.
And then, together, they got to work on that ever-after.
* * *
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