I shifted in my chair, still blinking furiously at my coffee.
I had gotten too much sun on my nose, causing even more freckles. I knew my shoulders were in no better state. The sun had brought out more gold and red in my hair, and more curls besides. I tried to imagine myself swanning about a Venetian ballroom, surrounded by women like Celeste. Elegant, graceful women. Silky smooth, sleek women who never worried about dripping their banquet dinners down the front of their gowns, or tripping over the hems of their dresses as they strode about in their impossibly high heels.
I had been to the convent, yes. And I had spent those years in what was euphemistically called finishing school, too. My friends and I regaled ourselves with memories of the absurdities we’d suffered there almost daily in the group chats that kept us connected, shut off as we were in our very different lives. But all the schooling in the world couldn’t make me over into Celeste, no matter how many hours I’d spent walking around with a heavy book on my head to improve my posture.
“You are the very definition of a silk purse made from a sow’s ear,” my father had snarled at my debutante ball. Right after I’d tripped and nearly upended the punch bowl and the table it had been set upon.
That had been the first and last time I had been let loose in aristocratic society, aside from my wedding.
And now this. Where I would bring shame not only upon my father, which I did so often it hardly signified, but on Javier.
This man who knew how to make me sob with joy and need. Who broke me wide-open with more pleasure than the human body should have been able to bear, and yet he did it again and again, and I not only bore it—I craved it. The man who did not want to hear the words that bubbled up in me, so I moaned them out instead in a meaningless, wordless tune.
The very thought of humiliating him the way I knew I was more than likely to do made me want to curl up into a ball. And sob for a few hours.
“Or perhaps you are only comfortable with this marriage when it is conducted in private,” Javier said, snapping my attention back to him. “Out of sight. Off on an island no one can access but me. Hidden away where no one can see how far you have fallen.”
I blinked at that. Because he sounded almost...hurt. “I don’t... I don’t want...”
But something had gone horribly wrong. Javier pushed back from the table, rising to his feet and tossing his linen serviette onto the tabletop. He glared down at me in much the same way he had once stared up at me in my father’s house. With commanding, relentless fury that should have burned me alive.
And I felt exactly the same as I had then.
Frozen. Paralyzed. Intrigued despite myself.
And in no way immune from that fire.
“You are happy enough to glut yourself on my body,” he growled down at me, an expression I didn’t recognize on his harsh face. Again, I was tempted to believe that I’d hurt him. Him. “You are insatiable. No matter how much I give you, you want more. When you call out for God, I believe you think I am him. But that does not mean you wish to show the world how much you enjoy your slumming, does it?”
He could not have stunned me more if he had overturned the table into the nearest pool and sent me tumbling after it. I felt myself pale, then flush hot, as if with fever. “That’s not what I meant at all. I’m not the one who will be embarrassed, Javier. But I’m almost positive you will be.”
His mouth was a flat, thin line, but in his gaze I swore I could see pain. “Yes. I will be humiliated, I am sure, when the world sees that I truly married the woman I intended to. That I procured the last Fitzalan heiress. You will have to try harder, mi reina, if you want me to believe the stories you tell to hide your true feelings.”
I found myself on my feet across from him, my heart kicking at me. I felt panicked. Something like seasick that everything had twisted around so quickly. That I had possibly wounded him, somehow. “I’m not telling you a story.”
He said something in guttural Spanish that I was perfectly happy not to understand. Not completely.
“You must have heard what they call me,” I continued, holding myself still so he wouldn’t see all the shaking I could feel inside of me. “The disappointing Fitzalan sister. The unfortunate one. It was never a joke.”
“Enough.” He slashed his hand through the air, still staring at me as if I had betrayed him. “We leave in an hour. I have a phone call to make. I suggest you use the time learning how to control your face and the truths it tells whether you are aware of it or not.”
He left me then. He stormed off into the villa, and I knew there’d be no point following him. When he disappeared into the wing he kept aside as his office, he did not emerge for hours, and he did not take kindly to interruptions. I had learned these things the hard way.
But today, everything felt hard. I stood where I was for a long time after he’d gone.
That does not mean you wish to show the world how much you enjoy your slumming, does it? he had demanded.
Slumming was the sort of word my father used. It felt like poison in me, leaving trails of shame and something far sharper everywhere it touched. And it touched every part of me. And, worse, corroded the sweet, hot memories of our high blue, sun-filled weeks here.
My eyes blurred all over again.
It had never crossed my mind that Javier even noticed what people like my father thought of him, much less how they might act when he was around. He hadn’t seemed the least bit interested in the guests at our wedding, or the things they might have said about him. He hadn’t even bothered to stay for the whole of the wedding breakfast, dismissing them all as insignificant, I’d thought.
Yet he’d thrown out that word, slumming, as if he was far less impervious to these slights than I imagined.
I moved out of the sun, as if that could somehow retroactively remove my freckles, and stood there in the cool shadows of our bedroom. I tried to calm my breathing. That wild beating of my heart. But I was staring at that vast bed and I was...lost.
Javier had been intense these past weeks. More than intense. He was demanding, in bed and out. Focused and ferocious, and it sent a delicious chill down my spine and deep into the softest part of me just thinking about it. He turned me inside out with such regularity that I hardly knew which was which any longer. I’d stopped trying to tell the difference.
And now we had to leave here. I had to parade all these things I felt in front of the whole of the world and, worse by far, my own family.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but that didn’t help, because then all there was to do was feel. And sometimes I told myself that Javier must feel the things that I did. Sometimes I dreamed that he felt as torn apart, then made new, every time we touched.
I wrenched my eyes open again. In the harsh light of day, when I was out on another walk or tucked up beside the pools with one of the Spanish books I was steadily making my way through, I knew better. I had been the virgin, not him. He was a man of vast experience—as I had seen for myself when I searched for him online.
Javier could have anything he wanted. Anyone he wanted. The only thing he ever wanted from you, a nasty little voice inside me whispered, was your surname.
Because all the rest of this, I was forced to admit to myself as I stood there—staring blindly at the master bed where I had learned more things about myself than in all my years at the convent—Javier had already had a thousand times over. With women the whole world agreed were stunning beyond measure.
And one of them had been Celeste.
My knees felt wobbly, or maybe it was that my stomach had twisted so hard it threw me off balance, but I found myself sinking down onto the bench at the end of the bed.
Sometimes I told myself sweet little fantasies that Javier might feel as I did, or might someday, but if I was honest, I’d known that was unlikely. I’d pretended I didn’t know it, but I did. Of course I did.
Because the only time I had seen any hint of feelings in him was just now.
Now, when we were finally stepping out into public together. Now, when he would have to parade the lesser Fitzalan sister before the world. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that our first outing would be to a costume ball. I’d read entirely too many books that used masks and costumes to terrible advantage. Why should this be any different?
Because this was an arranged marriage, plain and simple.
I had spent these weeks in some kind of a delirium. A daydream. Sex and sun and the gleaming Mediterranean—who wouldn’t be susceptible?
But Javier had not been in any such haze. Javier had known exactly what he was doing.
He had married me for my name. My fortune, and not because he needed money, but because he was now a part of the Fitzalan legacy.
He had married a pawn, but I had made the cardinal sin of imagining myself a wife in truth. Somehow, in all these weeks, my actual situation had not been clear to me. This was an arranged marriage, and the arrangement was not in my favor.
Javier had not promised me love. He had not promised me honor. And crucially, I realized as I sat there, feeling like the child I had never thought I was until today, he had never promised me fidelity, either.
* * *
If Javier noticed my silence—or any of those feelings I was afraid I wasn’t any good at hiding, though I tried my best—he gave no sign.
He spent the flight to Venice on his mobile and seemed as uninterested in the fairy-tale city that appeared below us as we landed as he was in me. I pressed my face to the window, not caring at all if that made me look gauche. Or foolish. Or whatever word I knew my father would have used, if he had been there to see my enduring gracelessness.
But I didn’t want to think about my father. Or any of the things that waited for me tonight. All the ways my foolish heart could break—I thrust them all aside.
We were delivered to a waiting boat and that was when my treacherous heart flipped over itself, as if this was a romantic journey. As if any of this was romantic.
I knew it wasn’t. But Venice was.
The haughty, weathered palazzos arranged at the edge of the Grand Canal. The piers with their high sticks and the curved blue boats. The impossible light that danced on the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. Gondoliers on the waterways and pedestrians on the arched bridges.
Venice was like poetry. Arranged all around me, lyrical and giddy at once.
The private water taxi delivered us to a private island in the great lagoon.
“Another private island?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t when all I received in return was that darkly arched brow of his and that dark gaze that still looked pained to me.
“I prefer my privacy,” Javier replied. Eventually. “Though this is not mine. It is a hotel.”
I blinked at the pink stone building that rose before me and the rounded church facade that gleamed ivory beside it. There were gold letters on the stones, spelling out the name of some or other saint. “Why are there no other people?”
Javier angled an arrogant sort of look down at me.
And I understood then. He had bought the place out. Because of course he had.
He was Javier Dos Santos. How had I managed to forget all that meant?
I felt flushed straight through as we walked across the empty courtyard, following the beaming staff up from the water and into the hotel itself. This was not like his villa, so open and modern at once. I was struck by the age of the rooms, and yet how graceful they remained, as if to encourage guests to revel in all their mystery and grandeur. And yet it was far more welcoming than my father’s residences, all of which had always erred on the side of too many antiques. Cluttered together, simply because they were pieces of history that broadcast his taste in acquisitions.
Our footsteps were loud on the floors. The staff led us to a sprawling suite that encompassed the whole of the top floor, and I told myself it shouldn’t feel like punishment when Javier disappeared into the designated office space. Especially since he didn’t glance back.
But I summoned a smile from somewhere, because I wasn’t alone.
“You have some time before you need to begin getting ready for your evening, signora,” my attendant told me in deferential Italian. “Perhaps you would like some light refreshment?”
My smile hurt. “That would be lovely.”
I watched as she left, wondering what I looked like to her, this woman who attended the fabulously wealthy and astronomically celebrated occupants of this suite. She must have seen a thousand marriages like mine. Did it begin here, I wondered? Was she rushing down to the kitchens to snigger about the freckled, mop-headed wife who had somehow found herself with a man like Javier Dos Santos in a hotel he’d emptied of all other guests because he preferred the quiet?
But I was making myself crazy. I knew it.
I moved across the grand salon where my attendant had left me, then out through the shutters to the balcony that ran down the length of our suite. And though the air was bracing, especially after all those weeks on the island, I made my way to the edge and leaned against the railing to watch the winter sun turn the sky a pale pink.
If Venice had been pretty in the light, it was magical at dusk.
I breathed in, then let it out, and I thought I felt a kind of easing deep inside.
The city was otherworldly before me, spread out as it must have been at the feet of all the women who had stood on this balcony before me. So many lives, begun and ended right here. All those tears, all that laughter. Panic and fear. Joy and delight. Down through the ages, life after life just as it would continue on after me, and somewhere in the middle of all of it was me.
What was the point of working myself up into a state?
My problem was I kept imagining that I could make my marriage what I wanted it to be when that had never been in the cards, and I should have known that. I did know that.
The day before my wedding I had dreamed of the sweet blue eyes of a stable boy because that was some kind of escape. The day after my wedding I had been punch-drunk on the things my new husband could do to me, the things he could make my body feel, and I had lost myself in that for far too long.
The truth of the matter was that I was a Fitzalan. And no matter if I was the lesser one, I was still a Fitzalan. The women in my family had been bartered and ransomed, kidnapped and sold and held captive across the centuries.
And if my fierce old grandmother had been any indication, not a one of them had dissolved in the face of those challenges. On the contrary, Fitzalan women made the best of their situations. No matter what.
Fitzalans have a higher purpose, Grand-Mère had always said.
There wasn’t much I could do about my curls or my clumsiness, but I could certainly work on my attitude. It was perhaps the only thing that was truly mine. Javier had called the party I was headed to tonight my business, and I had been silly to dismiss that.
He wasn’t wrong. I had spent years in finishing school learning all the ways an aristocratic wife could use her role as an accessory to her husband to both of their advantage.
“Your greatest weapon is the fact no one expects you are anything but window dressing,” Madame had always told us. “Use it wisely, ladies.”
And that was why, when I was dressed in my mask and gown and was led out into the main hall to meet Javier that evening, I was ready.
I’d had them pull my hair back into another chignon, though this one did not pretend to be smooth. My curls were obvious, but I thought if they were piled on top of my head it would look more like a choice and less like the accident of birth they were. My inky-black gown had been made to Javier’s exacting specifications, my attendants had assured me, clasped high on one shoulder and cascading down on an angle to caress my feet. The mask itself was gold and onyx, and I couldn�
�t deny the little thrill it gave me to see it on my face when I looked in the mirror.
Better by far, however, was Javier’s stillness when he saw me, then the gruff nod he gave me.
It told me the same thing I’d told myself while I’d stood outside in the cold and gazed at the fairy tale of Venice laid out before me in the setting sun. Javier might feel nothing for me at all. I needed to accept that. But he wanted me with at least some of the same desperation I felt in me.
It was more than I’d been raised to expect from my marriage. I told myself it would be more than enough.
Because it had to be enough.
“I am ready,” I told him. When he held out his arm, I slid my hand through it. And I angled my head so I could look up at him. Then wondered if my breath would always catch like this at the sight of him, even more overwhelming than usual tonight in his dark black coat and tails. “This will be our first society event as a married couple. You must have imagined how it would go.”
I could see his dark eyes behind his mask. And that mouth of his, hard and tempting, that I would know anywhere.
“I have.”
“Then you must tell me exactly how you see it all in your head, so that I can be certain to do my part.”
His gaze was a harsh, glittering thing. He was dressed all in black, including his mask, and yet the way he looked at me made me think I could see all the bright colors of the Mediterranean. “Your part? What is your part, do you imagine?”
“My part is whatever you prefer, of course. You can use me as a kind of weapon to aim however you like. You have no idea how indiscreet men like my father are around people they think are too far below them to matter.”
His hard mouth curved slightly, though I did not mistake it for a smile. “I know exactly how they treat people like me, Imogen. And I do not need weapons to handle them. I am the weapon.”
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