There was no time. No playing. There was only this.
There was only the slick, deep slide into all her molten heat.
There was only Imogen.
“Is this a lie?” she whispered in my ear as I lost myself in the rhythm. The deep, sweet thrust in, then the ache of the retreat.
I didn’t believe in love. I wanted this to be a lie. That was the only world I knew.
But it was hard to remember what I knew with Imogen beneath me, holding me as tightly and as fiercely as I held her. It was hard to remember my own name as she met me, spurring me on, wrapping her legs around my hips and arching against me to take me deeper.
And the first time she exploded, I kept going. On and on, until she was sobbing out my name the way I liked it.
Only when she convulsed around me a second time did I follow.
But it still wasn’t enough.
When I could breathe a little again, I rose. I stripped off what remained of my evening clothes, and swept my still-shuddering wife up into my arms again. I carried her through the sprawling suite, not letting go of her when I reached the bedroom.
I threw her onto the bed and went down with her, and then, finally, I took back control.
Over and over.
I had her in every way I could imagine.
I tasted her, everywhere. I made her sob, then scream.
I took her into the shower and rinsed us both, then started all over again while the steam rose in clouds around us and the hot water spilled over us both.
I took her and I worshipped her. I imprinted myself on her.
And if there was a lie in any of the things we did, I couldn’t find it.
There was pink at the windows when Imogen finally slept, smudges beneath her eyes as she sprawled where I’d left her after the last round. I sat on the side of the bed and forced myself to look away from all of that lush sweetness.
It took some doing.
She would not stop talking of love. She’d kept it up all night, charging that same windmill again and again.
Over and over and over.
And I had spent the whole of my adult life telling myself only the truth. Or trying. I could do no less now.
I was a man, not the monster they imagined I was. Or I believed I was. And no windmill, either. And if there was any creature on this earth who could make me believe in things I knew to be lies, it was this one.
And I could not have that.
I could not bear it.
That was how I, who had never run from anything, found myself out in the Venice dawn.
Running like hell from a woman with red-gold curls, an impossibly sweet smile that cut into me every time I saw it, a defiance that I wanted to taste, not crush—and no sense at all of how she had destroyed me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Imogen
FITZALANS ENDURED.
That was what I told myself when I woke up that morning in Venice and found myself alone.
And without him there to insist on those truths he seemed to hate so much, I lied.
I told myself that he had gone out, that was all. Perhaps to conduct some business. Perhaps to exercise the way he liked to do in the early morning back on the island. I made up all kinds of excuses, but I knew. Deep down, I knew.
He was gone.
His staff arrived at noon.
I didn’t put up a fuss. I didn’t even ask any questions. I let them collect the bags and lead me out of the empty hotel. I didn’t look back.
Nor did I ask where I was headed once they bundled me onto a plane. Not Javier’s plane, I noted. Or at least not the one I had been on before. I stared out the window as we soared over Italy and I wondered where he was. Where he had gone to.
And when—or if—he might return.
I didn’t know if I was relieved or hurt when we landed back at La Angelita. I held my breath as the car pulled up in front of the villa, telling myself a thousand different and desperate stories about how he’d needed to rush back here, that was all. I would walk inside, past that table in the foyer that still made me blush every time I saw it, and he would be here to greet me with that tiny curve in the corner of his hard mouth...
But he wasn’t there.
For the first week, I jumped at every noise. Every time I heard a door open. Every time the wind picked up. Every time a window rattled. I jumped and I expected to see him standing there.
But Javier did not return.
It was sometime into the third week that I found myself sitting in his library, surrounded by books that failed to soothe me for the first time in my life. I was rereading one of my favorite novels, but even that didn’t help. I felt thick and headachy and on the verge of tears, all at the same time, and it got worse every day.
I told myself it was a broken heart, that was all. But identifying what was wrong with me didn’t help. It didn’t fix it. It didn’t bring my husband back.
I sat in that library, I thought about the grand sweep of history that had led down through the storied history of the Fitzalan family to me. Here. Alone.
I found myself thinking about my sister and the life she led. How much worse would I feel if I had been married, claimed in such an intimate fashion, and then abandoned...by my sister’s husband? By the pursed-mouthed count who never smiled or one of the many indistinguishable men of father’s acquaintance just like him?
Despite the way the memories of the ball still smarted, I felt the stirrings of something like sympathy for her. Celeste hadn’t had much choice in the matter of her marriage, either. What must it be like for her, shackled to the count until he died, with her unhappiness expected on all sides—and held to be wholly unimportant?
The truth was, I was lucky. I loved Javier. More, I couldn’t help believing that he loved me, too, though he might not know it.
If marriage was forever, and I knew full well that this one was—that the kinds of marriages people like me had were always permanent, because they were based on all those distressingly practical things Celeste had mentioned and Javier had echoed—then it didn’t matter how long Javier stayed away.
I didn’t have to hunt him down. I had already said my piece in Venice.
All I had to do was wait.
The days rolled by, as blue and bright as ever. I found that I was less interested in being on holiday, and started to amuse myself in different ways now that there was no one here to tell me any different.
“I do not think that Senor Dos Santos would like you in his office,” the worried butler fussed at me when he found me behind my husband’s imposing steel desk, helping myself to Javier’s computer and telephone.
“Would he not?”
“The senor is deeply concerned with his privacy, Senora. He does not like anyone in this space when he is not at home.”
I beamed at the butler. “Then it is a great shame that he is not here to tell me so himself.”
I busied myself as I saw fit. I couldn’t put myself to work the way others might, it was true. But I could do my part, so that was what I did.
And if Javier had a problem with the way I was spending his money on what I held to be worthy charities, well. That was his problem. If he wanted to make it my problem, he would have to come back to this island and face me.
I filled my days with all that glorious Mediterranean sunshine. I walked through the budding olive groves, looking for signs of spring. I sat in the pools outside the bedroom when dark fell so I could gaze up at the stars and do my best to name them. I walked the length of the unspoiled beaches on all sides of the island, letting all that crisp sea air wash over me, into me.
I spoke to the ocean when no one was around to hear me. And I always felt it answered me in the relentless way the waves beat against the shore.
It told me stories of endurance, deep and blue and forever.<
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It was a full month since the ball in Venice when I woke as I always did. I stretched out in the vast bed where I lay alone at night and tortured myself with memories of those lost, beautiful weeks when I’d first come here. When I’d given Javier my virginity and my heart and he’d given me light. I blinked at the sunshine as it poured in through the windows.
And then, instead of rolling to my feet and perhaps going for a morning swim, I was seized with the sudden certainty that I was about to be sick.
Horribly sick.
I barely made it across the room and into the bathroom in time.
It was only when I had finished casting out my misery and was sitting there on the tiled floor with a cold washcloth against my face that it occurred to me my evening meal of the night before might not have been to blame.
I wore nothing but one of Javier’s shirts that I had liberated from his closet so I could pretend he still held me. And I told myself it was close enough to him actually being here as I sat there on the floor, my back against the wall, and spread my hands out over my belly in a kind of half wonder, half awe.
I hadn’t cried since that morning in Venice. Not since I had finally accepted the fact that Javier had left me, and had taken myself into the shower because I knew that there was no way he would simply abandon me to my own devices. Not after what he’d paid for me. I knew that his staff would turn up, sooner or later. I needed to be dressed and ready.
But first I had stood beneath the hot spray in that Venetian hotel, loved him, and cried.
These tears were different. There was still that same despair a month later, but it didn’t quite take hold of me. Because beneath it was searing, irrepressible joy.
I knew that in my world babies were seen as insurance, not people. Heirs and spares and collateral damage. Too many children and the inheritance was diluted. Too few and tragedy could send all that wealth and history spinning off to someone else’s unworthy hands.
But here, now, on the bathroom floor in a villa that was the only place I had ever been truly happy, I forgot all that. I pushed it aside.
“I don’t care what they say,” I whispered, a fierce promise to the new life inside of me. “I will always love you. You will always know it.”
And when I was done, I climbed to my feet and washed my face until there was no trace of tears. Then I called for my attendant and told her what I wanted.
Two hours later, I received a delivery from the nearest chemist’s, somewhere on the Spanish mainland. Fifteen minutes after that, I confirmed the fact that I was, in fact, having Javier’s child. My child.
Our baby.
And when night fell on that very same day, the sun making its idle way toward the horizon while it painted the sky golds and pinks, I heard the same sort of noise I always heard. And as I always did, I looked up from my favorite chair in Javier’s library, expecting to hear the wind or see one of the servants hurrying past.
But this time, he was there.
Right there in front of me after all these weeks.
And he looked murderous.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Javier
SHE WAS MAGNIFICENT.
The truth of that slammed into me like a hammer, one hit and then the next, and I had to fight to breathe through it.
Imogen sat with her feet folded up beneath her in an armchair and a thick book open in her lap. I had been standing in the doorway to the library for some time before she noticed me, so enthralled was she with her reading.
It was like torture. She worried her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. Her skin was flushed from the sun and from the walks the staff had told me she took daily.
And because she was carrying my child.
My child.
She lifted her gaze and instantly made me wonder if she’d known I was there all along.
“Hello, Javier,” she said, as if I had happened out for an hour or two. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Were you not?”
I didn’t wait for her to answer. I hardly knew what moved in me then. Fury, certainly. Something like panic. And that same dark current of need and longing that had chased me all over the planet and had never let me escape.
She had haunted me everywhere.
And it was worse, somehow, now that we were in the same room.
“I gave up expecting you in the first week,” she said, and what struck me was the tone she used. So matter-of-fact. Not as if she was trying to slap at me at all. Which, of course, made it sting all the more. “How long will you stay, do you think?”
“I am told you have news to share with me, Imogen. Perhaps you should start with that.”
“News?”
She looked flustered. But I didn’t quite believe it.
“Surely you cannot have imagined that you could ask my staff for a pregnancy test without my knowing of it.” I stepped farther into the room, expecting her to shrink back against her chair. But she only gazed at me, those copper eyes of hers wiser than before. Or perhaps it was only that I noticed it more now. Now that I knew how completely she could take me apart. And had. “There’s nothing you have done in this house that I have not been made aware of within the hour.”
She lifted her chin to that challenging angle that I had imagined a thousand times. And that I had wanted to touch a thousand more.
“If you have complaints about the way I choose to donate to the charities of my choice, I’m always happy to sit down with you and discuss it.”
“Is this how our marriage works? Is this how any marriage works, do you imagine?”
“If it doesn’t, that would also require that you sit down with me. Face-to-face. And have an actual conversation.” She lifted one shoulder, then let it drop with an ease I didn’t believe. Or didn’t want to believe, because nothing in me was easy. “It is so hard, I find, to conduct a marriage all on one’s own.”
I found myself circling her chair, much as I had circled this island again and again since I’d left her in Venice. I had flown all over the world, dropping in on my various business concerns wherever I went. But I always returned to Spain. And I always had to fight myself to keep from coming straight back to this island.
To Imogen.
“That depends, I think, on what marriage it is you think we are having.” I was filled with that same dark fury I hadn’t been able to shake in all these weeks—the fury I had begun to suspect wasn’t fury at all, but feelings. “I bought you for a very specific purpose. I never hid my intentions. You are the one who changed the rules. You are the one who made everything—”
“Real?” she supplied.
“You don’t know what real is,” I hurled at her, and I could hear that I was spinning out of control. That quickly. That completely. But I couldn’t stop it. “You have no idea what it is to grow up the way I did.”
“No, I don’t.”
I was so taken aback by her agreement that I froze. Then watched as she rose to her feet, the light, summery dress she wore flowing around her. I was struck by the expanse of her legs and her bare feet with toes tipped pink. I couldn’t have looked away from her if my life depended on it.
She had become no less of a goddess in the time I’d been away, and it was worse now. Because I knew she carried my child. I couldn’t see it, not yet, but I knew.
It made her more beautiful. It made everything more beautiful, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Beauty. Love. Imogen.
This is what I knew: I wasn’t built for happiness.
“I don’t know the precise details of how you grew up, or every last thing your childhood did to you. I know the bare bones. I know what little you told me when you thought you could use your past as a weapon. And I’m never going to know more than that unless you tell me. Just as there are things you don’t know about me that you never will unless you’re here t
o ask. But it doesn’t matter, because our marriage will last forever. That’s the benefit of a business arrangement.” She waved an airy hand that I didn’t believe and wanted, badly, to take hold of with my own. Yet I refrained. “We have all the time in the world to tell each other everything, one detail at a time.”
Yet it was the phrase business arrangement that I couldn’t get past, not this light talk of details when I had already shared more with her than anyone else in this life I’d scraped together by force of my own will. Business arrangement was in no way an incorrect way to describe our marriage, and yet it scraped over me, then deep inside me, as if it was hollowing me out.
“Why am I not surprised that a few weeks of solitude and the threat of motherhood are all it takes?” I shook my head. “No more talk of love.”
And it was not until my own, bitter words hung there in the quiet of the library between us that I realized how much I’d been depending on hearing more of those protestations she’d thrown my way in Venice.
Or how certain I’d been that she’d meant all those words of love I’d refused to accept.
Imogen’s eyes blazed copper fire. “You have everything you want, Javier. The Fitzalan heiress of your dreams. A child on the way to secure your legacy. And right when I was tempted to get ideas about my station, you put me in my place. Mention the word love and that’s a quick way to get a month of solitary confinement.” She wrinkled up her nose. “I can’t complain. I’ve spent a lot of time in far worse prisons than this.”
“La Angelita is hardly a prison.”
“I love you, you fool.” But she sounded something like despairing. “It isn’t going to go away just because you do.”
“You didn’t come after me.”
I heard the harsh, guttural voice. And it took me a long, hard kick from my own heart to realize it was mine.
“Javier...” she whispered, one hand dropping to cradle that belly where my child already grew.
And something in me...broke.
“You have ruined me,” I told her, as if I was accusing her of some dark crime. “You took my home. You took my heart when I did not think it existed to be taken. And you left me with nothing. You talk of prison? I have spent these past weeks flying from country to country, looking at every last part of my collection...and none of it matters. None of it is you. The whole world is a prison without you in it.”
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