But he assured himself that as time passed here, the effect these things would have on her would far outstrip any reaction of his own.
“Do you truly not understand?” he asked her. “Or is it that you imagine you can somehow appeal to my better angels if you pretend that you do not? Let me save you the trouble. I have none.”
If he expected her to wilt, he was in for disappointment. If anything, she sat straighter, managing to look somehow regal. He supposed it was another form of armor.
Cenzo intended to strip it away. Every bit of it.
“I’m not attempting to make any kind of appeal,” she said, sounding cool and unbothered. But he could see the way her eyes flashed and knew better. “All I’m trying to do is figure out what it is you believe will occur between us over the next month. I don’t need an agenda, but I am interested in the specifics. So far, all of it is very vague. It will all be terrible. I will be ruined. My father will be torn asunder, blah blah blah.”
“I like this,” Cenzo said, amused. “Show me your fangs, little one. They are adorable.”
She stood up then, abruptly. He thought she might storm off into the castle, but as ever, she surprised him. Josselyn moved instead to the rail, gripped it, and stared out toward the sea.
“If you’re thinking of jumping,” he said with great indolence, “I would advise against it. It’s not a straight shot, you see. You would likely live, in some or other reduced capacity. Not quite the dramatic gesture I imagine you’re going for.”
“I have no intention of jumping.”
She turned back, and he had the interesting notion that this was perhaps the first time they had truly gazed at each other. No artifice, no shock. No manners.
And unsmiling, she was actually even more beautiful. There was nothing to take away from the simple, stunning architecture of her face. And that beauty mark that directed attention straight to that mouth of hers. He intended to taste her and take his time with it.
Soon.
Because of his plan, he assured himself. All of this was in service to the plan.
“There is no agenda,” he told her, eventually, when she was beginning to look agitated. “I assume you have studied up on me, as I have you.” He did not wait for her to confirm it. And besides, he was Cenzo Falcone. There was only so much study required. “Then you know that when I set myself to a task, I achieve it.”
“I was under the impression that wasn’t an issue of character, in your case,” she said, her tone as even as her gaze was dark. “So much as unlimited funds to back any decision you might choose to make.”
“Does it make a difference? I have spent the past two years studying your weaknesses so that I might use them against you. Your devotion to your father, check. Your martyr complex, check.”
“If I had a martyr complex,” she retorted, “I would be halfway into a swan dive even now.”
“That is not how a martyr complex works, I think. It’s the heat of the pyre that matters and the audience to behold it, not the actual immolation. But it is of no matter. Now that it is only the two of us, stranded here for weeks, there will be nothing to do all day, every day, but find buttons. And then push them.”
“I admire your confidence that you will be the one pushing those buttons,” she said softly. “As if I will be doing nothing at all but sitting idly by, waiting to see what you might use against me next.”
“But you see, I cannot be pushed,” he told her, almost apologetically. When inside, the dragon in him shot fire. “At the end of the day, cara, there is someone you will wish to protect. That leaves you weak. I have no such weaknesses.”
“You do not wish to protect your own mother?”
“Françoise Falcone requires no protection,” Cenzo assured her. “And even if she did, there is no possibility that you could ever leverage her against me. For whatever I might think of your family, her opinion is worse. Much worse.”
Josselyn frowned. “Is that why she didn’t attend the wedding?”
“She understands why I am doing this but felt she could not accord it her blessing.” He inclined his head in a gesture that he knew looked like contrition on others. Not so much on him. “You understand.”
“How odd.” Josselyn let out a half-laugh. “My father thought it was because she was embarrassed.”
The very idea had him laughing out loud. A real laugh, even.
“I have seen my mother in many moods, but I have never seen her embarrassed.” He shook his head. “Though it is true that she feels that any American, by virtue of the newness and greenness of your connections, must be beneath not only the Falcone line but her own family, who trace their blood to the House of Bourbon.”
“You misunderstand me,” Josselyn said, a curious expression on her face. It made him wonder if he’d misjudged her—but no. That was impossible. Cenzo did not make mistakes. “I don’t think bloodlines have anything to do with it. My father assumed your mother did not wish to show her face after she’d made such a play for him. And was, of course, denied.”
“I beg your pardon?”
His wife did not seem to recognize her danger. She was leaning back against the rail now, suddenly looking entirely at her ease. A whisper of something washed over him, though he did not immediately recognize what it was.
It took him another moment to realize that it was apprehension.
But surely that was not possible either. He held all the cards in this. She had never been anything but a lamb to the slaughter.
And more, she thought the man he knew was to blame for the grief in him that never dissipated was good.
He held on to that outrage.
“I was only ten when my mother died, as you’ve already established,” Josselyn said, sounding easier with every syllable. “My father used to tell me stories at bedtime, and he didn’t read to me from books. He told me stories about my mother and my brother. About how funny and bright and brave Jack was, and how now he could act as my big brother no matter where I was. And about how he and my mother met, and fell in love, and built a life together. This became our tradition.”
There was absolutely no reason, Cenzo assured himself, that he should feel a trickle of foreboding move down the back of his neck.
She was still speaking. “When I outgrew needing to be tucked into bed, every night we were together my father would still tell me stories about the past. I think it helped him as much as me, if I’m honest. And one of the stories he liked to tell was how he thought that perhaps he had fallen in love with my mother from afar. For how else could he explain that when his engagement was announced, a woman who he considered his best friend’s, who he had always admired, propositioned him. But he turned her down for a woman he hardly knew.”
Cenzo felt everything in him still. “Your father is a liar. Better you should know it now and stop spreading his poison.”
Josselyn looked unmoved. “I don’t think your parents had been married long. They all knew each other well, didn’t they? The stories Papa tells of their youth seem like something out of a Hemingway book. A movable feast with the three of them all over Europe, your mother the woman that half the men they knew were in love with.”
“My mother would no more lower herself to an American—” Cenzo began in a fury.
“Well, you’re quite right, but only because my father didn’t accept her offer.”
“I feel certain that my mother is, even now, somehow aware of this slander and has suddenly come over horrified in her villa in Taormina.” Cenzo shook his head. “Wherever could you have come by such a notion?”
“She wrote him letters, Cenzo,” Josselyn said softly. “So even if I was tempted to think that my father had forgotten what actually happened, or had embellished it, I’m afraid there are the letters to tell a different story.”
“You are wrong.” Cenzo’s voice was flat. “You have o
bviously never met my mother, for if you did you would know that she is not romantic. She comes from an ancient French line and was raised to concern herself only with how best she could carry forth that legacy.”
And more, she had been devoted to his father. She was still devoted to his father.
“If you say so.” This wife he’d been so sure he could crush beneath his shoe with little effort gazed back at him as if she knew she’d set off a seismic reaction inside him. She even shrugged as if this was all nothing to her. “But also, for a time, it seems that she was willing to throw it all away for an upstart American all the same.”
Cenzo found himself standing and had no idea when he’d decided to move. Temper and something else flooded through him, making him feel a heady mix of lit up and darkly intense, and all of it was focused on the slender woman who stood before him, the Sicilian sun in her hair and the Sicilian Sky on her finger.
And while he watched, she slowly smiled at him.
“Tell me again how it is that you have no buttons to push.” She dared him. She dared him. “And I will tell you more stories about your mother, because believe me, there are many. After our engagement, I went through all my father’s correspondence. It was fascinating. Illuminating, even.”
Cenzo slashed his hand through the air. And though everything in him urged him to move forward—to put his hands on her, to handle this with his mouth on hers, his hands all over her skin—he held himself back.
Because he hadn’t expected this, and that was a problem. He hadn’t anticipated that she would turn the tables on him—it hadn’t crossed his mind that she could—and that would take some thought. Some different plans, perhaps.
Some getting used to, certainly.
And he could not allow himself to lose, in the heat of the moment, what had taken him years of fury and focus to put into motion.
“I see you are a liar much like your own father,” he gritted out. “How proud he must be.”
But the meek, obedient virgin he had expected to easily break apart only smiled wider.
“That’s a nice try,” Josselyn said. “But the difference is, I know my father. I know him well. I haven’t set him up on any kind of pedestal, and, in fact, have been his employee as well as his daughter, so I can truly say I know more than one side of him. Trust me when I tell you that I am deeply conversant on my father’s flaws. He is not a liar. Neither am I.” She studied him, still smiling. “But I’m beginning to suspect that your mother is.”
Cenzo felt a seething kind of rage build inside him, and the hint of that deep, wild grief behind it, and it was not contained to the usual places. Here, with her, it pooled in his sex and made his skin feel two sizes too small, stretched over his bones.
“I will admit that you surprised me, Josselyn,” he managed to say as if he was in full command of himself, as he should have been. “I did not expect you to traffic in such falsehoods. But do not worry. It will change nothing. I simply know better, now, who you really are.”
He picked up the plates from the table, taking them, and himself, back inside.
And he was all too aware that she followed him, maneuvering herself so that she once more stood on the other side of the wide, long kitchen island and regarded him in that same steady way.
As if she thought she was in control of this.
“I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression,” she told him, and she was no longer smiling at him, all sharp challenge. “Papa was flattered by your mother’s interest in him. The story wasn’t told at your mother’s expense, ever. He thought too highly of her. It was to highlight that even then, when he could have had a woman who he had long considered the finest of them all, he stuck with my mother instead. When he barely knew her. And before, in fact, they had gone ahead and fallen for each other. You can take that as an insult if you must. But it doesn’t come from my father.”
“You asked for an agenda.” For the first time, possibly ever, Cenzo was not sure that he could keep his voice steady. Until he managed it, somehow. “For today, I suggest you acquaint yourself with this island. Explore it at will. Learn its nooks and crannies, take note of the ruins and the cliffs, and better still, note that there is nowhere to go. The quicker you accept that, the better.”
“That was almost a lovely invitation. And then you ruined it.”
“I will expect you to dine with me in the evenings,” he continued in the same stern way, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If you do not present yourself, I will come find you. You will not like that.”
“More threats, naturally,” she said, almost sunnily. “I see you’ve recovered from the shock of hearing that your mother is a person, as complicated as anyone else.”
Cenzo refused to spend one single moment dignifying her lies—not even with a stray thought about his mother or his parents’ often chilly, remote marriage. Not one.
He would blame her father for that, too.
“I intend to sleep in our bed every night,” he told her in the same implacable way. “I will not force you to do the same, but you will have noticed, I think, that I meant it when I said there were no other beds here. I would not encourage you to come up with a makeshift one, either. I will not allow it. You may sleep in the marital bed next to your husband, or you may be uncomfortable. The choice is yours.”
“You are all heart.”
“It is my intention, cara, to take the virginity we both know you still possess. And soon. But do not worry unduly. I will not force myself upon you.”
“What is an undue amount of worry in this situation, Cenzo?”
He only gazed back at her and did nothing to hide the ruthlessness in him. The power of his will. Or his certainty that she would not only bend, but crumble.
“Let me guess,” Josselyn said after a moment. “You believe that I will beg you for the pleasure.”
“I know you will.”
He felt like himself again as she stood there before him, clearly trembling in some kind of outrage, though she fought to conceal it. But he could see it all over her, making her attempt to stand there—straight and tall and drenched in serenity—fall slightly flat.
And he knew she wouldn’t believe it, but he could still see her innocence all over her. He could read her too clearly. Her color was heightened once again. Her dark eyes were faintly glassy. And Cenzo had no doubt that if he were to reach over and touch her, her skin would be hot.
Just as he knew that if he reached between her legs, she would be wet.
But these were all discoveries he would force her to make. And then he would use them against her, one after the next.
“I tried to tell you this before,” she said, enunciating her words in a manner that he supposed was meant to cut him to ribbons. “But I find you repulsive. Horrific. The only thing I will ever beg you for is a divorce.”
She turned at that and marched herself out of the kitchen.
And really, he should have let her go. This was only the first day of a long siege.
But the dragon in him had woken again, and it liked the scent of her. His sex was thick and heavy, and he hungered for a real taste of that mouth of hers. Particularly now that he’d discovered that she truly did have fangs, and more, could use them.
He wanted her naked. He wanted her beneath him, astride him, on her hands and knees before him, the better to take his thrusts.
And all of these things would be his, he knew. All he need do was wait. And play this game he could already tell he would win. And handsomely.
But first, there was today, and he didn’t like the fact that she thought she had the upper hand.
Without questioning himself, Cenzo followed her from the kitchen. He heard her boots against the flagstones, then each step as she started up the stairs into the tower. More, he could hear her temper in every crash of her feet against the old stones.
It was ea
sy enough to catch her, then whirl her around, there in the narrow stairwell.
“But you said—” she began, her eyes wide as she gazed up at him. “You promised—”
“I wish only to kiss my wife,” Cenzo growled. “On this, the first day of the rest of our life together.”
“You don’t want to kiss me,” she threw at him, and he thought the way she trembled now was her temper taking hold. The most convenient of the passions, but he would take any. “You want to make one of your grim little points. You want to start what you think will be my downward spiral, until all I can do is fling myself prostrate before you and cringe about at your feet. Guess what? I would rather die.”
“Let us test that theory,” he suggested, and kissed her.
And this time, it had nothing at all to do with punishment. Though it was no less a claiming.
This time, it was a seduction.
Pleasure and dark promise.
He took her face in his hands, and he tasted her as he wanted at last. He teased her lips until she sighed, melting against him, and opened to let him in.
Then he angled his head and set them both on fire.
He kissed her and he kissed her, until all that fury, all that need, hummed there between them. He kissed her, losing himself in the sheer wonder of her taste and the way that sweet sea scent of hers teased at him, as if she was bewitching him despite his best efforts to seize control.
Cenzo kissed her like a man drowning and she met each thrust of his tongue, then moved closer as if she was as greedy as he was.
As if she knew how much he wanted her and wanted him, too, with that very same intensity.
And there were so many things he wanted to do with her. But kissing her felt like a gift, like sheer magic, and for once in his life, Cenzo lost track of his own ulterior motives. His own grand plan.
There was only her taste. Her heat.
Her hair that he gripped in his hands, and the way she pressed against him.
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