by Dani Collins
But Benedetto rather thought that a man like this loved nothing at all.
After all, he’d been fathered, however indifferently, by a man just like this.
He inclined his head to his host, then followed the small man out of what he’d defiantly announced was his “office” when it looked more like one of those dreadful cubicles Benedetto had seen in films of lowbrow places, out into the dark, dimly lit halls of this cold, crumbling house.
Once upon a time, the Charteris home had been a manor. A château, he corrected himself, as they were in France. Benedetto could fix the house first and easily. That way, no matter what happened with his newest acquisition, her father would not raise any alarms. He would be too happy to be restored to a sense of himself to bother questioning the story he received.
Benedetto had played this game before. He liked to believe that someday there would be no games at all.
But he needed to stop torturing himself with someday, because it was unlikely that tonight would be any different. Wasn’t that what he’d learned? No matter how much penance he paid, nothing changed.
Really, he should have been used to it. He was. It was this part that he could have done without, layered as it was with those faint shreds of hope. All the rest of it was an extended, baroque reconfirmation that he was, if not precisely the monster the world imagined him, a monster all the same.
It was the hope that made him imagine otherwise, however briefly.
This was not the first time he’d wished he could excise it with his own hands, then cast it aside at last.
The house was not overly large, especially with so much of it unusable in its current state, so it took no time at all before they reached the dining room on the main floor. His host offered an unctuous half bow, then waved his arm as if he was an emcee at a cabaret. A horrifying notion.
Benedetto prowled into the room, pleased to find that this part of the house, unlike the rest with its drafts and cold walls despite the season, was appropriately warm.
Perhaps too warm, he thought in the next moment. Because as he swept his gaze across the room, finding the oldest and middle daughter to be exactly as he’d expected, it was as if someone had thrown gas on a fire he could not see. But could feel inside of him, cranked up to high.
The flames rose higher.
He felt scalded. But what he saw was an angel.
Angelina, something in him whispered.
For it could be no other.
Her sisters were attractive enough, but he had already forgotten them. Because the third, least known Charteris daughter stood next to her mother along one side of a formally set table, wearing a simple dress in a muted hue and a necklace of complicated pearls that seemed to sing out her beauty.
But then, she required no embellishment for that. She was luminous.
Her hair was so blond it shone silver beneath the flickering flames of a chandelier set with real candles. Economy, not atmosphere, he was certain, but it made Angelina all the more lovely. She’d caught the silvery mass back at the nape of her neck in a graceful chignon that he longed to pick apart with his hands. Her features should have been set in marble or used to launch ships into wars. They made him long to paint, though he had never wielded a brush in all his days.
But he thought he might learn the art of oils against canvas for the express purpose of capturing her. Or trying. Her high cheekbones, her soft lips, her elegant neck.
He felt his heart, that traitorous beast, beat too hard.
“Here we all are,” said Anthony Charteris, all but chortling with glee.
And in that moment, Benedetto wanted to do him damage. He wanted to grab the man around his portly neck and shake him the way a cat shook its prey. He wanted to make the man think about what it was he was doing here. Selling off a daughter to a would-be groom with a reputation such as Benedetto’s? Selling off an angel to a devil, and for what?
But almost as soon as those thoughts caught at him, he let them go.
Each man made his own prison. His own had contained him for the whole of his adult life and he had walked inside, turned the key, and fashioned his own steel bars. Who was he to cast stones?
“This is Benedetto Franceschi,” Charteris announced, and then frowned officiously at his daughters. “He is a very important friend and business partner. Very important.”
Some sort of look passed between the man and his wife. Margrete, once a Laurent, drew herself up—no doubt so she could present her bosom to Benedetto once more. Then again, perhaps that was how she communicated.
He remained as he had been before: vaguely impressed, yet unmoved.
“May I present to you, sir, my daughters.” Margrete gestured across the table. “My eldest, Dorothea.” Her hand moved to indicate the sulky, too self-aware creature beside the eldest, who smirked a bit at him as if he had already proposed to her. “My middle daughter, Petronella.”
And at last, she indicated his angel. The most beautiful creature Benedetto had ever beheld. His seventh and last wife, God willing. “And this is my youngest, Angelina.”
Benedetto declared himself suitably enchanted, waited for the ladies to seat themselves, and then dropped into his chair with relief. Because he wanted to concentrate on Angelina, not her sisters.
He wanted to dispense with this performance. Announce that he had made his choice and avoid having to sit through an awkward meal like this one, where everyone involved was pretending that they’d never heard of the many things he was supposed to have done. Just as he was pretending he didn’t notice that the family house was falling down around them as they sat here.
“Tell me.” Benedetto interrupted the meaningless prattle from Charteris at the head of the table about his ancestors or the Napoleonic Wars or some such twaddle. “What is it you do?”
His eyes were on the youngest daughter, though she had not once looked up from her plate.
But it was the eldest who answered, after clearing her throat self-importantly. “It is a tremendous honor and privilege that I get to dedicate my life to charity,” she proclaimed, a hint of self-righteousness flirting with the corners of her mouth.
Benedetto had many appetites, but none of them were likely to be served by the indifferent food served in a place like this, where any gesture toward the celebrated national cuisine had clearly declined along with the house and grounds. He sat back, shifting his attention from the silver-haired vision to her sister.
“And what charity is it that you offer, exactly?” he asked coolly. “As I was rather under the impression that your interest in charity ball attendance had more to do with the potential of fetching yourself a husband of noble blood than any particular interest in the charities themselves.”
Then he watched, hugely entertained, as Dorothea flushed. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then she sank back against her seat without saying a word. As if he’d taken the wind out of her sails.
He did tend to have that effect.
The middle daughter was staring at him, so Benedetto merely lifted a brow. And waited for her to leap into the fray.
Petronella did not disappoint. Though she had the good sense to look at him with a measure of apprehension in her eyes, she also propped her elbows on the table and sat forward in such a way that her breasts pressed against the bodice of the dress she wore. An invitation he did not think was the least bit unconscious.
“I consider myself an influencer,” she told him, her voice a husky, throaty rasp that was itself another invitation. All of her, from head to toe, was a carefully constructed beckoning. She did not smile at him. She kept her lips in what appeared to be a natural pout while gazing at him with a directness that he could tell she’d practiced in the mirror. Extensively.
“Indeed.” His brow remained where was, arched high. “What influence do you have? And over what—or whom?”
“My personal brand is really
a complicated mix of—”
“I am not interested in brands,” Benedetto said, cutting her off. “Brands are things that I own and use at will according to my wishes. The purpose of a brand is to sell things. Influence, on the other hand, suggests power. Not the peddling of products for profit. So. What power do you have?”
She shifted in her chair, a strange expression on her face. It took him a moment to recognize it as false humility. “I couldn’t possibly say why some people think I’m worth listening to,” she murmured.
Benedetto smiled back, and enjoyed watching the unease wash over her as he studied her, because he was more the monster they thought he was than he liked to admit.
Especially in polite company.
“Pretty is not power,” he said softly. “Do you know how you can tell? Because men wish to possess it, not wield it. It is no different from any other product, and like them, happily discarded when it outgrows its usefulness or fades in intensity. Surely you must know this.”
Petronella, too, dropped her gaze. And looked uncertain for the first time since Benedetto had walked in to the dining room.
He was not the least bit surprised that neither of the Charteris parents intervened. Parents such as these never did. They were too wrapped up in what they had to gain from him to quibble over his harshness.
But he hardly cared because, finally, he was able to focus on the third daughter. The aptly named Angelina.
“And you?” he asked, feeling a coiling inside of him, as if he was some kind of serpent about to strike. As if he was every bit the monster the world believed he was. “What is it you do?”
“Nothing of consequence,” she replied.
Unlike her sisters, Angelina did not look up from her plate, where she was matter-of-factly cutting into a piece of meat he could see even from where he sat was tough. They had given the choice cuts to him and to themselves, of course. Letting their children chew on the gristle. That alone told him more than he needed to know about the Charteris family. About their priorities.
Perhaps the truth no one liked to face was that some people deserved to meet a monster at the dinner table.
“Angelina,” bit out Margrete, in an iron voice from behind a pasted-on smile and that magnificent chest like the prow of a ship.
“I spoke the truth,” Angelina protested.
But she placed her cutlery down, very precisely. She folded her hands in her lap. Then she raised her gaze to Benedetto’s at last. He felt the kick of it, her eyes blue and innocent and dreamy, like the first flush of a sweet spring.
“I play the piano. Whenever I can, for as long as I can. My other interests include listening to other people play the piano on the radio, taking long walks while thinking about how to play Liszt’s La Campenella seamlessly, and reading novels.”
Her voice was not quite insolent. Not quite. Next to her, her mother drew herself up again, as if prepared to mete out justice—possibly in the form of a sharp slap, if Benedetto was reading the situation correctly—but he lifted a hand.
“Both of your sisters attempt to interact with the outside world. But not you. There’s no trace of you on the internet, for example, which is surpassingly strange in this day and age.”
There was heat on her cheeks. A certain glitter in her gaze that made his body tighten.
“There are enough ways to hide in a piece of music,” she said after a moment stretched thin and filled with the sounds of tarnished silver against cracked china. “Or a good book. Or even on a walk, I suppose. I have no need to surrender myself to still more ways to hide myself away, by curating myself into something unrecognizable.”
Petronella let out an affronted sniff, but Angelina did not look apologetic.
“Some would say that it is only in solitude that one is ever able to stop hiding and find one’s true self,” Benedetto said.
And did not realize until the words were out there, squatting in the center of the silent table, how deeply felt that sentiment was. Or was that merely what he told himself?
“I suppose that depends.” And when Angelina looked at him directly then, he felt it like an electric charge. And more, he doubted very much that she’d spent any time at all practicing her expression in reflective glass. “Are you speaking of solitude? Or solitary confinement? Because I don’t think they’re the same thing.”
“No one is speaking about solitary confinement, Angelina,” Margrete snapped, and Benedetto had the sudden, unnerving sensation that he’d actually forgotten where he was. That for a moment, he had seen nothing but Angelina. As if the rest of the world had ceased to exist entirely, and along with it his reality, his responsibilities, his fearsome reputation, and the reason he was here…
Pull yourself together, he ordered himself.
The dinner wore on, course after insipid course. Anthony and Margrete filled the silence, chattering aimlessly, while Benedetto seethed. And the three daughters who were clearly meant to vie for his favor stayed quiet, though he suspected that the younger one kept a still tongue for very different reasons than her sisters.
“Well,” said Anthony with hearty and patently false bonhomie, when the last course had been taken away untouched by a surly maid. “Ladies, why don’t you repair to the library while Signor Franceschi and I discuss a few things over our port.”
So chummy. So pleased with himself.
“I think not,” Benedetto said, decisively, even as the older daughters started to push back their chairs.
At the head of the table, Anthony froze.
Benedetto turned toward Angelina, who tensed—almost as if she knew what he was about to say. “I wish to hear you play the piano,” he said.
And when no one moved, when they all gazed back at him in varying degrees of astonishment, outright panic, and pure dislike, he smiled.
In the way he knew made those around him…shudder.
Angelina stared back at him in something that was not quite horror. “I beg your pardon?”
Benedetto smiled wider. “Now, please.”
CHAPTER THREE
“ALONE,” ADDED THE TERRIBLE, notorious man when Angelina’s whole family made as if to rise.
He smiled all the while, in a manner that reminded Angelina of nothing so much as the legends she’d heard all her life about men who turned into wolves when the moon was high. She was tempted to run to the windows and see what shape the moon took tonight, though she did not dare.
And more, could not quite bring herself to look away from him.
Angelina had not been prepared for this. For him.
It was one thing to look at photographs. But there was only so much raw magnetism a person could see on the screen.
Because in person, Benedetto Franceschi was not merely beautiful or sinful, though he was both.
In person, he was volcanic.
Danger simmered around him, charging the air, making Angelina’s body react in ways she’d thought only extremes of temperatures could cause. Her chest felt tight, hollow and too full at once, and she found it almost impossible to take a full breath.
When he’d singled her out for conversation she’d responded from her gut, not her head. And knew she’d handled it all wrong, but only because of her mother’s reaction. The truth was, her head had gone liquid and light and she’d had no earthly idea what had come out of her mouth.
Nothing good, if the pinched expression on Margrete’s face was any guide.
Still, disobedience now did not occur to her. Not because she feared her parents, though she supposed that on some level, she must. Or why would she subject herself to this? Why would she still be here? But she wasn’t thinking of them now.
Angelina wasn’t thinking at all, because Benedetto’s dark, devil’s gaze was upon her, wicked and insinuating. A dare and an invitation and her own body seemed to have turned against her.
He wanted to hear her play.
But a darker, less palatable truth was that she wanted to play for him.
She told herself it was only that she wanted an audience. Any audience. Yet the dark fire of his gaze worked its way through her and she knew she wasn’t being entirely honest. The yearning for an audience, instead of the family members who ignored her, wasn’t why her pulse was making such a racket, and it certainly wasn’t why she could feel sensation hum deep within her.
She could hardly breathe and yet she stood. Worse, she knew that she wanted to stand. Then she turned, leading him out of the dining chamber, careful not to catch her sisters’ eyes or sneak a glance at her worryingly, thunderously quiet father on her way out.
Angelina tried to steel herself against him as she moved through the murky depths of the house, certain that he would try to speak to her the moment they were alone. Charm her into unwariness or attempt to disarm her with casual conversation.
But instead, he walked in silence.
And that was much, much worse.
She was so aware of him it made her bones ache. And it took only a few steps to understand that her awareness of him was not based on fear. Her breasts and her belly were tight, and grew tighter the farther away they moved from the dining room. Deep between her legs she felt swollen, pulsing in time with her heart as it beat and beat.
Helpless. Hopeless.
Red hot and needy.
The house brought it all into sharp relief. It was dimly lit and echoing, so that their footsteps became another pulse, following them. Chasing them on. Angelina was certain that if she looked at the shadow he cast behind them, she would see not a man, but a wolf.
Fangs at the ready, prepared to attack.
She could not have said why that notion made her whole body seem to boil over, liquid and hot.
She walked on and on through a house that seemed suddenly cavernous, her mind racing and spinning. Yet she couldn’t seem to grasp on to a single thought, because she was entirely too focused on the man beside her and slightly behind her, matching his stride to hers in a way that made her feel dirty, somehow.