Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  The only thing Angelina had ever wanted was her piano and a place to play it. She had been certain she knew herself inside and out. But this man taught her—over and over—that there were banked fires in her she hardly understood.

  Dark, greedy claws that dug in, deep, whenever he touched her and when he did not. Red and terrible longings that made her toss and turn when she wanted to sleep.

  This hunger that made her run to him when she knew full well she should have run the other way.

  “Such a pretty, needy little thing you are,” he murmured one evening.

  Like all the nights he came here, there had first been the awkward family dinner where he’d demonstrated his mastery over her father, then cowed her sisters and mother into uncharacteristic silence—usually with little more than a lift of one dangerous brow. When her mother and sisters repaired to the drawing room, leaving her father to his solitary port, Benedetto would usher Angelina to the conservatory.

  It was the same every time.

  That long, fraught walk through a house only half-alive. The sound of his footsteps mingled with hers. The humming, overfull silence stretched out between them and echoing back from the walls. Her breath would change as they moved, and she was certain he could hear it, though he always remained behind her. And he never spoke.

  She told herself she marched toward her own, slow execution. She walked herself off the plank.

  But the truth she never wished to face was that the closer they got to the conservatory, the quicker her steps. The quicker her breath.

  And oh, how molten and hot her blood ran in her, pooling between her legs with a desperate intent.

  Because inside that room, who knew what might happen?

  He always made her play.

  And then he played her, always making her scream and arch and shake. Always his wicked fingers, his clever mouth, tasting her, tempting her.

  Training her, something in her whispered.

  “Is this how you murder them all?” she asked one evening, a scant week away from their wedding.

  Benedetto had laid her out on the chaise that had appeared one morning, along with all kinds of furniture throughout the château. It was as if the house was a visual representation of her own femininity, and she could see it grow its own pleasure. Lush and deep.

  Paintings reappeared. Priceless antiques took their places once again. There were updates everywhere, light where there had been darkness, the cobwebs swept away and cracks plastered over.

  She’d forgotten herself, with her skirts tossed up and his head so dark between her thighs.

  She’d forgotten herself, but she remembered with a jolt when she shifted and caught a glimpse of them in the fogged-up windows that surrounded them on all sides.

  Benedetto was so big, tall and strong, and she was laid out before him, splayed wide like an offering. He was eating her alive and she was letting him, but she should never have let herself forget that the pleasure he visited upon her untried body was a weapon.

  Everything about this man was a weapon only he knew how to use.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she managed to gasp out while her heart galloped inside her, lust and fear and that same dark ache fusing into one.

  She tried to pull her legs closed but his broad shoulders were between them, and he did not move. He lifted his head and his night-black eyes bored into her. He pressed his palm, roughened and huge, against the faint swell of her abdomen.

  And something about the pressure made a new, dangerous heat uncurl inside her.

  “What do you know of marriage?” he asked, and his voice was as dark as the rest of him, insinuating and dangerous.

  She could feel that prickle that was as much longing as it was fear sweep over her body, leaving goose bumps in its wake.

  “I have never been married before.”

  Angelina didn’t know why she was answering him so prosaically. When she was as he liked her, still dressed for dinner but with her skirts around her waist, so she was bared only to him. Bared and wet and aching again.

  Sometimes she thought the aching might actually kill her, here in this house before she had the chance to leave it, and that notion made her want to sob out loud.

  Other times, she hoped it would.

  Benedetto shifted his weight so that he held himself up on one crooked elbow. He let his hand drift from her abdomen to her secret, greedy flesh.

  “Put your hands above your head,” he told her, and she knew it was an order. A command she should have ignored while she still could, but her arms were already moving of their own accord. Lifting over her head so that her back arched and her breasts pressed wantonly against the bodice of the old dress she wore.

  She knew he liked that. She knew a lot of the things he liked, by now. He liked her hair free and unconfined, tangled about wherever he lay her. He liked to get his fingers in it so he could guide her head where he wanted it. Particularly when he kissed her, tongue and teeth and a sheer mastery that made her shiver.

  “Tell me what you know of men, Angelina,” he said now, stroking the bright need between her legs, though he had already had her sweating, shaking, crying out his name.

  This time, when her hips began to move, he found her opening. And he began to work one of those blunt, surprisingly tough fingers into her depths of her body.

  She felt the stretching. The ache in her intensified.

  Her nipples were delirious points, and every time she breathed, the way her breasts jarred against the fabric of her bra made her want to jerk away. Or move closer.

  “I have never spent much time with men,” she managed to pant out. “I had a piano tutor, a boy from the village, but I learned all he had to teach me long ago.”

  “Did you play for him as you play for me?” Benedetto asked, his voice something like a croon—but much, much darker. “Did you open your legs like this? Did you let him slip between your thighs and taste your heat?”

  And even as he asked those questions, he added a second finger to the first. He began to stroke his way deep inside her, and the sensation made it impossible to think. Impossible to do anything but lift her hips to meet him, then try to get away, or both at once.

  His hand found a rhythm, but her hips took convincing.

  “N-No…” She wasn’t sure what, precisely, she was saying no to. His fingers plunged, withdrew. Then again. And again. A driving, relentless taking. “No one has ever touched me.”

  “Not even you?” he asked. “Late at night, tucked up beneath your covers in this tomb of a house? Do you not reach down, slip your fingers into all this molten greed, and make yourself shudder into life?”

  Angelina was bright red already. But the flash of heat that he kindled within her swept over her until she was making a keening, high-pitched cry. Her hips finally found their rhythm, thrusting against him wildly as her head fell back.

  And she thrashed there, not sure how anyone could survive these little deaths, much less the bigger one that waited for her.

  Not sure anyone should.

  “Look at me,” Benedetto ordered her.

  She realized she didn’t know how much time had passed. How long she had shaken like that, open and exposed. It took her a long while to crack open her eyes. She struggled to sit up because he was sitting too, regarding her in his typically sinful and wicked way.

  Angelina couldn’t tell if it was shame or desire that worked inside of her, then.

  Especially when he held her gaze, lifted the fingers he’d had inside her, and slowly licked them clean.

  She heard herself gasping for breath as if she was running. If she was running to escape him, the way she knew she should. She could crash through the windows into the gardens that her parents had let go to seed, and were now manicured and pruned. She could race into the summer night, leaving all this behind her.

&nb
sp; She could save herself and let her family do as they would.

  But she only gazed back at him, breathing too heavily, and did not move an inch to extricate from this man who held her tight in his grip—though he was not touching her at all.

  “I want you desperate, always,” he told her, his voice that same, serious command. “I want you wet and needy, Angelina. When I look at you, I want to know that while you look like an angel, here, where you are naked and only ever mine, you are nothing but heat and hunger.”

  “Do you mean…?”

  “I mean you should touch yourself. Taste yourself, if you wish. I insist. As long as you are always ready for me.”

  She understood what he meant by ready in a different way, now. Because it was one thing to read about sex. To read about that strange, inevitable joining. She understood the mechanics, but was not until now, so close to her wedding night, that she understood that it would be far more than merely mechanical.

  Benedetto’s head tilted slightly to one side. “Do you understand me?”

  “I do,” she said, and his smile was dark.

  “Then I do not think, little one, that you need to worry overmuch about murder.”

  That was the last time she’d seen him.

  She pushed herself upright in her bed this morning, her head as fuzzy as if she’d helped herself to the liquor in the drawing room when she didn’t dare. Not when she had Benedetto to contend with and needed all her wits about her.

  And it shocked her, as she looked around her room, that there was a lump in her throat as she accepted the reality that this room would no longer be hers by the time the sun set.

  Her bedchamber had already undergone renovations, like so much of the house had in the past month. It already looked like someone else’s. Plush, quietly elegant rugs were strewn about the floors, taking the chill away. She’d forgotten entirely that once, long ago, there had been curtains and drapes and a canopy over her bed, but they were all back now.

  He’d given her back her childhood so she would know exactly what she was leaving behind her when she left here today.

  She got up and headed to her bathroom, walking gingerly because she could feel the neediest, greediest part of her ripe and ready—just the way he wanted her. But she paused in the doorway. Because she could no longer hear the symphony of the old pipes.

  And when she turned on the water in her sink, it ran hot.

  Angelina ran herself a bath and climbed in, running her hands over her slick, soapy skin. Her breasts felt larger. Her belly was so sensitive she sucked in a breath through her teeth when she touched it.

  And when she ran her hands between her legs, to do as he’d commanded her, she was hotter than the water around her.

  Then hotter still as she imagined his face, dark and knowing, and made the water splash over the sides of her tub onto the floor.

  But too soon, then it was time to dress.

  Margrete bustled in, her sisters in her wake like sulky attendants. And for a long while, the three of them worked in silence. Petronella piled Angelina’s hair on top of her head and pinned in sparkling hints of stones that looked like diamonds. Dorothea fussed with her dress, fastening each of the parade of buttons that marched down her spine. Margrete called in Matrice, the notably less surly housemaid now that there was money, and the two of them packed Angelina’s things.

  Petronella did Angelina’s makeup. She made her younger sister’s face almost otherworldly, and did something with her battery of brushes and sponges that made Angelina’s eyes seemed bluer than the summer sky.

  Matrice left first, wheeling out Angelina’s paltry belongings with her.

  And there was no need to keep her hiding place a secret now, so Angelina let her mother and sisters watch as she walked over to the four posts of her bed, unscrewed one tall taper, and pulled out her grandmother’s pearls.

  Her sisters passed a dark look between them while Angelina fastened the dark, moody pearls around her neck and let the weight of them settle there, against her collarbone.

  And then her mother led her to the cheval glass.

  The dress had arrived without warning two weeks before the wedding. Angelina had tried it on and let the seamstress who’d arrived with it take her measurements and make her alterations. The dress had seemed simple. Pretty. Not too much, somehow.

  But now there was no escaping the dress or what it meant or what would become of her. She stared into the mirror, and a bride stared back.

  The dark pearls she’d looped around her neck looked like a bruise, but everything else was white. Flowing, frothy white, while her hair seemed silvery and gleaming and impossible on top of her head.

  She looked like what she was.

  A virgin sacrifice to a dark king.

  “You must ask him for what you want,” Margrete told her, her voice matter-of-fact, but her eyes dark. “A piano, for example.”

  “He has already promised me a Steinway.”

  Margrete moved the skirt of the wedding gown this way, then that. “You must not be afraid to make demands, but you must also submit to his.” Again, a touch of her dark gaze in the mirror. “No matter what, Angelina. Do you understand me? With a smile, if possible.”

  Angelina expected her sisters to chime in then, making arch comments about sex and their experiences, but they were silent. She looked in the glass and found them sitting on the end of her bed, looking…she would have said lost, if they had been anyone else.

  “I’m not afraid of his demands,” she said.

  It wasn’t until her mother’s gaze snapped to hers again that she realized perhaps she ought to have been.

  “You must remember that no matter what, you need only call and I will come to you,” Margrete said then, as if she was making her own vows.

  Angelina could not have been more shocked if her mother had shared sordid details of her own sexual exploits. “I… Really?”

  Margrete turned Angelina then, taking her by the shoulders so she could look into her face.

  “You’re not the first girl to be ransomed off for the benefit of her family,” Margrete said in a low, direct voice. “My father lost me in a card game.”

  There was a muffled sound of surprise from the bed. But their mother did not wait for that astonishing remark to sink in. Margrete lifted her chin, her fingers gripping Angelina’s shoulders so hard she was half worried they would leave a mark.

  “Life is what you make of it. Some parts are unpleasant, others regretful—but those are things you cannot control. You can always control yourself. You can school your reactions. You can master your own heart. And no one can ever take that from you, Angelina. No one.”

  “But Papa…” Angelina was turning over the idea of a card game and her severe grandfather in her head. “Papa was not a murderer.”

  “All men are murderers.” Margrete’s dark eyes flashed. “They take a daughter and make her a woman whether she wants it or not. They kill a girl to create a wife, then a mother. It’s all a question of degrees, child.”

  And with those words, Margrete took her youngest daughter by the hand and led her down the grand, restored stair to the ballroom, where she handed Angelina off to her father.

  The father who had won her mother, not wooed her, as Angelina had always found so hard to imagine.

  The father who did not look at the daughter he was sacrificing to line his pockets even once as he marched her down the aisle, then married her off to a monster.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BENEDETTO TOLERATED THE CEREMONY.

  Barely.

  God knew, he was tired of weddings.

  His angel walked toward him, spurred on to unseemly haste by her portly father, who was practically salivating at the opportunity to hand her over to Benedetto’s keeping. Or to her death. That Anthony Charteris had not required Benedetto to make any
statements or promises about Angelina’s well-being showed exactly what kind of man he was.

  Tiny. Puny. Greedy and selfish to his core.

  But then, Benedetto already knew that. If Anthony hadn’t been precisely that kind of man, he wouldn’t have come to Benedetto’s notice.

  As weddings went, this one was painless enough. There was no spectacle, no grand cathedral, no pageant. The words were said, and quickly, and the only ones he cared about came from Angelina’s mouth.

  “I do,” she said, her voice quiet, but not weak. “I will.”

  He slid a ring onto her hand and felt his own greed kick hard enough inside that he could hardly set himself apart from Charteris. What moral high ground did he think he inhabited?

  Soon, he told himself. Soon enough.

  The priest intoned the words that bound them, and then it was done.

  He was married for the seventh time. The last time, he dared to hope, though there was no reason to imagine he could make it so.

  There was no reason to imagine this would be anything but the same old grind. The lies, the distrust. In his head he saw a key in a lock, and a bare white room with nothing but the sea outside it.

  Oh, yes. He knew how this would end.

  But despite everything, something in him wished it could be otherwise. Her music sang in him, and though he knew better, it felt like hope.

  Once the ceremony was over and Angelina was his wife, he saw no reason to subject himself to Charteris or his family any longer. With any luck, neither he nor Angelina would ever see any of them again—for one reason or another.

  He left Angelina to the tender mercies of her mother and sisters for the last time. He cut through the small gathering, ignoring the guests that Charteris had invited purely to boast about his sudden reversal of fortune, something that was easy to do when they all shrank from him in fear. And when he reached the place where Anthony was holding court, he scared off the cluster around him with a single freezing stare.

  “My man of business will contact you,” he told his seventh father-in-law with as little inflection as possible. “He will be your point person from now on for anything involving the house or the settlement I’ve arranged. Personal communications from you will not be necessary. And will no longer be accepted.”