by Dani Collins
“Yes, yes,” Charteris brayed pompously, already florid of cheek and glassy of eye, which told Benedetto all he needed to know about how this man had lost the fortune he’d been born with and the one he’d married into, as well. “I was thinking we might well have a ball—”
“You may have whatever you wish,” Benedetto said with a soft menace that might as well have been a growl. “You may throw a ball every weekend. You may build a château in every corner of France, for all I care. The money is yours to do with as you wish. But what you will not have is any familiarity with me. Or any access to your daughter without my permission. Do you understand?”
He could see the older man process the rebuke like the slap it was, and then, just as quickly, understand that it would not affect his wallet. He did not actually shrug. But it was implied.
“I wish you and my daughter every happiness,” Charteris replied.
He raised his glass. Benedetto inclined his head, disgusted.
And then he went to retrieve his seventh wife.
As he drew closer to the little knot she stood in with her mother and sisters, he felt something pierce his chest at the sight of her. Gleaming. Angelic.
All that, and the way she played the piano made him hard.
And that was nothing next to her taste.
Something in him growled like the sort of monster he tried so hard to keep hidden in public. Because people so readily saw all kinds of fiends when they looked at him—why should he confirm their worst suspicions?
“Come,” he said, when his very appearance set them all to wide-eyed silence. “It is time to take you to my castle, wife.”
He watched the ripple of that sentence move through the four of them. He could see the words Butcher of Castello Nero hanging in the air around them.
And whatever he thought of Anthony Charteris, whatever impressions he’d gleaned of these women over the past month, they all paled in unison now.
Because everyone knew, after all, what happened to a Franceschi bride. Everyone knew the fate that awaited her.
For the first time, the things others thought about him actually…got to him.
Benedetto held out his hand.
The Charteris sisters remained white-faced. Their mother was made of stouter stuff, however, and the look she fixed on him might have been loathing, for all the good it would do her.
But it was Angelina who mattered. Angelina whose cheeks did not pale, but flushed instead with a brighter color he knew well by now.
Angelina, his seventh bride, who murmured something soothing in the direction of her mother and sisters and then slid her delicate hand into his.
Then she let him lead her from her father’s house, never to return.
Not if he had anything to say about it.
He assisted her into the back of the gleaming black car that waited for them, joining her in the back seat. He lounged there, as the voluminous skirts of her soft white wedding gown flowed in every direction, like seafoam.
Benedetto found he liked thinking of her that way, like a mermaid rising from the deep. A creature of story and fable.
“Why have you waited to…seal our bargain until our wedding night?” she asked as the car pulled away from the front of the old house that was already starting to look like itself again. Its old glory restored for the small price of Angelina’s life.
What a bargain, he thought darkly.
Of course, neither Angelina nor her noxious father had any idea of the bargain he intended to pose to her directly—but he was getting ahead of himself.
And if this time was different—if he had found himself captivated by this woman in ways he did not fully understand and had never experienced before—well. He was sure he would pay a great penance for that, too, before long.
But she was gazing at him, waiting for him to answer her.
“It is customary to wait, is it not?” Because he was happy to have her think him deeply traditional. For now. He watched her, but she did not turn around to watch her life disappear behind her. So she did not see her sisters, clutching each other’s hands as they stood at the top of the stairs, staring after her. She did not see her mother in the window, her face twisting. She did not note the absence of her father from these scenes of despair. “Some things have fallen out of favor in these dark times, I have no doubt, but I hope a white wedding will always be in fashion.” He allowed his mouth to curve. “Or a slightly off-white wedding, in this case. It is your piano playing, I fear. It undoes all my good intentions.”
Angelina looked at him, her blue eyes searching his face though her own looked hot. “You have had many lovers, if the tabloids are to be believed.”
“First, you must never believe the tabloids. They are paid to write fiction, not fact. But second, I have always kept my affairs and my wives separate.”
She cleared her throat. “And now? Will you continue in the same vein?”
He picked up her hand, and toyed with the ring he’d put there, that great, gleaming red ruby that shone like blood in the summer light that fell in through the car windows. “What is it you are asking me?”
“Do you conduct your affairs while you’re married?” She sat straighter, though she didn’t snatch her hand back from him. “Will one of my duties be to look the other way?”
“Are you asking me if I plan to be faithful? Less than an hour after we said our vows before God, man, and your father’s creditors?”
“I am. Do you?”
Again, he was struck by how different she was from the rest of his brides—none of whom had seemed to care who he touched, or when. It was as if Angelina had cast a spell on him. Enchanted him, despite everything.
“As faithful as you are to me, Angelina.” His voice was darker than it should have been, but it was one more thing he couldn’t seem to control around her. “That is how faithful I will be to you in return.”
This time he was certain he could see those words, like another set of vows, fill up the car like the voluminous skirts she wore.
“That’s easy enough then,” she replied with that tartness that surprised and delighted him every time she dared show it. “I have only ever loved one thing in my life. My piano. As long as you provide me with one to play as I wish, as you promised, why shouldn’t I keep the promises I made to you?”
He lifted her hand to his mouth, and then, idly, sucked one of her fingers into the heat of his mouth.
“I’ve never understood cheating,” she continued, her voice prim, though he could see the way she trembled. He could taste it. “Surely it cannot be that difficult to keep a vow. And if it is, why make it in the first place?”
“Ah, yes. The certainty of youth.” He applied more suction, and she shuddered beautifully. “You know very little of passion, I think. It has a habit of making a mockery of those who think in terms of black and white.”
Her eyes were much too blue. “Have you cheated on your wives before?”
And he had expected silence. That was typical. Or if there were questions, this being Angelina who seemed so shockingly unafraid of him, perhaps more pointed questions about murderers or mysterious deaths. Or euphemisms that didn’t quite mention either. But not this. Not what he was tempted to imagine was actual possessiveness on her part. He noted that the hand he was not holding was balled into a fist.
Benedetto would have sworn that he was far too jaded for passion to make a mockery of him, and yet here he was. Hoping for things that could never be.
“I have never had the opportunity to grow bored,” he replied, deliberately. With no little edge to his voice. “They were all gone too soon.”
He watched her swallow hard. He watched the column of her neck move.
He wished he could watch himself and this dance of his as closely.
“You have not told me your expectations,” she said, shifting
her gaze away from him and aiming it somewhere in front of her. He found he missed the weight of her regard. “You’re obviously a very wealthy man. Many wealthy men have staff to take on the position normally held by a wife.”
“I assure you that I do not intend to take my staff to my bed.”
He saw the lovely red color on her cheeks brighten further but she pushed on, and her carefully even voice did not change. “I’m not referring to your bed. I’m referring to the duties involved in running a great house. Or in your case, a castle.”
“You are welcome to engage my housekeeper in battle for supremacy, Angelina. But I warn you, Signora Malandra is a fearsome creature indeed. And jealously guards what she sees as hers.”
His bride looked at him then, narrowly. “Does that include you?”
Benedetto shrugged, keeping his face impassive though he was once again pleased with her possessiveness. “She’s been with my family for a very long time. You could argue that in many ways, she raised me. So yes, I suppose she does see me as hers. But she is not my lover, if that is what you are asking.”
He didn’t actually laugh at that. Or the very notion of suggesting such a thing where his housekeeper could hear it.
Angelina managed to give the impression of bristling without actually doing so. “It had not occurred to me that you might install your lovers under the same roof as your wife. Though perhaps, given your infamy, I should anticipate such things.”
“I will not do anything of the kind,” he drawled, trying to sound lazy enough that the car would not reverberate with the truth in his words. “But whether you believe that or not will be up to you.”
“You expect me to be jealous?”
“I’m not afraid of jealousy, Angelina. On the contrary. I do not understand why it is considered a virtue to pretend the heart is not a greedy organ when we can all feel it pump and clench in our chests. Lust starts there. And where there is lust, where there is need and want and longing, there will always be jealousy.” He shrugged. “This is the curse of humanity, no? It is better to embrace the darkness than to pretend it does not or cannot exist.”
“Jealousy is destructive,” she said, again in that matter-of-fact tone he suspected was a product of her youth.
“That depends what you are building,” he replied. “And whether or not you find beauty in the breaking of it.”
And then he laughed, darkly and too knowingly, as she reddened yet again.
It was not a long drive to the private airfield where his plane waited for them. Once there, he escorted her up the stairs and then into the jet’s luxurious cabin.
Angelina looked around at the ostentatious display of his wealth and power and swallowed, hard. “Are my things here? I can change—”
“I think not,” he said, with a quiet relish. “You will remain in that gown until I remove it myself, little one.”
Again, that glorious flush that made her glow. Her lips fell open while her pulse went wild in her throat. “But… But how long…?”
“We will have a wedding night,” he assured her, though wedding nights with him were rarely what his brides imagined. “Were you worried?”
“Of course not,” she said.
But she was lying. He could hear the music she played in his head. He could remember all too well those steamy evenings in that barren room that she’d filled with art and longing and her own sweet cries of need and release.
He was entirely too tempted to indulge himself—because he couldn’t recall the last time he’d been tempted at all.
Benedetto tilted his head slightly as he regarded her, not surprised when that bright glow crept down her neck. “You have my permission to please yourself as you wish if you find you cannot wait. No need to lock yourself away.” He indicated one of the plush leather seats in the cabin. “Pull up your skirts, bare yourself to me, and show me your pleasure, Angelina.”
He could hear her ragged breath as she took that in. “I… I can’t.”
Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Then you must suffer, wife. And you must wait.”
And he watched her almost idly as he handled matters of business on the short flight. She sat in her seat as if it was made of nails, shifting this way, and that. Clearly squirming with anticipation, though he supposed she might lie to them both about that. Too bad it was stamped all over her.
He couldn’t wait to indulge himself. He, who usually preferred his wedding nights be more theater than anything else.
Why couldn’t he stick to the script with this woman?
They landed in Italy on another private airfield not far from the coast where the Franceschis had lived for centuries. He ushered her into another car that waited for them, gleaming in the afternoon sun, but this time he drove it himself.
“We must hurry if we wish to make the tide,” he told her.
And the dress she wore barely fit into the bucket seats of the low-slung sports car. But the helpless, needy sound he heard her make when he put the car into gear could only be a harbinger of things to come.
If he let it.
And oh, how he wanted to let it. He had already tasted her—and he couldn’t seem to get past that. He couldn’t seem to keep his head together when he was near her. He couldn’t remember his duties, and that spelled disaster.
He knew all that, and still, all he could focus on was her reaction to his car.
He could imagine the way the low, throaty growl of the engine worked its way through her where she sat. But even if he couldn’t, the way she began to breathe—too heavily—told him what he needed to know.
She might not like him. She might want him for the concert piano he’d had made especially for her. She might choose to leave him like all the rest, and soon.
But she wanted him.
Desperately.
There was an honesty in that. And it was new. Completely different from the six who’d come before her.
Benedetto found he was less interested in her sensual suffering than he probably should have been.
“I cannot wait, Angelina,” he told her now. “I want you to lift your wedding gown to your waist, as if we were back in your stark conservatory.”
And he could tell the state she was in when she didn’t argue. Or stammer. Or even blush again.
He shifted the car into second gear as he raced down the old roads toward the coastline his grandparents had kept undeveloped, even when that had required they fight off “progress” with their own hands, and watched as she obeyed him.
So quickly her hands were shaking.
“Good girl,” he murmured when she’d bared all the soft, silken flesh of her thighs to his gaze. He could only glance at all that warm lushness as he drove, faster and faster, but it was enough. It made him so hard he ached with it. “Touch yourself. I want you to do whatever you need to do to come, Angelina. Fast and hard. Now.”
She let out a sound that could have been a sob. A moan.
But he knew when she’d found her own heat, because she made a sound that was as full of relief as it was greed.
It made his sex pulse.
And he drove too fast down the coastal road he knew by heart. Then he sped up as he hit the treacherous drive that stretched out into the water that rose higher and higher by the moment as the tide came in and began to swallow it whole.
“Come,” he ordered her.
She rocked her hips, making mindless, glorious little sounds. He could hear the greediness of her flesh, and a quick glance beside him found her with her head thrown back and her hands buried between her legs. The summer afternoon light streamed into the sports car, bouncing off the water and making her so bright, she nearly burned.
So beautiful, it cut at him.
So perfectly innocent, it should have shamed him, but it didn’t. Not when he wanted her this much.
&
nbsp; If he hadn’t been a monster already, this would have made him one, he was sure of it.
Benedetto heard her breath catch. Her head rocked back, and he was sure that he could feel her heat as if it was his hands on her, clutched deep in her molten core. That hot rush of sweet, wet fire as she took herself over the edge.
She shook and she sobbed, and he drove faster. There was light and water and his seventh bride, coming on command. And when her sobs had settled into a harsh panting, he reached over. He took one of her hands, and sucked her fingers into his mouth because that heat was all for him. It was his.
She was his, and no matter if that damned them both, he didn’t have it in him to stop this madness. He couldn’t.
“Open your eyes, Angelina,” he told her then, another soft order. “We are here.”
That was how he drove her into Castello Nero, the ancestral home of his cursed and terrible clan. Flushed and wanton, wet and greedy, the taste of her in his mouth and that wild, ravaged look on her face.
Welcome home, little one, Benedetto thought darkly.
And then he delivered them both into their doom.
CHAPTER SIX
ANGELINA BARELY HAD the presence of mind to shove her skirts back down, letting the yards and yards of soft white fabric flow back into place. To preserve whatever was left of her modesty.
Though she almost laughed at the thought of modesty after…that. After the past month, after this drive—what was left for him to take?
But, of course, she knew the answer to that.
And imagining what she had to lose here in this place made it difficult to breathe.
The castle keep rose on all sides, the stone gleaming in the summer afternoon light. The sunshine made it seem magical instead of malevolent, and she tried her best to cling to that impression.
But her body felt like his, not hers. Even her breath seemed to saw in and out of her in an alien rhythm.