by Dani Collins
His, she thought again. Not hers.
Benedetto swung out of the car but Angelina stayed where she was. The drive from the airfield had been a blur of heat, need, and the endless explosion that was still reverberating through her bones, her flesh. Still, she could picture the car eating up the narrow road that flirted with the edge of the incoming tide on what was little more than a raised sandbar. Some of the waves had already been tipping over the edge of the bar to sneak across the road as Benedetto had floored his engine. It was only a matter of time before water covered the causeway completely.
And all the molten heat in the world, all of which was surely pooled between her legs even now, couldn’t keep her from recognizing the salient point here in a very different way than she had when she was merely thinking about Castello Nero instead of experiencing it herself.
Which was that once the tide rose, she would be stuck here on the island that was his castle.
Stranded here, in fact.
“How long is it between tides?” she had asked at the family dinner table one night while Benedetto was there, oozing superiority and brooding masculinity from where he lounged there at the foot of the table, his hot gaze on her.
Because she might have already betrayed herself where this man was concerned, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t read up on him.
“Six hours,” Dorothea had said stoutly.
“Or a lifetime,” Benedetto had replied, sounding darkly entertained.
She could feel her heart race again, the way it had when she’d been back in the relative safety of her father’s house. But it was much different here, surrounded by the stone walls and ramparts. Now that this was where she was expected to stay. High tide or low.
Come what may.
The door beside her opened, and he was there. Her forbiddingly beautiful husband, who was looking down at her with his mouth slightly curved in one corner and that knowing look in his too-dark eyes.
And his hand was no less rough or insinuating when he helped her from the sports car. No matter where he touched her, it seemed, she shuddered.
“Welcome home, wife,” he said.
The ancient castle loomed behind him, a gleaming stone facade that seemed to throb with portent and foreboding. It had been built to be a fortress. But to Angelina’s mind, that only meant it could make a good prison.
The summer sky was deceptively bright up above. The castle’s many towers and turrets would surely have punctured any clouds that happened by. Her heart still beat at her, a rushing, rhythm—
But in the next moment, Angelina understood that what she was hearing was the sea. The lap of tide against the rocks and the stone walls.
She didn’t know if that odd giddiness she felt then was terror or relief.
When she looked back at her husband, that same devil that had worked in her the first night he’d come to her father’s house brushed itself off. And sat up.
“Why do you call me ‘wife’ instead of my name?” she asked.
“Did you not marry me?” he asked lazily, giving the impression of lounging about when he was standing there before her, his hands thrust into the pockets of the dark bespoke suit he wore that made him look urbane and untamed at once. “Are you not my wife?”
“I rather thought it was because all the names run together,” Angelina said dryly. “There have been so many.”
She didn’t know what possessed her to say such a thing to the man who had rendered Margrete Charteris silent. Or how she dared.
But to her surprise, he laughed.
It was a rich, sensuous sound she knew too well from back in her father’s conservatory. Here, it seemed to echo back from the ancient stone walls, then wrapped as tightly around her as the bodice of the wedding dress she wore.
“I never forget a name.” He inclined his head to her. “Angelina.”
Hearing her name in his mouth made the echo of his dark laughter inside her seem to hum.
Benedetto took his time shifting his gaze from her then. He focused on something behind her, then nodded.
That was when Angelina realized they were not, as she’d imagined, alone out here in this medieval keep. She turned, her neck suddenly prickling, and saw an older woman standing there, dressed entirely in black as if in perpetual mourning. The housekeeper, if she had to guess, with a long, drawn face and a sharp, unfriendly gaze.
“This is your new mistress,” Benedetto told the woman, who only sniffed. “Angelina, may I present Signora Malandra, keeper of my castle.”
“Enchanté,” the older woman said in crisp, cut-glass French that did not match her Italian name.
“I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance,” Angelina murmured, and even smiled prettily, because Signora Malandra might have been off-putting, but she was no match for Margrete Charteris.
“Come,” said Angelina’s brand-new husband, once again fixing that dark gaze of his on her. “I will show you to the bedchamber.”
The bedchamber, Angelina noted. Not her bedchamber.
Her heart, having only just calmed itself, kicked into high gear again.
He did not release her hand. He pulled her with him as he moved, towing her through an archway cut into the heavy stone wall. Then he drew her into the interior of one of the oldest castles in Italy.
She still felt off balance from what had happened in his car, but she tried to take note of her surroundings. Should you have to run for your life, something dark inside her whispered. She tried her best to shove it aside—at least while she was in her husband’s presence.
Unlike the house where she’d grown up, Castello Nero was flush with wealth and luxury. Benedetto took her down corridors filled with marble, from the floors to the statues in the carved alcoves, to benches set here and there as if the expectation was that one might need to rest while taking in all the art and magnificence.
He laughed at her expression. “Did you expect a crumbling Gothic ruin?”
She blinked, disquieted at the notion he could read her so easily. “I keep imagining kings and queens around every tapestry, that’s all.”
“My family have held many titles over time,” he told her as they walked. Down long hallways that must have stretched the length of the tidal island. “A count here, a duke there, but nobility is much like the tide, is it not? In favor one century, forbidden the next.”
Angelina’s family considered itself old money rather than new, but they did not speak in terms of centuries. They were still focused on a smattering of generations. The difference struck her as staggering, suddenly.
“The castle has remained in the family no matter the revolutions, exiles, or abdications that have plagued Europe,” Benedetto said. “Titles were stripped, ancestors were beheaded, but in one form or another this island has been in my family since the fall of the Roman Empire. Or thereabouts.”
Angelina tried to imagine what it must feel like to be personally connected to the long march of so much history—and to have a family castle to mark the passage of all that time.
“Did you grow up here?” she asked.
Because it was impossible to imagine. She couldn’t conceive of children running around in this shining museum, laughing or shrieking in the silent halls. And more, she couldn’t picture Benedetto ever having been a child himself. Much less engaging in anything like an ungainly adolescence. And certainly not here, in a swirl of ancient armor and sumptuous tapestries, depicting historical scenes that as far as Angelina knew, might have been the medieval version of photo albums and scrapbooks.
“In a sense,” he replied.
He had led her into a gallery, the sort she recognized all too well. It was covered with formal, painted portraits, she didn’t have to lean in to read the embossed nameplates to understand that she was looking at centuries of his ancestors. The sweep of history as represented by various Franceschis across time. From m
onks to noblemen to what looked entirely too much like a vampire in one dark painting.
Benedetto gazed at the pictures on the wall, not at her. “My parents preferred their own company and my grandfather thought children were useless until properly educated. When my parents died my grandfather—and Signora Malandra—were forced to take over what parenting was required at that point. I was a teenager then and luckily for us all, I was usually at boarding school. It felt like home. I was first sent there at five.”
Angelina had never given a single thought to the parenting choices she might make one day, yet she knew, somehow, that she did not have it in her to send such a tiny child away like that. Off to the tender mercies of strangers. Something in her chilled at the thought.
“Did you like boarding school?” she asked.
Benedetto stopped before a portrait that she guessed, based on the more modern clothing alone, might have been his parents. She studied the picture as if she was looking for clues. The woman had dark glossy hair and a heart-stoppingly beautiful face. She sat demurely in a grand chair, dressed in a gown of royal blue. Behind her chair stood a man who looked remarkably like Benedetto, though he had wings of white in his dark hair. And if possible, his mouth looked crueler. His nose more like a Roman coin.
“There was no question of liking it or not liking it,” Benedetto said, gazing at the portrait. Then he turned that gaze on her, and she found the way his eyes glittered made her chest feel constricted. “It was simply the reality of my youth. My mother always felt that her duties were in the providing of the heir. Never in the raising of him.”
“And did… Did your parents…?”
Angelina didn’t even know what she was asking. She’d done what due diligence she could over the past month. Meaning she had Googled her husband-to-be and his family to see what she could find. Mostly, as this castle seemed to advertise, it seemed the Franceschi family was renowned for wealth and periodic cruelty stretching back to the dawn of time. In that, however, she had to admit that they were no different from any other storied European family. It was only Benedetto—in modern times, at any rate—who had a reputation worse than that of any other pedigreed aristocrat.
His mother had been considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. She and Benedetto’s father had run in a glittering, hard-edged crowd, chasing and throwing parties in the gleaming waters of the Côte d’Azur or the non-touristy parts of the Caribbean. Or in sprawling villas in places like Amalfi, Manhattan, or wherever else the sparkling people were.
“Did my parents regret their choices in some way?” Benedetto laughed, as if the very idea was a great joke. “How refreshingly earnest. The only thing my parents ever agreed upon was a necessity of securing the Franceschi line. Once I was born, their duties were discharged and they happily returned to the things they did best. My father preferred pain to pleasure. And as my mother was a martyr, if only to causes that suited her self-importance, they were in many ways a match made in heaven.”
Angelina’s mouth was too dry. “P-Pain to pleasure?”
Benedetto’s eyes gleamed. “He was a celebrated sadist. And not only in the bedroom.”
Angelina didn’t know what expression she must have had on her face, but it made Benedetto laugh again. Then he drew her behind him once more, leading her out of this gallery filled with black Franceschi eyes and dark secrets, and deeper into the castle.
“Why is that something you know about your own father?” she managed to ask, fighting to keep her voice from whispering off into nothingness. “Surely a son should be protected from such knowledge.”
Benedetto’s laugh, then, was more implied than actual. But Angelina could feel it shiver through her all the same.
“Even if my parents had exhibited a modicum of modesty, which they did not, the paparazzi were only too happy to fill in the details before and after their deaths. Barring that, I can’t tell you the number of times one or other of their friends—and by friends, I mean rivals, enemies, former lovers, and compatriots—thought they might as well sidle up to me with some ball or other and share. In excruciating detail.” He glanced down at her, his mouth curved. “They are little better than jackals, these highborn creatures who spend their lives throwing fortunes down this or that drain. Every last one of them.”
“Including you?” She dared to ask.
That curve in the corner of his mouth took on a bitter cast. “Especially me.”
Together they climbed a series of stairs until they finally made it to a hall made of windows. Modern windows in place of a wall on one side, all of them looking out over the sea. Angelina could see that the wind had picked up, capping the waves in white, which should have added to the anxiety frothing inside her. Instead, the sight soothed her.
The sea carried on, no matter what happened within these walls.
It made her imagine that she might, too.
Despite everything she knew to the contrary.
“This is the private wing of the castle,” Benedetto told her as they walked beside the windows. “The nursery is at one end and the master suite far on the other end, behind many walls and doors, so the master of the house need never disturb his sleep unless he wishes it.”
“Your parents did not come to you?” Angelina asked, trying and failing to keep that scandalized note from her voice.
“My provincial little bride.” He sounded almost fond, though his dark gaze glittered. “That is what nannies are for, of course. My parents held regular audiences with the staff to keep apprised of my progress, I am told. But Castello Nero is no place for sticky hands and toddler meltdowns. I would be shocked to discover that your parents’ shoddy little château was any different.”
That was a reasonable description of the house, and still she frowned. “My parents were not naturally nurturing, certainly,” Angelina said, choosing her words carefully. “But they were present and in our lives.”
“No matter what, you need only call and I will come to you,” Margrete had said fiercely before the wedding ceremony today. It had shocked her.
But Margrete had always been there. She might have been disapproving and stern, but she’d always been involved in her daughters’ lives. Some of Angelina’s earliest memories involved reading quietly at her mother’s feet, or laboriously attempting to work a needle the way Margrete could with such seeming effortlessness.
It had never occurred to her that she would ever look back on her childhood fondly.
Of all the dark magic Benedetto had worked in the last month, that struck Angelina as the most disconcerting. Even as he towed her down yet another hall festooned with frescoes, priceless art, and gloriously thick rugs.
“You will find a variety of salons, an extensive private library, and an entertainment center along this hall.” Benedetto nodded to doors as he passed them. “Any comfort you can imagine, you will find it here.”
“Am I to be confined to this hall?”
“The castle is yours to explore,” her husband said. “But you must be aware that at times, the castle and grounds are open to the public. Signora Malandra leads occasional tours. Because of course, there is no shortage of interest in both this castle and its occupant.”
“But…”
Once more, she didn’t know what on earth she meant to say.
Benedetto’s dark eyes gleamed as if he did. “Foolish, I know. But far be it from me not to profit off my own notoriety.”
He paused in the direct center of the long hall that stretched down the whole side of the castle. There was a door there that looked like something straight out of the middle ages. A stout wooden door with great steel bars hammered across it.
“This door opens into a stairwell,” Benedetto told her. He did not open the door. “The stairwell goes from this floor to the tower above. And it is the only part of the castle that is strictly forbidden to you.”
“Forbidden?” Angelina blinked, and shifted so she could study the door even more closely. “Why? Is the tower unsafe?”
His fingers were on her chin, pulling her face around to his before she even managed to process his touch.
“You must never go into this tower,” he said, and there was no trace of mockery on his face. No curve to that grim mouth. Only that blazing heat in his dark eyes. “No matter what, Angelina, you must never open this door.”
His fingers on her chin felt like a fist around her throat.
“What will happen if I do?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
“Nothing good, Angelina.” The darkness that emanated from him seemed to take over the light pouring in from outside. Until she could have sworn they stood in shadows. At night. “Nothing good at all.”
She felt chastened and significantly breathless as Benedetto pulled her along again. Hurrying her down the long corridor until they reached the far end. He led her inside, into a master suite that was larger than the whole of the family wing of her parents’ house, put together. It boasted a private dining room, several more salons and studies, its own sauna, its own gym, a room entirely devoted to an enormous bathtub, extensive dressing rooms, and then, finally, the bedchamber.
Inside, there was another wall of windows. Angelina had seen many terraces and balconies throughout the suite, looking out over the sea in all directions. But not here. There was only the glass and a steep drop outside, straight down into the sea far below.
There was a large fireplace on the far wall, with a seating area arranged in front of it that Angelina tried desperately to tell herself was cozy. But she couldn’t quite get there. The fireplace was too austere, the stone too grim.
And the only other thing in the room was that vast, elevated bed.
It was draped in dark linens, gleaming a deep red that matched the ring she wore on her finger. Like blood, a voice inside her intoned.
Unhelpfully.
Four dark posts rose toward the high stone ceiling, and she had the sudden sensation that she needed to cling to one of them to keep herself from falling. That being in that bed, with nothing but the bloodred bedding and the sky and sea pressing down upon her, would make her feel as if she was catapulting through space.