by Dani Collins
In all this time, all throughout this longest month, he had never dislodged his clothing or allowed her to do so.
“Are you horribly scarred?” she’d asked him once, feeling peevish with lust and longing and that prickling fear beneath. She’d been stretched out on her piano bench in the conservatory back home, after he’d buried his face between her thighs and made her scream.
As usual.
Benedetto had only smiled, drawing her attention back to that mouth of his and the things it could do. “None of my scars are external.”
And now the first stars were appearing in the sky outside. He blocked them all out and somehow made them brighter at the same time, because he was perfect. He was everything.
She had never seen a naked man in real life. She had never imagined that all the various parts that she’d seen in pictures could seem so different in person. Because she knew what it felt like to be in his arms and she knew what it felt like to taste him in her mouth.
But Benedetto naked was something else. Something better. He looked as if he’d been fashioned by a sculptor obsessed with male beauty, but she knew that he would be hot to the touch. And more, unlike all the marble statues she’d ever seen—many of them here—there was dark hair on his chest. A fascinatingly male trail that led to a part of him she’d felt against her leg, but had never seen.
“What big eyes you have,” he said, sounding dark and mocking.
Angelina jerked her gaze up over the acres and acres of his fine male chest, all those ridges and planes that made her fingers itch. To touch. To taste. To make hers, in some way, the way he had already taken such fierce possession of her.
“I understand the mechanics,” she confessed. “But still…”
“Your body knows what to do.” He came down over her again, and she hissed out a breath because it was so much different, now. Bare flesh against bare flesh. Her softness against all the places where he was so impossibly hard. Everything in her hummed. “And so do I.”
And then, once again, she felt as if she was the piano.
Because he played her like one, wringing symphonies out of her with every touch, every brush of his mouth over parts of her body she would have said were better ignored.
He flipped her over onto her stomach, right when she thought that she might simply explode out of her own skin—
And he laughed in that dark, stirring way of his, there against the nape of her neck. Then he started all over again.
Angelina…lost track.
Of herself. Of him. Of what, exactly, he was doing.
All she could seem to do was feel.
He slipped his fingers between her legs and stroked her until she shattered and fell apart, but he didn’t stop. There was no ending, no beginning. There was only the rise and fall. The fire that burned in both of them and between them, flickering one moment, then roaring to life the next.
And all the while Angelina couldn’t seem to get past the feeling that all of this was exactly how it was supposed to be. All of this was right.
It was full dark outside when Benedetto turned her over again. He stretched her arms up over her head and finally, finally, settled himself between her thighs. She could feel him, a hard ridge of perfect male arousal where she was nothing but a soft melting.
She was shuddering. She thought maybe there was moisture on her face. But all Angelina could care about was the blunt head of his masculinity that she could feel pressing into her.
Not exactly gently. And yet not roughly, either.
It was a pinch she forgot about almost as soon as it happened followed by a relentless, masterful thrust, and then Benedetto was seated fully inside her.
And that time, when Angelina burst into flame and shattered into a million new pieces, each more ragged than the last, she screamed herself hoarse.
Benedetto was laughing again, dark and delirious and too beautiful to bear, as he finally began to move.
And all her notions about piano music and symphonies shattered.
Because this was far more physical than she could possibly have imagined. Her body gripped him. He worked himself into her, then out. His chest was a delicious abrasion against hers, she could feel the press of his hipbones with every thrust, and there was heat and breath and so much more than the things she’d read in books.
He dropped his hard, huge body against hers and Angelina thought that should smother her, surely. But instead she bloomed.
As if her body was made to be a cradle, to hold him between her thighs. Just like this.
He bent his head to hers and took her mouth again, so that she was being taken with the same sheer mastery in two places at once.
And she understood that there was no place he did not claim her.
Inside and out, she was his.
She could feel that ring of his on her finger and that hard male part of him thrust deep inside her body.
And it seemed to her that her pulse became a chant. His. His.
His.
And then, finally, Angelina tore her mouth from his. She gripped the fierce cords of his neck with her hands, and found herself staring deep into his dark, ferocious gaze.
Into eternity, she was sure of it.
His.
And when she exploded into fire and fury, claimed and reborn, he cried out a word that could have been her name, and followed.
* * *
Angelina was hardly aware of it when he moved. She came back to herself, disoriented and gloriously replete, as he lifted her up into his arms.
She was aware of it as he carried her down the tower’s narrow stair, high against his chest with only her hair trailing behind them. As naked as the day they were born.
Maybe she should have been embarrassed, she thought idly. For she knew full well that just because a staff was unseen did not mean they were not witnessing the goings-on of the house.
But how could she care if there were eyes on them when she felt like this? More beautiful than she ever had been. Perfect in his arms.
Right, straight through.
And so she looped her arms around his neck, rested her head against his shoulder, and said nothing as he took her back to that master suite. She did nothing but feel as he carried her into that room she’d seen before that contained only a massive, luxurious tub with a view straight on to forever.
Benedetto put her down carefully beside it so she could hold on if her knees gave way. They did, and he smiled, and then he set about drawing the bath himself. Soon enough, the water was steaming. And the salts he threw in it give the water a silky feel when she dipped her fingers in.
He said nothing. He only indicated with his chin that she should climb into the hot water, so she did.
Then she sat there, relaxing against the sloping side, the warm water like an embrace. The heat holding her the way he had. She thought he would climb in with her, but instead, with a long, dark look she had no hope of reading, Benedetto left her there to soak.
Something curled around inside her, low and deep, so she stayed where she was to indulge it. The water felt too good. She was too warm, and outside the sea danced beneath the stars, and flirted with her. She could not bring herself to climb out.
Angelina didn’t think she slept, there in a bathtub where she could so easily slip beneath the water to her death—in a place that hinted at death around every corner. But she was still startled when there were hands on her again, and she was suddenly being lifted up and out of the warm water.
But in the next moment, she knew it was him. And the knowledge soothed her.
It felt like a dream, so she didn’t really react as Benedetto wrapped her in a towel and set about drying her himself. She had tied her hair in a knot on top of her head and she could feel the curls from the heat, framing her face, in a way she had never liked—but she did not have the energy to
do anything about it.
She blinked, realizing that he had showered. She could smell the soap on him. And all he wore now were a pair of low-slung trousers. Somehow that felt more intimate than his nakedness.
For the first time, Angelina actually felt shy in this man’s presence.
The absurdity did not escape her, after the things he’d done to her in her father’s house. The things he’d done to her tonight. She should have been immune to him by now. Instead, he toweled her dry and then wrapped her in the softest, most airy robe she had ever felt in her life, and she suddenly felt awkward. Exposed.
She thought he would say something then. The way he looked at her seemed to take her apart, his dark eyes so unreadable and his mouth in that serious, somber line. But he didn’t. He ushered her from the room, with a certain hint of something very nearly ceremonial that made her heart thud inside her chest.
“Where we going?” she asked.
And it was times like these, when she was walking next to him—close enough that they could have been hand in hand if they were different people—that she was more aware of him than was wise. How tall he was. How beautiful and relentlessly male.
How dark and mysterious, even though he wore so little.
And she was forced to confront the fact that it wasn’t the things he wore that made him seem so dangerous. So outrageously powerful. It was just him.
The master of Castello Nero. The boogeyman of Europe.
Her husband. Benedetto.
“You did not think that was the sum total of your wedding night, I hope.” There was the faintest hint of a smile on his hard face. “We have miles to go, indeed.”
That didn’t make her heart thud any less.
Angelina followed him down the hall inside the grand suite and noticed that all the doors stood ajar. All the doors in the castle were wide open, now that she thought of it, save the one he’d showed her out in the hallway.
She thought of reinforced steel and heavy oak. Hidden stairs to a secret tower.
And she didn’t know why it made her pulse pick up.
“Do you live here now?” she asked. His brow arched, as if to say, We are here, are we not? She could almost hear the words and felt herself flush, ridiculously. But she pushed on. “I mean to say, after spending all that time in boarding school. And knowing that your own parents did not spend much time here, from what you said. When did you move back yourself?”
“After my grandfather died,” he replied. Not in the sort of tone that invited further comments.
“Were these his rooms?”
But she already knew the answer. She eyed a portrait on the wall of an old man gripping a cane with a serpent’s head as its handle, while staring down from his great height with imperious eyes that look just like Benedetto’s.
“When I was young,” Benedetto said, his voice sounding something slightly less than frozen through, “my grandfather entertained me for at least one hour every Sunday in his drawing room here. He asked me fierce and probing questions about my studies, my life, my hopes and goals, and then explained to me why each and every one of them was wrong. Or needed work.”
He stopped at a different door, and beckoned for Angelina to precede him.
“He was a terrifying, judgmental, prickly old man who would have been a king in a simpler time. He was never kind when he could be cutting, never smiled when he could scowl, and I miss him to this day.”
Angelina was so startled by the indication that Benedetto had emotions or feelings of any kind that she almost stumbled on her way into the room. And it took her a moment to realize that the reason she didn’t recognize it outright as the private dining room she’d seen when she’d first walked into the suite was because it was transformed.
There were candles lighting up the table, and clearly not, as in her parents’ house, because of worries about an impending electric bill. Because out in the hallway, lights were blazing. The candles were here to set a mood.
The table was filled with platters of food. And not, she thought she drew closer, just any food. A feast. There were only two table settings, straddling the corner of the highly polished, deep mahogany table, but there was food enough for an army.
“This looks like…”
But she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“It looks like a celebration, I hope,” Benedetto said stiffly. He pulled out the chair that was clearly meant to be hers, and she almost thought she saw a hint of something like apprehension on his face. Could it be…uncertainty? Her heart stuttered. “I stole you away from your wedding reception. I offer this instead.”
And suddenly, Angelina found the world around her little bit blurry. She sat in the chair he indicated, jolting slightly when her bottom found the chair beneath her because she was tender. Gloriously, marvelously tender between her legs.
He had given her a perfect piano and let her play, so that her introduction to her new life—her new home, her new status, her possible dark fate—was draped in a veil of music.
He had taken her down on that chaise and made a woman of her.
Her chest felt tight because he had made her wedding feast, and her heart. Her traitorous, treacherous, giddily hopeful heart beat out a rhythm that was much too close to joy for the seventh wife of the Butcher of Castello Nero.
Angelina could only hope it wouldn’t be the death of her.
Literally.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE DID NOT ask him directly if he’d killed his wives.
How they’d died, yes. Not whether or not he was guilty of killing them. Not whether he’d done the dark deeds with his own two hands.
And Benedetto couldn’t decide, as they sat and ate the wedding feast he’d had his staff prepare for them, if he thought that was evidence that she was perfect for him or the opposite.
All he knew was that he was in trouble.
That he had already treated her differently than any other woman, and all other wives.
He kept expecting something—anything—involving this woman to be regular. Ordinary. But instead, she was incomparable to anyone or anything, and he had no idea what to do with that.
Even now, when she was scrubbed clean, bathed so that all her makeup was gone and her hair was merely in a haphazard knot on the top of her head, she was more radiant than she had been at their wedding ceremony.
And he didn’t think he could bear it.
“You look quite angry with your crab cakes,” she pointed out in that faintly dry tone of hers. “Or is it the company that does not suit?”
“Tell me about the piano,” he said, instead of answering her question. “You are quite talented. Why did you never think to leave that ruin of a château and do something with it?”
“I thought of nothing else.” And she actually grinned at him. At him. “There was no money for necessities, much less ambition.”
“I do not understand,” Benedetto said, with perhaps more ill-temper than necessary. “Surely your father could have avoided most of the unpleasantness in his life if he had made money from you and your piano. Rather than, say, trying his hand at high stakes card games he was doomed to lose before he walked in the room.”
And this woman, this unexpected angel who should never have agreed to become his wife, grinned even wider.
“But to do so, you understand, he would first have to believe that that infernal racket I was forever making could benefit him in some way. Instead, he often asked me why it was I could not entertain myself more quietly while sucking off the family teat, quote unquote. The way my sisters did.”
Benedetto couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. She was grinning as she waved away her father’s indifference to her talent. And while she did, she applied herself to each course of the feast he had ordered with equal abandon.
He liked her hunger. He wanted to feed it.
All her hungers.
“It sounds as if you were kept in a prison,” he told her, his voice in a growl. “But you do not seem the least bit concerned by this.”
“Because you freed me.”
And there was laughter in her voice as she said it. In her eyes, too, making the blue into a sparkle that was brighter than the candles.
A sparkle that faded the longer she gazed at him.
“It is a long, long time indeed since I have been viewed as the better of two options,” he said darkly.
“People always tell you the devil you know is better,” Angelina said, a wisdom beyond her years where that sparkle had been, then. “But I have never thought so. There’s more scope for growth in the unknown. There has to be.”
“How would you know such a thing? Did they teach it in the convent?”
Again, her lips moved into something wry. “Ask me in three months and two days or so.”
And despite himself, Benedetto laughed.
What was the harm in pretending, just for a little while, that this was real? That it could be precisely what it seemed. No more, no less. Would that really be the worst thing that ever happened?
He suspected he knew the answer. But he ignored it.
When they finished eating, he led her out onto one of the balconies, this one equipped with a fire pit built into the stone, benches all around, and a hot tub on one end with nothing before it but the sea. He could imagine winter nights in that tub, the two of them wound around each other—
But he stopped himself, because she wouldn’t be here when winter came.
He watched as she stood at the rail, the sea breeze playing with her hair, making it seem more like spun silver than before.
Or making him feel like spun silver himself, which should have appalled him.
“You look remarkably happy.” The words felt like a kind of curse as they came out of his mouth. As if he was asking for trouble. Or tempting fate too directly, standing there beside her. It was as if his heart seized up in his chest, then beat too hard, beating out a warning. “Particularly for a woman who married a monster today.”