by Dani Collins
She turned her dreamy face to his and then his fingers were there, helping the breeze at its work, teasing her hair into curls and lifting them seemingly at random.
“If you think about it,” she said softly, “we are all of us monsters. In our hearts, most of all.”
“Are you already forgiving me?” Benedetto asked, though it seemed to him that the world had gone still. The tide had stopped turning, the planet had stopped spinning, and there was only Angelina. His last, best wife and her gaze upon him, direct and true, like his own north star. “Don’t you think that might be premature?”
“Do you need forgiveness?”
Something inside him crumbled at that. It was a question no one had ever asked him. Because everyone thought they already knew all the answers to the mystery that was Benedetto Franceschi. Everyone believed they were privy to the whole story.
Or they preferred to make up their own.
Over and over again.
“Carlota,” he heard himself say. And though he was horrified, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “I should never have married her.”
Angelina’s gaze moved over his face, but he didn’t see the revulsion he expected. Or anything like an accusation. It made him…hurt.
“I thought you had to marry her.” She tilted her head slightly. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“That was the understanding, but I doubt very much we would have been marched down the aisle with shotguns in our backs if we’d refused.” He let go of her hair and straightened from the rail. And no matter how many times he asked himself what he thought he was doing, he couldn’t seem to stop. “Still, we were both aware of our duty. I thought she was like me—resigned to our reality, but happy enough to play whatever games we needed to along the way. Because as soon as the line was secure, we could do as we liked. And even before, for that matter. All that needed to happen was that we set aside a certain period of time of strict fidelity to ensure paternity.”
“That sounds very dry and matter-of-fact. We are talking about sex and marriage and relationships, are we not?”
“We are talking about ancient bloodlines,” Benedetto replied. “Ancient bloodlines require ancient solutions to problems like heirs. And once the deed was done, we could carry on as we pleased. Another grand old tradition.”
Angelina blinked. “You do know that science exists, don’t you? No need to do the deed at all.”
He should have stopped talking. He shouldn’t have started. But he didn’t stop.
“You must understand, Angelina. Carlota and I knew we were to be married before either one of us had any idea what that meant. We were intended for each other, and everything we learned about the opposite sex we learned in the shadow of that reality. And when it finally came time to do our duty, she suggested we jump right in and get the heir taken care of, rather than messing about with invasive medical procedures we would inevitably have to discuss in the press. We were friends. We were in it together. She rather thought we should handle things the old-fashioned way because it was quicker and easier. Theoretically.”
“What did you think?”
There was a certain gleam in her gaze then that reminded him that this was a woman he’d not only married, but had enjoyed for the past month. And just today, had made sob out his name like another one of her symphonies.
Benedetto smiled. “I was young and brash and foolish. I thought that as long as Carlota and I had agreed on all the important things—like the fact neither one of us was interested in fidelity once our duties were handled, hale, and hardy—we might as well.”
He could remember Carlota’s bawdy laugh. The way she’d smoked cigarettes with dramatic, theatrical flourish. The way she rolled her eyes, speaking volumes without having to speak a word.
I can’t cope with having it all hanging there over my head, she’d declared a few months before their wedding. It will be just be too tedious. Let’s get in, get out. Get it done.
Are we a sports team? Benedetto had asked dryly.
In his memory, he was as he was now. Cynical. Self-aware and sardonic. But the reality was that he’d been twenty-two. Just like her. And he’d had no idea how quickly things could change. Or how brutally life could kick the unwary, especially people like them who thought their wealth protected them from unpleasant realities.
They’d both learned.
“I was so arrogant,” he said now, shaking his head. “I was so certain that life would go as planned. Looking back, there were any number of warning signs. But I saw none of them.”
“Was she very depressed?” Angelina asked, her eyes troubled.
“Carlota? Depressed? Never.” Benedetto laughed. “She was in love.”
“With you.” Those blue eyes widened. “So you did break her heart when you refused to give up your mistress.”
“That is a very boring tabloid story.” Benedetto sighed. “Sylvia was my mistress, though I think you will find that when a man is twenty-two years old and dating an actress of roughly the same age, they’re just…dating. But no matter, that does not make for splashy, timeless headlines.”
“Mistress is certainly catchier,” Angelina said quietly.
“Carlota was in love, but not with me,” he said, because he couldn’t seem to stop doing this. Why was he doing this? Nothing good could come of unburdening himself to her. “He was not of our social class, of course. Her parents would not have cared much if she carried on with him, because everyone could boast about sleeping with the odd pool boy—which is something her mother actually said to me at her funeral. But you see, Carlota wasn’t simply sexually involved with this man of hers. She was head over heels in love with him, and he with her. Something I knew nothing about.”
And then he hissed in a breath, because Angelina lifted a hand and slid it over his heart.
“It works, Benedetto,” she said quietly. “I can feel it.”
He felt something surge in him, huge and vivid. Something he could hardly bear, and couldn’t name, though he had the terrible notion that it had been frozen there inside him all this time. That it was melting at last.
And the only thing this was going to do was make this worse. He knew that all too well.
“We spent the first few days of our honeymoon as friends, because that was what we’d always been,” he gritted out, because he’d started this. And he would finish it, no matter the cost. “But then she decided that we might as well start making that heir as quickly as possible, so we could move on. She went off to prepare herself. Which, because she was in love with another man and had never had the slightest interest in me, involved getting drunk and then supplementing it with a handful of pills.”
“You don’t think she killed herself,” Angelina breathed.
“On the contrary,” Benedetto said grimly. “I know she did. It was an accident, I have no doubt, but what does that matter? It happened because she needed to deaden herself completely before she suffered a night with me.”
He had never said anything like that out loud before in his life. And he hated himself for doing it now. He wanted to snatch the words back and shove them down his throat. He wanted to insist that Angelina rip them out of her ears.
“Was she truly your friend?” Angelina asked, and he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t looking at him with horror, as he deserved.
Or with the same resigned bleakness his grandfather had.
“She was,” he said, another thing he never spoke about. To anyone. “She really was.”
“Then, Benedetto.” And Angelina’s voice was soft. “You must know that she would never want you to suffer like this. Not for her. Don’t you think she would have wanted at least one of you to be free?”
That landed in his gut like a punch.
He wasn’t sure he could breathe.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Angelina
. You have no idea the kinds of chains—”
But he cut himself off, because that wasn’t a conversation he could have, with her or anyone else. He’d promised. He’d chosen. He gathered her to him instead, then crushed his mouth to hers, pouring it all into another life-altering kiss.
For a moment, he imagined that it really could alter his life instead of merely feeling that way. That he could change something. Anything.
He kissed her and he kissed her.
And Benedetto realized with a surge of light-headedness that the taste he hadn’t been able to get enough of over the past month, that impossible glory that was all Angelina, was hope.
Damn her, she was giving him hope.
He sensed movement in his peripheral vision, so he lifted his head, holding Angelina close to him so he could see who moved around in the dining room on the other side of the windowed doors.
It was Signora Malandra, and he felt himself grow cold as the older woman stared out at him.
She didn’t say a word. But then, she didn’t need to. Because if this castle was a prison, then Signora Malandra was the jailer, and it was no use complaining about a simple fact.
Angelina didn’t see the silent, chilly exchange. Benedetto checked to make sure, and when he looked up again the housekeeper had disappeared.
Taking his fledgling hope with her.
“You don’t have to tell me anything further,” Angelina told him then. “You don’t have to tell me anything at all, Benedetto.”
Her face was still so perfect. Her expression still so dreamy. And he knew that she had forgiven him for acts she knew nothing about, even if that was something he could never do himself.
He swept her up into his arms again. And he didn’t head for that bloodred bed in the room of stone that might as well have been a stage.
Benedetto shouldn’t have done any of the things he’d done with Angelina, but he had. And he wasn’t going to stop until he had to. But that only meant he needed to make sure what stolen moments they had were real.
She was the only thing in his life that had ever been real, as far as he could tell, for a long, long time.
He carried her into one of the salons, this one with a fireplace and a thick, soft rug before it. He lay her down and then busied himself preparing the fire.
“I would have sworn that there was no way a man of your consequence would know how to light a fire,” Angelina said, laughing again.
And what was he supposed to do with her when she kept laughing where any other woman would have been crying? Shivering with fear? Barring herself in a bathroom? All things other wives of his had done after Sylvia had died, and with far less provocation.
But then, he hadn’t touched any of them.
He looked over his shoulder at her, incredulously, but she didn’t seem to take the hint.
“The only reason I know how to do it is because we relied on fires for light and heat in my father’s house,” she confided. Merrily, even. “Necessity makes you strong or it kills you, I suppose. Either way, not something the great Benedetto Franceschi would ever have to worry about, I would have thought.”
He busied himself with the logs. “It was not always in my best interests to alert members of this household as to my whereabouts. I can fend for myself. Inside the walls of the castle, anyway.”
“But surely—”
But Benedetto was done talking.
“Quiet, little one,” he growled, and then he crawled toward her, bearing her back down beneath him.
And he taught her everything he knew.
How to take him in her mouth. How to indulge herself as if he was her dessert. How to ride him and how to drive him wild by looking over her shoulder with that little smile of hers while he took her from behind.
He was a man possessed, falling asleep with her there before the fire, only to wake up and start all over again.
He could not taste her enough. He could not touch her enough.
As if, if he only applied himself, he could take all that hope and beauty, all that magic and music, and infuse it directly into his veins.
As if there was more than one way to eat her alive.
As if he could keep her.
And in the morning, dawn crept through the windows, pink and bright. It woke him where he lay stretched out before that fire still.
He had done everything wrong. He knew that.
But that didn’t change what had to happen now. It didn’t alter in the slightest the promises he’d made. The choices he’d walked into with his eyes wide open, never expecting this. Never expecting Angelina.
Benedetto lifted her up. He tried to steel himself against the way she murmured his name, then turned to bury her face against his shoulder, not quite waking up.
He carried her through the suite, everything in him rebelling as he walked into the bedchamber at last. Outside the windows, he could see the light of the new day streaking over the sea.
It should have been uplifting, but all he wanted to do was rage. Hit things. Make it stop.
He took her to that bloodred bed and laid her in it. He drew the coverlet up, but left her hand exposed, that bloodred ruby marking her as his. And a fortune or two of them surrounding her.
Blood on blood.
He didn’t want to leave, but he knew he had no choice if he was to keep his old vow. He handled the hateful practicalities and then he tore himself away. He forced himself out of the bedchamber and refused to allow himself to look back.
But the sight of her was burned into his brain anyway. Blond hair spread out over the pillows like silver filigree, somehow making all that dark red seem less ominous. Cheerful, almost.
As if she really was an angel.
Benedetto took a long shower, but that didn’t make it any better. He dressed in a fury, then had another fight on his hands to keep himself from walking back into the bedchamber and starting all over again.
Instead, he stepped out into the hall. He wasn’t the least bit surprised to see the figure of his housekeeper waiting there, halfway down. Right in front of the door he’d told Angelina she was never to open.
Inside him, he was nothing but an anguished howl. But the only sound he made was that of his feet against the floor.
Walking toward his duty and his destiny, as ever.
When he reached Signora Malandra, they stared at each other for a quiet eternity or two.
“It is done,” Benedetto said, the way he always did.
The older woman nodded, her canny gaze reminding him of his grandfather.
Or maybe that was his same old guilt talking too loudly once again, trying to drown out that tiny shimmer of hope.
“Very well then, sir,” she said. She smiled at the door, locked tight, then at him. “So the game begins. Again.”
CHAPTER TEN
ANGELINA WOKE UP on the first morning of her married life with a buoyancy inside her chest that she would have said was impossible—because she’d certainly never felt anything like it before.
At first, she was a bit surprised to find herself in that great, blood colored bed. More than surprised—she was taken aback that she had no memory of getting into it. The memories she did have were white hot, stretched out in front of a fire her forbiddingly grand husband built himself. A delicious shiver worked its way over her body, inside and out.
She sat up slowly, holding the bejeweled coverlet to her chest as she looked around. But nothing had changed. The room was still a stark aerie, nothing but stone before her and above her, and the sea outside. Waiting.
But for some reason, what she’d expected would feel like a fall to her death felt like flying instead. Exhilarating. She shoved her hair back from her face, and spent a good long while staring out at the sea in the distance. Blue. Beautiful.
Only as brooding as she made it.
When she swung her legs over the side of the high bed and found the cool stones beneath her feet, she felt almost soothed. Not at all the reaction she would have expected to have in this room that had scared her silly yesterday.
She took a long, hot shower, reveling in such a modern installation only yards from that medieval bedchamber. And as she soaped herself up, reveling in how new her own skin felt, she thought that Benedetto was much the same as this castle of his. Stretched there between the old and the new and somehow both at once.
Benedetto.
Her heart seem to cartwheel in her chest, and she couldn’t help the wide, foolish smile that took over her face at the thought of him. He had taken her virginity—or more accurately, she’d given it to him. First while she played, offering him everything she was, everything she had, everything she hoped and dreamed.
The physical manifestation of the music she’d played for him had been appropriately epic.
She could still feel his hands, all over her flesh. She could feel the tug and rip of her gown as he’d torn it from her, then buried himself inside her for the first time. She still shuddered as images of the darkly marvelous things he’d taught her washed through her, over and over.
And she couldn’t wait to do all of it again.
Maybe, just maybe, she could be the wife who stuck.
She was turning that over in her head, thinking about stories that lost more truth in each telling, as she dressed herself in the sprawling dressing room that was filled with clothes that she knew, somehow, would fit her perfectly. Even if they bore no resemblance to the meager selection she’d brought herself. And she remembered, against her will, what Petronella had said. That two or three lost wives could be a tragedy, but add another three on top of that and there had to be intention behind it.
That, or Benedetto Franceschi, the least hapless man she had ever met, was just…profoundly unlucky.
A notion that made her laugh a little as she found her way out of the dressing room, following her nose. Coffee, if she wasn’t mistaken. And she could feel excitement and anticipation bubbling inside of her, as if she was fizzy from the inside out, because she couldn’t wait to see him again. His dark, forbidding face that she knew so much better now. That she’d kissed, touched. That she’d felt on every inch of her skin.