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

by Dani Collins

  Between her legs, she felt the deep pulse of that hunger she would have said should surely have been sated by everything they’d done the night before.

  But it seemed her husband left her bottomless.

  Her husband, she repeated to herself. Giddily, she could admit.

  She pushed the door open to one of the pretty little salons, expecting to see Benedetto there, waiting for her in all his formidable state. But instead, the dour housekeeper waited there with a blank expression on her dolorous face.

  Or an almost blank expression. Because if Angelina wasn’t mistaken, there was a glitter in Signora Malandra’s too-dark eyes. It looked a little too much like triumph.

  Angelina didn’t like the trickle of uneasiness that slipped down her back.

  “Good morning,” Angelina said, sounding as frosty as her own mother. She pulled the long, flowing sweater she’d found more tightly around her, because it might be the height of summer out there, but old castles were cold. All that stone and bloody history, no doubt.

  “I trust you slept well,” the older woman said, lifting an accusing eyebrow in a manner Angelina was all too familiar with. “If…deeply.”

  This woman could not possibly be attempting to shame her master’s brand-new wife because she’d slept half the morning away. After her wedding night. Surely not.

  “Have you seen my husband?” Angelina asked instead of any number of other things she might have said. Because if Margrete had taught her anything, it was that a chilly composure was always the right answer. It made others wonder. And that was far better than showing them how she actually felt.

  Signora Malandra indicated the small table near a set of French doors that stood closed, no doubt to control the sea air. And then waited there, gazing back at her, until Angelina realized the woman had no intention of answering her until she obeyed.

  Luckily, Angelina had spent her entire life under the thumb of overly controlling women. What was one surly housekeeper next to her mother and sisters? So she only smiled, attempted to look meek and biddable, and went to take her seat. As ordered.

  Her act of rebellion was to crack open one of the doors, and then she smiled as the breeze swept inside, fresh and bright.

  “Coffee?” the older woman asked. It sounded like an accusation.

  Angelina channeled her mother and smiled wider, if more icily. “Thank you for asking. The truth is, I don’t care for much in the way of breakfast. I like my coffee strong and very dark, and sometimes with a bit of cream. But only sometimes. I don’t like anything to interfere with my walk.”

  “And where will we be walking?” the housekeeper asked as she poured Angelina a cup of coffee. “Perhaps we have forgotten that this is an island. The castle covers the whole of it, save a few rocks.”

  It took everything Angelina had not to respond to that. Not to point out that we were not invited.

  The other woman sniffed as if she’d spoken aloud. “Though I suppose if you are feeling enterprising, you could walk the causeway. It’s quite a pretty walk, though I’m not sure I would attempt it until I became more conversant with the tides.”

  “What a wonderful idea,” Angelina said with a sweetness she did not feel. And when she took a sip of the coffee, it was suitably bitter. Which matched her mood.

  “I was born and raised in this castle,” Signora Malandra said, and again, Angelina could see something she didn’t quite like in the older woman’s gaze. “It sounds like foolishness, to warn every person who visits here about the inevitability of the tide when the ocean is all around us. But I warn you, mistress.” And there was an inflection on that word that made Angelina’s stomach tighten. “This is not a sea to turn your back on.”

  Angelina felt chilled straight through, and it had nothing to do with the breeze coming in from the water. She was glad she’d thought to wrap the sweater around her when all she wore beneath was a light, summerweight dress that she’d chosen because the color—a bright pop of yellow—made her happy.

  She did not feel quite so happy now.

  And she did not appreciate having dour old women try to scare her, either.

  “My husband?” she asked again, as Signora Malandra looked as if she was headed for the door.

  “Your husband is gone,” the old woman said coolly. And again, with that hint of triumph in her gaze. “Did you not get what he left you?”

  “What he left me?” Angelina repeated, not comprehending. How could Benedetto be gone? Did she mean…into town, wherever that was? She tried to conceal her shock. “Has he gone out for the day?”

  And this time, there was no mistaking the look on the other woman’s face. It was far worse than triumphant. It was pitying.

  “Not for the day, mistress. Two months, I would say. At the very least.”

  And by the time Angelina had processed that, Signora Malandra was gone.

  This time, when she found her way back into the bedchamber, it seemed ominous again. Altered, somehow. Almost obscene.

  Someone had made up the bed in Angelina’s absence, and that felt as sickening as the rest, as if some unseen evil was swirling around her, even now—

  A sound that could have been a sob came out of her then, and she hated herself for it.

  She remembered his face, out there on the balcony last night. That had been real. She was sure of it. Angelina had to believe that what she felt was real, not the rest of this. Not the stories that people had told, when the one he’d told her made more sense. Not because she wanted to believe him, though she did.

  But because real life was complicated. It had layers and tragedies. It was never as simple as a bad man. It was never black and white, no matter how people wanted it to be.

  There was nothing in the room, not even bedside tables, and she thought the housekeeper must have been playing with her.

  Even as she breathed a little easier, however, she realized with a start that the mantel over the fire didn’t look the way it should. She drifted closer to the fireplace, her heart in her throat, because there was a bit of paper there with an object weighting it down.

  She could have sworn it hadn’t been there when she woke up. Then again, her attention had been on that happiness within her that now felt curdled, and the watching, waiting sea.

  Her whole body felt heavy, as if her feet were encased in concrete as she moved across the floor. But then, at the last moment—almost as if she feared that someone would come up behind her and shove her into the enormous hearth if she wasn’t careful—she reached out and swiped the paper and its paperweight up. Then moved away from the fireplace.

  The object was a key. Big and ornate and attached to a long chain.

  She stared at it, the weight of it feeling malevolent, somehow. Only when she jerked her gaze from it did she look at the thick sheaf of paper with a few bold lines scrawled across it.

  This is the key to the door you must not open.

  Benedetto had written that. Because of course, this was his handwriting. She had no doubt. It looked like him—dark and black and unreasonably self-assured.

  You must wear the key around your neck, but never use it. Can I trust you, little one?

  And for a long time after that, weeks that turned to fortnights and more, Angelina careened between disbelief and fury.

  On the days that she was certain it was no more than a test, and one she could handily win, she achieved a kind of serenity. She woke in the morning, entertained herself by sparring with the always unpleasant housekeeper, and then tended to her walk. When the weather was fine, and the tide agreeable, she did in fact walk the causeway. Out there on that tiny strip of not quite land, she felt the way she did when she was playing the piano. As if she was simultaneously the most important life in the universe, and nothing at all—a speck in the vastness. The sea surged around her, birds cried overhead, and in the distance, Italy waited
. Wholly unaware of the loneliness of a brand-new bride on a notorious island where a killer was said to live. When the man she’d married had been a dark and stirring lover instead.

  Her husband did not call. He did not send her email. She might have thought she’d dreamed him altogether, but she could track his movements online. She could see that he was at meetings. The odd charity ball. She could almost convince herself that he was sending her coded messages through these photographs that appeared in the society pages of various international cities.

  Silly girl, she sometimes chided herself. He is sending you nothing. You don’t know this man at all.

  But that was the trouble. She felt as if she did.

  She didn’t need him to tell her any more of his story. She knew—she just knew—that her heart was right about him, no matter what the world said.

  Those were the good days.

  On the bad days, she brooded. She walked the lonely halls of the hushed castle, learning her way around a building that time had made haphazard. Stone piled upon stone, this wing doubling back over that. She walked the galleries as if she was having conversations with the art. Particularly the hall of Franceschis past. All those dark, mysterious eyes. All those grim, forbidding mouths.

  How many of them had locked their women away? Leaving them behind as they marched off to this crusade or that very important business negotiation, or whatever it was men did across time to convince themselves their lives were greater than what they left behind.

  On those days, the portraits she found online of the stranger she’d married felt like an assault. As if he was taunting her from London, Paris, Milan.

  And all the while, she played.

  Her tower was an escape. The safest place in the castle. She played and she played, and sometimes, she would stagger to the chaise, exhausted, so she could sleep a bit, then start to play all over again.

  And if she didn’t know better, if food didn’t appear at regular intervals, hot tea and hard rolls, or sometimes cakes and coffee, she might have imagined that she was all alone in this lonely place. Like some kind of enchanted princess in a half-forgotten fairy tale.

  She played and she played.

  And the weeks inched by.

  One month. Another.

  “Sweet God,” said Petronella, when Angelina was finally stir crazy enough to call her parents’ home. “I convinced myself he’d killed you already and was merely hiding the evidence.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Angelina replied primly, because that was easier. And so familiar, it actually felt good. “He’s done nothing of the kind.”

  Or not in the way that Petronella meant it, anyway. They put her on speaker, and she regaled her mother and sisters with tales of the castle. She’d tagged along on enough of Signora Malandra’s tours by then that she could have given them herself, and so spared no flourish or aside as she shared the details of the notorious Castello Nero with her family.

  Because she knew they would think wealth meant happiness.

  Because to them, it did.

  “Everywhere I look there’s another fortune or two,” she assured her mother. “It’s really spectacular.”

  “I should hope so,” Margrete said, in her chilliest voice. “That was the bargain we made, was it not?”

  And when she hung up, Angelina was shocked to find herself…sentimental. Nostalgic, even, for those pointless nights huddled together in the drawing room of the dilapidated old château, waiting to be sniped at and about. Night after night after night.

  Who could have imagined she would miss that?

  She would have sworn she could never possibly feel that way. But then again, she thought as she moved from one well-stocked library to the next—because the castle boasted three separate, proper libraries that would take a lifetime or two to explore—she was more emotional these days than she’d ever been in her life.

  She’d woken up the other morning crying, though she couldn’t have said why. She slept in that absurd bed every night, almost as if it was an act of defiance. But she couldn’t say her dreams were pleasant. They were dark and red, and she woke with strange sensations in her body, especially in her belly.

  Angelina was glad she couldn’t remember the one that had rendered her tearful. Though the truth was, everything seemed to make her cry lately. Even her own music.

  That night, she followed her usual routine. She played until her fingers hurt, then she staggered down the stairs from her tower to find a cold dinner waiting for her. She ate curled up on a chilly chair out on the balcony while the sea and wind engaged in a dramatic sort of dance in front of her. There was a storm in the air, she could sense it. Smell it, even.

  When she could take the slap of the wind no longer, she moved inside. She was barefoot, her hair a mess, and frozen straight through when she left the master suite and walked down that hallway. The key he’d left her hung around her neck as ordered, the chain cool against her skin and the key itself heavy and warm between her breasts.

  And she stood there, on the other side of that door, and stared at it.

  Some nights she touched it. Other nights she pounded on it with her fists. Once she’d even gone so far as to stick the key into the lock, though she hadn’t turned it.

  Not yet.

  “I am not Pandora,” she muttered to herself.

  As always, her voice sounded too loud, too strange in the empty hallway.

  She had no idea how long she stood there, only that the world grew darker and darker on the other side of the windows, and she’d neglected to put on any lights.

  When lightning flashed outside, it lit everything up. It seemed to sizzle inside of her like a dare.

  A challenge.

  It had been two months and three days. It was nearly September. And she was beginning to think that she had already gone crazy. That she was a madwoman locked away in a castle, which was an upgrade from the proverbial attic, but it ended up the same.

  Alone and unhinged. Matted hair and too much emotion. And an almost insatiable need to do the things she knew she shouldn’t.

  There was another flash of lightning, and then a low, ominous rumble of thunder following it.

  She heard a harsh, rhythmic kind of noise, and realized with some shock that she was panting. As if she’d been running.

  And then, when another roll of thunder seemed to shake that wall of windows behind her, she found herself sobbing.

  Angelina sank to her knees, there in that solitary hall.

  She had waited and waited, but it was nights like this that were killing her. Was this how he’d rid himself of all those wives?

  And as soon as she had that thought, she had to ask herself—what kind of death was worse?

  This had to be a test. But how long could she do it? She’d had a month of play, and then one impossibly beautiful night with a man everyone insisted was evil incarnate. Her heart had rejected that definition of him.

  Could she set that against these months of neglect? She was slowly turning into one of the antiques that cluttered this place. Soon she would be nothing more than a story the dour old woman told, shuffling groups of tourists from room to room.

  “I have been a prisoner my whole life,” she sobbed, into her hands.

  Her piano made her feel free, but she wasn’t.

  At the end of the day, she was just a girl in a tower, playing and playing, in the hopes that someone might hear her.

  All Benedetto had done was trap her. Her family had never wished to listen to her play, but they’d heard her all the same. Now the only thing that heard her was the sea, relentless and uncaring. Waiting.

  She lifted her head, shoving the mass of her hair back. Her heart was kicking at her, harder and harder.

  She already knew what her mother would tell her. What her sisters would advise.

  You’v
e got it made, Petronella would say with a sniff. You’re left to your own devices in a glorious castle to call your own. What’s to complain about?

  Angelina understood that she would fail this test. That she already had, and all of this had been so much pretending otherwise. The key suspended between her breasts seemed to pulse, in time with that hunger that she still couldn’t do anything to cure.

  Before she knew what she meant to do, the key was in her hand. She stared at it, as another flash of lightning lit up the hall, and she could have sworn that she saw the key flash too. As if everything was lightning and portent, dread and desire.

  The ring Benedetto had put on her other hand seemed heavy, suddenly. And all she could think about was six dead women. And a bedchamber made bloodred with dark rubies.

  And was she really to blame if she couldn’t stay here any longer without looking behind the one door that was always kept closed?

  What if he was in there? Hurt?

  What if something far more horrible was in there?

  Like all the women who had disappeared, never to be heard from again.

  Even as she thought it, something in her denied it. Her heart would not accept him as a villain.

  But either way, she found herself on her feet.

  And then she was at the door, one palm flat against the metal. She blew out a breath that was more like a sob. She thrust the key into the lock, the way she’d done one time before, amazed how easily it went in. Smooth and simple and right.

  She held her breath. Then she threw the dead bolt.

  Alarms didn’t sound. The castle didn’t crumble to ash all around her.

  Emboldened, Angelina blew out the breath she was holding. She took another one, deeper than before, and pushed the heavy door open. She expected it to creak ominously, as if she was in a horror film.

  But it opened soundlessly on a stair, very much like the one she climbed every day to her own tower.