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

by Dani Collins

  Thunder rumbled outside, the storm coming closer. She couldn’t see a thing, so she inched inside, then reached out her hand into the darkness, sliding it along the stone, her whole body prickling with a kind of premonition. Or fear. Panic that she would thrust her hand into something terrible—

  But she found a light switch where she expected to, in the same place it was in her stairwell. She flicked it on and then began to climb.

  Each step felt like a marathon. So she went faster and faster, climbing high, until she reached another door at the top. And her heart was beating too hard for her to stop now. There was too much thunder outside and in her, too.

  She threw open the second door and stepped inside, reaching and finding another light and switching it on.

  And then she blinked. Once, then again, unable to believe her eyes. Angelina dropped her hand to her side, drifted in a few more steps, and looked around as if she expected something to change…

  But nothing changed.

  It was an empty room with windows over the sea, just like the tower room she spent her days in. There were stone walls, a bare floor, and a high ceiling where a light fixture hung, illuminating the fact that there was nothing here.

  Benedetto had demanded she stay out of an empty room.

  That sparked something in her, half a laugh, half a sob.

  Angelina thought she heard a noise and she jumped, expecting something… But that was the trouble. She didn’t know what she wanted. And the room was empty. No monsters. No dead wives. No words scrawled on a paper, or carved into the stone. Just…nothing.

  The same nothing these last two months had been.

  That made something in her begin to throb, painfully.

  She was disgusted with herself. She didn’t know if she wanted to go play her piano until she felt either settled or too wound up to breathe, or if she should crawl beneath that heavy coverlet again to dream her unsettling dreams.

  But when she turned around to go, she stopped dead.

  Because Benedetto stood in the doorway to the empty chamber, the expression on his face a far more terrible thunder than the storm outside.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BENEDETTO HAD STAYED away for six weeks. It was easy enough to do, touring his various business concerns. Such a tour would normally have claimed all of his attention, but this time he had found himself distracted. Unable to focus on what was in front of him because he was far more concerned with what he’d left behind.

  That hadn’t happened in as long as he could remember.

  He wasn’t sure it had ever happened. But that was Angelina. She was singular even when she wasn’t with him.

  And since his return to this castle he’d forgotten how to love the way he had as a child, he had become a ghost.

  The irony wasn’t lost on him. That he should be the one to haunt these old halls, staying in the servants’ quarters and wandering in the shadows, both part of the castle and apart from it… Perhaps it was a preview of what awaited him.

  Because the other option was that it was a memory of his time here when he was young and had seen the castello as his personal playground, magical and inviting in every respect, and that was worse, somehow.

  But Angelina had cracked, as he’d known she would. He’d hoped her singularity would extend to this and she might be the one to resist temptation, but she didn’t. None of them managed it. Sooner or later, they ended up right here in this empty room above the sea, staring at him as if they truly expected him to come in wielding an ax.

  He had come to enjoy, on some level, that they believed all the stories they heard about him and married him anyway. The triumph of his wealth over their fear.

  It wasn’t as if any of them had touched him the way Angelina had. None of them had seen him, listened to him, or made love to him. None of them had played him music or treated him as if he was a man instead of a monster.

  They had married his money. And they all came into this empty room, sooner or later, despite his request they stay away, expecting to come face-to-face with the monster they believed he was. The monster they knew he was.

  Benedetto had long since stopped minding the way they looked at him when they saw him in the door, as if they could see the machete he did not carry with him.

  This time, it hurt.

  This time, it was a body blow.

  “What are you doing here?” Angelina demanded. Her face was pale, her beautiful blond hair whipping around her with the force of her reaction. One hand was at her throat, and he could see the panic in her eyes.

  If he was a better man, the fact that her fear pierced his soul would drop him, surely. And he would not stand here, wondering why it was that heightened emotion made her even more beautiful.

  Or why it reminded him of the look on her face when she’d shuddered all around him, again and again.

  Or why nothing about her was like the others—and he hated that they were here in this room anyway. Playing out this same old scene. This curse of his he had chosen when he’d never imagined he would want to see the end of it, much less meet someone who’d made it—and him—feel broken from the start.

  “Why should I not be here?” he asked, aware as he spoke that he was…not quite as in control of himself as he might wish. Not as in control as he usually was for this scene. “Perhaps you have forgotten that I’m the master of this castle.”

  “Now that you mention it, you do look vaguely familiar,” she threw at him, any hint of fear on her face gone as if it had never been. Instead, she looked fierce. “You almost resemble a man I married, who abandoned me after one night.”

  “I did not abandon you.” He spread his hands open before him. “For here I am, Angelina. Returned to you. And what do I discover but betrayal?”

  “You ordered me to stay out of an empty room,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe it. The hand at her throat dropped to her side, and she took a step toward him, her blue eyes as stormy as the sea and sky outside. “Why would you do that? Do you know what I thought…?”

  “But this is a room of terror, clearly,” he taunted her, his voice dark, and it was less an act than it usually was. “Look closely, little one. Surely you can hear the screams of the women I’ve murdered. Surely if you squint, you can see their bodies, splayed out like some horrific art installation.”

  He watched her emotions move over her face, too quickly to read. And wished—not for the first time—that it was different.

  Lord help him, but he had wished that she would be different.

  “That is what you came for, is it not?” he demanded, his words an accusation.

  “Are you trying to tell me that is not exactly what you wish me to think?” She waved one hand, the ring he’d put on her finger gleaming like the only blood in this room. “Is that what makes you happy?”

  “I gave up on happiness a long time ago,” Benedetto growled. “Now I content myself with living down to people’s worst nightmares? Why shouldn’t I? Everyone needs a villain, do they not?”

  Angelina moved toward him, staggering slightly, her bare feet against the cold stone. “I do not want a villain, Benedetto. I want a husband.”

  “If that were true, you’d be asleep even now, tucked up in the marital bed. It would not have occurred to you to disobey me.”

  “What you are describing is a dog, not a wife,” she snapped at him. “I never promised you obedience.”

  “Surely that was understood,” he shot back. “When I bought you.”

  And again, he knew that he was far less in control of himself than he ought to have been. He had played this scene out before, after all. He usually preferred an iciness. A cool aloofness that wasn’t an act, because it was his usual, normal state.

  Nothing about Angelina had been normal or usual. Nothing about this was ordinary.

  Even now he wanted to bundle h
er up into his arms and carry her off. And never, ever put her down again.

  “Are you going to tell me what all of this is about?” she asked after a moment, when he’d found himself entirely too entranced by the way her jagged breaths made her body move.

  He could see her cheeks were tearstained. She was the one who had disobeyed, the way they all disobeyed, and yet he felt as if he had betrayed her.

  For moment he couldn’t understand why.

  And then it hit him.

  For the first time since he’d met her, Angelina was looking at him as if he really might be a monster, after all.

  Of all the things he’d lost, of all the indignities the choices he’d willingly made long ago required that he endure, it was this he thought might take him to his knees.

  “Or are these just the kinds of games you like to play?” Angelina asked when he only stared at her. She shook her head, swallowing hard, as if she was holding words back. Or a sob. Or, if that hectic look in her eyes was any guide, a scream. “I am so deeply sick and tired of being nothing more to anyone but a game piece to be moved around a board that is never of my choosing. Is this how you do it, Benedetto? Do you set up every woman you marry in the same way? Do you plot out the terms of your own betrayal, give them the key, and then congratulate yourself on having weeded out yet another deceitful bride? When all along it is you who creates an unwinnable situation?”

  He eyed her, amazed that he felt stung by the accusation when he knew it was perfectly true—and more, deliberate. Yet no matter the sting, he was entranced by the magnificence of her temper that reminded him of nothing so much as the way she played that piano. In his weeks here as the resident ghost of his own lost childhood, he’d found himself listening to her play more than he should. He’d found himself sitting behind the stairs, losing himself on the notes she coaxed from the keys.

  As if she’d still been playing for him.

  Focus, he ordered himself.

  “Am I the only one you made sure would fail?” Angelina demanded. “Or is this how you do it? And what do you gain from this? Do you toss us out a tower window, one by one?”

  Benedetto laughed, though nothing was funny. “Would that suit your sense of martyrdom, wife?”

  She stiffened. “I am no martyr.”

  “Are you not? Tell me, how else would you describe a young woman who was presented to a known murderer and allowed him a taste of her on that very first night? Do you also write to mass murderers in prison, offering your love and support? There are many who do. I’m sure the attendant psychological problems are in no way a factor.”

  She looked at him for what felt like a very long time, a kind of resolve on her face. “I didn’t believe you were a murderer. I still don’t.”

  And something in him rocked a bit at that. “Because you had made such an in-depth study of my character over the course of that one dinner?” He didn’t like the emotion on her face then. He didn’t like emotion. He growled. “Perhaps, as we are standing here together, stripped down to honesty in this empty room, we can finally admit that what you truly wanted was to escape. And all the better if you could do it while hammered to the family cross.”

  “Surely a martyr is what you wanted,” she replied, displaying that strength he’d heard in her music time and time again. And quietly. “Or why would you go to such trouble to present yourself as a savior, willing to haul a family like mine out of financial ruin—but only for a price.”

  “I know exactly why it is I do what I do,” Benedetto growled with a soft menace. “A better question is why you imagined you could marry a man like me, surrender yourself to my dark demands, and have things end differently for you than the rest. Do you truly imagine yourself that special, Angelina?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and there was something in her gaze then. A kind of knowing on her lovely face that clawed at him like the storm outside, thunder and flashes of light. “But there were times you looked at me and it seemed clear that you thought so, Benedetto.”

  She could not have pierced him more deeply had she pulled out a knife and plunged it into his heart. Then twisted it.

  Benedetto actually laughed, because he hadn’t seen it coming. And he should have. Of course he should have.

  Because there was nothing meek about his Angelina. His angel. She was all flaming swords and descents from on high in a blaze of glory, and if he hadn’t understood that when he had first seen her—well. When she’d played for him that first night, it had all been clear.

  Then he’d tasted all that flame himself.

  And there was no coming back from that.

  She had introduced music into his life. Now it would live in him, deep in his bones no matter where in the world he went, and he had no idea how he was going to survive without it.

  Or without her.

  Because these last two months had been torture. If they had been a preview of what awaited him, he might as well chain himself up in his own dungeon and allow himself to go truly mad at last.

  It almost sounded like a holiday to him.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, and despite the question, she stood tall. She didn’t try to hide from him. After a beat he realized there was no fear on her face. “Is that the truth of you, after all?”

  And this was the life he had chosen. He had made a promise to his grandfather years ago, and time after time he had kept it.

  He had considered it a penance. He had taken a kind of pride in being so reviled and whispered about on the one hand, yet courted and feted all the same because no matter what else he was, he was a man of a great and historic fortune.

  Benedetto had considered it a game. For what did he care what names he was called? Why should it matter to him what others said? He had yet to meet anyone who wouldn’t risk themselves in his supposedly murderous presence if it meant they would get paid for their trouble.

  He had cynically imagined he understood everything there was to know about the world. He had been certain he had nothing left to learn—that nothing could surprise him.

  He understood, now it was too late, that the point of it all had been a woman like Angelina.

  It was possible his grandfather had expected someone like her to come along sooner, so that Benedetto would learn his lesson. It had never been a game or a curse. It had been about love all along.

  Love.

  That word.

  Franceschis do not love, his mother had told him with one of her bitter trills of laughter. They destroy.

  Love yourself, his father had said as if in agreement, his tone mocking in response to his wife. He’d cast a narrow sort of look at his only son and heir. No one else will. Not because Franceschis destroy, or any such superstition. But because the only thing anyone will ever see is your fortune.

  He loves me, Carlota had told him on the day of their wedding. He knows me. And so he also knows that my duty to you must come first.

  She was joy and she was love, his grandfather had said stiffly on the morning of his grandmother’s funeral, staring out at the sea. And none of each can possibly remain without her.

  I love you, Benedetto, his grandmother had told him long, long ago, when she’d found him hiding in one of the castello’s secret passageways. I will always love you.

  But always had not lasted long.

  As far as he had ever been able to tell, love had died along with her, just as his grandfather had said.

  Something he’d been perfectly happy with all these years.

  Until now.

  When it was too late.

  Because he knew how this scene between them was about to go. He played the monster and his wives believed it, and he’d been satisfied with that system since the start. There was only ever one way this could go.

  He had always liked it. Before.

  He raked his hair back from his
face, and wished that he could do something about the way his heart kicked at him. Or better yet, about the fact he had a heart in the first place, despite everything.

  Surely if he could rid himself of the thing the way he thought he had a lifetime ago, all of this would be easier.

  “I am not going to kill you,” he told her, his voice severe as he tried to draw the cloak of his usual remoteness around him. But he couldn’t quite get there. “Nonetheless, you have a choice of deaths before you. You can consider this chamber a passageway, of sorts. A bridge between the life you knew until today, and one in which you can be anyone you choose. Assuming you meet the criteria, that is.”

  She swayed slightly on her feet. “The criteria?”

  And he had done this so many times. It should have come as easily to him as breath.

  But his chest was too tight. That damned heart of his was too big. “The criteria for escape is simple, Angelina. If you meet it, we will create a new identity for you. You can go anywhere you wish in the world under this new name. You will not have to worry about supporting yourself, because I will take care of your financial arrangements in perpetuity.”

  “Wait…” Angelina shook her head slightly. “Does that mean…?”

  He nodded. “My third wife runs a scuba diving business on an island you would never have heard of, off the coast of Venezuela. My fourth wife lives a nomadic lifestyle, currently traveling about mainland Europe in a converted van. It looks modest from the outside but is, I am assured, the very height of technology within. My fifth wife prefers the frenetic pace of Hong Kong, where she runs a spa. And Veronica, my most famous wife, never able to have a moment to herself in all her days, has settled down on a farm in a temperate valley on the west coast of America. Where she tends to grapes on the vine, raises goats, and makes her own cheese.” His smile was a grim and terrible thing. He could taste it. “You can have any life you wish, Angelina. At my expense. All you need to do is disappear forever.”

  “But if they’re not… If you didn’t…” She pulled in a visible breath with a ragged sound. “Are you married to all these women at the same time?”