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

by Dani Collins

  “It took her,” Benedetto grated out. “And then I knew what kind of man I was. Because as much as I grieved her, there was a relief in it, too. As if the hand of God reached down and saved me twice, if in horrible ways. Once from a union with a woman I could never make truly happy, because she loved another, and then from a woman who made me as miserable as I made her. The rest of my life, I will have to look in a mirror and know that I’m the sort of man who thought such things when two women died. That is who I am.”

  “You sound like a human being,” Angelina retorted, fiercely. “If we were all judged on the darkest thoughts that have ever crossed our minds, none of us would ever be able to show our faces in public.”

  Benedetto shook his head. “My grandfather was less forgiving than you are, Angelina. He called me here, to this castle. He made me stand before him and explain how it was that I was so immoral. So devoid of empathy. Little better than my own father, by his reckoning, given that when my grandmother died he was never the same. He never really recovered.” His dark, tortured eyes met hers. “There is nothing he could have said to wound me more deeply.”

  “Was your father so bad then?” She studied his face. “My own is no great example.”

  He made a hollow sound. “Your father is greedy. He thinks only of himself. But at least he thinks of someone. I don’t know how to explain the kind of empty, vicious creature my father was. Only that my grandfather suggesting he and I were the same felt like a death sentence.”

  “Did you point out that he could always have stepped in himself, then?” Angelina asked, somewhat tartly. “Done a little more parenting than the odd hour on a Sunday? After all, who raised your father in the first place?”

  And for moment, Benedetto focused on her instead of the past. She could see it in the way his eyes changed, lightening as he focused on her. In the way that hard mouth of his almost curved in one corner.

  “What have I done to earn such ferocity?” he asked, and he sounded almost…humbled.

  “You saved me from a selfish man who would have sold me one way or another, if not to you,” she said, holding his hands tight. “You gave me a castle. A beautiful piano. And if I’m not very much mistaken, a child, too. What haven’t you given me, Benedetto?”

  He let out another noise, then reached over, smoothing a hand down over her belly, though it was still flat. She thought of the oddly heightened emotions that had seemed to grip her this last month or so. The strange sensations low in her belly she’d assumed were due to anxiety. She’d felt strange and out of sorts for weeks, and had blamed it on her situation.

  But knelt down the hard stone floor of this tower with Benedetto before her, his shoulders wider than the world, she counted back.

  And she knew.

  Just like that, she knew.

  All this time she’d considered herself alone, she hadn’t been. Benedetto had been here in the shadows and more, she’d been carrying a part of the both of them deep inside her.

  Her heart thumped in her chest, so severely it made her shiver.

  “My grandfather reminded me that I have a distant cousin who lives a perfectly unobjectionable life in Brussels. Why should he not leave all this wealth and power to this cousin rather than to me if I found it all so troublesome that I had not only married the most unsuitable woman imaginable, but failed to protect her?” Benedetto shook his head. “He told me that if I wanted to take my rightful place in history, I must subject myself to a test. A test, he made sure to tell me, he did not imagine there was any possibility I would win given my past behavior.”

  “Did he want you to win?”

  He took a moment with that. “All this time I’ve assumed he wanted to teach me a lesson about loneliness. But I suspect now it was supposed to be a lesson about love.”

  Benedetto gathered her hands in his again, tugging her closer, and all of this felt like far more important ceremony than the one that had taken place in her father’s house. There were no witnesses here but the sky and the sea. The storm. No family members littered about with agendas of their own.

  It was only the two of them and the last of the secrets between them.

  “My grandfather tasked me with finding women like you,” Benedetto said. “Precisely the sort my father had preyed upon, in his time. Women with careless families. Women who might want to run. Women who deserved better than a man with a list of dead wives behind them. I would marry them, but I would not make them easy about my reputation. I would bring them here. Then I would leave them after the wedding night and let them sit in this castle with all its history and Signora Malandra, who is always only too happy to play her role.”

  “She’s a little too good at her role.”

  “She, too, always thought I ought to have been a better man,” Benedetto said. He shook his head. “When they found their way to this tower I was to offer them a way out. One that kept them safe, gave them whatever they wanted, and made me seem darker and more villainous to the outside world. And he made me vow that I would continue to do this forever, until one of these women gave me a son. And even then, I was to allow her to leave me. Or stay, but live a fully supported, separate life. ‘You had two chances and you blew them both,’ he told me. ‘You don’t get any more.’”

  “How many chances did he get?” Angelina demanded, her voice as hot as that flash of lightning in her eyes.

  “But that was the problem,” Benedetto said in the same way he’d told her, on their wedding night, that he missed the man who had created this prison for him. “My grandfather was a hard man. I do not think he was particularly kind. But he loved my grandmother to distraction and never quite recovered from her loss. She was the best of us. He told me that he was glad she had died before she could see all the ways in which I failed to live up to what she dreamed for me, because after my father had proved so disappointing, they had had such hopes that I would be better.”

  Angelina frowned. “I’m not sure how you were responsible for Carlota’s choices on the one hand—in the face of her own family’s pressure, presumably—and an act of nature on the other.”

  “It was not that I was personally responsible for what happened to them,” Benedetto said quietly. “It was that I was so arrogant about both of them. Boorish and self-centered. It never occurred to me to inquire into Carlota’s emotional state. And everything Sylvia and I did together was irresponsible. Would a decent man ever have let her out of his sight, knowing the state she was in?”

  “A question one could ask of your grandfather,” Angelina said.

  “But you see, he didn’t force me into this. He suggested I bore responsibility and suggested I test myself. I was the one who had spent the happy parts of my childhood playing out involved fantasies in these walls. Ogres and kings. Spells and enchantments. I thought I was already cursed after what had happened to Carlota and Sylvia. Why not prove it? Because the truth is, I never got over the loss of my grandmother either, and she was the one who had always encouraged the games I played. In some twisted way, it seemed like a tribute.” Benedetto reached over and touched her face again, smoothing her hair back with one big hand. “And if my grandfather had not agreed, because without her we were both incapable of loving anything—too much like my father—could I have found my way to you?”

  She let go the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “I don’t care how you got here,” Angelina told him, like another vow. “Just as long as you stay here now you’ve come.”

  Outside, lightning flashed and the storm rumbled. The sea fought back.

  But inside this tower, empty of everything but the feelings they felt for one another, Angelina felt something bright and big swell up inside her.

  It felt like a sob. It felt overwhelming, like grief.

  She had the strangest feeling that it was something else altogether.

  Something like joy. />
  “I don’t want to leave you,” she told him. “I don’t want to play these games that serve no one. I have always wanted to be more than a bartering chip for my own father, and you are far more than a monster, Benedetto. What would happen if you and I made our own rules?”

  “Angelina…” His voice was a low whisper that she knew, without a shred of doubt, came from the deepest, truest parts of him. “Angelina, you should know. I had read all about the Charteris sisters before I ever came to your father’s house. And I assumed that I would pick the one who seemed best suited for me, on paper.”

  “If you are a wise man,” she replied dryly, “you will never tell me which one you mean.”

  And just like that, both of them were smiling.

  As if the sun had come up outside when the rain still fell.

  “I walked into that dining room and saw an angel,” he told her, wonder in his eyes. In the hands that touched her face. “And I knew better, because I knew that no matter who I chose, it would end up here. Here in the locked tower where all my bodies are buried, one way or another. And still, I looked at you and saw the kind of light I have never believed could exist. Not for me.”

  “Benedetto…” she whispered, the joy and the hope so thick it choked her.

  “I had no intention of touching you, but I couldn’t help myself. How could you be anything but an angel, when you could make a piano sing like that? You have entranced me and ruined me, and I have spent two months trying to come to terms with the fact you will leave me like all the rest. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to come to terms with that.”

  “Maybe this is crazy,” he continued, wonder and intensity in every line of his body. “Maybe I’m a fool to imagine that anything that starts in Castello Nero could end well. But I look at you, Angelina, and you make me imagine that anything is possible. Even love, if we do it together.”

  And for a moment, she forgot to breathe.

  Then she did, and the breath was a sob, and there were tears on her face that tasted like the waiting, brooding sea.

  Angelina thought, This is what happiness can be, if you let it.

  If for once she believed in the future before her, not tired old stories of a past she’d never liked all that much to begin with.

  If she believed in her heart and her hands, the man before her, and the baby she knew they’d already made.

  “Our children will fill these halls with laughter,” she promised him. “And you and I will make love in that bed, where there is nothing but the sea and the sky. It will no more be a chamber of blood, but of life. Love. The two of us, and the good we do. I promise you, Benedetto.”

  “The sky and the sea are the least of the things I will give you, little one,” he vowed in return.

  And the stone was cold and hard beneath her, but he was warm. Hot to the touch, and the way he looked at her made her feel as if angels really did sing inside her, after all.

  She wrapped herself around him, high up in that tower that she understood, now, wasn’t an empty room at all. It was his heart. These stones had only ever held his heart.

  Now she would do the honors.

  Because she was the seventh wife of the Butcher of Castello Nero. The first one to love him, the only one to survive intact, and soon enough the mother of his children besides.

  There was no storm greater than the way she planned to love this man.

  Deeper and longer than the castle itself could stand—and it had lasted centuries already.

  And she started here, on the floor of this tower, where he settled her on top of him and gazed up at her as if she was the sun.

  And then, together, moment by moment and year by year, they both learned how to shine.

  Bright enough to scare away the darkest shadows.

  Even the ones they made themselves.

  Forever.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE SEVENTH WIFE of the terrifying Butcher of Castello Nero confounded the whole world by living.

  She lived, and well, by all accounts. She appeared in public on Benedetto’s arm and gave every appearance of actually enjoying her husband’s company. As months passed, it became apparent that she was expecting his child, and that, too, sent shock waves across the planet.

  The tabloids hardly knew what to do with themselves.

  And as the years passed without the faintest hint of blood or butchery, Benedetto found himself becoming something he’d never imagined he could. Boring.

  Beautifully, magnificently boring to the outside world, at last.

  Their first child, a little boy they called Amadeo to celebrate some of the music that had bound them to each other, thrived. When he was four, he was joined by a little brother. Two years later, a sister followed. And a year after that, another little girl joined the loud, chaotic clan in the castle on its tidal island.

  A place only Angelina had seemed to love the way he always had, deny it though he might.

  And Benedetto’s children were not forced to secrete themselves in hidden places, kept out of sight from tourist groups, or permitted only a weekly hour with him. Nor were they sent off to boarding school on their fifth birthdays. His children raced up and down the long hallways, exactly as Angelina had said they would. The stone walls themselves seemed lighter with the force of all that laughter and the inevitable meltdowns, and the family wing was soon anything but lonely. There was an endless parade between the nursery at one end, the master suite on the other, and all the rooms in between.

  Ten years to the day that Benedetto had brought his last, best wife home, he stood at that wall of windows that looked out over the sea, the family wing behind him. He knew that even now, the staff was setting up something romantic for the two of them in that empty tower room that they kept that way deliberately.

  Because it reminded them who they were.

  And because it was out of reach of even their most enterprising child, because Angelina still wore the key he’d left her around her neck.

  They would put the children to sleep, reading them stories and hearing their prayers, and then they would walk down this very same hall the way they always did. Hand in hand. The bloodred ruby on her hand no match for the fire inside him.

  The fire he would share with her up there where they had pledged themselves to each other. The fire that only grew over time.

  Benedetto was not the villain he’d played. He was not the boogeyman, as so many would no doubt believe until he died no matter what he did.

  But any good in him, he knew with every scrap of conviction inside him, came from his angel. His wife and lover, who he had loved since the very first moment he’d laid eyes on her. The mother of his perfect, beautiful, never remotely disappointing children. The woman who had reminded him of the child he’d been—the child who had believed in all the things he’d had to relearn.

  And the best piano player he had ever had the privilege of hearing.

  He could hear her playing now, the notes soaring down from the tower that was still hers. These days, there was often art taped to the walls, and the children lay on the rug before the grand piano so they could be near her. So they could feel as if they were flying, too, as their mother played and played, songs of hope, songs of love. Songs of loss and recovery.

  And always, always, songs of joy.

  These were the spells she cast, he thought. These were her enchantments.

  The sun began to sink toward the horizon. Pinks and reds took over the sky. And still she played, and he could picture her so perfectly, bent over the keys with her eyes half closed. Her hands like magic, coaxing so much beauty out into the world.

  He could hardly wait to have them on him again, where he liked them best.

  Benedetto had so many things to tell her, the way he always did after time apart. Whether it was five minutes or five weeks. How much
he loved her, for one thing. How humbled he still was, a decade on, that she had seen the good in him when it had been hidden from everyone. Even himself.

  Especially himself.

  She had a heart as big as the sea, his lovely wife. She maintained a relationship with her family, and he rather thought her quiet example made her sisters strive to be better than they might otherwise have been. Her mother, too, in those few and far between moments Margrete Charteris thawed a little. And if her father could never really be saved, it hardly mattered. Because Anthony Charteris had as a son-in-law a rich and besotted billionaire more than willing to spend his money on his father-in-law if it pleased his wife.

  After all, there was always more money.

  Benedetto would spend it all if it made her happy.

  He heard the music stop and found himself smiling. He decided he would wait until they were alone to tell her that he had decided to share her piano playing with the world. Whether she wanted to perform or not, he could certainly share her music. He thought the world deserved to know that not only had Angelina soothed the savage beast with her playing, she was one of the best in the world. Accordingly, he’d bought her a record company.

  But that would come.

  First there was tonight.

  He heard her feet on the stone and then she was there beside him, her eyes still the bluest he’d ever seen. Particularly when they were sparkling with music and love and light, and all of it for him.

  “Happy anniversary, little one,” he murmured, kissing her. He felt that same rush of longing and lust, desire and need, tempered now with these long, sweet years. “I have loved you each and every day. I love you now. And I only plan to love you more.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that,” she replied, in that dry way he adored. “I love you too. And it turns out I have a rather bigger gift for you than planned.”

  Benedetto turned to look at her in some surprise, and Angelina smiled.