“May I present to you, sir, my daughters.” Margrete gestured across the table. “My eldest, Dorothea.” Her hand moved to indicate the sulky, too self-aware creature beside the eldest, who smirked a bit at him as if he had already proposed to her. “My middle daughter, Petronella.”
And at last, she indicated his angel. The most beautiful creature Benedetto had ever beheld. His seventh and last wife, God willing. “And this is my youngest, Angelina.”
Benedetto declared himself suitably enchanted, waited for the ladies to seat themselves, and then dropped into his chair with relief. Because he wanted to concentrate on Angelina, not her sisters.
He wanted to dispense with this performance. Announce that he had made his choice and avoid having to sit through an awkward meal like this one, where everyone involved was pretending that they’d never heard of the many things he was supposed to have done. Just as he was pretending he didn’t notice that the family house was falling down around them as they sat here.
“Tell me.” Benedetto interrupted the meaningless prattle from Charteris at the head of the table about his ancestors or the Napoleonic Wars or some such twaddle. “What is it you do?”
His eyes were on the youngest daughter, though she had not once looked up from her plate.
But it was the eldest who answered, after clearing her throat self-importantly. “It is a tremendous honor and privilege that I get to dedicate my life to charity,” she proclaimed, a hint of self-righteousness flirting with the corners of her mouth.
Benedetto had many appetites, but none of them were likely to be served by the indifferent food served in a place like this, where any gesture toward the celebrated national cuisine had clearly declined along with the house and grounds. He sat back, shifting his attention from the silver-haired vision to her sister.
“And what charity is it that you offer, exactly?” he asked coolly. “As I was rather under the impression that your interest in charity ball attendance had more to do with the potential of fetching yourself a husband of noble blood than any particular interest in the charities themselves.”
Then he watched, hugely entertained, as Dorothea flushed. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then she sank back against her seat without saying a word. As if he’d taken the wind out of her sails.
He did tend to have that effect.
The middle daughter was staring at him, so Benedetto merely lifted a brow. And waited for her to leap into the fray.
Petronella did not disappoint. Though she had the good sense to look at him with a measure of apprehension in her eyes, she also propped her elbows on the table and sat forward in such a way that her breasts pressed against the bodice of the dress she wore. An invitation he did not think was the least bit unconscious.
“I consider myself an influencer,” she told him, her voice a husky, throaty rasp that was itself another invitation. All of her, from head to toe, was a carefully constructed beckoning. She did not smile at him. She kept her lips in what appeared to be a natural pout while gazing at him with a directness that he could tell she’d practiced in the mirror. Extensively.
“Indeed.” His brow remained where was, arched high. “What influence do you have? And over what—or whom?”
“My personal brand is really a complicated mix of—”
“I am not interested in brands,” Benedetto said, cutting her off. “Brands are things that I own and use at will according to my wishes. The purpose of a brand is to sell things. Influence, on the other hand, suggests power. Not the peddling of products for profit. So. What power do you have?”
She shifted in her chair, a strange expression on her face. It took him a moment to recognize it as false humility. “I couldn’t possibly say why some people think I’m worth listening to,” she murmured.
Benedetto smiled back, and enjoyed watching the unease wash over her as he studied her, because he was more the monster they thought he was than he liked to admit.
Especially in polite company.
“Pretty is not power,” he said softly. “Do you know how you can tell? Because men wish to possess it, not wield it. It is no different from any other product, and like them, happily discarded when it outgrows its usefulness or fades in intensity. Surely you must know this.”
Petronella, too, dropped her gaze. And looked uncertain for the first time since Benedetto had walked in to the dining room.
He was not the least bit surprised that neither of the Charteris parents intervened. Parents such as these never did. They were too wrapped up in what they had to gain from him to quibble over his harshness.
But he hardly cared because, finally, he was able to focus on the third daughter. The aptly named Angelina.
“And you?” he asked, feeling a coiling inside of him, as if he was some kind of serpent about to strike. As if he was every bit the monster the world believed he was. “What is it you do?”
“Nothing of consequence,” she replied.
Unlike her sisters, Angelina did not look up from her plate, where she was matter-of-factly cutting into a piece of meat he could see even from where he sat was tough. They had given the choice cuts to him and to themselves, of course. Letting their children chew on the gristle. That alone told him more than he needed to know about the Charteris family. About their priorities.
Perhaps the truth no one liked to face was that some people deserved to meet a monster at the dinner table.
“Angelina,” bit out Margrete, in an iron voice from behind a pasted-on smile and that magnificent chest like the prow of a ship.
“I spoke the truth,” Angelina protested.
But she placed her cutlery down, very precisely. She folded her hands in her lap. Then she raised her gaze to Benedetto’s at last. He felt the kick of it,
