“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dorothea tutted, bustling about Angelina’s bedchamber as if she’d never sat on a settee wailing about her impending death. “You know how people like to talk. That’s all it is, I’m certain. A series of tragic events and too many rumors and innuendos.”
“I hope you’re right,” Angelina had said.
But Dorothea’s only response had been to lay out more soft, frilly things for Angelina to try on.
And it was a strange thing indeed to know that her life had changed completely—to understand that nothing she knew would be hers any longer, and soon—when for thirty days, only the trappings of her life changed. The manor house slowly returned to its former glory. Her father laughed again. Margrete looked less stiff and tense around the eyes.
But Angelina still woke in her same old bed. She still timed her breakfast to avoid the rest of the family, and then set off for her long morning walk, no matter the weather. She still played the piano for hours, alone in the conservatory.
If it weren’t for the endless hammering, she might have been tempted to imagine that she’d made the whole thing up.
Then again, every time that Benedetto visited—a stolen evening here, a day or two there—the balance in Angelina’s family…shifted.
Because she was shifting, she thought as she lay in her bed at night with her hands between her legs, not sure if she wanted to sob or scream out all the wildfires he’d lit inside her. With that dark gaze. With the things he did to her when they were alone. His mouth, his fingers. And always that dark, seductive laugh.
She had always thought of a seduction as something…quicker. The mistake of an evening. Something hasty and ill-considered that would take time and space to repent.
But Benedetto taught her many lessons about time. And patience.
And the exquisite torture of anticipation.
The only thing Angelina had ever wanted was her piano and a place to play it. She had been certain she knew herself inside and out. But this man taught her—over and over—that there were banked fires in her she hardly understood.
Dark, greedy claws that dug in, deep, whenever he touched her and when he did not. Red and terrible longings that made her toss and turn when she wanted to sleep.
This hunger that made her run to him when she knew full well she should have run the other way.
“Such a pretty, needy little thing you are,” he murmured one evening.
Like all the nights he came here, there had first been the awkward family dinner where he’d demonstrated his mastery over her father, then cowed her sisters and mother into uncharacteristic silence—usually with little more than a lift of one dangerous brow. When her mother and sisters repaired to the drawing room, leaving her father to his solitary port, Benedetto would usher Angelina to the conservatory.
It was the same every time.
That long, fraught walk through a house only half-alive. The sound of his footsteps mingled with hers. The humming, overfull silence stretched out between them and echoing back from the walls. Her breath would change as they moved, and she was certain he could hear it, though he always remained behind her. And he never spoke.
She told herself she marched toward her own, slow execution. She walked herself off the plank.
But the truth she never wished to face was that the closer they got to the conservatory, the quicker her steps. The quicker her breath.
And oh, how molten and hot her blood ran in her, pooling between her legs with a desperate intent.
Because inside that room, who knew what might happen?
He always made her play.
And then he played her, always making her scream and arch and shake. Always his wicked fingers, his clever mouth, tasting her, tempting her.
Training her, something in her whispered.
“Is this how you murder them all?” she asked one evening, a scant week away from their wedding.
Benedetto had laid her out on the chaise that had appeared one morning, along with all kinds of furniture throughout the château. It was as if the house was a visual representation of her own femininity, and she could see it grow its own pleasure. Lush and deep.
Paintings reappeared. Priceless antiques took their places once again. There were updates everywhere, light where there had been darkness, the cobwebs swept away and cracks plastered over.
She’d forgotten herself, with her skirts tossed up and his head so dark between her thighs.
She’d forgotten herself, but she remembered with a jolt when she shifted and caught a glimpse of them in the fogged-up windows that surrounded them on all sides.
Benedetto was so big, tall and strong, and she was laid out before him, splayed wide like an offering. He was eating her alive and she was letting him, but she should never have let herself forget that the pleasure he visited upon her untried body was a weapon.
Everything about this man was a weapon only he knew how to use.
“I didn’t mean that,” she managed to gasp out while her heart galloped inside her, lust and fear and that same dark ache fusing into one.
She tried to pull her legs closed but his broad shoulders were between them, and he did not move. He lifted his head and his night-black eyes bored into her. He pressed his palm, roughened and huge, against the faint swell of her abdomen.
And something about the pressure made a new, dangerous heat uncurl inside her.
“What do you know of marriage?” he asked, and his voice was as dark as the rest of him, insinuating and dangerous.
She could feel that prickle that was as much longing as it was fear sweep over her body, leaving goose bumps in its wake.
“I have never been married before.”
Angelina didn’t know why she was answering him so prosaically. When she was as he liked her, still dressed for dinner but with her skirts around her waist, so she was bared only
