“Veronica Fitzgibbon.” Benedetto made a faint tsking sort of sound. “Perhaps the best-known of all my wives, before marrying me. You might even call her famous.”
“More than famous,” Angelina corrected him softly as his hand made it to the fine, delicate bridge of her collarbone and traced it, purely to make her shiver. “I doubt there’s a person alive who cannot sing at least one of her father’s songs. And then she dated his drummer.”
“Indeed. Scandalous.” He concentrated on that necklace of hers, then. The brooding pearls against the softness of her skin. The heat of her body, warming the stones.
“She lasted the longest. Three months and two days,” Angelina whispered.
He made himself smile. “See that? You do know. I thought you might.”
“She crashed her car into a tree,” Angelina told him, though he already knew. He’d spent two days in a police station staring at the pictures of the wreckage as the authorities from at least three countries accused him of all manner of crimes. “On a mountain road in the Alps, though no one has ever been able to explain what she was doing there.”
“There are any number of explanations,” Benedetto corrected her. “Most assume she was fleeing me. And that I was hot in pursuit, which makes for a delicious tale, I think you’ll agree.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “Alas, I was giving a very boring lecture at a deeply tedious conference in Toronto at the time.”
“And how will I go, do you think?” she asked, a different sort of light in her blue eyes, then.
He hated this. He had disliked it from the start, though a truth he’d had to face was that he’d found a certain joy in the details. The game of it. The end justifying the means. But here, now, with her and that bruised look on her face and his own heretofore frozen emotions unaccountably involved this time—he loathed it all.
“I have already told you,” he said quietly. “We all die how we live. It is inevitable.”
“But—”
“A better question to ask,” he said quietly, cutting her off, “is why any woman would marry me, knowing these things. These assumptions and allegations that must be true, because they are repeated so often. There must be a fire after all this smoke, no? Why did you say yes, Angelina?”
He watched, fascinated, as goose bumps shivered to life all over her skin. And she shifted, there where she stood. “I had no choice.”
“Will we be starting this marriage off with lies?” Benedetto shook his head. “Of course you had a choice. Your father promised me a daughter. Not you in particular. Had you refused to marry me I had two others to choose from.”
“My mother made it very clear that none of us were permitted to say no, no matter what.”
“That must be it, then.” He didn’t quite smile. It was too hard, too furious a thing. “But tell me, Angelina, how do you rationalize away the many times you came apart in my hands?”
“I don’t rationalize it.” Her blue eyes flashed. “I deplore it.”
“I don’t think you do,” he told her, and he moved his hand to her jaw, tilting her head so that her mouth was where he wanted it. “I think you’re confusing hunger for something else. But then, you did spend all that time in the convent, did you not? I’m surprised you feel anything at all save shame.”
“I have a full complement of emotions, thank you. Chief among them, revulsion. Fury. Disgust.”
“I want you too, little one,” he said, there against her mouth. “I hear the seventh time is the charm.”
She made a tiny little noise, protest and surrender at once, and then Benedetto took her mouth with his.
Because a kiss did not lie. A kiss was not a story told around the world, losing more and more truth each time it was sold to the highest bidder.
There was only truth here in the tangle of tongues. In the way her body shuddered beneath his hands. In the way she pressed herself against him, as if she would climb him if she could.
He could taste her fear and her longing, her need and her hope.
Benedetto tasted innocence and possibility, and beneath that, the sheer punch that was all Angelina.
He anchored her with an arm around her back, and bent her over, deepening the kiss. Taking more and more, until he couldn’t be sure any longer which one of them was more likely to break.
She was intoxicating.
Despite all the times he’d done this, there had never been a time that he had wanted a wife like this. Or at all. But then, in all the ways that mattered, she was his first.
That thought made a kind of bitterness well in him, and he pulled away. And then took his time looking at her. Her lips parted. Her eyes dark with passion.
This from the woman who claimed she didn’t want him at all. That she had been forced into this.
He rather thought not.
He liked to think he had been, though that wasn’t quite true either. He’d had his choices, too.
“Not yet,” he murmured, as much to himself as to her.
Because one choice he did have was to treat her the way he’d treated the others. He had already tasted her more than the rest of them, save Sylvia. He had already betrayed himself a thousand times over while in the thrall of her piano.
But she didn’t have to know that. And he didn’t have to succumb to it here.
And now that they were married, he could get this back on track.
Benedetto let go of her, pleased despite himself when she had to grip the bed beside her to stay on her feet. He picked up the hand she’d been pressing against the bed and could see the indentation of the coverlet’s stone on her palm.
He was savage enough to
