“What do you mean, not yet?” she demanded. “I thought that once we were married—”
“So impatient,” he taunted her. “Especially for one forced to the altar as you have been.”
If she dared, he could tell, she would have cursed him to his face.
Instead, she glared at him.
“Don’t you worry about consummating our marriage.” He laughed, though the lie of it caught a little in his chest. “I will take you in hand, never fear. But first, I wish to show you something.”
Benedetto turned and headed for the door without taking her hand to bring her with him. And he smiled when he heard her follow him.
He didn’t have to turn around and study her face to understand her reluctance. It was entirely possible she didn’t know why she was following him. That she was simply as compelled as he was. He hoped so.
It was a good match for this mad yearning he felt inside, when he knew better. A yearning that he was terribly afraid would be the end of him. This innocent, untrained girl could bring him to his knees.
But then, that was a power he had no intention of handing over to her. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t use it.
He led her out into the master suite, then through a door that led to a separate tower from one of the salons.
Angelina balked at the door, looking around a little bit wildly.
“This is your tower,” he told her, sounding almost formal. “You can enter whenever you wish.”
“That seems like a lot of towers to remember,” she said, a little solemnly, from behind him. “I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”
He looked over his shoulder as they climbed the stairs.
“Don’t,” he warned her, and meant it more than he usually did. More than he wanted to mean it. “Whatever else you do here, do not imagine that the warning I gave you was a joke, Angelina.”
He saw her swallow, hard, but then they were at the top of the stairs. He threw open the door, then waited for her to follow him inside.
And then Benedetto watched as she tried to contain her gasp of joy.
“A piano,” she whispered, as if she couldn’t believe it. “You really did get me a piano. A Steinway.”
“I am assured it is the finest piano on the Continent,” he told her, feeling…uncertain, for once. Unlike himself. Did he crave her approval so badly? When he didn’t care in the least if the entire world thought him a monster? It should have shamed him, but all he could do was drink in the wonder all over her. “It is yours. You can play it whenever you wish, night or day. And I will give instructions to my staff that you are to be left to it.”
There was a look of hushed awe on her face. She aimed it his way, for a moment, then looked back at the piano that sat in the center of the room. When he inclined his head, she let out a breath. Then she ran to the piano to put her hands on it. To slide back the cover, and touch the keys.
Soft, easy, reverent. Like a lover might.
And for a deeply disturbing moment, Benedetto found himself actually questioning whether he was, in fact, jealous of an inanimate object.
Surely not.
He shoved that aside, because he’d been called a monster most of his life and he could live with the consequences of that. He had. It was smallness and pettiness he could not abide, in himself or anyone else. Benedetto hated it in the men who auctioned off their daughters to pay their debts; he despised even the faintest hint of it in himself.
“Play, Angelina,” he urged her. And if his voice was darker than it should have been, rougher and wilder, he told himself it was no more than to be expected. “Play for me.”
He was married. Again. Every time he imagined he might be finished at last. That it would be the end of this long, strange road. That finally, this curse would be lifted and he would be freed.
Finally, he could bury his grandfather’s dark prophecies in the grave where the old man lay.
And every time, Benedetto was proved wrong. He’d almost become inured to it, he thought as Angelina spread her fingers, smiled in that inward, mysterious manner that he found intoxicating, and began to coax something stormy and dark from the keys.
As the music filled the tower he admitted to himself that this time he wanted, desperately, to be right.
He wanted to be done.
He wanted her.
It was the way she played, as if she was not the one producing the notes, the melodies, the whole songs and symphonies. Instead, it was as if she was a conduit, standing fast somewhere between the music in her head and what poured out of her fingers.
Benedetto had never seen or heard anything so beautiful.
And he couldn’t help but imagine that she could do the same for him and the dark destiny he had chosen to make his own.
Outside, the afternoon wore on, easing its way into another perfect Italian evening.
And his bride played as if she was enchanted, her fingers like liquid magic over the keys. Half-bent, eyes half-closed, as if she was caught in the grip of the same madness that roared in him.
Or perhaps Benedetto only wished it so.
When wishing was another thing he had given up long ago.
Or should have.
But everything had changed when he’d walked into that dining room in her father’s house and seen an angel where he’d expected nothing more than a collection of wan socialites. He stood against the wall in the tower room, his back against the stones that had defined him as long as he’d drawn breath.
It was easy to pretend that he had been disconnected from this place, shuttled off to boarding school the way he had been, but Castello Nero lived inside him and always had. As a child he’d loved coming home to this place.
