“It looks like a celebration, I hope,” Benedetto said stiffly. He pulled out the chair that was clearly meant to be hers, and she almost thought she saw a hint of something like apprehension on his face. Could it be…uncertainty? Her heart stuttered. “I stole you away from your wedding reception. I offer this instead.”
And suddenly, Angelina found the world around her little bit blurry. She sat in the chair he indicated, jolting slightly when her bottom found the chair beneath her because she was tender. Gloriously, marvelously tender between her legs.
He had given her a perfect piano and let her play, so that her introduction to her new life—her new home, her new status, her possible dark fate—was draped in a veil of music.
He had taken her down on that chaise and made a woman of her.
Her chest felt tight because he had made her wedding feast, and her heart. Her traitorous, treacherous, giddily hopeful heart beat out a rhythm that was much too close to joy for the seventh wife of the Butcher of Castello Nero.
Angelina could only hope it wouldn’t be the death of her.
Literally.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE DID NOT ask him directly if he’d killed his wives.
How they’d died, yes. Not whether or not he was guilty of killing them. Not whether he’d done the dark deeds with his own two hands.
And Benedetto couldn’t decide, as they sat and ate the wedding feast he’d had his staff prepare for them, if he thought that was evidence that she was perfect for him or the opposite.
All he knew was that he was in trouble.
That he had already treated her differently than any other woman, and all other wives.
He kept expecting something—anything—involving this woman to be regular. Ordinary. But instead, she was incomparable to anyone or anything, and he had no idea what to do with that.
Even now, when she was scrubbed clean, bathed so that all her makeup was gone and her hair was merely in a haphazard knot on the top of her head, she was more radiant than she had been at their wedding ceremony.
And he didn’t think he could bear it.
“You look quite angry with your crab cakes,” she pointed out in that faintly dry tone of hers. “Or is it the company that does not suit?”
“Tell me about the piano,” he said, instead of answering her question. “You are quite talented. Why did you never think to leave that ruin of a château and do something with it?”
“I thought of nothing else.” And she actually grinned at him. At him. “There was no money for necessities, much less ambition.”
“I do not understand,” Benedetto said, with perhaps more ill-temper than necessary. “Surely your father could have avoided most of the unpleasantness in his life if he had made money from you and your piano. Rather than, say, trying his hand at high stakes card games he was doomed to lose before he walked in the room.”
And this woman, this unexpected angel who should never have agreed to become his wife, grinned even wider.
“But to do so, you understand, he would first have to believe that that infernal racket I was forever making could benefit him in some way. Instead, he often asked me why it was I could not entertain myself more quietly while sucking off the family teat, quote unquote. The way my sisters did.”
Benedetto couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. She was grinning as she waved away her father’s indifference to her talent. And while she did, she applied herself to each course of the feast he had ordered with equal abandon.
He liked her hunger. He wanted to feed it.
All her hungers.
“It sounds as if you were kept in a prison,” he told her, his voice in a growl. “But you do not seem the least bit concerned by this.”
“Because you freed me.”
And there was laughter in her voice as she said it. In her eyes, too, making the blue into a sparkle that was brighter than the candles.
A sparkle that faded the longer she gazed at him.
“It is a long, long time indeed since I have been viewed as the better of two options,” he said darkly.
“People always tell you the devil you know is better,” Angelina said, a wisdom beyond her years where that sparkle had been, then. “But I have never thought so. There’s more scope for growth in the unknown. There has to be.”
“How would you know such a thing? Did they teach it in the convent?”
Again, her lips moved into something wry. “Ask me in three months and two days or so.”
And despite himself, Benedetto laughed.
What was the harm in pretending, just for a little while, that this was real? That it could be precisely what it seemed. No more, no less. Would that really be the worst thing that ever happened?
He suspected he knew the answer. But he ignored it.
When they finished eating, he led her out onto one of the balconies, this one equipped with a fire pit built into the stone, benches all around, and a hot tub on one end with nothing before it but the sea. He could imagine winter nights in that tub, the two of them wound around each other—
But he stopped himself, because she wouldn’t be here when winter came.
He watched as she stood at the rail, the sea breeze playing with her hair, making it seem more like spun silver than before.
Or making him feel like spun silver himself, which should have appalled him.
“You look remarkably happy.” The words felt like a kind of curse as they came out of his mouth. As if he was asking for trouble. Or tempting fate too directly, standing there beside her. It was as if his heart seized up in his chest, then beat too hard, beating out a warning. “Particularly for a woman who married a monster today.”
She turned her dreamy face to his and then his fingers were there, helping the breeze at its work, teasing her hair
