Benedetto had never imagined his heart would be involved. He’d been certain he’d buried that along with his grandmother.
“You must choose,” he gritted out, little as he wanted to.
And for moment, he thought maybe they were dead, after all. Two ghosts running around and around in this terrible castle, cut off from the rest of the world. That the two of them had done this a thousand times before.
Because that was the way she looked at him. As if she’d despaired of him in precisely this way too many times to count already.
He could have sworn he heard her playing then, though there was no piano in sight. Still, the blood in his veins turned to symphonies instead, and he was lit up and lost.
For the first time since he’d started this terrible journey, he honestly didn’t know if he could complete it. Or even if he could continue.
And all the while, his seventh wife—and first love, for all the good it would do him in this long, involved exercise in futility—gazed back at him, an expression on her face he’d never seen before.
It made everything in him tighten, like hands around his throat.
“What if I choose a third option instead?” she asked.
Quietly. So very quietly.
Outside, the sea raged and the sky cracked open, again and again. But all he could focus on was Angelina. And those unearthly blue eyes that he was sure could see straight through him and worse, always had.
“There is no third option,” he gritted out.
“But of course there is,” she said.
And she smiled the way she had when he’d been deep inside her, on that night that shouldn’t have happened. The night he couldn’t forget.
He heard a great roaring thing and knew, somehow, that it was happening inside him.
“I could stay here,” Angelina said with that same quiet strength. “I could have your babies and truly be your wife. No games. No locked towers or forbidden keys. Just you, Benedetto. And me. And whatever children we make between us.”
He couldn’t speak. The world was a storm, and he was a part of it, and only Angelina stood apart from it all. A beacon in all the dark.
“We don’t have to play games. We don’t have to do…whatever this is.” Angelina stood there and shined at him. He’d never seen that shade of blue before. His heart had never felt so full. “We can do what we want instead.”
No one, in the whole of Benedetto’s life, had ever looked at him the way she did. As if he was neither her savior nor her hero nor even her worst nightmare. He could have handled any of those. All of them.
But Angelina looked at him as if, should he only allow it, he could be a man.
He didn’t know how he stayed on his feet when all he wanted was to collapse to his knees. To beg her to stop. Or to never stop. Or to think about what she was doing here.
To him.
“Angelina,” he managed to grit out. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“But I do.” And this time, when her lips curved, it looked like hope. “Benedetto, you asked me to marry you, and I said yes. Now I’m asking you the same thing.”
“Angelina…”
“Will you marry me? And better yet—” and her smile widened, and it was all too bright and too much and his chest was cracking open “—will you stay married to me? I’m thinking we can start with a long, healthy lifetime and move on from there.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“YOU MUST BE MAD,” Benedetto said, his voice strangled.
Angelina couldn’t say she wasn’t. Maybe the next step was searching out convicted killers and making them her pen pals, as he’d suggested. But she rather thought the only killer who interested her was this one, who’d only ever been convicted in the court of public opinion. And who hadn’t killed anyone.
“There is no third option,” he said, his voice like gravel. But there was an arrested look on his face that made her heart lurch a bit inside her chest. “I made certain promises long ago. Whether you carry my child now or not is immaterial.”
She’d been talking about babies as if she was talking about someone else, but the possibility that it had already happened, that it was happening even now, settled on her, then. She slid a hand over her belly in a kind of wonder. Could it be?
This whole night so far had been like one of her favorite pieces of music. A beautiful journey—a tour of highs and lows, valleys and mountains, storms and sunlight—and all of it bringing her here. Right here.
To this man who was not a monster. No matter how badly he wanted to be.
Her heart had known all along.
“I could do it your way,” she said softly. “I could sign up for the heir apparent program. I could keep signing up. We could make it cold-blooded and chilly, if you like. Is that what you want?” There was something so heartbreaking about that, but she knew she would accept it, if it was what he had to offer. She knew she would accept anything if it meant she could have him, even the smallest part of him—but she saw something like anguish on his hard face, then. “Or is it what you think you deserve?”
And for a moment the anguish she could see in him seemed as loud and filled with fury as the storm outside. It was hard to tell which was which—but her heart knew this man. Her heart had recognized him from the start.
It recognized him now.
“It’s all right if you can’t answer me, Benedetto,” she said. She went to him then, stepping close and putting her hands on his chest, where he was as hot to the touch as she recalled. Hotter. She tipped her head back, searching that beautiful, forbidding face of his. “If you can’t bring yourself to answer, you don’t have to. But tell me how
