Modern Romance Collection July 2024 Books 1-4

CHAPTER TWO

WHENTHEDOOR to his bedchamber opened without permission, Valentino Bonaparte tried to convince himself that the woman who appeared before him like an apparition was little more than a daydream, but he knew better.

Valentino was many things, many of them apparently unpardonably foolish, but he had not stooped to lying to himself. Not yet.

Though there were a great many hours left in this already cursed day. Given what had already occurred—something he would have assumed was impossible—he could not rule anything out.

“You cannot possibly be here,” he told the woman who stood there in the doorway. The doorway to his bedroom, a place where she had spent entirely too much time—if only in the dreams he preferred to act as if he did not have.

She did not smile. Not quite. “And yet I am.”

He turned fully around, putting his back to the window where he had stood all this while. First waiting for the guests to arrive so the task of his wedding could be completed in an orderly fashion. Then watching them all leave in the wake of his man’s announcement.

There was no doubt that the world would soon know that Valentino’s deliberately provocative half brother had upped the ante by stealing his bride out from under his nose and on the day of the wedding, but he had not felt that he needed to announce it.

It was enough, surely, to cancel the entire affair.

And now Carliz was here. Without invitation.

As always.

He took a moment to study her as she stood there, framed by the open doorway, aware that he was responding to her the way he always did. His chest felt tight. His blood ran hot. His sex was hard.

Time did not improve his reaction to this woman. Distance did not diminish it.

She had been bothersome from the moment they’d met.

Today she was dressed in what looked like a selection of flowing scarves, including one draped over her head. As if she thought anything could conceal her. But Valentino would know her anywhere.

Carliz was drawn in regal lines, from her smooth brow to her aquiline nose to the willowy form she inhabited with a certain, specific grace that was entirely her own—and set every part of him alight. She was the sort of woman who gave the impression of being forever languid, when a closer inspection always revealed that there was nothing languid about the way she carried herself. Princess Carliz was the walking embodiment of what might happen if a lightning bolt turned itself human, wrapped itself in supple flesh, and created storms wherever she went.

He knew the way she smelt. A faint hint of spice, so faint that when he had been close to her—on two very dangerous occasions—he had wanted nothing so much as to bury his face in her neck, breathe her in until that scent was a part of him, and then find every part of her body, every secret space, where he might lose himself in her more fully.

Sometimes he dreamed that scent and woke, alone and furious all over again.

Valentino knew the way she tasted, a mad heat that he had spent years acting as if he could not recall. Or had forgotten. Or had never found compelling in the first place.

He had never had another choice. The only other option was chaos, and it was clear to him that the events of the day made it more than obvious that the role of chaos agent in the Bonaparte family was already taken.

But he remembered the way Carliz had looked at him after that ill-advised kiss, her gaze ripe with a kind of wonder, bright with stars, and impossible. That was what he knew to be true of this woman above all else.

She was impossible.

Then again, this was a day already filled with impossible things. What was one more?

“Did you do this?” he asked her quietly.

She moved further into the room, pushing the scarf that must have covered her face back so he could see the soft, burnished gleam of her hair—not quite blond, not quite red, but something that danced between the two and flirted with shades of brown besides. He could not see which of the layers she wore were wraps or scarves and which might suggest the presence of a dress—and Valentino thought he might go mad with wondering. With the way the soft fabric moved against her body, concealing more than it revealed, and yet making him hunger to see the rest.

To taste her at last. Everywhere.

He suspected she was fully aware of his reaction. That she had planned for it, in fact, and he did not want that image in his head—of Carliz gauging her own feminine power in a mirror, fully knowing what it would do to him.

It had been a point of agony for him in these past years that she knew him far better than she should. Whatever it was that had exploded between them that cursed night, she had been able to use it to her advantage. Or so it seemed to him, because he could find nothing at all advantageous in the way this woman affected him.

But he was not the sort of man who cried mercy.

“I suppose I can glean from that question that you are not the one who called off your own wedding,” she was saying.

He thought she would cross to him, but instead she wandered through the room instead, and he wondered if she knew that he would never be able to sleep well in here again. Not without remembering the way she drifted so close to the end of the bed, letting her hand dance over the coverlet. Not without getting that scent of hers everywhere, like the faintest shower of cinnamon powder on everything.

Valentino would see her ghost here, forever, gazing at the art on his walls then looking past him toward the view of the rest of the island, carefully situated to show neither his father nor his brother’s houses. He preferred to act as if he was the only Bonaparte here, as he was the only one concerned with the family legacy, and had built his house to make certain it seemed that way while he was here.

It was only after Carliz had taken in all these things, all the tiny details that made up his life—a life he did not wish for her to know anything about—that she turned back to look at him once more.

Her gaze, as always, was direct. Knowing. Too steady for his own good.

Once she was gone, Valentino knew that he would be tormented by this moment. That he would spend uncountable hours seeking out her scent when it could not possibly linger here. When he would make sure the staff scoured this room to make certain it could not.

Even now, he wanted to lean closer, to inhale deeply, to reach out and put his hands on her—

Weary as he was of the virtue that had so far gotten him precisely nothing in this life, Valentino clung to it.

He did not close the space between them. Because he knew better. He did not get his hands on her, nor indulge himself by finding out what, exactly, was beneath those dancing, flowing scarves. If it was only the hint of her bare skin that he saw, every time she breathed, or if it was truly possible that any sudden movement might send all of that fabric sliding to the floor.

You do not need to know, he told himself with a clenched sort of piety.

“I did not call off the wedding,” Valentino told her, before he forgot that he ought to make this a conversation and not another staring match with all of these unnecessary other things he did not intend to do anything about. “The bride was thoughtful enough to send a message that she would not be attending the festivities, so canceling the ceremony seemed a prudent next step.”

It had not been a message, as such. It had been a report from his security detail that his bride had run off to the other side of the island, clad in her wedding dress, in the company of none other than Aristide.

Rumor has it he married her, signor, his man had informed him a shockingly short while later. Before the guests had even left the chapel.

The thought of his half brother filled him with the usual roar of fury and pain, old grudges, and worse still, those persistent memories of the friendship they’d had. Before they knew who they really were to each other. Before the truth had come out.

Before Valentino had lost not only his mother, but his inheritance. And also his relationship with the housekeeper who had been sleeping with his father all along while treating Valentino as if he was also her son. Ginevra, the housekeeper he had viewed as family.

And Aristide himself.

The friend he had considered a brother until it turned out he really was his brother, and that ruined everything.

On a philosophical level, Valentino had no idea why it hadn’t been obvious to him from the start that Aristide would ruin even this. A wedding that should not have registered on his brother’s radar, as Valentino very much doubted that matrimony interested the profligate, careless Aristide in the least.

All Aristide ever cared about was making things difficult for the brother from whom he had already taken so much.

He excelled in it.

Luckily, Valentino thought now, as he often did, I care only and ever about one thing.

Aristide could tarnish his own name all he liked—but Valentino embodied the family legacy. He was the Bonaparte tradition, despite his father’s best efforts and his brother’s many antics. He would not tarnish.

If anything, this wedding nonsense would only make Valentino look better by contrast. The very picture of duty and quiet resignation in the face of more unsavory behavior from the usual suspects.

Really, he should thank Aristide for making the case himself so airtight. Though he knew he would not. That he would die first, in fact.

“Well,” said Princess Carliz, looking at him with those curious eyes of hers that made him think of treasure chests and ancient castles, the kind of things that ran in her blood back through the ages.

“Well?” he echoed.

And it was then, as Valentino heard the edge in his own voice, that he realized two things.

One, that he had not already called to have her removed, which he would like to put down to the demands of this moment—but he could not pretend that he was emotional about this. Not in the way one might expect a jilted groom to be. He was annoyed, yes. He did not like the mess of this or the fact he knew that he would be required to do some cleanup. He also did not care to have his plans altered.

But two, and more critically, it only just now occurred to him that he and Carliz were...alone.

All alone, here in his bedchamber, where no one else would dare set foot without his express permission.

That thing in him that he had gone to such lengths to keep at bay, to keep at arm’s length, to keep away from beat hot and hard.

“I hope you don’t expect my sympathies.” Carliz looked at him with an expression he’d seen before. It was that knowing look of hers that he disliked intensely. Because she should not know him. She should not know a single thing about him. They were strangers. Except, of course, that was not precisely true—though it should have been. And he could not understand why it was that this woman got to him in ways no one else ever had. In ways he could not allow. “I don’t know why you were marrying the poor girl in the first place.”

“I can assure you that there is nothing poor about her.”

Carliz waved an impatient hand. “Do not bore me with some tedious dissertation on your dynastic responsibilities, please. There is no possible way that you have heard more on that score that I have over the years. My sister’s potential husband search requires a committee to splice together the perfect bloodlines that appeal to my mother’s European sensibilities, my sister’s refinement and consequence, and what the palace considers appropriate advertising for the next generation of the modern kingdom. If they could get away with a lab experiment and a selection of petri dishes, I believe they would.”

“The bride may have had second thoughts,” Valentino said, lifting his shoulder in the barest shrug. And he did not choose to ask himself why it was that he was so happy to let Carliz think he was nonchalant about this. Before she’d walked into the room, he had been as close to irate as he allowed himself to become—though always with the strictest control. He did not particularly wish to figure out why he did not want her to know that. “Luckily, I do not require lab experiments in petri dishes, only a certain level of respectability. I am sure she will be easily replaced.”

“How tempting for the next figurine you tote to the altar.” Carliz’s voice was scathing, something she very clearly did not mind if he knew. “If only I, too, could be a nameless puzzle piece for you to move about at will, easily and often duplicated, exchanged, then soon enough forgotten.”

And for the first time since he’d woken up this morning, filled with the dark resolve that had gotten him into this position in the first place and fully prepared to execute his duty no matter what, Valentino found himself feeling...something a whole lot like good.

There was no other way to explain the sudden lightness he could feel in him after so long holding up the weight of this heaviness he’d brought upon himself. Because despite what his wretched father had done—from parading his mistress beneath his wife’s nose and thereby, eventually, causing his wife’s death to all the years of pitting his legitimate son against his bastard for his own entertainment—Valentino had always been conscious of his place. Of who he was. Who he would always be, no matter what games his father played. No matter what became of his inheritance.

He was still and ever Valentino Bonaparte, the one and only true heir to his family’s legacy. It was still incumbent upon him to be the Bonaparte he wished to see in the world. Not like his reckless half brother, certainly. And certainly nothing like his cruel father.

There had been others before Milo, and it was Valentino’s job to make certain that there would be more after him. Men like his grandfather, dignified and reserved, and filled with distaste for the sort of person Milo had become. There had been the uncles that Milo had always hated, mostly because they didn’t approve of him. There had been the older one, Vincenzo, the original heir. He had been a stalwart man in his own father’s style, all that was intelligent and fair-minded. But he had died, taken abruptly when he was in his twenties, long before he’d had the chance to secure his legacy.

It was the youngest brother in the family, Bruno, who had told Valentino stories about the lost heir to the Bonaparte fortune. Uncle Bruno, who had been deeply revolted by Milo for most of his life and had renounced the family entirely when he’d moved to America and married his long-term partner. Severing all ties in his wake.

Valentino had always been keenly aware that if only the sainted Vincenzo had married and secured the family line earlier rather than later, so much of what had happened after could have been averted.

He had felt as if a clock were always ticking in him as he’d set about securing his own fortune, so that he would never, ever be dependent upon his father’s cruel whims. It had been a relief to decide that he was finally ready and then to move forward as swiftly as possible. His requirements for a wife were quite simple, after all. He wanted someone practical and biddable. His mother had been neither of those things, and look at where she had ended up. His mother had been emotional. She had fancied herself in love with Milo, she had suffered for it, and Milo had used that love shamelessly.

Valentino had always been clear on that score after watching the many disasters of his family unfold before him. There would be no love where he was concerned. Love cursed whoever it touched. Love corroded and destroyed.

Love was, at best, a catastrophic disaster.

Love, apparently, was what kept Ginevra, the housekeeper of his youth and long his father’s lover, still at her job tending to the original house on the estate and Milo himself even though her own son had done shockingly well for himself and should have been more than able to support her.

He could not think of a better warning against love than the two women who had actually loved a monster like Milo Bonaparte. His mother had died. Ginevra toiled on. None of them were happy, nor ever would be.

With all of that in mind, Valentino had decided that Francesca Campo fit the bill nicely. She had been so biddable that she had nearly disappeared in the middle of conversations. It was true that he had found her boring, but he had thought that was a positive.

After all, if he’d wanted a lightning bolt, he’d known right where to find one.

And right now, said lightning bolt was advancing upon him.

“Do you know why I am here?” she was demanding, with all her usual delicacy.

Which was to say, none. For a princess, she was astonishingly direct.

“Somehow I doubt it was to offer your felicitations,” he murmured, watching those scarves dance and flow as she moved, damn her. “Likely that is the reason you’re not invited.”

“I had to sneak onto this island,” she told him. “I had to crash your wedding, the only event of any significance that I have not been invited to in as long as I can recall.”

“Perhaps you have confused reality and fantasy yet again,” he said coolly, though nothing in him was cool. It was all fire and the dark. The dangerous, enveloping dark. “Is it possible that you forgot, once more, that we have no relationship, you and I? Did you perhaps tell yourself a different story so often that you forgot it was a lie?”

“We might not have had the wild affair the papers think we did,” she said, coming to stand directly before him, that gaze of hers trained on him. “But this is not a lie, Valentino. And I don’t need you to tell the truth about it. I know the truth.”

“What is it you think you know, Principessa?” he asked, though he knew better. He knew this was not a conversation he should allow. He had made certain, for years, that it could not take place. There was no reason to stop now. But he could not seem to keep himself from it. “What is it you imagine this is?”

She opened her mouth as if to answer him, but then stopped. And he knew too much about her for his own good, though he had vowed to himself that he would pretend they had never met. Still, he had found himself accidentally finding his way to articles, here and there. Not simply the usual tabloid fodder that trailed about after her, but the few actual, interesting discussions of who she was, mostly in relation to her sister, Queen Emilia of Las Sosegadas, a tiny little jewel of a kingdom tucked away in the mountains between France and Spain.

And even then, he had felt as if every sentence he’d read had been confirmation of something he already knew from their brief, electric meetings. He could see that she was clever. It was the way she looked at him, and right through him, when no one else had ever seemed particularly capable of that.

No one, that was, except his brother—but he chose not to focus on that twisted, tortuous relationship.

Carliz was beautiful, yes, but he had seen her when she was not putting on that act of hers. Not that she was not bright and glorious, drawing everyone near. She was all of that, but she was also more. She was not only that gleaming, laughing version of herself, and even though the moments they had spent together did not add up to even an hour, he had seen more of her than the whole of the world.

He told himself that was a curse, but it felt more like a blessing.

“I have a better idea,” she said now, studying him. “Why don’t you tell me what this is?”

“I have told you. Repeatedly.” But he would do so again, because he needed to hear it too. “It is nothing. It can only be nothing. It will never be anything else.”

“That does not sound like nothing.” She shook her head. “And if it was really nothing, I feel certain you would already have had me removed from this room. Ejected from the grounds of your estate. Or thrown in jail like any other sad little stalker. But that’s not what I am, is it?”

Valentino was surprised that there was the urge in him to agree with her. To say the unsayable things. To throw himself off a cliff, here and now. He did not know how he managed to keep himself from giving in to it. That was how strong it was. “I understand what you want me to say. But that doesn’t mean I will say it.”

“Of course not. Because if you said it, then you could no longer hide away in all your denial. And then what would you do?”

And Valentino laughed. It was a rusty sound, because he was not a particularly joyful or typically amused person. He was a man of strict compartments. Only his mother and his brother had ever called him by his full name, and he liked it that way. Because now that his mother was dead, it was only his greatest enemy who called him Valentino.

To the rest of the world, he was Vale. It made things very easy for him. Anyone who called him by the nickname knew only the performance he put on, not him.

But Carliz called him Valentino. Worse, he had told her to. He had given her that name himself, when he never did such a thing. He always handed out his nickname, so he could file the people who used it into the appropriate spaces.

“I saw you in Paris not long ago,” he told her. “I was there on business. You were there to make a scene.”

“I would say I remember,” she replied, looking unrepentant. “But that would be a lie.”

“I remember well enough. You were there with the usual entourage. Taking over the restaurant, spilling out into the streets.” He had not expected to see her. He had been shocked she had somehow not felt the weight of his stare, or simply felt his presence, and he didn’t like what that said about him. “You were laughing and making merry though it was clear to me that you were empty inside.”

“But have you not heard? I am always empty inside. That is one of the foremost qualities about me that people admire.” She leaned closer, and he was hit with that spice and a hint of silk. “The emptier I am, the more they can imagine me however they like. It makes for a lovely sparkle, and I am nothing if not sparkly. Really, it is a public service.”

“I told myself I was not following you,” he said, not sure why he was telling her this. Not sure why he was admitting to this fault in his character. “I was merely walking back along the same boulevard. And you had no idea that I was there. You were simply careening this way and that in a Parisian night, heedless of your surroundings.”

“I pay a security detail a great deal of money to make certain that I can be as heedless as I like, whenever I like.” Though Carliz smiled, wryly. “It is more honest to say that the crown pays, because as my sister has pointed out many times, she would be the one called upon to pay a ransom for anything truly upsetting to befall me. Still. I was perfectly safe.” Again she studied him again. “But you were not concerned about my safety, were you?”

“You looked so lost, Carliz,” he told her, and maybe he knew she would react to that. That she would suck in a breath. “That was when I decided to forgive you for all the lies you have told about the two of us over the years. I doubt you knew any better.” He leaned in, just a little, the better to stick in the knife. “Just a lost little princess, stumbling around Europe, making messes for her sister to clean up.”

He saw something flash in her eyes, but in the next moment, she laughed. And this was not that sparkly laugh of hers that she trotted out in front of the cameras. Or for her shallow little friends’ mobile phones. This was a low sort of laugh, warm and deep.

It moved in him like the kind of fine bourbon he only allowed himself seldomly.

“It’s not going to work,” she told him. “I can’t be shamed. Though you are welcome to try, if you like. Everyone does.”

“Princess,” he said from between his teeth, as if she was the one needling him when he had just sunk a knife in, deep. And on purpose. “This has been a challenging day. I am now embroiled in a scandal not of my own making and you are here, right in the middle of it. It makes me wonder what level of collusion there has been between you and my brother.”

She looked intrigued by that. “I absolutely would have colluded with your brother. But I didn’t think of it.”

“When I leave this room I will have to pick up the pieces, yet again, from one more disaster not of my making.” Valentino let out his own laugh then, but this time it was nothing but bleak. “I cannot even blame my brother. He has always behaved as badly as possible, I assume to live down to the expectations placed upon him. I cannot blame my would-be bride, for it is not as if she truly betrayed me. That would require an emotional connection we never had. But you are something else again. I find it is easy enough to blame you.”

“You can blame me all you want,” Carliz threw right back at him.

She stepped even closer, and now it was dangerous. They were barely a breath apart. Her scent was all around him, and he could feel her heat, too, and it would not even require a decision to reach out for her. He could simply exhale—

“Good,” Valentino growled. “Because I intend to blame you for everything. Thoroughly.”

“Please do,” she dared him. “At last.”

And maybe he needed that decision to be made, even if she was the one to make it. Either way, he finally shrugged off that leash he’d had wrapped tight around his own neck since he’d first laid eyes on her in Rome. After all this time, after letting it choke him for years, he finally just...cut the chain.

Because this day of all days, Valentino thought he might as well do the thing he was already accused of doing. He might as well have one taste since he had already paid for it in the press. Over and over again. And would likely continue paying for it after today.

And besides, he had always rather liked a lightning storm.

Maybe he had needed a disaster of this magnitude to admit it.

Valentino reached out and put his hands on her body, the silk of those scarves and the heat of her skin beneath. Then he drew her closer still, so that body of hers was pressed against his chest the way he woke up remembering, sometimes.

This was like that night, but much, much better.

Because when he kissed his maddening princess this time, he had no intention of stopping.