CHAPTER SEVEN
VALENTINOMARRIEDPRINCESSCARLIZ in the front room of his house in London.
It was an excessively well-appointed room, but it was not the famous cathedral in her kingdom that her sister would marry in, one day. It was not the lovely old chapel on the island where he had been set to marry last summer.
Carliz wore a quiet dress in a pale hue that was not quite white and did not smile. He wore a suit and presented her with a spectacular ring that had been his mother’s, which, upon reflection was perhaps ill-suited for a union that he did not intend to let fall apart the way his parents had.
But when he kissed her, sealing their union, it was an unremarkable brush of lips and yet still that dark thrill rushed through him. That same insatiable need.
He already regretted that he’d had no choice but to make this decision.
“Will we be taking a honeymoon?” Princess Carliz, his wife, asked in that tone she’d taken with him over the past fortnight that they’d stayed here in London, sorting out contracts and wedding arrangements. It was edgier by the day. Too sharp, and that dark look in her usually gleaming eyes. “I can’t wait to sit somewhere lovely in this same towering fury. It’s love’s young dream, I dare say.”
“We will return to the island,” he told her in freezing tones, and not because she was being provoking. But because all he could think of was that laughably quick brush of their lips. How could something haunt him when it had barely happened? “And we will iron out the contours of this bargain we’ve made.”
“What a marvelous idea,” she murmured dryly, holding her wedding flowers before her like a shield. Or a weapon designed to make him feel small, and he did not like that the happy little blossoms managed it when no one else had since he was, in fact, small. “Thank you so much for asking my opinion on the matter.”
“We will leave in the morning,” he gritted out.
Then he left her there to spend his wedding night in his club, fully aware that she had been his wedding night once before. At least this time he’d actually gone ahead and made the damned vows.
The Diamond Club was the sort of place where he ought to have been able to shrug off his cares and worries alike. That had been the point of it, in the beginning. It was exclusive and elite, invitation only, so that only the ten wealthiest people in all of the world were allowed to hold membership.
He liked everything about the place. The clubhouse itself was on a discreet and quiet street not far from his house in London. He kept a suite there, for he had often stayed at the club when he did not wish to be tracked by the paparazzi or anyone else. The staff was almost supernaturally excellent, capable of anticipating every whim almost before it was formed. Though Valentino had found the place had lost quite a bit of its luster once he realized that his brother was also a member.
He’d preferred the days before he’d known that, when he’d simply come and gone by helicopter, in and out of his private suite, never setting eyes on anyone but the fearsomely well-trained manager, Lazlo, who made everyone he encountered feel as if he worked only and ever for them.
Tonight, however, he did not wish to be alone in his suite. He tried to tell himself that he had removed himself from his house because his marriage was a sham and he cared nothing at all for the woman he’d married or anything else involving her, but that was how he’d expected to feel three months ago. Should he have actually married Francesca.
Had he felt that way tonight, he would have seen no reason to leave the house.
He had left because if he didn’t, then that pounding, driving need inside him would take him over. It had already begun. He had stood there in the aftermath of their small ceremony, vowing to himself that he would not touch her again.
But what was he trying to prove? What new hair shirt was this, when he thought he was well used to the closetful he already knew too well—and could identify now, thanks to her.
Especially when he had shamelessly used the fire that always burned between them to get Carliz to marry him in the first place.
He assumed she would have married him one way or the other, eventually, or she wouldn’t have gotten on his plane back in Italy. But he hadn’t needed to mount any arguments. He hadn’t had to offer her an object lesson in why they needed to get married in the first place. He had simply raised his brow and waited.
She had sat there in his kitchen, her cheeks getting redder and her eyes getting brighter.
He was sure that the whole of his house smelled of cinnamon, now.
I will marry you, she had said solemnly, as if there had ever been any doubt.
Valentino had told himself that the triumph he’d felt then was a simple thing. That it had nothing to do with any primitive need to possess her in any and every way he could, because he refused to accept that need existed in him.
It was simply the pleasure of a good deal well negotiated, he’d told himself.
But if that were true, there was no reason why a simple brush of lips at their wedding should haunt him out from his house and into the streets of London. There was no reason why the clatter and roar of the city should fade as he walked, because all he could seem to think about was the way she’d looked at him, those eyes of her like ancient treasure, as she’d recited her vows.
He could not see how more time alone in his head would help.
Once he got to the club, he went to one of the club’s main rooms and nodded at a few familiar faces, though he did not stop to talk to anyone. It was enough to have his favorite drink waiting when he took his preferred seat. It was enough to page through the Times like some or other duke from centuries past.
It was enough to sit in the place, a monument to a certain kind of power, and remind himself that he was the one who had it. His wife—his wife—was a princess, true enough. But only one of them did the kneeling—
Stop, he growled at himself, outraged that even here he was not free of her. That nowhere was safe.
And when someone sat down in the chair beside him, despite the many empty and available spots around the soothingly lit room, he scowled.
Then all the harder when he realized it was Aristide.
It was all very well for someone like Aristide to speak of change. To pretend it was possible.
That did not mean it was.
Or that Valentino might wish to take part in it.
“I do not recall inviting you to sit,” Valentino said after a baleful moment. “But then, you have never needed an invitation to intrude upon me, have you?”
There was a time when his brother would have taken that bait, but tonight Aristide only smirked. “Surely you must exhaust yourself with all of the expected snide comments, brother. Besides, it is all very boring. If you must insult me, is it too much to ask that you come up with something new?”
“If I had wanted conversation, I would have addressed my mirror,” Valentino replied coldly. “That would have provided me with far more opportunity for reflection and honest interchange than whatever games it is you think you will be playing with me tonight.”
And they stared at each other, all of that tangled history between them.
“I thought you should know,” Aristide said after a moment, in a sort of deeply calm voice that Valentino did not associate with his reckless brother at all. There was a certainty there. A settled quality that made no sense, but that Valentino could see all over him. It was even in the way he sat. “It is early days, but Francesca and I are expecting a child.”
Valentino stared back at him. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I appreciate your congratulations.” Aristide shook his head. “In the past, you have had a tendency to assume the worst, so I thought you should know. My wife and I are having a baby. It is not an assault on you, or your position as heir—whatever that means with a father such as ours. I merely thought you should hear it from me.”
Valentino studied his brother, his fingers clenched tighter than they should have been around his drink. “It is funny, is it not, that you have anointed yourself the messenger of all of these things. That despite the reception you must expect from me, you consider it your duty to fill me in. What does that say about you, I wonder?”
“Perhaps nothing,” his brother said quietly. “But then, I am the one who trusted you to remain my friend no matter what happened. You are the one who broke that trust.”
But there was not any of the bitterness there that had been, once. Valentino could not account for the difference. It made him...uneasy.
“Your mother taught me to cook and clean as a child,” Valentino said instead, abruptly. “Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Aristide said, and when he shifted in his chair he was the lounging, reckless creature he had always been. As if Valentino had imagined the change. Or as if this was a mask his brother wore, not unlike his own—but he dismissed that. “I was there.”
“Why?” Valentino asked, aware that he sounded much more fierce than necessary. “Why did she do such a thing? Was it...did she get some amusement from this?”
He detested himself for asking. But then he didn’t know why the only thing he could think to do after receiving the report from his doctor—the confirmation that Carliz really was having his baby, which he knew meant she would not be walking away from him—was cook for her.
Just as he couldn’t understand why he’d told her about Ginevra and her cooking classes in the first place. About a period in his life he did his best to pretend had never occurred. Because he remembered all too well when he and Aristide had been friends. And how that had ended, when he’d discovered that most of his family had been lying to him all along.
He expected his brother to scoff. To toss off one of his trademark witticisms.
Maybe he wanted Aristide to do exactly that. To remind him that no matter the few good memories he had of his childhood, they had always been lies. That Aristide’s take on that time would only be a part of those lies.
But Aristide only looked back at him with a curious sort of look on his face. For the life of him, Valentino could not interpret it.
“Cooking and cleaning is how my mother loves, Valentino,” Aristide told him, a little too kindly for Valentino’s taste. “It is how she shows her love. Not quite the villain in your story, I think. Just a woman in love. For her sins.”
Something within Valentino seemed to crack wide open at that. He stood, leaving his drink untasted.
“I commend you on your ill-gotten marriage and all the many moral lessons it will teach an impressionable child,” he said. And then, “As it happens, I have also married. And I’m also expecting a child.”
Something flashed in Aristide’s eyes, though it looked a lot like resignation. “But of course you are.”
Valentino stood. “May the cycle continue.”
He had said such things to his brother before. This was nothing new. But for the first time, he didn’t feel the usual sting as he walked away. Usually there was a level of outrage, but it was always held up by his absolute certainty that he was in the right. That he was the good one. That he had always behaved as he should.
But if cooking and cleaning were how Ginevra showed love, and it was not simply her job... If she had taught Valentino this language as well as her own son...
He did not care for the direction of his thoughts.
It was as if something in him was shifting, changing against his will, and he did not like it.
He took his time walking through the streets of London with the wet in his face, as if that might sort him out. It was late when he shouldered his way into the tidy old house and started for the stairs, somehow unsurprised when Carliz appeared at the top of them.
As if he’d summoned her.
Dressed in nothing but a chemise because she clearly wanted him mad and desperate, and it worked.
“I thought you were out carousing,” she said coolly, down her nose and down the stairs. “The way all bridegrooms traditionally do on their wedding night as it sets such a delightful precedent for the marriage, I am sure.”
“It is still our wedding night, mia principessa.”
And he released himself from the vows he’d made after the ceremony in that moment. Because he and Carliz had made their own vows today, had they not? And who was Valentino to deny the power of an ancient ritual?
With my body, he had told her, I thee worship.
He thought it was about time he started.
“Is this a wedding night at all?” she asked dryly, but there was a certain glimmer in that burnished gold gaze of hers. A knowing spark. “How would I be able to tell?”
He started up the stairs toward her, something dark and needy taking him over more and more with every step.
“Never fear,” he told her. “I’ll show you.”
And so he did.
He advanced upon her, his heartbeat a match for the fire he could see in her gaze. By the way her eyes widened as he came ever closer, and best of all, the fact that she did not move out of the way. Not by so much as a hair.
When he got to the top of the stair he simply hauled her to him, set his mouth to hers, and carried her, once more, to the nearest bed.
That was where he took his time, unwrapping her like the gift he undoubtedly did not deserve.
It had been a long three months. And she had been a virgin, which meant that he, who had never claimed any kind of ownership over any of his lovers, was the only one to have ever possessed her.
That knowledge worked in him like something mad, impossible, overwhelming. Some kind of virus taking over each and every cell and bone and organ. He could feel the way it infected him. He could feel it rush through him, making him feel near enough to unworthy that it was as if he was someone else entirely.
Someone he doubted very much he would like on the other side of this spiral down into sheer madness.
But he couldn’t stop.
He didn’t want to stop.
What he wanted was to make that sense of possession real.
Valentino reacquainted himself with every curve, every sweet plane. He found that thickening at her waist, her newly rounded belly, and felt something shake in him—deep.
If anything, the new intensity of her curves made her even more beautiful. The fact that she had married him, that she was carrying his child—he didn’t have to like how those things had come to pass, and he didn’t have to have the faintest romanticized notion of how things between them would go.
He was a man. She was a woman. And they had created a life between them.
Valentino would have to be the kind of monster his own father was, the kind of monster he’d dedicated the whole of his life to not being, not to care about something like that.
But this was not the time to think of monsters. This was a time to remind Carliz not only who he was, but who she was. And who they were together.
This was a time to find his way back to that glazed, bright glory in her gaze when she looked at him. The way her lips parted as if she was too oversensitive to breathe. The way she obeyed his every command.
Not, he knew, because she was somehow incapable of standing up for herself. Had she not proven that already?
“You like it when I tell you what to do,” he said, his voice a low growl, when he finally moved her to sit astride him so he could gaze upon her as if she were something like a fertility goddess.
Because she was. She was his fertility goddess, and he nearly lost himself then.
“I promise that I will always do what you tell me to do,” Carliz whispered throatily, a knowing little smile on her lips. “Just as long as we are naked.”
He laughed, a low, dark sort of sound, and then he drove into her. She shattered at once, throwing her head back and crying out his name, and he knew.
She had given him the key to this puzzle.
He would make this work, after all.
This most unlikely of unions, which should surely have led him straight to disaster, would be all right.
All he needed to do was keep his princess wife as naked as possible.