CHAPTER EIGHT
THESECONDTRIMESTER was much better than the first. Carliz felt like herself again.
Though it was hard to say if that was the simple benefit of being in a different part of her pregnancy, or if it was all to do with the marriage she’d somehow found herself in.
It was as if their wedding night had pried the lid off at last. She’d woken up the next morning, convinced that he was going to do the same thing he’d done after their first night together. They had started off in one of his guest rooms, because it was closest to where she’d stood at the top of the stairs when he’d come in. And then, because he’d been in that sort of mood, he had declared that they might as well introduce the rest of the house to its new lady.
So they had, until dawn.
She’d woken up in what he’d told her was his bed when he was in London, and there was no particular reason that she should feel such a thrill at that. She was married to him now. Married. It was likely going to be her bed, too.
Or maybe not, something in her whispered, because it had dawned on her that it was happening again. She was alone, again. He had left her to wake up without him, again.
That had not gone well the last time.
She had taken her time getting ready in the clothes she had sent on from the hotel she’d intended to stay in down in Italy, licking her wounds and planning a different life.
Naturally, instead, you married him, she’d muttered to herself.
Carliz had taken great care with her appearance that first day as his wife. If he was going to turn into stone again the way he seemed to do come morning, she’d intended to make it hard for him. She’d intended to make it hurt.
Because one thing had become abundantly clear during the long hours of the night. There hadn’t been any spankings this time, but that was not to say that he’d gone any easier on her.
She would have been disappointed if he had.
Valentino Bonaparte was the only man alive who had ever treated her like she was strong. Not just pretty. Not just pedigreed. But fully capable of taking anything he chose to give her, then giving it back to him so that they both could benefit.
It was the loveliest cycle she’d ever been a part of.
And she’d understood, at last, that this was what he’d seen in her when they’d first met in Rome. This all-consuming hunger. This specific need that could only be doused for a little while, and only by surrendering themselves to each other again and again and again.
It had no longer been a surprise to her that he had walked away from it. That was likely the smarter path to take. Not the one she took, however.
When she’d dressed herself, done her hair, and fixed her makeup so she looked effortlessly sultry, she’d started down the stairs to face him anyway. Because the most important things she’d learned over the course of the night was that she hadn’t made up a single thing that had happened between them. Not one thing. He had felt everything she had. He had experienced it all the same way that she had.
The only difference was that he had chosen to walk away from it. Then had acted as if he’d had no idea why she might want to rush straight in anyway.
Carliz had known better, at last. It didn’t matter what he said. It didn’t even really matter what he did, not while he had all those clothes on, all those bespoke suits that were really just deliciously tailored armor against his feelings.
The only truth that mattered was the truth they made between them, tangled up in each other, skin to skin.
She’d vowed that she wasn’t going to forget that again.
Yet when she’d marched into that kitchen where she was still amazed that this man of all men actually cooked for himself, she’d stopped dead.
Because he had not been wearing one of those suits that morning. He had been standing there at his counter, wearing nothing but a pair of deeply fascinating boxer briefs that molded to one of her favorite parts of his body. He had been typing into a slick laptop that he’d cracked open before him. And he’d spared her a short, thrilling glance. “You should eat, Principessa,” he had told her with only the faintest hint of admonishment. “You must think of the baby.”
Then he’d indicated, with a tilt of his head, the plates of food that had waited for her on the table out closer to the garden.
Even weeks later and in a different country, remembering that first morning of their married life made her break out all over in happy little goose bumps.
There had been somewhat less giddy conversations with the palace. Her mother had been torn between outrage that Carliz had essentially gone off and eloped, histrionic concern at what that would do to the royal family’s image, and obvious, unadulterated delight that one of her daughters had actually taken that step into matrimony.
Though the fact that the baby would come much too early, by even the most casual calculations, about put her over the edge.
No longer so heartbroken, I hope, Mila had said, on one of the occasions that the two of them spoke privately.
Hearts are amazing organs, Carliz had replied, which wasn’t answering the question and they both knew it. So much hardier than they seem. And somehow able to thrive in the most complicated scenarios.
Just remember, her sister had said with that serene smile of hers. If you bring him back home, I can throw him into the palace dungeon at will.
The team that had been put together to find Carliz a husband were clearly less delighted, but the head aide spoke to her politely enough.
In the end, the woman said after a lengthy interrogation about the actual nature of her relationship with Valentino, including dates and hard truths, you will be far more likely to behave if you’re happy.
I’m sure that’s true of everyone, Carliz had replied. And just as unlikely.
Your sister does not require happiness, the aide had said. She will behave no matter what. So you see, in our office where we dislike surprises, this is not so bad. The older woman had leveled a look at her and though Carliz braced herself, she had not rolled into a lecture. Instead, she’d smiled and looked...kind. And for all your mother’s clucking, this is also not the Dark Ages. Congratulations on the next prince or princess of the realm, Your Highness.
And it had surprised Carliz how much that had affected her. How much it had meant and continued to mean.
Just as it surprised her that now, when her duty to the crown was both assured and no longer a pressing issue, she felt something like homesick. Not for the grayness or the heaviness of those first three months, but what she missed were those nights with her sister. Getting to spend time with Mila the way they had when they were little girls, and even then, only rarely. Because Mila’s destiny had always been assured and silly games with her sister had never been part of her studies.
Carliz knew that she would never regret those otherwise sad months for that time with her sister alone.
Living on a private island off the coast of Italy, of course, was not exactly the worst thing she’d ever had to endure.
Especially because Valentino kept right on treating her like dessert. And it turned out that the man had a sweet tooth that only Carliz could assuage.
He found her wherever she was. Sitting with her feet in the pool, wandering the gardens, reading a book. He was insatiable and better still, he was uninhibited in the extreme. He took her everywhere, in every possible way, until her days were shot through with sensuality like burning red threads that held everything else together.
His days were always filled with work, so he would call her into his offices and conduct whole calls while she stood there, naked before him. Sometimes he made her pleasure herself in the chair before his desk, her feet propped up so he could see everything while she tipped back her head, slipped her hands between her thighs, and did as he liked. As he commanded.
Other times he had her kneel before him and pleasure him while he tended to what he called the most tedious part of his life, his paperwork.
Her job was to keep him just on edge enough that he could continue to work. Just close enough so that he was not leveled by the need to make love to her mouth with that same inexhaustible self-control that made her shatter apart without him having to even lay a finger upon her.
She failed every time.
And she rather thought that was the point.
Carliz had been in Italy for near on a month when the rest of her things arrived, sent with love and courtesy from the palace. And it felt strange all over again to see her belongings hanging in the dressing room that adjoined Valentino’s. It was odd to have a whole sitting room allocated for her use with its pretty little terrace that looked out toward the sea, and now the tables held the small trinkets she’d picked up in her travels.
It was an odd thing indeed to no longer be Valentino’s assumed affair, his dramatic estranged love, but his wife. She wasn’t sure she knew how to take on the role of a wife. She’d been much better at manufacturing the story of the first version of them.
Possibly because, for all the ways she knew this man as well as she knew herself, there were a lot of other ways she didn’t know him at all.
There were rules about where she could walk on the island, for example. She was not to stray onto his brother’s property, ever. Much less visit his father.
“I will take care of that unpleasant duty when I must,” Valentino told her. “I’d prefer it if he never laid eyes on you at all.”
But he had told her that in bed and she’d still been addled by the number of orgasms she’d had. The pure magic that man could work with his fingers and his tongue. So she hadn’t argued.
She liked to think that had he told her at a different time, she might have.
At a dinner in her second month on the island, he waved the subject of his father away.
“The man has nothing to add to anything but malice,” he said dismissively. “He is a poison, nothing more. The only way I know how to deal with him is a campaign of failing to react no matter how outrageous he becomes. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do that if I’m also protecting you from his usual snide barbs.”
That sounded so reasonable. But Carliz couldn’t help noticing that his punctuation to that statement was to take her there, across the table, in a blistering rush of passion that left her panting, a little bit dizzy, and with her concerns unaddressed.
She began to put those things together. If she looked back, ever since their wedding night, he had responded to pretty much everything in precisely the same way. Sex.
When she had asked him what, exactly, was the root of his dispute with his brother—a rivalry so intense that the whole world knew of it—he had said something offhanded, then commanded her to strip. When she had asked about his mother, having seen a portrait of her in the gallery, he had swung her up into his arms, carried her into one of the nearby rooms, and tied her to the sofa.
In fact, she thought when she woke one morning after a typically long and glorious night in his arms, she could not think of a single real conversation they’d had.
Not one. And it made her feel foolish. Which she supposed she was meant to feel. Because that was what he was doing. He was playing her for a fool. He was doing it deliberately.
She wasn’t sure how she had failed to notice.
Carliz swung out of the bed and snatched up the little silk wrapper that she wore, because he liked it. That annoyed her too, and she was frowning as she stalked out into the rest of what she supposed was their suite. Though now that she was paying attention, it was clear that the room set aside for her use was as far away from his as possible.
Another thing she hadn’t noticed, because all she really cared about was where he was at any given moment and how quickly he could be inside her.
She left the suite and walked as regally as possible down the stairs, smiling in the best approximation of her sister’s serenity as she passed staff members who she usually did not appear in front of in nothing but a silk wrapper. She marched herself across the house and straight into Valentino’s office, standing there before his desk until he deigned to look up at her, one dark brow already aloft.
“Do you need me to teach you some manners again, mia principessa?”
She might be mad at him, but that did nothing to change the way her body reacted to him. It was as if he flipped a switch in her. As if that was all it took. One slightly suggestive statement and her whole body was vibrating like a tuning fork.
“You’re avoiding me,” she accused him.
“How can this be so?” he asked idly. “We are always together.”
“I don’t mean physically.”
“My dear princess wife,” he said, and suddenly everything was silk and heat, and his gaze crowded into her like he was already thrusting home between her legs. “You are standing much too far away from me.”
And it felt almost like an out-of-body experience, because she was aware of what he was doing this time. It was as if she was watching it from somewhere else. The way he rose and came around his desk to take her in his arms. The way he kissed her, so deep, so stirring, that there was nothing she could do but kiss him back with all she was and everything she had.
Carliz was both there and not there as he brought her down with him into that thick rug before the fire in his office, took his time stripping that wrapper from her body, and feasted on her until she had her fingers sunk deep in his hair and was sobbing out his name the way she always did.
And then again, louder still, when he set her before him on her hands and knees in deference to her growing belly and took her from behind, reaching up to pull her head around so he could kiss her in that same deep, restless way.
Until there was nothing to do but surrender as he took her apart.
But in the aftermath, she came back to herself, and this time, remembered. So she turned to him as they lay there and traced the stern lines of his face with a fingertip.
“It’s so hard to believe we get to be together like this after all those years of running away from these feelings,” she said.
She was close to him, and she was watching for it, so she saw the way he stiffened. It was almost imperceptible, but she saw it.
Carliz pushed on. “Do you know, when I first laid eyes on you, I don’t think I ever truly imagined that this could happen. That we would get this day in and day out. Husband and wife, falling more and more in love—”
There was a part of her that wanted to tell herself that she was only testing him by saying that word, but he’d been fooling her quite enough. She didn’t see why she needed to fool herself. Carliz had been in love with this man since the moment she’d laid eyes on him.
That was simply the way it was. The way it always had been.
But he sat up, disentangling himself from the heat they’d made. And the stern way he looked at her was not in the least bit sexy.
“I will thank you,” he said, very quietly, “not to speak about your feelings in my presence.”
“I will speak about whatever I want, Valentino,” she replied in the same deceptively soft way. “I’m sorry if my love offends you. But I feel fairly certain that, given the fact you’ve been running from it since that night in Rome, you’ve been fully aware that it’s been here, all along.”
“I want you to hear me, Carliz.” He stood then, leaving her sitting naked on the floor, surrounded by a wrapper of silk. And she couldn’t seem to move as he dressed, quickly, betraying absolutely no emotion when she was certain she could feel it coming off of him in waves. “I know you have a tendency to hear what you wish to hear. And make up scenarios to suit the ones you already have in your head.”
“Yes,” she agreed dryly. “I’m clearly delusional. That’s why I’m your wife. I hallucinated my way here.”
“The chemistry between us is off the charts,” he said coolly, and she hated him for that. Quantifying it seemed to cheapen it, and she didn’t want chemistry. She certainly didn’t want off the charts chemistry. Not when she knew that this was so much more than that.
And that he was only saying that because he was trying to diminish what it really was.
“I think what you mean is that you’re in love with me,” she said, because she knew he was. It was the intensity between them, she supposed. It was the fact he’d told her they could never be anything and now they were married. It could be because her life had always been glossy, but empty, and he had felt like the only real thing in it since Rome. It was because she was there when he held her close. She was there when he stared at her as if no one but them existed. She was here, now. She could feel what was between them and she wasn’t afraid to name it. But that didn’t make it easier to say. Because it certainly wasn’t something he wanted to hear. “And that doesn’t have to be scary, Valentino, because I’m in love with you too.”
“I am not in love with you,” he told her, and was all the more brutal because he looked...patient. Perhaps slightly pitying. There was no flashing in his gaze that she could cling to and call denial. There was no flare of temper in his voice that she could tell herself was the truth of how he really felt.
She thought it would have hurt her less if he’d backhanded her.
Instead, he slipped his hands into his pockets. “I can see that this is distressing you, but I thought we understood each other. I’m happy to have sex with you all day, every day, Carliz. I like sex. I particularly like it with you.”
“If you say another word about sex or chemistry,” she said, though her throat was tight and her voice sounded strangled, “I will not be responsible for my actions.”
Again, that pitying look. “This is what I had hoped to avoid. But I suppose it is better to come to an understanding before our child is born. There will be no scenes in my house.” And at least, when he took on that stern, formidable look again, it was better than pity. Anything was better than pity. Though she had to remind herself that he didn’t know any better, not this man who’d built himself a mausoleum to reside in while he was still alive. Anything to avoid those feelings he didn’t think he had, or the childhood that had made him this way. “Perhaps you have not noticed that everything in this house is precisely calibrated to soothe.”
“Like a crypt,” she said, and somehow without anything like a sob in her voice. Though she felt like a sob personified, all the same.
“I will not have chaos,” he told her, something urgent in the way he spoke. The way he looked at her, even the way he held himself. All those feelings he didn’t want, filling him up. Love, she thought, and she knew she was right because it hummed in her, deep. “I want the home that I live in to feel like an upscale art gallery, Carliz. Not a bar, filled with drunkards, broken glass, and puddles of regrets on the floor.”
She decided this was not the time to break the news to him that babies were not typically mindful of upscale gallery rules.
“You’re describing an excellent Friday night,” she shot back instead. She had the urge to wrap herself up again, to hide herself from his gaze, but that served him, not her. So instead, she stayed where she was, sitting there like a goddess on a half shell with every bit of royal blood inside of her pumping, hard.
Because she was her sister’s heir, like it or not. She could give regal for days.
And she knew perfectly well that for all his talk about chaos and crypts, he didn’t have any more control at the sight of her nakedness then she did when she beheld his.
In case she needed more proof that this man who could control everything, and believed he could control his own baby, could not control his heart around her.
“My fear has always been that we are fundamentally incompatible,” he told her as if that had weighed heavy on him just moments before, when he had been losing himself between her thighs. “Sexual attraction without shared values is cancerous.”
“Or it’s fun, Valentino.”
“How would you know?” he asked her softly. “You acted the part of the party princess, but it was a lie. A role you played to get attention, and now you have mine, don’t you? But you don’t want it.”
“I do want it. That’s what I’ve tried to—”
“What you want is a person you’ve made up in your head,” he said, a quiet devastation that swiped hard at the confidence in this, in love, in them that she was trying so hard to cling to. “And what I wanted was a biddable, quiet wife who would bear no resemblance whatsoever to the black hole of attention-seeking behavior that was my mother.”
If he really had slapped her, she didn’t think she could have been more startled. “I have never heard you say a bad word about your mother before.”
“Because I never speak of my mother,” he bit out, something in his gaze that told her that whatever else this was, this was Valentino without a mask. She’d claimed she wanted that. She did want that. “What would be the point?”
“She was your mother. You don’t need a point.”
“Tell me if you see the similarities, Carliz.” His eyes were blazing now. “She was a happy-go-lucky creature, everyone says so. Renowned for her beauty and vivacity. This is why my father pursued her. Then, as men do, he took her back to his island and turned her into a ghost of herself.” His smile was hard. Brutal. “I did not witness this. I only saw the aftermath. The mother who raised me was the woman he made, not the woman he married. And that woman was jealous. Insecure. She was not pleasant to be around, and then, once the truth was out—confirming what she had suspected for years, only to be told she was mad—she supplemented the worst parts of herself with pills. Alcohol. Whatever was to hand.”
“I’m so sorry,” Carliz whispered. “You didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve it either.”
“Do you want to know the overwhelming feeling that I grapple with day and night?” And now his eyes were flashing, but not in a way she liked. “Guilt. With a healthy dollop of shame. Because when my brother told me the information that should never have been kept secret in the first place, information he knew I should have had already, I wanted to leave. This place, my father, all of it.”
He didn’t say and Aristide. The brother he had clearly been close with, once. She wondered at the omission.
But Valentino was still talking in that same brutal manner. “My mother refused to go. And I watched her wallow in the feelings that had already bested her. For years. Until she finally made herself so ill that she needed a hospital. And my father refused to call for the boat or the helicopter that could have saved her. And I didn’t know any of this until too late, because I was tired of her nonsense and sleeping in the old chapel at the base of this hill to get away from all of them. Those, Carliz, are the only feelings I have.”
With every word he seemed to loom larger, so he was towering over her now, though he hadn’t moved. And his eyes had gone nearly black with the force of what he was telling her. With the force of all those things she could tell that he kept inside him all this time.
“You were a child,” she said, trying to sound calm. Centered. “It wasn’t your responsibility to care for either one of your parents.”
“Once again, how would you know?” His eyes blazed. His mouth was a flat line. “Nothing has ever been expected of you. You were never called upon to do anything at all but smile prettily and keep to the background. What responsibilities have you ever had?”
There it was, she thought dazedly. That backhand she thought she’d like better.
Turned out, she didn’t.
“I can appreciate what you’re doing now,” she said then. And it was harder than anything else she could remember doing, even coming here to tell him about the baby, to remain calm. Or to sound calm, anyway. “You might want to remember that you’ve already spent years being unkind to me, Valentino. I’m used to it. I don’t believe it any more now than I did then.”
She had never believed it.
What had bloomed between them had been that strong from the start, like a chain linking them together, but also making it impossible for them to lie to each other no matter what words they used.
But there was more than that.
It was the way he had held her on the dance floor in Rome, as if she was precious. Made of spun glass and wonder. His hands had been so big and yet so gentle at the small of her back. It had been the way he moved with her, smooth and easy, as if he had been holding her in his arms his whole life.
There was the way he had tended to her after their second round that first night. He had carried her into his bath and washed her with his own hands, gentle once again. He had spanked her and she had still been processing how much she’d liked that. He had taken her virginity and she had still been wild with longing and passion and all of that shattering.
Yet he had treated her as if he cherished her.
It had made the next morning all the more devastating.
For a long time—those long three months—she had told herself that the truth of this man was in his hardness, but now she shared a bed with him. She knew the melting softness of the way he held her in the dark. She knew the kisses he brushed over her brow when he thought she was asleep.
She knew the hardness was an expression he used. But Carliz was more certain by the day that the real Valentino was the one he hid.
This only confirmed it.
Though she had to keep telling herself that.
“That doesn’t make you heroic, mia principessa,” he said from between his teeth. “It makes you masochistic.”
“But that’s what you like most about me,” she shot right back.
And this time, she knew that she dared him to put her over his knee. That she wanted him to, if only to prove yet again that they fit each other perfectly.
That she could earn his softness by taking his hardness.
That maybe she was the only one who could.
He met that dare and then exceeded it, spanking her until all of these things she felt about him came pouring out. He spanked her until she sobbed out her pleasure in that sharp, delicious fire, called him names, and then shattered into pieces with his fingers plunged deep inside of her.
Only to feel it all over again when he carried her to that chair, settled her astride him, and gripped her hot, red bottom with his deliberate hands. He built that fire in her back up, then held her there, sobbing for him all over again for what seemed like a lifetime.
And when he finally relented, threw her over the cliff and then followed, she leaned forward and bit him.
Hard enough to leave a mark, right there above his collarbone.
Valentino’s eyes glittered as he pressed his fingers to it, some while later. He was watching her closely.
She could only hope she looked as unrepentant as she felt.
“That is the only scenario in which we will discuss feelings in this marriage,” he told her. “Do you understand?”
“I understand what you said,” Carliz replied. “That doesn’t constitute agreement.”
“I am leaving on a business trip,” he told her. “Originally I intended to take you with me, but I think it is best if we put a little space around this, you and I.”
She was curled up in the chair and when he handed her the wrapper from the floor, she didn’t bother to take it. He hung it on the chair’s arm beside her. “Naturally,” she murmured in agreement. “You need to get those defenses nice and high again.”
“Carliz.” And she inhaled, quickly and deeply when he leaned over her and took her chin in his hand, tilting her head back so she had no choice but to fall straight into his gaze. Everything in her melted, the way it always did. Her body wasn’t conflicted about him or their marriage at all. Or perhaps it simply wasn’t afraid to follow things it wanted, even if it hurt. “I suggest that you spend your time in this house finding something to do with yourself that does not involve poking at me. Because that approach will get you spanked, yes. It will lead to scenes like this one, which are the only scenes I intend to allow. But it will never get you what you want.”
But he had said things like that before, hadn’t he? And here she was all the same.
Only when she swallowed, filled a powerful sort of sadness—for him, for her—that she couldn’t seem to shove away, did he step back. Then she watched him pull himself together so easily. So quickly.
She really did wish she could believe that he was truly that cold, and hate him.
Carliz thought that maybe she could talk herself into it—but in that moment, the strangest sensation took her over. She clapped a hand to her belly, looking down in wonder.
“Is something wrong?” Valentino’s voice was gruff. Not that stern, remote detachment that made her want to claw at him, just to see if ice could bleed.
“I think...” It happened again, and she smiled. And she knew. “I think he kicked.”
They had found out they were having a son only the week before. In typical form, Valentino had only nodded curtly. Carliz had started singing the baby songs, because now she knew that it was a boy. A baby boy. Her little boy.
That was the sort of beautiful that hurt, but she liked it.
She held her breath as Valentino squatted down beside her. He reached out a hand but stopped before he touched her, looking up to her as if for her permission. And she felt...ancient. As if some deep, wild femininity that she hadn’t known until now lived there inside of her. Because in so many things, she was more than happy to follow this man. But this was something she knew. Their future was inside of her.
She took his hand and she spread it out over that belly of hers that seemed to grow bigger by the day. By the hour. She watched his face change as that telltale little kick bubbled there beneath his palm.
“He knows his father,” she whispered.
And for a moment, she saw a Valentino she had only ever dreamed about. He looked...shattered, but with joy. His eyes changed and there had never been a blue that color, she was sure of it.
He looked down at her belly with wonder, and then he looked at her—
And Carliz watched as he remembered himself. She couldn’t seem to breathe as he turned himself back into stone and ice.
Though it seemed to take him longer than it usually did.
“I will be gone ten days,” he told her, so matter-of-factly it hurt. “It is my hope that you will use this time wisely. Explore the house, Carliz. This is the place I made to reflect who I am. It is all perfectly obvious. Every single thing I keep in this house is calming. I hope that you can be one of them.”
He still had his hands on her belly, and he tightened them, just slightly, as if he was trying to hug his son.
She thought she might cry, but that would be worse. Instead, she forced herself to say nothing. To sit there with the baby they’d made kicking inside her for the first time as Valentino did what he did best and walked away from her again.
But this time, she did not cry. This time, when she stood—her sore bottom reminding her of him with every step—she decided to do exactly what he’d asked.
After he left, she wandered around the house, looking at the whole of it sternly, the way he must.
She saw every bit of minimalism, as if he’d wished to diminish the very things he chose to display. She saw bare walls, likely chosen with that same deliberate hand, that she remembered from London, too, though London retained the character of the original building to give it a cozier feel. This place had been built for starkness. Everything was very spare, which she knew she was meant to find sophisticated.
But she had been raised in a palace, filled with ancient artifacts and national treasures, all of them crammed in so that no era was left out.
And her country was a cold, snowy place. The winters were long and dark.
They liked color in Las Sosegadas. So did Carliz.
So the next morning, she went into the little study they’d set up for her and she took some time to arrange all of her half-finished canvases, replacing the soporific paintings that were already hanging in the suite. Then she gathered up her paints and stepped out into the hall, finally feeling completely at home in this place.
Then she did what she’d been yearning to do all along, and decorated.
Every wall. Every ceiling.
And when the staff begged her to rethink, she simply chose bolder colors.
Carliz worked feverishly, night and day, and when she was done, she had completely transformed Valentino’s austere little palace.
She had made it chaotic. Bright. Happy and more than a little whimsical, and in every possible respect, the exact sort of scene—attention-seeking in every way—that he hated.
And oh, would he hate this.
There were only two days left before he came back by the time she was done. So she settled in, enjoyed the bold, silly freedom of the place while she could, and tried to get ready for the coming storm.