CHAPTER TEN
MILOBONAPARTEWAS a pig.
There was no prettying that up. There was no lipstick that would make the man anything but what he was. Tiny. Venal.
And vicious, as men like him always were. He’d tried to put her down, she’d pulled rank, and now he would not rest until he found a better way to get that scorpion’s sting deep into her flesh. She’d met far too many men like Milo in her day. She’d learned long ago that it was best to laugh along, never quite seeming to get that he wasn’t joking, and then to beat a quick retreat as soon as possible.
“Spicy,” Milo said, taking her arm and standing too close. “I like it.”
Carliz laughed. “A little spice goes a long way,” she said, and then launched into an artless anecdote about accidentally eating too many Pot Douglah peppers in Trinidad on a silly trip one year.
She laughed and she laughed and she put space between her and Milo, but her heart ached for Valentino, who could not have done the same kinds of things when he was a child. He must have felt trapped here, battered this way and that by his father’s cruelties.
Because Milo, like all other men of his ilk, liked nothing so much as a captive audience. That much was obvious.
And he was making a meal of it today. He took his new princess-in-law, as he insisted on calling her, all around the old castle as if conducting a tour. What he was really doing, Carliz was aware, was sticking any knife he could think of in deep so that Valentino would squirm.
Valentino did not give him the satisfaction. Externally. But if she could see that he held himself more stiffly than usual, she was certain that Milo saw it too.
So she found herself going full social butterfly. After all, this was one of the things she had always been good at. Drawing fire so that the real target—usually her sister—could get some breathing room. Because it didn’t matter what this man thought. She didn’t care what he thought. To her, he was nothing but another small, disappointing specimen who had an undue influence on the man she’d fallen in love with.
“There used to be flower beds all along the side of the house,” Milo said in his oily way as they passed a set of windows. “They were ugly. I had them removed.”
Carliz suspected that the flower beds were a sore point, because Valentino’s jaw looked like granite. “What a shame,” she replied, with another laugh. “I’ve always thought that as flowers can only ever be lovely, any fault in them must be down to maintenance.”
And before Milo could tell her what—who—he was talking about, she set off on a circuitous story about the year she’d spent wandering from one major flower show to the next, from Philadelphia to Melbourne to Singapore and to Chelsea. She raved on about orchids until Milo walked ahead of her, likely to drown her out.
“They were my mother’s favorite flowers,” Valentino said in a low voice, looking at her with an expression on his face that made her heart hurt. “They died from neglect, but he likes to pretend he took them down himself. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter how he killed them.”
“It matters,” she whispered back, fiercely. “It all matters.”
Eventually, after a tour through the portrait gallery in which Milo lingered over a portrait of Valentino’s mother and Carliz had made certain to act as if she was incapable of taking any negative bit of the story on board, he led them into a sitting room. He insisted they sit. Then he rang for service.
With a malicious sort of glimmer in his gaze.
They all sat there in a fraught sort of silence, until a beautiful older woman arrived at the door. She began silently serving them coffees and biscotti. Home baked, clearly.
But what fascinated Carliz was the way the woman looked at Valentino. With something like longing. Or perhaps it was regret.
Whatever it was, Valentino did not meet her gaze.
Carliz knew this was the famous housekeeper—Aristide’s mother, Ginevra—the one who would not leave Milo’s employ. No matter what was said about her. Or him, for that matter.
The one who had taught Valentino how to cook.
Clearly pleased with the interplay, no matter how silent, Milo settled back with his coffee and beamed.
The visit did not improve from there.
By the time they left—by the time, that was, that Valentino shot to his feet in the middle of one of his father’s sly, insulting monologues wrapped up in the pretense of an actual conversation, he had managed to cover a lot of ground.
“He managed to insult not only my sister and her reign and the whole of my country, but both of my parents, one of whom has been dead for some time.” Carliz said it wonderingly as they climbed back up the steep stairs, both of them breathing deep as if they’d been slowly suffocating to death in that house. She wasn’t quite laughing, but she wasn’t not laughing, either. It was all so vile and relentless. “I was either so beautiful that it made me an automatic whore or not quite beautiful enough to keep the eye of a Bonaparte, I couldn’t tell. It kept going back and forth. And I do believe, right there at the end, that when he started going on about the apple only falling from the tree if the fruit is rotten straight through, that he was actually propositioning me.”
“He was.”
Valentino’s voice was grim, but Carliz was too busy climbing stairs and putting distance between her and that man to pay close attention to that. “Really, if you step back and think about it, the whole thing was a pitiful work of art. Such comprehensive and contradictory insults piled one on top of the next. I’ve never seen the like.”
“You shouldn’t have had to suffer through it now.”
They made it to the top of the stairs and she pulled her soft cardigan closer around her, because it had gotten colder. She kept forgetting that it would do that, given the boundless sunshine of most days. It wasn’t like the mountains, where the change of seasons did not require any interpretation. And it certainly wasn’t as cold here as it would be at home.
But even she was not immune, no matter how alpine her blood, to the wind right off an ocean that cut straight to the bone.
Valentino seemed impervious to the cold because of whatever was burning in him. She looked at him, then stopped walking herself. Because he looked if something inside him had ignited.
And not in the way she liked best.
“I hope you see, now,” he growled at her when he had her attention. “No matter what I do, no matter where I go, there’s always that. I always come back to that room. That man. That psychodrama that we have all been playing our parts in since I was born.”
She felt stunned by that. Winded. “Valentino. I don’t know what you thought was happening. But it’s not you who should be apologizing for any of that behavior.”
“The better he knows a person, the worse it gets,” Valentino said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “He finds their weaknesses. He exposes them, and capitalizes on them. He is relentless. Day after day, year after year.”
“He is the voice in your head,” Carliz said softly, as it occurred to her that they had somehow found themselves on uncertain ground again. “I’m sorry for that.”
And when he looked at her then, he looked wild and untethered. Not like the controlled Valentino she’d seen so much of, and something in her shook at that.
“My mother and my father together were a disaster,” he told her roughly. “And I have dedicated my life to making certain that I will never reenact that disaster, Carliz. I told you. Again and again, I told you that this could never be anything. I tried to keep you safe from it. You would not listen.”
She felt something begin to shake, deep inside her. She found herself wrapping her arms around her own body, as if she could keep it in. Or as if she could make it better, somehow, by not letting him see that any of this was upsetting her.
But even as she thought that, she thought that really, that was the problem. All this pretending things didn’t hurt when they did. All of this pretending not to feel when that was about as effective as pretending not to breathe.
She had loved him from the very first second she’d seen him. She had acted on that ever since. He knew that she had. Why was she bothering to pretend?
So she blew out a breath, and she watched him take note of the fact that it came out shuddery. “No,” she agreed. “I would not listen. And do you know why?”
“Because you did not understand what you are dealing with,” he thundered at her. He swept arm out toward the peninsula. Toward that sad little house that stood there, weathering storms inside and out. “This is me being honest with you, Carliz. Brutally, totally honest in the only way I can, and you still can’t accept the truth.”
She studied him, something beating too hard inside her. Some kind of low, desperate panic, because she didn’t like the sound of his honesty. She didn’t like the look on his face.
“You mean more honest than pretending the only thing between us is sexual?” she asked.
“That is the only thing that we can indulge in.”
He moved closer and then his hands were on her upper arms, pulling her toward him. And surely there was something deeply twisted in her that she should revel in that. Exult in it. Yet she had known, so long ago in Rome and with one glance, that this man could fit her so well. That he could speak to every single part of her as well as he did. Even now, that knowing was like a rock inside her, and everything else was built on it.
And she also knew that if she did not fight for what she wanted now, he would roll right over her in his determination to pretend none of this was happening between them. The way he always did. She lifted her hands and slid them onto his chest, not precisely to push him away. But it was not welcoming, either.
“I met your father,” she said, evenly. Very evenly. “And he seems like a lonely, bitter old man, who like many lonely, bitter old men, thinks it a great laugh to antagonize anyone who draws near. I don’t know why you would imagine that he has anything to do with you. Or us.”
“Because this is my blood!” he cried out, as if in anguish. “This is who I am. I’ve done my best to be something else, Carliz. Anything else. You have no idea how hard I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard to be a good man. To walk the path of the honorable in every way. To do my best to live up to my grandfather’s example, with dignity. And instead I am reduced to nothing more than...this.”
“Is this so bad?” she asked, softly. She searched his face, his hard jaw. “What do you think would happen if you stopped trying to hide yourself from me, Valentino? What would happen if you did something truly remarkable, like taking me out to dinner? If we sat in a restaurant, ordered food, and talked to each other as if we were simply...people?”
“Why can’t you see?”
And he sounded so wounded. She felt for him, truly she did. If she could have, she would have taken this pain away from him.
But there was more to think of here than his feelings, whether he would admit he had them or not.
Carliz knew a little bit about the things families passed down, one generation to the next, even with the best of intentions. Heirs and spares. Good ones and bad ones. The roles people played that had never quite fit them, but they couldn’t seem to shed. The expectations that sat heavy, like the weight of crowns.
She wanted better than that for her child. Maybe every mother did.
Maybe, a voice inside suggested, your mother does too. Maybe that’s what all her picking and picking is about. Maybe you’ve been reading it wrong, all this time.
“If you let this man destroy your marriage the way he destroyed his,” Carliz said, as gently as she could when her heart was breaking. “Don’t you see? Then he’s winning. You’re letting him win.”
Valentino stared down at her and she could see all the different faces he had shown her, whether on purpose or not. That stranger she’d seen so unexpectedly in Rome. How startled he looked. How shocked, just as she had been.
That grief she’d seen on his face in that drafty old castle keep. The unbearable weight of it all.
Her stern, deliciously hard lover, who knew no boundaries he could not push and cajoled her into heights she could not even have imagined, before him.
The bleak look on his face now. An echo of the way he had looked at her at their wedding. And that morning in July when he’d told her that they would never see each other again.
But now, here, standing on top of the cliff as the wind got colder and harsher, she saw everything. What he had been trying to hide. What she had been letting him hide. Because none of this—nothing between them—occurred in a vacuum.
“My father was a monster,” Valentino bit out in that same rough tone. “He let my mother die because she had ceased to amuse him. The only reason my brother and I are alive is because it entertains him to have us forever at each other’s throats.”
“Then why not defy him and become the best of friends,” she asked, trying to sound cool and remote but failing. “After all, who has more in common with you than Aristide? Who but the two of you know how you were raised, what happened here, and what you must carry in the wake of it?”
He shook his head at that, as if she’d delivered a body blow. “You can’t reason with a monster like my father, Carliz. And I have always known that I have the same monster in me. Look at how I treat you. Look at what I think passes for desire. For passion.”
“You mean those things we do together?” This time she laughed in disbelief, and a sharper hurt than she would have thought possible. “Those things you taught me? That I treasure?”
“I’m as twisted as he is,” Valentino intoned, handing down a pronouncement from on high. “And it does not matter how I try to compartmentalize this obsession I have for you. I know where it ends. I watched it end terribly once already. I cannot allow myself to do the same thing. Carliz. Please. Listen to me when I tell you that whatever poisoning him is in me, too. It’s the same blood. It only ends up in the same place.”
And they were both breathing too hard then. There were too many things swirling around in her head. All the things she could say. All the things she felt.
But instead, she moved closer, tipping her face up to his, not caring at all when the rain began to fall.
“We are standing at a crossroads, you and I. A literal one. If you look down to your left, you’ll see your past. In a stone house on the end of a spit of land, waiting for the sea to take it back.” It was almost as if they might kiss, wildly, impossibly. It felt like that, but darker, while they were so close. So still. So ravaged by these things that he thought owned him. “On your right is the house you built so you could control it. So you could keep it stark and cold, because you thought that would keep you safe.”
“It was never about safety,” he argued. And he wasn’t lying. She could see that. He believed that it had been about those things he’d told her it was about. Calm. No scenes. He didn’t understand that all of that was the same fear.
“But I have defaced it, Valentino,” she said, low and urgent. “It is bright now. Filled with color and chaos, and surely you must know that soon enough, there will be a child there too. And he will not follow your commands. He will not do as he is told. He will cry and he will disrupt our sleep and he will not care who you are or what promises you made to yourself long ago.” She tapped on the chest before her, not gently. “He will want his father, and so you have to choose. It’s that stark. The darkness or the light, but the choice has to be yours.”
“You think it’s a crossroads. You think it’s a choice.” He was shaking his head, but he didn’t let go of her arms. “But all these things are in me, all of the time. It doesn’t matter what I choose, they will all come with me. And soon enough...”
“Soon enough, what?” she demanded, and maybe there were tears in the corners of her eyes. Maybe not only in the corners, but slipping out and joining the raindrops that gathered there as the winter weather moved in, but she didn’t bother to dash them away. “What is the point of you going to such lengths to have control over everything in the world if you don’t have control of yourself? If you’re worried about snapping, Valentino, there is a solution. Don’t.”
He heaved out a breath. “As if it’s that simple.”
“You forget that I’ve met your father,” she countered, pressing her palms into the wall of his chest. “Do you really believe that he’s faced with some kind of internal moral dilemma? He’s not. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. He didn’t accidentally become the way he is, my love. He likes it. He wants to be cruel. If you don’t, if that’s not who you are... You don’t have to be anything like him.”
She was not sure she had ever said anything more intently in all her life.
“I want desperately to believe that,” Valentino told her in a gravelly voice. “But deep inside me, a voice always reminds me—”
“That’s his voice!” she cried at him.
Then she stepped back, because she was too close to using the one weapon they both wielded so expertly, and with such deadly effect. Because she knew that if she kissed him here, they would consummate this moment, whatever it was, out here in the rain, the wind. And it would be glorious. She would come apart so thoroughly that she would think for a moment that it was impossible she might ever be put back together.
She loved that feeling almost beyond reason.
But then she would come back into her body, hard.
And everything would be exactly the same.
So she backed away. And she didn’t care any longer if he saw her tears. If he saw her shake.
She was either able to show what she felt or she wasn’t. There was no sense hiding it.
“You think that this is an honorable thing that you’re doing,” she said then, though everything in her shouted at her to move toward him. To taste him. To hold on to him any way she could. It hurt that she didn’t. “You think that if you cut yourself off from emotion, from feeling anything—even though you already feel it—you can avoid it. Control it. But that’s a lie, Valentino. And you might be able to lie to yourself. But don’t you understand by now? You’ve never been any good at lying to me. Because I know that what you feel is real. I’ve always known. I don’t know how.”
But she did. It was that same chain, linking them together. She could almost see it gleaming now, out here in all this wet.
He said her name, or she thought he did, but the rain stole the sound away from him.
Carliz kept going. “And pretending otherwise doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a coward. And if you act like this? If this is the life you choose?” She put one hand on her belly, and with her free one she pointed right at him. “Sooner or later, your son will see you for the liar and the coward you are, and then what will you be to him? Just another monster, like your father is to you?”
The rain came down. The wind whipped at them. She thought he might have made a noise, the sort of noise an animal might make while in pain. And she hated herself for causing him pain.
But that didn’t mean what she said was in any way untrue.
So she stepped back, still holding his gaze, no matter it was rain slicked too.
“Your choice, Valentino,” she whispered, and she knew he heard her.
The rain and the wind could only take so much.
Then she turned around, though everything in her protested. She forced herself back along the cliffs and then down into the house she’d painted all those bright colors. It seemed a lifetime ago.
And even now, even after she’d faced his monster of a father and come out none the worse for wear, he didn’t want to love her.
Carliz had to look at it head-on. She took herself, dripping wet and rapidly growing cold, and toweled off. She wrapped herself in every blanket she could find and curled up on the chaise in her favorite sitting room.
She stared at the wall she’d painted bright yellow and blue, and hung with old paintings. And she asked herself what—exactly—she planned to do for herself and her child if Valentino couldn’t love them the way he should.
Because she might have decided it was enough to know what she knew, to have that faith. But she couldn’t ask the same of her child. And that meant she would have to leave him.
Carliz didn’t know how she was going to make herself do that, again.
Or how she thought she was going to live without him.