CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
It had not occurred to Zago that she would choose menial labor.
He thought that merely suggesting that she take to his bed to save her little business would lead to cracks in that armor of hers—because they both knew that whatever else that had happened between them, what had happened in his bed had been honest.
Scorchingly so.
Zago had certainly never intended to pressure her into his bed, not least because he did not think that pressure would be required. But he was also not averse to using whatever tools he could to come to a place that felt like justice when it came to her. And him. And Nicolosa most of all.
If he’d really thought she would sleep with him on demand, as some kind of payment, he would never have offered it as an option. Because in all his fantasies about what it might be like to have another night with Irinka—not that he admitted that such notions haunted him—in not a single one of them was the heat between them transactional .
He’d assumed that she would not wish to get intimate with him, because there had been too much honesty there and that had clearly been too much for her. He had intended to greatly enjoy watching her try to play one of her little roles with him, here.
There was no way she could do it. He was sure of it, and he’d intended to take great pleasure in watching her try.
Zago had rather thought that claiming she needed to spend a month in his bed was a bit of a taste of her own medicine. Strange things happened when a person messed around with other people’s emotions. He had wanted to give her a much-needed object lesson.
Before she’d appeared at the palazzo, he may also have imagined that her power over him would be lessened, but still. He knew that in the end he was a man of honor.
He had never been anything else.
All Zago had wanted was to make her think twice about this role she played—the role that had led directly to his beloved sister’s unhappiness.
He had thrown out the option for domestic service as more of a nuclear option, so perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised that the impossible woman chose it.
Then again, revenge could take many forms. Apparently she chose the menial route.
At first, he didn’t think that she would really go through with it.
“Your expectation is that I put an Englishwoman of noble blood to work in the kitchens?” his maggiordomo , the austere Roderigo, asked in astonishment when Zago informed him of the addition to his staff. “Surely not. Surely I am misunderstanding your intent.”
“That is exactly my intent,” Zago told this man who had looked at him in the same exacting manner when Zago had been an unsupervised child and given to sliding down the banisters of ancient stairs in this place. “I think that daily chores will be just the thing because she is an Englishwoman of noble blood. Though half of her is quite Russian, if you are concerned.”
He did not think it germane to mention that Roksana, who was still emblazoned on the covers of magazines with regularity, was no one’s stereotype of any hardy Russian peasant, grimly tilling a field.
“With respect,” Roderigo ventured. And he paused, as if considering the parameters of that respect. Or perhaps if he wished to show any respect at all in the face of such extraordinary events… But the man’s lifetime of service to the Baldissera family clearly won the day. By a razor-thin margin. “It is only that I’m not certain you understand the care that goes into maintaining the palazzo. For anyone to be accepted to work here requires a great deal of training, no matter how menial the labor.”
“I trust you,” Zago said, his patience about as thin as that margin. And Roderigo immediately inclined his head, because he had not lowered himself to arguing with a member of the family in the span of anyone’s memory. No matter the provocation.
He expected Roderigo to come back almost at once, Irinka in tow, because he could not imagine her working— really working —any more than Roderigo could.
Yet that night went by and there was no sign of her. The next morning, he woke early, expecting half the staff to be lined up outside his door with lists of their complaints about her princess behavior and inability to complete the tasks they did by rote, but the hallway was empty when he looked.
He was forced to demean himself and start skulking around until he could find her himself.
And when he did, he stopped in astonishment.
Because when she’d stayed here before, he didn’t think she’d ever risen before noon. Partly because they had stayed up half the night, so perhaps that wasn’t a fair assessment of how she normally greeted a new day. But still, it was barely six in the morning today. Early by any measure.
And the infamous socialite daughter of scandal and notoriety that was Irinka Scott-Day was not reclining in an eye mask somewhere. She was out with the rest of the maids, scrubbing the steps that led up into the palazzo. The way they did every morning, and much of the courtyard as well, to get the salt off from the canals’ brackish water.
She didn’t even look like herself. Someone had given her clothes and they were too baggy, and certainly not of the quality she generally preferred. Her hair was in two braids tight to her head in front and then woven together at the back. It was the sort of hairstyle that he thought would be better served under a tiara. In some ballroom somewhere.
Not scrubbing the steps.
Zago didn’t like it. Though he could not have said why.
And he certainly shouldn’t have found it appealing, despite his best efforts to quell it, that she seemed to take so easily to something that should have broken her. That had been engineered to break her, in fact.
But she was anything but broken. Irinka seemed to have no trouble whatsoever pitching in with the rest of them, as if she’d spent every day of her life doing absolutely nothing but scrubbing floors. When he knew that wasn’t the case. Everyone knew it wasn’t. Her manicure alone announced the truth of things without her having to say a word.
And yet even more strangely, the other maids seemed to have no trouble with her. There were no rolling eyes behind her back, no whispers, no quickly hidden smiles of disdain.
This was not at all how he’d planned this.
But if she could be so stubborn, then so too could he.
A few more days passed, and Zago continued to receive no bad reports about Irinka’s tenure as a new staff member. He received no reports about Irinka at all, for that matter.
It had been a week when he finally caved and asked Roderigo.
“I keep expecting to hear complaints about your newest hire,” he said that evening, watching the sun set on the canal, a pageant of bright colors mixed into the water until it was all the same gleaming mystery.
It made him think of Irinka even more and he resented it.
“It is the most extraordinary thing,” said Roderigo, sounding almost…overawed?
Zago looked at him, a bit narrowly. This from a man who had distinguished himself by failing to be impressed by anything, always. He had been running this house since before Zago was born and in all that time he had always remained resolutely under-awed by every person of means and consequence he’d encountered.
It was part of why Zago trusted him so implicitly.
“Don’t tell me that you have fallen under her spell,” Zago murmured. He swirled his aperitivo in its heavy crystal tumbler. “I am astounded at you, Roderigo.”
The older man seemed as unimpressed with him as ever. He regarded Zago, his employer, with a cool eye. “Everyone knows precisely who she is, of course. Most of us remember when she was here before. And yet never could we have imagined that when put to the test, she would rise to meet it so beautifully.”
“Beautifully,” Zago repeated in disbelief.
“I suppose we are all of us given to our biases,” the older man said then, in a philosophical tone of voice that Zago had never heard come from dour Roderigo in all his life. “I would expect a fine young lady such as the signorina to not only be emotionally unprepared to work as we do, but to be physically incapable as well. And yet she has been unflagging and enthusiastic in turn. She is the first one up in the morning and the last still working at night.” He sighed, and appeared to remember himself, taking on his habitual almost frown. “I only wish this were not some bargain between the two of you, for I would hire her on the spot.”
That was precisely what Zago did not wish to hear. He eyed the man who had in many ways raised him somewhat balefully. “I’m delighted to hear it.”
The old man stopped pretending that he was polishing the statuary and fixed his employer with a narrow glare. “At the risk of overstepping—”
“Is that considered a risk in this house? I thought it was considered a perk of employment.”
Roderigo ignored him. “There is a point at which a person can become blinded to the reality of things, too busy are they focusing on the past. Making it the present, when it cannot be. It can never be. And then it, too, is lost to time.”
If his maggiordomo had hauled off and gut punched him, he would not have been any more surprised.
“Thank you,” Zago replied after a moment, and even that was a challenge. “That will be all.”
Roderigo inclined his head and withdrew so gracefully that it only made Zago feel churlish.
He had not bargained for this.
To be haunted by her even more than usual, because he knew that she was sleeping under this roof.
To think that at any moment he might turn a corner in his own home and find her there, shooting him an insolent look from those too-blue eyes and then carry on with some menial task as if he did not exist.
He had created the situation, he understood that. But it was still insupportable. It was agony .
And perhaps that was how he found himself moving through the house much later that night, telling himself that he did not wish to disturb anyone and that was why he remained so quiet.
Or perhaps that was simply a matter of plausible deniability.
If anyone had seen him, or heard him, then it was possible he might have thought better of what he was doing.
But no one did.
And Zago kept going, as if drawn through the house by a force outside his control.
He climbed the stairs in dim light until he found his way to the servants’ quarters, and it was as if he was in a dream when he was, at last, standing at her door.
Drawn to her as he was when he slept, because he had certainly had a version of this dream before now. Many, many versions of it. More than he cared to admit. All of them with him standing outside a room, a house, and knowing she was within.
All of that longing and grief, despair and desire.
But he was awake this time, alive with this wanting—this need—that tore him inside out whether he indulged it or did not.
And he was aware that there were too many truths just there , simmering beneath the surface—
But Zago was not in the mood to sift through such detritus, so he put his hand to the door, opened it up, and stepped inside.
And Irinka, damn her, merely gazed back at him as if she had been expecting him all along.
As if his sudden appearance did not faze her in the least.
She was sitting on her bed, wearing something sloppy and oversize that both hid her figure and accentuated it. She set aside the book she was reading with every appearance of complete serenity and only the faintest hint of irritation, as if she had been having a pleasant evening and was preparing herself—bracing herself—for the excessively minor annoyance that was Zago.
And something in him, something doused in the fuel of that summer three years ago and the reckoning that so far wasn’t… ignited .
That he should be haunted, pursued by her ghost through his own home, while she sat here so calmly. Reading a book. Completely at her ease and unbothered by all of this.
“I hope you are enjoying yourself,” he managed to say, though his voice felt thick on his own tongue.
“I am,” she replied with more of that perfect equanimity that made his skin feel six sizes too small. “I feel as if I’m on a spiritual retreat, Zago. Isn’t that how a person transcends their ordinary little life? A bit of labor, a bit of chanting, a monastic cell, and ample time to interrogate one’s thoughts? I’m certain I will achieve enlightenment at any moment.”
It was that arch, amused voice of hers, and he hated it. That cocktail party version of her, brittle and witty in all the worst ways. It was the kind of wit that was too sharp, too unpredictable. The sort that created barriers, when his memories of her were all blurred boundaries, the two of them tangled and entwined in every possible way.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Her eyebrows rose, and she made no attempt to soften the challenge in her expression. “Is this not what you wanted? A reckoning writ large upon my immortal soul while engaged in a good, old-fashioned mortification of the flesh? It’s all so hair-shirted and Catholic. I must be in Italy.”
And when he planned this, down to fetching her off the street in England, he had done so with great forethought. He had been careful, plotting it all out like a chess game. If this, then that. If not that, then this. He had allowed for every possible move and had arranged multiple countermoves to address each, or so he’d thought.
But he hadn’t planned for this .
For her to be almost like a different person altogether.
Colder. Harder.
“You have changed,” he told her, darkly.
She regarded him coolly, which was at least some kind of improvement on mild annoyance . “You taught me a very important lesson, Zago. And don’t think I’m not grateful. Before you, I had no idea that I was so susceptible to the kinds of nonsense that other girls indulge in. You showed me that I was no better than any of them. That there was no need to pretend otherwise. And once I accepted that part of myself, I found the true strength that my mother always tried to bring out in me.” She smirked. “Kudos.”
Something in him simply snapped.
Zago moved to the bed and he reached for her, hauling her into the air and then setting her on her feet before him.
“I cannot understand the game you’re playing,” he gritted out. “This is simply a role you’re playing, like all the others. Because you know and I know that what happened between us was no silly girl’s daydream. You know and I know exactly what this was.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she threw at him, but there was a storm in her gaze.
He leaned closer, his hands curling around her shoulders to draw her closer. Or perhaps it was that he bent closer to her, he couldn’t tell.
It hardly mattered.
“I told you not to lie to me,” he said, so close that it was almost a kiss. “I warned you.”
She made a sound of frustration, or perhaps it was the same need that shouted in him, and then she surged forward and up onto her toes to crash her mouth to his.
And the world shifted all around them once more.
This kaleidoscope, this catastrophe.
Every color in the world shattered and brought together, over and over again, every time her tongue touched his.
She angled her head and his hands moved so he could lift her into the air, because he knew what she would do even as she did it—wrapping her legs around his waist and hooking her arms around his neck.
There is nothing cold about this Irinka. There was nothing chilly, no barbed comments, no serene irritation .
There was only the impossible firestorm that had raged between them from the start.
He could remember it too well, especially now he had her in his arms once more.
He kissed her and kissed her, holding her up and reveling once again at how perfectly they fit together, how exquisitely their bodies seemed to know each other too well.
And he remembered.
That night at the beginning of that summer, looking up from a questionably modernized version of La Traviata at La Teatro Fenice, only to catch her eye during the interval.
And Zago had never believed in the kind of electric shock that could stop a man in his tracks, change his life, and make him over to someone new at a glance.
He had never believed that it was possible to look at a woman, feel hollowed out within, and never feel whole again unless he was with her.
And yet he had moved with single-minded purpose toward her, the very moment he’d seen her. He couldn’t remember who she had been there with, or why. Nothing had existed for him but the girl with the blue eyes and the jet-black hair—and that look of shocked recognition that they had shared.
It all happened so fast.
He had left this very house that night one version of himself and had come back a different man entirely.
And in all these years since that night, since the summer that had followed it, he had questioned that feeling. He had almost convinced himself that it had been some kind of summer fever, not uncommon in Venice. And he had been something like relieved to discover it had shifted into a certain, driving coldness when he’d realized she was involved with Nicolosa’s heartbreak.
But now the truth was here, in his arms, and he was changed anew.
Just as it had three years ago, everything escalated.
His hands moved, finding her bare skin beneath the baggy clothes she wore.
She moaned against his mouth and somehow they were moving, tangling up with each other on that tiny bed that barely fit her, much less the two of them.
But there was something about the situation that made it hotter.
Breathless and wild.
Neither one of them spoke. And there was no need to issue warnings, for surely the both of them were equally aware that most of the palazzo’s staff slept nearby.
So it was all breath and hands, tongues and teeth. They wrestled and moved, relearning each other in a blistering rush of heat, moving with each other and against each other and into each other, until he found himself lying on his back with his hands wrapped around her hips.
He lifted her, his gaze finding her as the light neither one of them had bothered to turn off bathed them both in its glare.
Zago could see her perfectly—no dream, no blur—as Irinka pushed herself up on her knees, braced herself against the wall of his chest, and then lowered herself down on him—
And not slowly. She did not ease her way.
She was soft and wet, he was huge, and she made a whimpering sound as she took him in, hard and fast.
He pulled her down, smoothing his hand down the length of her spine and holding her face to his chest as she panted. That took some time. Then, slowly, she adjusted, moving her hips incrementally as she tried to accommodate him.
As she relearned him and how deep and wide he filled her.
It had taken a long time that first time, three years ago. It had taken him bringing her to pleasure with his mouth, his fingers. Testing her and teasing her until she was mindless and begging him and bargaining.
Only then did he press inside her body, and he’d done it slowly. It had been a sweet, exquisite torment.
But he had not hurt her.
“Why did you do that?” he asked, there at her ear.
“Maybe,” she replied, her face still buried in his chest, “you are not the only one who wanted a reckoning.”
Irinka pushed herself up then, and stunned him anew. Her hair was a wreck now, made messy by his hands. It flowed all around her and she still wore what he thought must be some discarded man’s T-shirt someone in the house had donated to her, because it drooped off the side of her shoulder. But it gave him tantalizing glimpses of her breasts beneath. And he left it on because he could still slide his hands up and fill his palms with her. He could still pull her closer, and play with her nipples through the thin material with his mouth, because it drove her wild.
But she gazed down at him, and there was moisture in the corner of her eyes, and a tear or two on her cheek, wiped hastily away.
And something about her was so fierce that it made him ache.
Only then did she press her palms hard against his abdomen, and begin to move.
And the glory of this, the sheer, mad wonder, leveled him.
Ruined him.
“If I were you,” he told her in a dark whisper, “I would hurry.”
Then, at last, she was wholly and entirely the girl he’d known that summer. Her lips curved into something wicked and knowing.
And because she was Irinka, she immediately slowed.
Zago let her play. The way she lowered herself, the way she moved her hips. The way she rocked against him, bracing herself as she did it. He let her experiment with all of these things.
He let her set the pace, the rhythm.
But he also trailed a hand up and over her belly, beneath that shirt, and then tugged her down so she could play her games while his tongue was in her mouth, and he could meet that fire with fire of his own.
With his other hand, he reached between them and pressed down hard, just above the place where they were joined.
And Irinka shattered immediately.
She shattered and she screamed, but he swallowed the sound, taking all of it in his mouth and holding her as she shook and shook.
He kept thrusting into her, harder and harder, as she soared off one peak and then flew higher toward another.
Zago moved back, flipping her over and coming up to hold her close. Then he thrust deep, losing any rhythm save the one they made together, until she was thrown off that cliff once more.
And this time, as she began to calm down, he slowed and spent some time toying with her, too.
Because turnabout was fair play.
“You’re a demon,” she whispered, half a sigh and half a groan.
“You’re welcome,” he replied.
But the next time she shattered, he buried his face in her neck, and went with her.