CHAPTER THREE
CARLIZHADSPENT a lot of time convincing herself that she’d made up... Well, everything when it came to Valentino. There had been months in there, maybe even a whole year, where she’d felt she had no choice. She’d had to convince herself that she suffered from nothing at all but an overactive imagination, or die.
Because he was marrying another woman. And she had been given absolutely no choice but to live with that.
But any doubt she might have had on that score was swept away when his mouth took hers.
Completely and utterly and immediately.
Because if anything, the taste of him was far, far better than she’d allowed herself to remember. It was the way they fit. It was the heat, the power, the way she could feel his mouth as if it was on every part of her.
He kissed her as if they were both drowning in the same wild sea of sensation, and he wanted it that way. He kissed her as if he was daring her to let go, to drown with him, to let this thing swallow them whole.
It was that voracious.
He was that intense.
And it was funny, after all this time, to finally get the thing she’d claimed she’d wanted all along. It was funny to push and push against the same brick wall only to have it open up like it had only been a door all along.
She felt a bit like stumbling. She felt a bit as if the way her feet gripped the floor below her was uncertain and precarious, and Carliz didn’t know if she should step back and steady herself...or simply jump.
But when Valentino changed the angle of his mouth on hers, and he licked his way inside, she realized that her body had already made the decision.
Because this was flying.
So she twined her arms around his neck and kissed him back as if her life depended upon it. She felt as if it did.
When something in her began to shudder, low and deep, she knew that despite the things she’d told herself in that boat out on the water...she had not expected any of this to work. She had expected that she would sit there in that church, gearing herself up to make a scene but then not doing it. Because as angry and confused and heartsick she was over Valentino’s marriage she might have been, she could not imagine explaining to her sister how and why she had found it necessary to ruin another woman’s wedding.
So publicly.
And so, deep down, she had suspected that she would have been creeping back to her boat, hiding her face in her scarves so no one would see her tears, and then limping off to figure out what the rest of her life was supposed to look like. Now that love was dead and there was no need to worry about it any longer.
This was much better.
This was everything she had stopped hoping could happen. His mouth on hers, his hands spearing into her hair and gripping her, hard, in a way that made every single nerve in her body bloom bright with sensation.
Inside and out and everywhere else, because she knew Valentino in a way that no one else did. She had seen the way he was described in the press. Stern. Controlled. Methodical. They were usually insults, but she knew better. She knew that when it came to this, to the fire that burned only here between the two of them, he was all of those things—but in the kind of ways that made a woman’s body not quite her own.
“You are a witch,” he told her, harsh and thick against the line of her neck. “You have bewitched me.”
“If I knew any spells,” she said, tipping her head back to give him all the access he wanted, “I would have cast them long ago. I would not have waited for your wedding day.”
He growled out a sound that thrilled her, pure and simple, from the tips of her ears down to the tops of her toes.
It was an animal sound, rough and glorious. He pulled back, so that the whole of her field of vision was that face of his, those stern and sensual planes and the glittering heat that made his faded blue eyes look like whole summers. He bent slightly and swung her up into his arms, then carried her over to his bed as if she was light as a feather.
And Carliz knew her own body very well. She and her sister had been raised by a strict mother and stricter governesses who had drilled into them the importance of their royal appearance, but what was meant by that was the appearance of effortlessness. Mila had gone through periods of struggling to maintain the size that she and the palace advisors had decided provided the best photographs, replete with elegance and sophistication, to suit a queen. Carliz had not struggled as hard, but then she was never going to be photographed with seventeen tons of ceremonial robes, a scepter, and the ancient crown—the wearing of which required perfect posture and an elegant form. As was clear from all the pictures of portly King Amadeo in the fifteenth century.
All of that to say that Carliz was five feet, ten inches tall and while she like to keep herself in the sort of shape that allowed for offhanded bikini wearing whenever she liked, she was not a twig.
But Valentino didn’t seem to notice. He carried her as if she was tiny. As if she was a small, precious thing he could tuck in a pocket, if he wished.
It made her want to find that pocket, curl up in it, and maybe breathe for the first time in as long as she could remember.
He set her down on the edge of his bed, and then his hands were in her hair again. He tugged her head back. Then he dropped his face to her neck and he growled once more.
This time, it sounded like a warning.
“It’s that scent,” he muttered. “It’s been driving me mad.”
She wanted to say something amusing about that, but she couldn’t get her mouth to work, because he knelt down before her.
In a manner she could not call the least bit supplicant.
“I...” she began, but that dark fire in his blue gaze stopped her.
“Carliz.” Her name was like a command, and her whole body shivered. “It is either time, or it isn’t.”
She understood what he was asking without him having to ask it. It was that stark. And there were a million things she might not understand about what was happening to her or why he’d resisted it for so long, but she knew she would die if they stopped. She thought she would actually, literally die.
So she nodded, though her heart was in her throat.
And then his hands were on her thighs, sleeking their way up the inside of her legs and making her gasp. Making everything in her body seem to twist into something molten as she started leaning back, as if he needed room.
Valentino didn’t look up at her, so focused was he on what he was doing. He lifted her up, sliding his hands beneath her to grip her bottom as he hauled her closer to the edge of the bed and settled there, his face right there—
But then it stopped mattering.
Because he put his face between her legs and he breathed in, deep. And when he breathed out again, she could feel the rush of air against the most sensitive part of her, separated from his lips by only the faint scrap of silk that she wore.
He said something then, some kind of dark oath.
“Valentino,” she began.
But all he did was growl and then set his mouth on her tender flesh, sucking on her as if that silk was nothing.
And her body simply...took over. Carliz arched up on the bed, as if pulled toward the high ceilings by some cord attached to the center of her chest. Her heels found their way into the center of his back, and she couldn’t tell if she was pushing herself up or keeping herself still, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Because he was eating her alive. And he was taking his own sweet time doing it.
That shuddering inside her tumbled in and around itself, and everything rushed toward the place where his mouth moved, flooding her, until he made a deep noise of approval. Then he shifted her, taking the heat of his mouth away. And all she could hear was her own panting, high-pitched and breathless.
There was a tug, then another one, harder still, but she didn’t understand what was happening until his fingers gripped her bottom again and spread her open like a feast. Before licking his way into her molten heat at last.
And for a long while, maybe a lifetime, there was absolutely nothing but that.
The things he knew. The way he knew them, and how he showed her. The way he licked into her, moving his chin and his jaw so that everything was sensation. Everything was fire.
Still, she had the notion that this wasn’t for her at all. That her pleasure was a simple by-product of his own need to taste her like this.
Somehow that made it all even hotter.
Carliz felt everything shift inside her as he moved, as he consumed her. It was like a wave rising up, gathering steam, racing straight for her.
And there was a part of her that wanted to avoid it. There was a part of her that was on the verge of overwhelmed, and maybe she would even have pulled away, if only to see if she could control the heat of it, the intensity—
But he wouldn’t allow it.
Valentino held her tighter. He licked in deeper.
He let his teeth scrape that proud little center of her, once. Then again—
And Carliz turned to ash.
It was a white-hot implosion. She heard someone scream, and her body took over, jerking into his mouth as if she was trying to ride him from below.
She could feel him shaking too. Because he was all around her, and she was holding him between her thighs, and it was only later that she would realize that the shaking she felt was his laughter. As if he couldn’t believe the glory of this either.
There was nothing but that bliss.
Spitting on and on and on.
Carliz only spun back into flesh and bone when he pulled her up to sit on the edge of the bed again. His hands were on her shoulders, but it took her so long to focus on him and when she did, his mouth was in that straight, serious line. But his eyes were bright and dancing.
“Take heart, Principessa,” he said in that low, growly voice. “This is only the beginning.”
She could feel that in every single cell in her body. And every single one of them was blazing hot. And so she smiled, as if this kind of thing happened to her every day. “Marvelous,” she said, in some approximation of blasé. “It would be so disappointing if, after all this, it was just...boring.”
But that lassitude making her hot and sleepy and silly disappeared in an instant when his gaze changed. When it got hotter. More intent.
“I promise I will do my best,” he said in that deep, dangerous way of his. “I would not wish to bore you.”
It was possible that she would come to regret saying something so flippant.
That was what Carliz thought as he stopped doing whatever it was he was doing—she realized, belatedly, that it was possible he’d been intending to undress, for she was sure that he’d been wearing a full suit before and now was simply in shirtsleeves and his trousers—and looked down at her in a way that she could only call...alarming.
In that it set off every single delicious alarm inside her body in a way she had never felt before.
She had the distant thought that she’d been playing with this fire all along, and hadn’t realized it. As if it had been a wee little book of matches when he was more properly a wildfire.
He looked even more stern than before. That glittering thing in his gaze was even more intense. Valentino crossed his arms as he stood there before her, positioned between her sprawled-out legs. While she slumped there with her panties torn off and her dress hiked up to her waist.
And it didn’t occur to Carliz to fidget, or to cover herself. Or to do anything but gaze back at him, wide-eyed, once again feeling small and precious and more beautiful than she ever had before in the whole of her life.
“Take off your dress,” he told her.
It was an order. And...she liked it.
And he knew she liked it. His brows rose, waiting for a protest or a fight or even a reply. Maybe a laugh.
But her breath was coming faster, parts of her prickling into life and making themselves known. Her breasts felt heavy against her chest and her nipples were pinched of their own accord. Her skin felt too hot, and every time she breathed, it was as if she was causing her own dress to caress her. It made her want to squirm. Maybe she did, because she felt precious and debauched all at once. And she had never been this wet.
Ever.
And, in any case, it didn’t occur to her to disobey him. She pulled the dress up and over her head in one movement and threw it aside, realizing when she saw that look of approval on his face that his approval was exactly what she wanted. She sat up straighter, as if she was offering her breasts to him, and he nodded.
“That too,” he said.
Carliz’s hands were shaking as she fumbled with the front closure of her bra. She peeled it off her breasts, sucking in a breath as that simple little bit of motion made her react as if he’d done it. She was oversensitized. She was shivering. And yet there was not one part of her that was cold.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, and there was something about his approval that delighted her. It shimmered through her, making this hotter, making her feel molten and almost too bright with it to bear.
“You are a madness in me,” he told her. “You have driven me to the limits of my control, Principessa, and this I cannot allow.”
She didn’t know what that meant. But the way he looked at her, the way he studied her as she sat there, fully naked before him, made that same shimmering, shivery heat wrap her up even more.
“The things you have done require retribution,” he told her, which might have been scary if she hadn’t seen that gleaming dark fire in his gaze. If she hadn’t felt it, everywhere, as if he was still licking into her core. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said, though she didn’t.
“Because if we are telling truths here tonight,” he said, in that low, stirring way of his that she felt—again—like he was pressing the words into her skin with his tongue, “then we can admit, you and I, that the paparazzi should never have known a single thing about the two of us.”
“It could be argued that they didn’t. That they don’t.”
“Yet you will not make that argument.” His eyes were stern too, then, and it made her heart ache. As if there was nothing she wouldn’t do for this man’s good opinion, and happily. Had that been what had motivated her all along? But no. There was also all this fire, the flames still licking at her as if they would never stop. They hadn’t yet. “Because you know exactly what you did, Carliz. And so do I.”
He moved to the bed and sat beside her, still fully clothed. And then, raising that demanding brow, he patted his thigh. “Come, then. You know as well as I do what you have earned.” His eyes gleamed. “We’ll start with a reminder of our sins.”
For a long moment, she didn’t understand. She stared at his thigh, harder than any rock beside her. Then at his face and intensity there, so all-consuming it made her wish she could simply crawl inside of him... Yet, whether she understood it or not, she couldn’t stop shivering. And every single time she did, it made her wetter between her legs. It made her breasts feel heavier. It made oversensitized skin feel as if she was so raw that it might simply peel off in the next moment, leaving her brand-new and entirely his.
She didn’t hate that idea.
“Carliz,” Valentino said quietly. Intently. “Over my lap, please.”
And then she did understand, and it slammed into her like its own explosion. Hot. Hard. Devastating.
“You... You want to...?”
“Three years.” He bit off the words quietly, his eyes a bright flame. “How many tabloid stories do you think I was forced to suffer through in that period of time, thanks to you? Twenty? Forty?”
“I...” But she couldn’t finish. She didn’t even know what she might say.
And her heart was a trapped bird in her chest.
“Carliz.”
It was the way he was looking at her. As if he fully expected her to obey him. But more, as if he needed her to. As if that was a part of this wild connection between them. As if this had been at the heart of it all along.
Carliz would have said that it couldn’t have been. That there was no part of her that would ever want this kind of thing... But she wanted him. Her body was still tingling and shivering from what he’d already done to her. He had already proved that he knew her body far better than she did.
Her body had no qualms about any of this. Her bones felt made of nothing more than want.
And the fact that he wanted to spank her should have scared her. It should have turned her off immediately. If it did, she would not have cared about his approval. She would have extricated herself from this situation, no matter what.
But if anything, she was so excited she thought she might squirm off the side of the bed altogether.
“Do not make me ask you again,” he said, and though his voice was hard and his mouth so firm, there was something else in his gaze. That pale blue fire, darkening by the moment.
Carliz understood that she would follow that fire anywhere. That she already had.
That if she believed she had seen his heart from across a crowded room—and she did—she could believe this, too. That this was what needed to happen.
That these things she wanted, without knowing why, were worth chasing.
So she took that same leap of faith once more. She let herself roll toward him. Then she carefully and delicately draped herself over his lap.
He shifted as she did, putting his leg between hers in such a way that she understood she would not be able to squirm off of him. She was dangling there, completely exposed to him, unable to hide anything—even the way she kept shivering with all that expectation and wild, whirling delight.
“Count,” he ordered her.
And when his palm landed on the soft flesh of her bottom, she yelped.
It was not a delight. It hurt. She tried to roll away from him only to discover that her initial impression was correct. She couldn’t.
Carliz opened her mouth to complain, bitterly, but that heavy palm was on the place where it smacked her, first holding it, then rubbing it. Just slightly, until all she could feel was the heat of his hand, and somehow, that sharp spike turned into something hotter. Something that sent a kind of molten thread shooting out into other parts of her, putting her on notice.
Making her squirm again, but not because it hurt.
“Count, please,” he told her. “Because if I do, I am almost certain to lose my place. And if I lose count I will, naturally, have to start over.”
Carliz, who had never been spanked in her life, counted each smack that this man doled out to her. And he had not been kidding about the numbers.
He spanked her, hard. He held her in place and this time, when a wave raced toward her, she found that it was a more of whole tide. And soon enough, she was letting wave after wave transform her as she counted, as he spanked her and spanked her, the heat of the blows mixing with the heat inside of her, until it was something new, something impossible and unwieldy and too large to bear.
This, she thought, is what I wanted all along.
The connection. The intensity. The riot inside her. The implacable rightness of his hand, its rhythm, its cadence—never faster or slower.
As if this had been what she’d wanted from him from the start. Steady. Inexorable. Something perfect she could never have dreamed of, could never have asked for.
So she melted into him and she let the tide take her away, and when he was done, she thought he murmured something like good girl, which made her shudder and moan even more. And then to her surprise, he shifted that hard thigh beneath her, smoothing a hand down over the curve of her bottom until he found his way to all of that molten heat she couldn’t deny. And that rigid center of a need she couldn’t even believe could exist after a spanking.
“Now come for me, mia principessa,” he murmured and then he pinched her there, hard.
And everything inside of Carliz seemed to buckle. Then explode.
Wave after wave of sensation rocked through her until she was sobbing and writhing, and when he massaged her bottom it was a sharp, bright fire but made her come harder. And on and on it went, no beginning and no end, and it was impossible.
All of this was impossible.
And then, at last, he sat her up again and shrugged out of his clothes beside her.
She was dizzy, and delirious, or maybe it was simply that she was focused so intently on him it was as if they were the same person. She felt as if they were the same person, but so marvelously, magically split in two so it felt this good when they came together again.
When Valentino was naked, he crawled onto the bed and then hauled her up with him toward the head, laying her out beside him. She could feel everything, all at once. The soft linens at her back, even though they agitated the hot flesh of her bottom. And then him next to her, that hair-roughed chest as beautiful in its own decidedly masculine way as his face. It was too much to take in, all the beauty of that perfect male form of his. The ridged abdomen. The impossible perfection of his muscled arms. The ease and certainty in the way he rolled her beneath him and settled between her legs.
She made a soft sound, and his gaze lightened.
“You will feel every spank,” he told her, as if he was offering her a gift. “And I give you permission to cry out as much as you need. As loudly as you want.”
Her throat was dry. “I...”
“All you need to say is thank you, Carliz,” he told her.
And so...she did.
Then, for the first time, she watched that mouth of his curve.
Deadly and beautiful and entirely hers.
And then he slammed his way inside her, and she...catapulted into another realm entirely.
Because everything was a wild flash of a sensation so intense it was something too new, too all-encompassing—
And everything was beautiful.
And it was all fused together, intertwined and tangled, until she found herself gripping onto him for dear life.
Her brain tried to pick apart the different sensations. The stinging in her bottom and that initial sharp pain inside of her that she had no time to adjust to—because he filled her, completely and utterly.
He filled her, and then he held her tight, as if getting his bearings, too.
She tried to breathe, but quickly realized that was not a priority. Not now.
Because there was too much sensation to bear, and yet she wanted all of it. There was too much sensation to handle, and yet she managed it. Somehow, she did it. She wanted to do it. She wanted all of it, all of him. She clenched a little bit, making him mutter a curse, but that made it better. She tested all that heavy heat wedged so deep inside her, and the more she did, the better it got.
Carliz took a breath, finally. And that was when he began to move.
She did the only thing she could think of to do. She clung to him. And then, when she realized he was setting a slow, deliberate pace, she matched his movements. The way she had when they’d danced in Rome.
The way she’d done, internally, when he’d spanked her.
It was all the same dance, she thought now.
And it wasn’t as if any of the sensations dissipated. But somehow, they all rolled into one. And he was at the center of it, thrusting deep inside her, pulling out, then doing it again.
And again.
And he was so big. She felt split in half and filled almost too much, but she liked it. Because every time she thought that surely she’d reached capacity, he found some new depth. And they moved together, so she had no choice but to figure out how to do this, how to make it better and better as she went. How to wrap her legs around him. How to hold on, and arch back, so he could drop his head and take one of those hard nipples into his hot mouth.
So he could make her cry out like he was teaching her melodies to brand-new songs.
Carliz had never felt both outside her skin and more inside it than she’d ever been in her life. Filled with him, and covered in sensation from her bottom and that molten core of hers and everywhere their bodies dragged together and then apart—
And then, suddenly—inexorably—the waves began to hit. One after the next.
But he didn’t stop.
He kept going, so that each wave that hit was bigger, longer, wilder.
And still he went on, until she began to think the sounds she was making really were songs, and they were lost in the same sea together, and she would be happy to drown. Just like this.
Wrecked beyond repair, but flying high all the while.
His pace changed. His movements became jerky and he rolled with her, holding her so tightly that it should have hurt, but it didn’t. Carliz felt herself break wide open once more, and when she did, he shouted too.
Together, then, they tumbled end over end, one wave into the next.
And the only thought she had in her head was his name.
She didn’t know how long she slept like that, but it must have been some while. When she woke, she was beneath the covers and Valentino was standing at that window again. Carliz felt a moment of cold fear that he would reset to their usual level. That they would start pretending the way they always did.
Instead, without turning around, he spoke. “I’m certain you must be hungry.”
She sat up, swallowing hard when she realized that her throat was dry. There was a meal set out on the low table in front of his fireplace. And she was starving. But she didn’t go to the food. She went to him instead, following an urge she’d had before yet had never indulged. Because she’d never been naked before when she’d had it. He’d never been there, wearing only a pair of trousers.
She wrapped herself around him, with her face pressed against one of the planes of muscle on his back. He started to say something, but she was still following that urge inside her, so she began to press kisses all along the smooth, hard expanse of his back. She got up on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck, then followed his spine all the way down.
And when he turned to her, there was a storm in those eyes of his. But Carliz dropped to her knees before him, put her hands on the waist of his trousers, and held his gaze as she pulled him free.
He was hard again. Bigger and bolder than she’d imagined, and she’d never thought that she would have the desire to do something like this. But this was Valentino. And she wanted nothing more than to taste him. To know him.
In every possible way.
When he didn’t tell her to stop, she leaned forward and took him into her mouth.
And then, she played. She used her tongue. She experimented with suction. She licked the length of him, once and again, and got lost along the way.
But when she began to feel that ache rise inside her again, as if he was the one touching her when it was the opposite, he pulled her away.
“No,” she began. “I want—”
“Too bad,” he replied.
Though there was something like laughter in his eyes.
They didn’t make it to the bed that time. He lifted her up in his arms, then slid her down the length of his body. He caught her thighs in his hands, holding her as she sank down over his length, until he filled her completely.
And started all over again.
It was a long time before she made it to that table in front of the fireplace, and ate her fill. Then let him treat her like dessert.
All night long, he taught her things about her body that she was a little bit afraid no one should know. Because now that she knew these things, how could she ever go back to who she was? Who she’d been before? But she couldn’t worry about that. She couldn’t worry about anything.
It was the longest night of her life, and Carliz loved every moment.
And it was sometime after dawn that he tucked her beside him, anchored her with his heavy arm, and they both slept.
She woke some while later to find sun streaming in the windows and the room completely empty. More disconcerting, there was no evidence that anything had happened here. Even the bed she slept in was shockingly neat, to her eye. The tray of food they had feasted on over the course of hours had disappeared. Her dress and scarves and shoes were laid out on a chair. So neatly that it made something in her...uneasy.
Carliz spent a long time in the shower, aware that there were parts of her body she’d never felt before demanding her attention. She liked it.
Her backside ached, but the ache felt like a part of all the other marvelous things she had felt and done. So the more she was aware of her bottom, the more she was also aware of her own soft heat.
When she was dressed and somewhat pulled together, she held her shoes in her hand and padded out of the room into the grand old house she’d barely looked at yesterday while she’d been trying to find him. She knew Valentino had built it. It felt like an ancient castle, except the brilliance of it was that it wasn’t, really. And so everything was modernized. Lights came on as she walked. The temperature was pleasant and perfect. It only looked old.
She knew enough from her own kingdom that accessible history was the kind of history people remembered. What they held dear. It was history that no one could touch or understand that people preferred to forget, then repeat.
Her own thoughts seem to sit heavy on her when she found her way to the ground floor, and discovered Valentino there.
Everything in her stilled.
He was standing in the great hall with his arms folded, his gaze trained on her as if he been waiting for her some while. And all she could think was that she had tasted every part of him now. That she knew how he tasted.
“I hope you’re well rested,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied. She waited, but he only gazed at her. “That’s the most ridiculous thing you could possibly have said.”
Something glittered in his gaze, but then it disappeared behind that opaque mask she knew too well. For she’d seen it too many times.
“I apologize for my intensity,” he said.
Carliz stiffened. “I have not asked for an apology.”
He inclined his head. “Yet I offer it all the same. I was perhaps more affected by the events of yesterday than I realized. I should not have taken them out on you.”
“I think what happened between us was always going to happen,” she said, carefully, as if she’d only just glanced down to find she was standing in a pile of broken glass. “Whether it was yesterday or some other day, it was inevitable.”
“I do not believe that.”
He said it so starkly. With such dreadful certainty. It made her feel...winded.
And he seemed to know it. He watched her so closely, as if he already knew every possible response she might have. “My security team found the boat you had waiting for you, and dispatched it,” he said. “Another one is available for your use, should you need it. But of course, this is a tidal island, and low tide is in one hour. If you wish, you can take a vehicle to the mainland. Or walk.”
She didn’t understand. And it had been a long time since Carliz had felt so completely out of her depth. Maybe she never had been, not like this. She couldn’t make sense of the fact that this man had made her feel so beautiful, so alive, and now she felt awkward. As if she’d misunderstood. As if she’d made this all up, all along.
“Valentino,” she began.
“You and I will never see each other again,” he told her, and he looked at her directly as he said it. There was nothing particularly opaque in his gaze, not then. It was direct. It was certain.
It was heartbreaking.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“What I can tell you is what I have told you all along,” he said, and she hardly recognized his voice. Too smooth. Too controlled, when he had groaned out his pleasure against the flesh of her breasts. “This is impossible. Last night should never have happened. There is no you and I, Carliz. There never will be.”
Then, impossibly, he turned and walked away.
Though, to her shame, she didn’t truly believe he was leaving her there until she heard the sound of a helicopter flying off above her.
And no one was there to see her when she let her knees buckle. When she slid down to the floor. There was no one there as witness, no one to see her cry.
That was a good thing, because she was there a long time.
But eventually, the floor grew too hard, too cold. She remembered what he’d said about the tide.
So Carliz got to her feet. She gathered up her scarves and what remained of her dignity, and she walked off that damned island, determined not to look back. Not to waver. Not to make even the faintest wish that things could be different, because they weren’t.
She had been a fool, plain and simple.
And when her feet touched the mainland, she vowed there and then on the whole of Italy and Europe stretching out behind it that she was done with Valentino Bonaparte.
For good.