CHAPTER FIVE
RESTRAINTHADNEVER been a word in Aristide’s vocabulary. He liked excess. Going after what he wanted when he wanted. There were lines he didn’t cross, of course, but he was almost never in a position to test those lines, because he didn’t put himself in those positions.
Francesca was testing everything. He’d never once felt twisted up over pretending to be anything he pretended to be. He loved a mask, playing a role, but pretending to be her besotted husband twisted something sharp and ugly inside of him.
Especially when she looked as if she might cry, and he’d felt her tremble in his arms. Not because she was overcome with lust—he knew what that looked like, felt like. There was something deeper going on inside that woman.
He wanted nothing to do with it.
There were lines, and she wasn’t meant to be of any interest to him. She was meant to serve a purpose, and he did not mix purpose and pleasure. She would be what he wanted, so he could get what he wanted, and in return he would reward her with all he could. Freedom and all that.
Not interest.
So he’d put her neatly aside. Physically, anyway. The past week seemed to take residence in his mind like some kind of fever. The triumphant smile when she’d revealed the cake she made with no help, that moment when their gazes had met. Held. The strange mix of joy and grief that crossed her face when she threw herself into the surf over and over again most mornings.
It was like watching someone being born. Realizing some great potential. She seemed to be sprouting before him like some sort of beautiful bloom. Like the pretty oleander that dotted the island—picturesque and fragrant.
And poisonous.
Because it felt like there were barbs sticking their sharp and tiny points into his chest. Every interaction with her felt like he was walking a dangerous tightrope. When she was only ever meant to be a means to an end.
And he did not touch his means to an end. He was not his father. Would never be.
So, the following day, he reminded himself of her real place in his life. He made all the arrangements to fly to Rome for a few days, followed by a trip to Milan, then Nice and Paris. He told his assistant to accept any and all invitations that came their way, as once they appeared at one event likely more invitations would follow.
They’d had their honeymoon, and now it was time to work.
He did not know why he expected Francesca to balk at this, to argue with him. But he found himself somewhat...shocked when she agreed easily to everything. Quickly packed her things so they could drive to the mainland before the tide swept in, then got on the airplane that would take them to Rome with nothing but pleasant smiles and a clear attempt to get to know all his staff by name.
She was in as much “business” mode as he, and he did not know why that left him feeling edgy.
They flew to Rome, her curled up in a seat reading one of her new novels, enthralled and completely unaware of him.
While he brooded. At her. He hated brooding. He wanted to act, but he didn’t know how, because the only action he seemed to want at the moment was touching her.
A line he’d promised himself he wouldn’t cross. He’d never taken anyone else’s promises seriously, but if there was one thing he prided himself on, it was keeping his promises to himself. To behave in keeping with the personal tenets he’d developed for himself, by himself.
It did not matter if anyone else saw it, believed it, or agreed with it. If he followed his own inner compass, that was all that mattered to him. No matter what rules of respectability, society, man-made laws, et cetera, he bent.
It had always been easy enough.
How dare this woman test him.
When they landed, he watched as all that relaxed enjoyment slowly drained off Francesca’s face. This was where she’d grown up, and she clearly had no fondness for it.
He understood that all too well. Her expression perfectly mirrored how he felt any time he forced himself to visit with his mother at the estate of his youth on the peninsula of the island.
It made him want to offer Francesca some kind of...comfort. Reassurance. These were impulses he’d long since refused to indulge himself in, as offering solace and reassurance to the people he loved most had only ever exploded in his face. He could not imagine what offering them to someone who was a business partner at best would do.
He said nothing the entire trip from airport to hotel. He checked them in and took her up to a beautiful honeymoon suite in a beautiful luxury hotel in the middle of Rome.
Where he very carefully made certain their luggage was placed in separate bedrooms. A silent and clear message to her. Of what, he wasn’t certain. Even less certain when she said nothing about it, or how it might look to the staff around them. She’d simply walked to her bedroom door and turned a sweet smile at him.
“Good night, Aristide,” she had said, pleasantly.
“Good night, angioletta,” he had replied. Irritably.
And he had spent the evening, once again, not sleeping. Then he’d gotten up early the next day and gone into the city center to do business. He had left word with his staff that he would not return until it was time to pick Francesca up to attend the ball and to let Francesca do as she pleased for the day.
At the ball, he would lean in to whisper in her ear at dinner. He would dance with her as if she were the only thing he could ever imagine laying his eyes or hands on. Because she was not wrong about any of that.
And maybe once it was all over, and he saw the response from the crowd he was playacting for, whatever frustrating discomfort dogging him would fade.
But when he returned to the hotel, to find her dressed and ready to go, all his plans simply...evaporated.
She wore a deep purple gown, form-fitting and regal, with hints of sparkle about the bust. Her hair was swept up in one of those intricate twists, and her makeup seemed to make her eyes larger, her lips plumper. Diamonds dangled at her ears to match the ludicrous one on her finger that he’d put there. She sparkled like a gem, and he suddenly felt like some kind of maniacal wizard who wanted to hoard all that magic to himself.
This was not what he’d expected. She had yet to be anything he’d expected. He was not sure he’d ever seen a picture of her with her shoulders bared, and maybe he had spent the past week watching her in much less, watching her swim, watching her, and he had not expected island Francesca to translate into the Francesca who was meant to give him respectability.
She looked like... Well, not the angel she had been presented as for long. Not some sultry she-devil, either. Just a beautiful, alluring, desirable woman. And still it threw him off his axis. Because he’d expected boring respectability. The elegant angel to save his fall from grace.
And here she was, looking a temptation. One that slid along his body like the whisper of a lie, hardening what it shouldn’t, softening what it shouldn’t.
He cleared his throat. Travel on the plane must have given him a touch of congestion this evening. “This getup is not quite what I had in mind for a ball to reinvent my reputation, Francesca.”
She blinked. Once. Something crossing her expression that he might have called startled, and a little hurt, if he was cataloging her expressions. But the flicker melted away into that cool pragmatism.
“No. But I got to thinking as I shopped. I could wear the overly virginal gowns my father insisted upon, or I could dress to please myself. I thought, given the circumstances, it made more sense to choose a gown that pleased me. That might match you.”
The words, and callback to her father’s control, were a bit of a careful, polite slap, and he hated that it landed. Especially when she met him with that demure blankness that had been her go-to in the beginning, and he hadn’t seen much of it the past few days. Like she’d begun to trust him.
When he couldn’t possibly let her do that, knowing what happened when he allowed himself to think anyone saw any goodness in him.
“We do not want to match me, I assure you. Me is the problem. The point here in public is respectability. Was I not clear?”
She didn’t move. He wasn’t even sure she breathed. She didn’t flinch or slump or look away. There were no flickers of hurt in her eyes. She held his gaze, cool and detached. When she spoke, her voice matched it.
“Is my dress not respectable?”
It was. He tried to be rational enough to accept that it was. It covered more than many he’d seen in glittering ballrooms and galas. But there was something about her in it, for all to see, that made it very difficult to hold on to the rational part of his brain.
When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Do you wish to pick out a dress for me? Tell me how to wear my hair? What lipstick color is appropriate for a woman of my station. Would you like to ration out my meals?”
“No,” he bit out, irritated that she would use her father’s controlling behavior against him. Worse, make him feel low and slimy when he wouldn’t have thought that possible.
Because he didn’t mind being low and slimy when it suited, but she made it feel wrong. “I trust your judgment of course.” Which was both an outright lie and said only to placate her so he could get away from this feeling.
“The thing is, I gave this considerable thought,” she continued, still so damn dull if not for the sparkle of her dress. “No one is going to believe you were immediately turned into a saint by the likes of me. It has to be more...gradual. And I think we’ll both have to bend toward the other a little to get our point across.”
“They will think I defiled you. Ruined you, the sainted angel of Italy. A demon drags down another paragon.” Which did not matter to him in the slightest. If he cared at all what people thought of him, he would have lived his life like Valentino. But there was a line he now had to walk. And it wasn’t so much caring what people thought of him, it was crafting it himself.
And she was... She looked... This wasn’t going how he had planned it, and he did not know why she was making things so damn difficult.
She shook her head. “Some may say that at first, you are correct. But dressing as though I am locked into some kind of chastity belt isn’t going to change that if you’re on my arm. We must make it look as though we’ve changed each other. For the better. I think that is the kind of story that will carry more weight, that will be more successful for you in the long run. But regardless, one ball will not magically transform your reputation after stealing your brother’s bride. The only way to soften that truth is with a story of love. As we had already agreed, if you recall.”
He did not know why it infuriated him when she spoke like that. Of stories and optics and what other people needed to believe. Like she had chosen him. Like she was in charge of helping him. Like this was all her doing.
When he had stolen her. Simple as that. She was supposed to be doing what he wanted, following his plans. Not making better ones that made too much sense. Not making this feel like a partnership when he never allowed those to take root.
“Shall we go?” she asked, all feigned brightness. “Or did you want to make a fashionably late entrance slightly...mussed.”
Mussed. Such a prissy word. And he had to remind himself, no matter how she behaved, how she tempted, she was sheltered. Perhaps her father had been a controlling bastard, but that only proved Aristide’s point.
She was out of her depth, and she was making him feel like he was. So he decided to return the favor. He leaned close, until her eyelids fluttered and her inhale was sharp. He waited for her to back away, but she didn’t.
Which shouldn’t be arousing. Shouldn’t make him momentarily forget his purpose. He shook it away, that iron backbone of hers. The flush that spread over her cheeks even as she met his gaze with cool, dark eyes.
He leaned in close, so his lips were almost on hers. “Would you like me to muss you, Francesca?”
She met his gaze, steady and searching, and he realized he’d miscalculated when she didn’t blush, didn’t look away. Simply angled her chin, almost closer to this near-kiss, then dropped her gaze to his mouth.
“I think I would not mind finding out what that would be like, actually.” Then she brought her eyes back up at him. And smiled.
For a moment, his brain was utterly blank. Nothing but the rush of blood, the tightening of his body, an alarming, deep-seated need that threatened to drown him where he stood.
So he said nothing, and she said nothing. They simply stood, too close, their breath mingling in the small space between them. The feeling of it slithered through him. That poison again. Weakening what he’d decided on, weakening what he knew he must do.
Keep her in the neat little box of business partner. Sex could be stringless fun with the right party, but this was not the situation to introduce nakedness, body to body. Not when everything he planned rested on her ability to pretend to be his perfect bride and lend him the respectability he would prove to the world he had.
Whether he did or not.
They would help each other, but they would not blur lines. This was the only right thing he knew.
So he drew his best weapon—cruel words and disdain—and used it. “I do not waste my time with senseless virgins who will likely get far too attached and have to be explained to how things between a man and woman work.”
She blinked again, that one harmed blink, as if by simply closing her eyes for a second she could make anything that hit a sore spot disappear by the force of her eyelashes.
“Perhaps I do not waste my time with playboys who think they’re invincible and throw little tantrums when they feel as if their power or control has been tested,” she said in an even voice, mimicking his disdainful tone far too easily it seemed.
“Tantrums?” He laughed, low and bitter, shocked clean through that she would turn his barb around on him. That it would land.
Perhaps he should have been better prepared. In all of this.
“Tantrums don’t have to be loud, Aristide,” she said, like a scolding nanny. “Sometimes withdrawing is a tantrum all its own.” She ducked out from where he’d all but caged her at the wall. “I think it’s best if we’re on time. One of those ways that I have oh-so-helpfully worn off on you that people might notice and comment upon.” She grabbed a little bag that matched her dress but sparkled more.
She straightened her shoulders, met his gaze. All business. All certainty.
All mask.
He wanted to peel it away from her. Here and now. Layer by layer. Until she looked like she had after he’d kissed her at their wedding. Shaken and confused and out of her depth.
Exactly like he felt.
But as much as he’d built a reputation for himself as carefree and wild, he was not careless when it came to people. It was why he continued to get invitations, why he succeeded in business. Why people liked him, in spite of his reputation. In spite of his wildness.
Perhaps his mother claimed it was some kind of coping mechanism—coping with what, he didn’t have a clue. Perhaps Valentino had—during one of their rare in-person arguments—accused him of keeping everyone at a distance with his vapid personality, as if Vale had any room to talk.
But Aristide understood himself and the world and people around him, because how could he not? He had built himself into all this, and you didn’t succeed while drowning in denial. He understood himself quite well.
He could be the laconic playboy all he wanted, but he did not harm anyone who was perceived to be “below” him because he would never allow himself to be the kind of monster his father was.
Francesca was beneath him—in experience, in understanding—so he would keep his hands to himself and pretend the night away as her besotted fake husband.
Temptation be damned.