CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WITHARISTIDEGONE to London, Francesca put herself to work. Mostly on training Liborio, who was indeed a bit of a disaster. But a wonderful one. He gave her a purpose and company. She didn’t feel quite so lonely with Liborio in tow.
Mostly.
But she refused to think about what the castle felt like without Aristide’s presence in it. Empty and like all the color was muted. She focused on a list of to-dos she curated for herself instead.
She went through Aristide’s charitable endeavors. The ones he kept quiet. Looking for an idea of how she might spend her now ample free time. She had always managed her father’s life, but Aristide had a staff in place for that. Perhaps she should take over some of it, but right now she still felt too raw to insert herself into his plans.
No, she’d find something for herself. Perhaps she could throw her own version of a fundraiser here for one of the organizations he’d donated to. Before she could really dig into a plan, though, she was interrupted by a staff member entering the room.
“Signora Bonaparte. There is a phone call for you.”
She blinked once at Luca. She was almost used to being called Bonaparte now, but it was the idea that someone was calling the house to talk to her that made her feel...out of place. She couldn’t think of a single person who would do so rather than call her mobile.
Except...perhaps Aristide. The way her heart leaped at the thought was downright depressing. And still, she reached for the phone with a terrible bubble of hope in her throat that she didn’t want.
She didn’t want him or love or hope. She wanted her old certainty back. Her old purpose back. Somehow, Aristide had taken that away from her and she didn’t know what to do.
Blowing out an irritated breath, she held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“Buon giorno, Francesca. This is Ginevra. Aristide’s mother.”
“Oh.” She tried to find something to say to that, but she didn’t know why Aristide’s mother would be calling her when Francesca hadn’t even shown up to the dinner they’d had a few nights ago.
“I thought perhaps if you weren’t busy this afternoon, you could come to tea. I have an open afternoon and would love to get to know you.”
Again, the only thing Francesca could think to say was, “Oh.”
“And bring your dog, if you’d like.”
She looked down at Liborio, who was on his back, wriggling around, as if trying to reach some itch. “I...” She didn’t want to go over there. Maybe she should claim illness again.
“See you at two, then,” Ginevra said cheerfully, and then the line went dead.
Ending any possibility of refusing. Francesca stared at the phone in her hand for some time before it penetrated that she needed to hang up the phone. Probably fix her makeup a bit. Find Liborio’s leash. If they left now, they could walk over to the main Bonaparte estate and arrive on time.
So, that was what she did. Hoping the walk would settle her some, give her some ideas on how to talk to Ginevra. Regardless of her feelings for Aristide, she was married to him for the long haul. She wanted to be...well, not his friend. That hurt too much. But a separate partner, and that certainly meant being on his mother’s good side would be a positive.
She set out across the island, chastising the eager dog for pulling on his leash. Summer’s heat had lifted, and though when it was sunny it could still be quite warm, fall was making its way onto the island.
When she arrived at the titular Bonaparte residence, she did not feel any affinity for the classically beautiful and historic estate. It felt...cold. A defiant slap of man against the wild, instead of Aristide’s artistic, wild partnership with it.
Which was neither here nor there. She picked her way up the yard to the main entrance. The door was wide open, and a woman stood there. Liborio immediately started yipping happily but Francesca kept a firm grip on the leash.
She needed something to grip on to. She plastered an old, polite smile on her face as she approached Aristide’s mother. “Good afternoon...” She trailed off because she realized the woman wouldn’t have the last name Bonaparte, so she did not know how to address her.
But the woman smiled all the same. “It is good to see you again, Francesca. Please, don’t hesitate to call me Ginevra.” She looked warmly from Francesca to Liborio’s wriggling body.
“I heard Aristide was in London and you’d stayed behind. Perhaps I should have waited for him to return, but it seemed like the perfect time to meet my daughter-in-law without my son to color the meeting.” She knelt down to meet Liborio’s incessant barks. “And to see this one again.” She scrubbed her hands over his fur. “He is a prize.”
“Aristide...picked him out.”
Ginevra leaned back on her heels, looked up at Francesca speculatively. “Fascinating.” Then she straightened. “Well, come. Follow me inside. Milo is on the mainland, and a woman can only polish the sconces so many times, even in a house such as this. So it seemed the perfect day for an elaborate tea and some company.”
“I can tie Liborio outside if—”
“Nonsense. Bring him in. Liborio. What a clever name.”
Francesca followed her inside. A grand foyer, an even grander main room. All dark woods and what must be ancient art and furniture, very well-tended but...dark. Stuffy. Overbearing. Until they moved into a small room off the kitchen. A sort of breakfast nook. Bright and colorful. Whimsical enough to remind her of Aristide.
He had spoken of his mother’s love for his father in terrible terms like parasite. Vale, if he’d deigned to speak about his father—never his mother—had been much the same. And it made no sense to Francesca either, that all this light and color would stay amid all that dark.
“Sit. Sit. Nothing formal.” Ginevra smiled, pointing at a table already piled high with tiny sandwiches and cakes and a pretty, floral teapot.
Francesca took a seat, quietly ordered Liborio to sit—which he thankfully did, panting up at the two women happily.
“I was sorry to have missed you the other evening,” Francesca said as Ginevra poured. “I wasn’t feeling quite up to it.”
“You and Aristide were having a fight. I wouldn’t want to sit at a dinner with anyone either in that situation.”
Francesca opened her mouth to argue, even if it would have been a lie, but she saw a knowing kind of look on Ginevra’s face. Had Aristide told his mother they were fighting?
“I couldn’t get the whole truth out of him, of course,” Ginevra continued with an easy wave of the hand. Everything about her was so...effortless. “He hasn’t told me a whole truth since he was thirteen.”
Thirteen. Yes, she supposed a lot of Aristide had changed at that moment. Finding out his real father, somehow gaining and losing a brother in one fell swoop.
“Though this time it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to tell me what was wrong, it was more he could not seem to figure out what he did wrong.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong.” Francesca looked down at her hands. How awkward this all was.
“Ah, I do not wish to make you uncomfortable, if you don’t want to discuss it. I just know how...contained Aristide can be. And how isolated this island can be. I wanted you to know, you can view me as a friend. And I happen to be a friend who...well, I don’t know that I understand my son, but I see him better than most. So many don’t see the real him because he can put on a show. Like his father.”
Ginevra was about the only person Francesca thought she’d seen smile when mentioning the feared Milo Bonaparte.
“Having met...all of you now, I think Aristide takes after you more than Mr. Bonaparte.”
Ginevra cocked her head and studied her as she piled two plates high with all manner of treats. She put one in front of Francesca, and one in front of herself, then tossed a little piece of biscuit to Liborio.
“I doubt he would agree with you, but I am glad to hear it. I’ve always thought so myself, but Aristide is good at...masks.” Ginevra took a hefty bite of a sandwich, then chewed thoughtfully. Her gaze seemed to flit about the pretty room, the dog, but then zeroed in on Francesca.
“And so are you. You’re not quite like how I remember you when you were with Vale.”
Francesca didn’t know what to say. Ginevra didn’t say it scathingly or accusingly, but it was still...touchy. She had jumped from marrying one brother to another. In one day.
“Vale was never mine, of course, but I cared for both boys. As best I could. I’m not holding moving from one to another against you. I know how easy it is for people to look at a situation and judge it. I am a judgment-free zone.”
Francesca did not know this woman well enough to tell her the truth. That it was hard to be judged when she had been willing to marry either brother for those mercenary reasons that seemed so far away now, even though just over a month ago she’d still been under her father’s thumb.
She should be happy, really, that her problems now were not being worried about life and limb. Just the state of her foolish heart.
“You know, dining with my son earlier this week reminded me of when he was younger. When he and Vale had their falling out. He is very good at reacting, but not always so good at understanding.”
Francesca didn’t laugh exactly, but it verbalized what she felt about trying to get through to Aristide. He had all his lines, all his ideas, and in his mind everything had to follow. If it didn’t, he didn’t find out why. He simply...shut it down.
“But I suppose that is our relationship. A lack of understanding. He does not understand why I stay. What being needed means to me. We don’t understand each other, I suppose, since he has made certain to build a life where no one needs him, and he is not needed anywhere. That makes me sad, but perhaps it makes him happy.” Ginevra reached across the table and took Francesca’s hands. “I would so like it if you could make him happy.”
Francesca looked into the woman’s warm, dark eyes. “By...needing him?”
Ginevra nodded.
But it landed in Francesca all wrong. It wasn’t need she felt. Need was not...a choice. Need made it sound like an addiction, a cure to a disease. This horrible feeling inside of her that ate her up wasn’t need, because she could live without it. She would happily live without it.
It wasn’t that she needed him. It was that she wanted him. To do nice things for her, while she took care of him. She wanted some semblance of...connecting. She did not want to be stuck in a mausoleum, waiting on him, all to feel needed.
No, she understood Aristide’s position on his mother, because she knew Milo. She wouldn’t judge Ginevra. Perhaps there was something in the odious man that worked for her, but Francesca could not call it love.
It reminded her too much of her father’s control. A man who would continue to treat the woman he’d fathered a child with as an employee. Who allowed her to have no say, no visibility in his life. This was not a man in love.
“I don’t need Aristide, and he doesn’t need me,” Francesca said gently, hoping to explain it in a way that might make sense to Ginevra. “I think...we have made great mistakes with each other on a personal level, but we can be... Well, our relationship won’t be about love or need. It’s more a...partnership.”
Ginevra studied her for a long while, still holding Francesca’s hands. “Forgiveness of mistakes is a choice.”
Francesca didn’t doubt it, but she could not continue to forgive someone for the same thing for thirty years. She couldn’t hide herself hoping for a crumb or a morsel of need. No, this was not the life she wanted for herself, regardless of Aristide.
“I think...love might be too.” She thought about the before, when she’d been falling in love with Aristide. Perhaps she could have stopped it, but she hadn’t because loving him opened up a lifetime of wonderful possibilities.
For him, it wasn’t that he did not have some feeling for her, it was that he did not like the possibilities her love offered.
So, they had chosen. And that was that.
She changed the subject to dogs, to the weather, to the decor in this room. They had a lovely little tea and spoke of superficial topics from that point on. Still, it was nice. It didn’t feel like a performance so much as the layers to a possible friendship. Sometimes serious, sometimes not.
When she got up, she allowed Ginevra to hug her. And when she said, “Thank you,” she meant it.
Ginevra pulled back, held Francesca by the elbows. “I always dreamed of a daughter. It would be my great pleasure if this could become a weekly occurrence for us. Regardless of love and Aristide and Milo, I would like to be friends with you, Francesca.” She smiled.
A lump clogged Francesca’s throat. To think she could be friends with someone at all, let alone when they didn’t agree, felt like...an epiphany. “I’d like that.” She looked down at Liborio’s happy panting. “He would too.”
“Excellent. We will consider it a date.”
Aristide paced the main room in his modern London apartment. He’d purchased it as a direct contrast to Valentino’s staid, upstanding home here. He had wanted to highlight those differences, always. It had felt like proving something.
But he realized starkly in this moment as he waited for Francesca, tied up over Francesca, desperate and aching over that woman, that every petty little thing he’d done in the past twenty years at his brother had only been this.
Trying to get his attention. Because he didn’t have the words, didn’t know how to tell Valentino what he wanted—a brother, a relationship, some reparation now that he had almost fully eradicated Milo from his life.
So, unlike his castle back on the island that he had built mostly for himself, and only a little at Valentino and Milo, this ugly, empty, monstrosity of an apartment brought him no joy.
He wanted to turn his anger at this to Francesca. How would he have realized these gestures were so pathetic and empty if she hadn’t accused him of hiding his wants?
So all this pain, this upheaval, this emptiness was her fault and she wasn’t here.
She had agreed to come, and they would need to leave for the event soon. So not only was she at fault for the roiling disarray inside of him, but she was late. It stoked his temper even higher.
Surely it was temper, not fear. What did he have to be afraid of?
He heard voices in the foyer, and then Francesca finally appeared. She smiled at him, that bland, heiress smile from before. She was already dressed for the fundraising event. A simple black dress, not going too far toward staid matron, but not quite the sparkly purple contraption that still haunted his dreams.
“Are you ready to go?” she asked by way of greeting.
“No dog in tow?” he asked, and he knew it sounded like a growl, like an accusation. He did not know what to do to stop it. Because she was the only one who ever stripped away his control.
She was the problem.
“Your mother was kind enough to offer to watch him. She’s quite fond of him.”
“My mother.”
“Yes. We had tea yesterday. I quite like her.” The fake smile warmed a degree. “I think you take after her more than you’d like to admit.”
She said this like a compliment when it was the worst thing that she could have said to him. Was this awful, roiling thing inside of him what his mother felt for Milo? Was this the need she spoke of that made her put a terrible, horrible man above all else?
But Francesca isn’t terrible. He didn’t know where that voice in his head came from. He could only stare at her, terrified she had ruined him irreparably.
“What have you done to me?” he demanded, at his wits’ end. Because he did not recognize this version of himself. The kind that couldn’t let go. He had always set people aside. Built an armor that kept out anyone who wanted in.
He did not need. He was not a glutton for punishment. He did not demand to be in the orbit of people who didn’t want him.
Because no one does.
His chest felt tight. He wanted to believe that very clear message life had taught him, but she kept being here, kept...hurting him by simply existing. And he did not know how to permanently set her aside. He kept wanting her.
And it felt so uncomfortably like the need his mother spoke of, he wanted to rip this apartment down to the studs with his two bare hands.
Her eyebrows had gone up and she studied him with that detached way she had with other people. She wasn’t supposed to have it with him. Why could she control this?
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said, carefully enunciating each word.
But neither did he. He didn’t understand any of this.
Except he wanted his hands on her. He wanted to forget his lines ever existed. He wanted to watch her swim and take her to bed and bring her a million gifts so she would smile at him like she had when he’d tasted her first cake.
“What you want could matter if you would tell me,”she had said to him. Naked in his bed. Hurt, from the words and accusations he’d hurled at her.
But how did he tell her what he wanted? When that seemed to ensure he would never, ever have it?
“If we plan it out, we could have a child,” he said, and he heard his own desperation, the beat of panic at offering such a ridiculous thing. But this would work... It would have to work. She’d been so upset about not being pregnant, and even if she should have been relieved, she hadn’t been. She wanted a child and... And...and...
Much like with the dog, this did not have the desired effect. She did not look happy or excited. She didn’t even look detached anymore. She looked furious.
“Oh, could we?”
And sounded more so.
“I am trying to give you what you want,” he ground out, wondering why she had to make that so damn difficult. Why he couldn’t make her respond the way she was supposed to.
She shook her head. “No. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but throwing gifts at me as if I’m supposed to be constantly grateful to you is... It has to stop. Now, we should go or we will be late and people will talk.”
“I do not want to go.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Ah. What would you like to do then, Aristide? Or can you find the words to say even that?”
“I want...” Something was crashing inside of him, crumbling into nothing but dust. His very bones perhaps. What did he want? Not this. Not this crushing. Not this need that would destroy him and her.
He wasn’t sure he could breathe. Something in her expression changed like she could see that. Some of her anger softened. “Perhaps I was wrong,” she said quietly. “I assumed you kept what you want hidden, but maybe you truly don’t even know what you want.”
I want you. I want you. I want you.
But he couldn’t say that. If he did... If he did...
“I find that sad, but I am slowly realizing what I want in the wake of all this, and it isn’t...what we’re doing. It isn’t misery and shouting matches and...whatever this is.”
“What are you saying?”
“We should take some time apart. Really apart. If people begin to talk, we’ll come up with a story. But I think we need some time away for the dust to settle.”
“No.”
“Aristide.”
She sounded so tired, so resigned. When she was the one who’d upended his life. “You did this.”
She shook her head. “No. No. I’m not doing this.” She whirled around, ready to march out of the room no doubt, but he grabbed her arm.
And found absolutely no words when she glared at him.
“How about this, Aristide. Maybe this will get through to you.” She sucked in a breath and let it out and continued with words that made absolutely no sense. “I love you.”
It was like being lanced clean through. A sharp, unbearable pain. He thought perhaps he’d even stumbled back, but he wasn’t sure he could feel his body.
“And I know you do not want that. I don’t even want it. But I cannot seem to make it go away. So being near you hurts. And I will not put myself through any hurt just because...” She waved a hand at him. “I want...more. I rather enjoy—or at least enjoyed—your company. Perhaps I pushed too hard too fast at that first taste of freedom, but I like working together. I like you. What I want is not a child or a dog plopped down in the absence of feeling. I don’t want needs overriding choice. I want a life.”
Life. Every time he’d hoped for life—a brother, a father, a mother who put him above the man who needed her, he had been rebuffed. So he had built a life that demanded nothing of him. Because that was all he was meant for. “I cannot give that to you, Francesca.”
“I didn’t ask you to. I told you what I wanted. You have given me much, Aristide, but I never asked any of it from you. You saw it, decided to give it. All on your own.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because that made it sound like...he’d done it on purpose when it was just...
She laughed. Bitterly. “No. Baking lessons and ridiculous dogs were certainly not your choices. You go out of your way to make everyone in your path happy.”
If only that were true. But he could not think of a single person in his path who was happy. “You don’t seem happy.”
“No, but that is me, Aristide. I am not happy because no amount of things you throw at me can change the fact that I want more. Like I said. A life.”
He did not mean to say the words in his head. He’d meant to keep them to himself. “I don’t have that in me.”
For a moment, when he caught just a flash on her face of some kind of sympathy, he thought it might be all right. She’d feel sorry for him enough to stop this. Or to fix it, somehow. She with her plans and her strength, she could fix it.
But it was only a flash.
“Do you not have it in you, or are you afraid that it will be difficult? That you will make mistakes? That we will fight and feel things that hurt?” She shook her head, and tears were filling her eyes but they didn’t fall. “Aristide, we are not our parents. We are not simply pain dressed up in skin. We get to decide these things. What we want. What we love. What we stand for. But you are afraid to open your eyes.”
And she said that with such dismissiveness, more words he didn’t mean to say poured out. “I am afraid that I will destroy you.”
Like I destroy all relationships.
He never meant to. They just all crumbled in his hands.
“Because once upon a time your brother could not handle the truth?” she demanded, somehow seeing through him when he barely saw through himself. “A truth neither of you have ever once addressed in nearly twenty years. Because you do not understand your mother and she does not understand you? What other relationship have you ever attempted?”
He wanted to find some way to stop her. Stop this, but she just kept talking. Each word a sharp stab of pain. Of truth.
“None, is the answer, Aristide. Something painful happened to you at thirteen, and you shut yourself off from all other painful things. Because you had the luxury to do so. Well, I never had that choice, so I guess I never learned how to deal with them like an adult.” She shook her head. “Maybe love itself is not a choice, but doing something about it is, and we have made our choices.”
She kept saying love, like it did nothing but backfire. Disappoint. Hurt.
“Actually, I take that back. I have made my choice. Per usual, you have let all the choices of others fall on your shoulders so you can disengage and blame someone else. If you want me, Aristide, if you love me, you will have to choose. I cannot do it for you, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. Give the hosts my apologies. I cannot be near you right now. I cannot...do this with you anymore.”
And as quickly as she’d arrived, she left, and somehow, he felt worse.
Worst of all, for the first time in his life, he had no one to blame but himself.
Which meant, he was the only one who could fix this. The only one who could...lay himself bare. Say what he wanted. Like she had done.
And trust that his angel, his life, his love was strong enough to handle it.