CHAPTER TWO
CESAREHADNEVER met the legendary headmistress of the Averell Academy, because her reputation—and that of the school—had preceded her. After Mattea had been expelled from four schools in one school year, Averell had been the only remaining choice.
That place might as well be a jail! Mattea had protested.
It is Averell or a real jail, Cesare had told her flatly. Choose carefully.
And since Mattea had actually remained at Averell for an entire school year, a new record for her, Cesare had not had any need to confer with the headmistress or anyone else about her sins. He had therefore thought about the school only when paying the astronomical tuition fees. If asked, he could not possibly have pulled the woman’s visage to mind.
But she certainly looked the part, he thought now. Precisely as a headmistress should. Her hair looked black, scraped back as it was to lie smoothly against her skull and then fastened into a torturous-looking bun on the back of her head that would make even the most hardened ballerina wilt. She wore huge glasses that obscured the better part of her face, and he thought it must be a trick of the light that he was tempted to imagine her skin looked smooth. Supple, even.
He dismissed the bizarre observation as he took in the rest of her. She was not quite as dowdy as he had expected, given her profession and the way Mattea had complained about her as if she was the Wicked Witch of the West in all regards. He had expected warts at the very least.
But this woman was significantly younger than he’d assumed she’d be. A fact that should not have sat upon him the way it did, as if it had weight. It did not. Of course it did not.
The only other immediately notable thing about the headmistress was that she was round. And dressed in dark colors, so she resembled nothing so much as an owl.
She eyed him—yes, owlishly—and she stood there, somehow looking as if there was steel down her back despite the roundness.
She also looked at him directly, unsmilingly, as if she was inspecting him—and finding him wanting.
It was unusual, but he decided he liked that, too. She was exactly what was needed to keep Mattea in line while Cesare was off tending to the tedious, yet necessary business of securing the family legacy.
“And where is your sister?” the woman asked, and something about her tone...got to him, though he could find nothing objectionable about it. Maybe it was her voice itself. It made something in him react.
Cesare told himself it was his hackles rising, and quite rightly, because it had been a long while indeed since he had been spoken to with anything but reverence and respect from someone he had never met before. Someone who worked for him, no less.
He told himself that it was likely good for him to have someone about who did not regard him as something akin to a local god, but it was going to take some getting used to.
Especially when he had a fifteen-year-old sister who handled daily irreverence quite well herself.
“I imagine she is still fast asleep,” he said, surprised that it took him a bit of work to keep his tone neutral. As if this was an important negotiation when it was not. He usually didn’t bother to meet new staff at all. He left that to the always efficient Mrs. Morse, who had stepped in when the curt former governess responsible for Mattea had quit after delivering her to Averell.
The headmistress gazed back at him in that same steady manner. “And do you have a set of instructions for how her days ought to be ordered?”
“Do I detect judgment?” he could not seem to help but ask.
“Judgment is often assumed, because of my position,” she replied smoothly, which he supposed was a nicer way of saying he was imagining things. When Cesare Chiavari was not, as a rule, known for his imaginative flights of fancy. “I reserve my judgment for my charges. Everyone’s happier that way, I find.”
Yet he felt judged all the same.
He could not account for the fact that this woman had him standing in his own ancestral hall, feeling things.
But he thrust that aside. Because it was unaccountable. And because she continued to gaze up at him through those enormous glasses as if she knew exactly what he was trying to pretend he was not feeling.
Cesare could not say he enjoyed the sensation of being easily read.
“My sister has a useless father who cares only about himself and a mother who was renowned for her bad decisions,” Cesare told her shortly.
“Your mother?” she asked. He stared at her, affronted, and she curved her lips, but barely. “You and Mattea shared the same mother, is that correct?”
He suspected she knew perfectly well that it was correct, and more, that she was reading into the fact that he hadn’t claimed his mother outright. He could feel a muscle in his jaw flex. “Mattea has been taught to communicate via temper tantrums and questionable behavior. All I can tell you is that she came by these skills...organically.”
What he wanted to say was, She is just like her mother. But he didn’t. And the fact that he had altered something simply to please this woman, or not to displease her, appalled him.
“I’m familiar with Mattea’s communication style, Mr. Chiavari.”
Cesare knew he wasn’t imagining the flint in her voice then. It was the way she said his name, as if she’d taken quiet, yet irrevocable, offense to it. He supposed it was possible that she was one of the great many who claimed they were offended at his family’s wealth. The simple fact of it. And he supposed he could not blame her. Or anyone else, come to that. Some found it obscene that anyone should have so much, he knew. No matter how tasteful a vast estate was, it was still a vast estate.
Still, he would not have thought that a woman who made her living thanks to the offspring of wealthy people much like himself would have such a reaction.
But how could it be personal? “I do not wish to psychoanalyze my sister unduly,” Cesare said in what he hoped were sufficiently quelling tones, “but she did not react well to my announcement that I plan to marry. I expect her to take this as an opportunity to act out all the more.”
This time, there was no doubt. The headmistress stiffened, her surprisingly clear hazel gaze going glacial. “Change is always difficult. Whether one is a lonely teenager or not.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Left to her own devices she would fill the estate with her friends and throw a party that would raze every bit of it to the ground, dancing all the while in the flames she ignited herself.”
The headmistress did not relent. Not one centimeter. “That will not make her less lonely. If it could, it would have done so already. Instead, I imagine such antics have only made her loneliness worse.”
Cesare frowned down at the bespectacled creature before him, not sure why he felt almost...jagged inside.
Whatever that meant.
“By all means, then,” he found himself saying, as if she had challenged him directly. “Let us wake her. If that is what you wish.”
He thought that this woman—Headmistress Higginbotham, if ever there was a more unwieldy name—looked at him oddly. Too closely.
As if she could see things in him that no one else could.
Things even he did not know.
If he were a different sort of man, Cesare thought, he might find this woman unnerving.
He did not. What he felt was that jaggedness and so he told himself, with great confidence, that it was merely irritation. If it was anything other than that, he did not wish to understand it.
Instead, he inclined his head, and beckoned her to precede him back up the stairs.
But when she did, he thought there was yet more judgment implied in the set of her back as she moved—somehow with obvious umbrage, yet surprisingly lithely, up the steps before him.
None of this made sense and Cesare did not care for things he could not immediately classify. He liked order—it was precisely why his sister, and his mother before her, chose chaos to shriek their endless, torturous feelings at him.
But there was nothing chaotic about the little owl with ruffled feathers marching up the stairs before him as if she was leading him somewhere.
Cesare had no previous experience with a headmistress of any sort, so he doubted very much that he was reacting to the simple fact of her and all that authority she was clearly not shy about casting this way and that. Even here, in his own home. He had been sent off to boarding school in England when he was eight and in many ways had been raised by teachers he’d had there, far away in the cold. The rain had seemed to sink into his bones, making him shiver from the inside out.
It had been the making of him, those cold, distant years.
Cesare had much preferred his teachers—good and bad and indifferent—to his elderly father and his flighty mother. He had enjoyed his independence. He had liked the adventure of it, when he was younger. And he had grown to take pride in the fact that he had not been required to depend on anyone, and therefore still did not.
Where other men had weaknesses, Cesare had only strength.
He wished he could teach his sister the same lessons.
Unlike Mattea, Cesare had never fought against the expectations of his birthright—nor had he used it to take advantage. Even if he might have wished to experiment with that life, there had been no time for the sowing of any oats, wild or otherwise.
His mother had waited for him to achieve his majority before she’d remarried. Not out of any sense of delicacy, of course, but because that was what she’d agreed to when she’d signed the marriage documents that had made her Vittorio Chiavari’s wife. Once Cesare was eighteen, she had married with great fanfare, and he had always assumed that she’d stayed with Mattea’s father out of fear. That people would blame her if the marriage fell apart. That they would imagine that she was to blame when she preferred to project an image of quiet serenity to the world outside the walls of her home.
He had even told himself that she was not his problem, because that made it easier to watch his mother scrabble for the attention of a man that, even at eighteen, Cesare had considered his inferior.
But what mattered was that never would there ever be any but Chiavari hands on the grand and glorious family legacy.
Cesare had assumed the reins of the family holdings when he was eighteen, some years after his father’s death. He’d learned that having been sent away so young made the occasional notion that he’d been abandoned by both of his parents in the space of a handful of years...easier. He had been raised to take care of himself, hadn’t he? And he’d had dreams of going to university, but that had not been at all realistic. Not when his mother was not there to help him. It was not the first time he’d sacrificed something for the good of the family legacy, and it would not be the last.
He liked to tell himself that, as with everything else, he had come to his resilience both honestly and young.
Sometimes he thought it was a blessing that Mattea had not had to do the same. Sometimes he thought he almost envied her that innocence she did not know enough to treasure. Perhaps he might have liked to throw a temper tantrum along the way himself, but the difference between him and his rather spoiled sister was that the only person he would have hurt with a tantrum was him. If he had behaved the way she did, he would have proved to all the vultures watching his ascension that he could not handle the task set before him.
He would have made himself a laughingstock.
Cesare had been determined that would never happen, and so it had not.
He had been left to his own devices by his father first, then his mother the moment she legally could leave, and he hadn’t had a meltdown. He hadn’t flailed about. He had kept any stray feelings he might have had about those things to himself and had made sure the devices he’d been left to were nothing short of stellar.
Then he had dominated, as was his wont.
Now all he needed to do was enact the final part of his duty to his legacy, that being the continuation of it. He had not been avoiding it. Not exactly. It was only that he had decided that he had so many other things to do first. Like build his own, separate fortune, so he need not do anything with the family fortune but grow it.
He had accomplished this masterfully, silencing any vultures who’d imagined they could circle him way back when, and so it was time.
Like it or not, it was time.
And he would not allow himself to deviate from the plans that had been laid out for him, as they were for all Chiavari heirs. His wife would be dutiful and biddable in all things. He would guide her as necessary, so that she could imbue her role with a seriousness his own mother had lacked. Together they would prepare for the next generation of Chiavaris.
Familial duty sorted.
If he was less...invested in that duty than he had been before he’d taken that trip to Venice some months back, well. That was between him and the moon. He would leave it there.
He couldn’t comprehend why he was thinking of that night just now.
At the top of the stairs, he moved ahead of the round owl he had hired and led the headmistress and her judgy back around to the entrance to the family wing, where Mattea had been accorded a set of rooms as far away from his as possible.
Once he married, he and his wife would follow long-standing tradition and move into the grand master suite that took over the top floor of this wing. The rooms up there were arranged in the old-fashioned way, with a significant separation between the master and the mistress’s bedchambers, so that once the necessary heirs had been produced, the couple could maintain their privacy as they wished.
The mistress’s chamber sat directly above the nursery, with its own private stair between them, though Cesare had always seen that as a curiosity more than anything else. He had certainly never seen the slightest evidence of his mother knew it was there. And he had never taken advantage of it himself.
His mother had not been a comfort to him when he was small. And she had been a deliberate thorn in his side when he was older. He did not allow himself to indulge any softer feelings on the subject, much less any what-ifs. They changed nothing.
And Cesare tried not to discuss these things in his sister’s presence.
“When is the wedding date?” the little owl asked from beside him as they walked down the hall of the lower family rooms, built when families were larger. Or perhaps for parents who had liked each other more than Cesare’s ever had, to his memory.
“It will be sometime in August, I assume,” he replied.
Though he was struck with the strangest notion that the woman who now walked beside him, quite as if she imagined herself his equal, ought to have been taller.
It was the oddest sensation. Perhaps it was that air of authority of hers. Perhaps he thought she should be at least as tall as she was round.
She made a sympathetic sound. He discovered he did not believe it. “I understand it’s hard to pick a date.”
“The date is not the issue.” He found himself in the exceedingly unusual position of having to explain himself and did not care for it. “I have yet to propose.”
“I see.”
He glanced beside him and lifted a brow at the expression that was not quite on her face, what little of it he could discern behind the gigantic glasses. “Once again I seem to have earned your judgment, Miss Higginbotham.”
“Not at all, Mr. Chiavari.” Once again, there was something in the way she said his name. Something very nearly...chiding. He disliked it, but he could hardly continue to insist that her judgment existed when she claimed it did not. It made him look delusional. Or emotional, which was worse. “I was under the impression the wedding was already set.”
He gazed at her in amazement. “I do not anticipate that my proposal will be declined.”
The very notion was absurd.
“Have you chosen a bride? Or will there be a selection process?”
Her expression was smooth and unreadable, as far as he could tell, and yet he still could not get past the notion that she was making a mockery of him.
Then again, he was unfamiliar with such things. It was entirely possible he was mistaken.
“I appreciate your interest in my personal affairs,” he told her in the sort of freezingly polite tone that most people took for the scathing put-down it was. She, naturally, appeared wholly unfazed, so he carried on, from between gritted teeth. “I assure you, I will be well and truly wed by the end of summer. You need not concern yourself with the details. Your one and only concern is keeping my sister entertained enough—or busy enough, or incarcerated enough, I am not picky—that she does not set off one of her typical bombs in the middle of the festivities. Or in the papers before any such festivities. Or at all.”
Last summer Mattea had been fourteen. She had crashed a stolen Ferrari into a famous fountain in Rome, then attempted to evade capture on foot, dressed only in what Cesare could euphemistically call a gesture toward a yoga ensemble.
He had been forced to decline “modeling offers” on her behalf ever since.
“I don’t think she would bother to take the time to set off an actual bomb,” the irritating woman beside him replied, almost cheerfully. “So there’s that, as a positive.”
He stopped with some flourish at the door at the end of the hall, and waved his hand. He did not need to point out the obvious. They could both hear the pounding beat of music—if it could be called music—thundering from within.
This was how Mattea greeted each day and celebrated most every night.
“That is very loud indeed,” the headmistress said, but with a little tsking sound, as if he was to blame for allowing it. The audacity was breathtaking.
He forced himself not to react. “In my experience, my sister does not play her music unless she is at home, the better to make certain it is annoying as many members of the household as possible.”
The headmistress considered this. Or him. Or possibly she was looking at the moldings, so impossible was it to tell with her glasses in the way. “And where is she going when she is not home?”
“In the half week she has been back from school this summer she has attempted to make a break for at least five distant European cities,” he said mildly. “With or without the company of the lovesick young men who attempt to gain access to my property. On her own she has stolen, in order, a utility truck used primarily for viticulture, a bicycle belonging to the postman, a delivery van, and the groundskeeper’s all-terrain vehicle. She never attempts to leave on foot, of course. She says that would feel like work. In every case, she was apprehended before she left the property.”
He did not know how to process the fact that the woman did not seem particularly surprised by any of that. He was outraged simply recounting it all.
It had only been a few days.
“But it’s quite a bit of property, isn’t it?” Miss Higginbotham was saying. “You could trek for ages in all directions before you found any hint of civilization.”
“A fact of which my sister is well aware, but chooses to ignore.” Cesare lifted a shoulder. “Possibly because what she really wants is attention.”
“Have you considered giving her that attention, then?”
He stared down at this owl of a woman, who he had employed for less than a day. She was not here because she possessed some vested interest in his sister’s well-being. She was here because she was being paid handsomely, and perhaps they both needed to remember that.
“You are to give her that attention, Miss Higginbotham,” he told her softly, making no attempt to keep the menace from his voice. “And you are to direct her focus away from me, and the woman I will marry. That is your purpose here. Am I understood?”
“Completely understood,” she replied.
And there was nothing impolite or edgy at all in the way she said that. It sounded like a simple statement of fact, nothing more.
There was absolutely no reason that he should find himself frowning as he walked away, as if she’d taken a swing at him.
And more, landed it.
He left the family wing behind as quickly as he could, not sure why he felt as if he was...escaping a haunting of some kind.
Perhaps it was because he did not, as a rule, spend any time with women like the headmistress. He preferred his women soft and obliging, not sharp. And he liked to see their faces, for God’s sake, because he appreciated feminine splendor however he found it.
But he was done with all that. In preparation for his future, he had drawn a line under his usual exploits. If such they could be called. He preferred dependably excellent sex from women who knew that they were in no way candidates for a ring, but now that he planned to take a wife, he had stopped calling them.
In his father’s day, there would have been no expectation of fidelity in a marriage like the one he planned to have, but he knew that in this day and age, there were different expectations. At least at first. He was prepared to remain celibate for the remainder of the summer and to sleep only with his wife until they completed their family.
After which he expected that they would come to a different arrangement. One that suited them both.
But even when he had the freedom to indulge his appetite as he pleased, he would steer clear of women who stirred up reactions in him like this little owl did.
Though he had to stop walking at that thought, and shake his head, because surely he was being possessed by some demon to even imagine such a thing was possible. He was not reacting. He was Cesare Chiavari. He did not lower himself to the likes of starchy headmistresses who were happy enough to hector their own employers.
The very idea was absurd.
He forced himself to think instead of the lovely Marielle, the meek and proper heiress he had determined would be perfect for the role of his wife. It had been no easy selection.
The mother of his heirs had to be pure. Untouched. She should exude virtue, not because of any ancient stipulation in that regard, but because Cesare’s own mother had fallen short in that regard. Vittorio had been so charmed by her beauty, and the presence she’d brought to her roles in the cinema that had made her a household name in Italy, that he had thrown all caution to the wind.
But he had never trusted her. Ever.
The actress he had become obsessed with became a wife Vittorio had watched over jealously. Angrily. Convinced that every man she encountered was her lover.
Until, according to all reports, she decided that if she was already to be accused of the crime, she might as well commit it.
And thus she had.
Cesare did not intend to make his father’s same mistakes. He would choose a woman who was appropriate, not one who set his blood afire.
He had always avoided the very hints of such elements. He had watched his father suffer, and his mother too, and he wanted no such affliction.
When he and his wife decided, as coolheaded and thoughtful adults, that they might prefer other partners, there would be no jealousy. They would conduct themselves discreetly. They would keep in mind, always, that their children did not need to know the contours of their relationship.
Dynastic marriage was by necessity a business arrangement, and Cesare wanted no talk of love or emotion or unpleasant feelings to pollute his. He would regard his wife well. He hoped for the same in return.
He wanted no part of any hauntings. He did not wish to sit around in his own office, in his own house, puzzling over the behavior of a woman he hardly knew and did not wish to know any better.
He spent enough time doing exactly that over his sister’s antics. But Mattea was fifteen. He intended to stamp out her behavior and when he did, he would make certain there were no more disruptions in his life.
There would be peace. Continued prosperity. And the perfection he had prided himself on since he was eighteen.
He just needed the surprisingly disconcerting Miss Higginbotham to do her damned job.