CHAPTER THREE
BEATRICESTOODSTILL outside Mattea’s room for a long time. Much longer than necessary. If there had been anyone there to see her, she never would have allowed herself to linger like this, because it was a clear sign that she’d been thrown for a significant loop and normally she made certain to present herself as completely and totally unflappable.
But this situation was...beyond her.
She was frozen into place, grateful that the music from behind the door was so loud. It drowned out her own too-fast breathing, so while she could feel the way her pulse pounded and she could feel the way the little air in her lungs sawed in and out, she couldn’t hear it.
It seemed a blessing and she was in dire need.
She didn’t know how she’d managed to...have a conversation with him. To talk to him the way he was talking to her, as if they had never met.
At first she’d wondered if he was playing some kind of game. Had he hunted her down and lured her here? Her heart had leaped at the notion—but he hadn’t broken. He hadn’t called her cara, the way he had in Venice.
She still couldn’t quite believe that he didn’t recognize her. Was she really that altered in appearance? It wasn’t as if she was wearing a costume. But she’d given him the benefit of the doubt. If he hadn’t engineered her coming to Italy because of their night together, it made sense that he wouldn’t expect to see the woman from that night in his home today. And she knew full well that no one saw her when they looked at her. They saw the headmistress. They saw the school.
That had always been the only thing she wanted them to see.
Still, she’d waited for him to recognize her anyway. Her voice. The color of her eyes. Her. But as the conversation went on and he didn’t seem to catch on, it became hideously clear to her that he really, truly didn’t know who she was.
And though Beatrice was certain that she would have recognized him anywhere and at any time, even if she was blind and deaf, she started to realize that it would be far worse if he did recognize her now.
That he would likely think that she had somehow contrived to meet him here, to track him down in this house that would never have admitted her otherwise. That he was the sort if man who would assume that anyone with less wealth than him—meaning, most people alive in the world—would by definition wish to seek him out to exploit whatever connection they could claim with him.
The idea that he would look at her and see some kind of gold digger made her skin go clammy.
And now here she was. Neck-deep in a mess she didn’t know how to get out of—and never would have gotten into if she’d had any idea who he was.
She had realized, too late, that she’d assumed she knew what he looked like because she’d heard his name so often.
Perhaps you should make a note to look these things up, she told herself acidly. Should you find yourself in this position again.
The idea of this happening again made her think she might actually break out in hysterical laughter, but she held it at bay. She tried to get her breathing back under control. She tried to think.
Because she needed to find a solution to this...but none came to mind.
Beatrice had found the father of her child. But instead of celebrating that the way she wanted to—the way she’d imagined she would if she ever came upon him, the way she’d hoped she would one day—she had discovered that he didn’t know her when he saw her.
That she was that unmemorable. Or perhaps it was simply that he had such nights all the time, so why would theirs stand out—though that thought made her want to do something truly out of character. Like scream to drown out the music.
Or cry.
And that was because of the situation on its own. That wasn’t even getting into the fact he had just discussed his upcoming nuptials to a lucky bride he had yet to propose to with her.
The lucky bride that he had yet to select.
She hated that she knew anything about this. Or him. She preferred the man he’d been in her head since Venice. That mysterious, miracle of a man who had come from nowhere, given her the best night of her life, and left her changed forever.
The man who had claimed he was not passionate, but had showed her nothing but.
She wasn’t prepared to let go of that version of him. But she had no choice, did she? Particularly since this version of him seemed about as passionate as a glacier.
Beatrice urged herself to buck up and carry on, but instead she stayed where she was. Reeling around and around inside her head while Mattea’s obnoxious music pounded on and on and on.
For the first time in as long as she could remember, Beatrice wanted nothing so much as to turn and run.
Away from this place. Away from a man who could have turned her inside out the way he had...and yet not know who she was when he saw her again. Away from the possibility, now that she hadn’t introduced herself, that he would discover that he knew her—and that she was pregnant with his baby—and wreck her life once again.
“A person could argue that it’s the smart thing to do,” she muttered to herself. “To run away from here before that can happen.”
But she didn’t make a move. She didn’t march for the servants’ quarters, grab her cases, and ask Mrs. Morse to provide her with a ride to the nearest village so she could make her own travel arrangements. She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. She could perfectly visualize every step she needed to take...
Yet she didn’t walk back down the hallway to begin the process of leaving this mess behind her.
Beatrice Mary Higginbotham did not run away from her problems. She solved them.
She stood straighter, there outside Mattea’s loud door. She squared her shoulders and forced herself to breathe, slow and deep, the way she advised the girls to do when they felt otherwise moved to shout and carry on.
What she absolutely did not do was give in to the deeply uncharacteristic urge to simply...collapse. And curl herself up on the floor where she could weep and weep and weep.
Because whether she liked it or not, her feelings had nothing to do with this. It was just as well she’d learned that today. Before she’d had time to really settle in here and imagine that things were different.
The truth was that she had nursed some romantic notions about the father of her child. She’d assumed that after the child was born she would return to Venice and seek him out, if it was at all possible. That was the thing she hadn’t dared to admit to herself even last night, lying in that tiny hotel room, thinking of the night they’d shared.
It had always been her intention to do her best to find her child’s father and see if what had bloomed between them that night was worth pursuing. If it was still there at all.
Now she knew that by the time she found him, if she’d been able to find him, he would have already been married. So this was a gift, it really was, to discover that he was the kind of man who could look at a woman he had tasted as thoroughly as he had tasted her and not recognize her at all.
And though there was still something in her that urged her to run, she tamped it down as ruthlessly as she could.
Because all the practical considerations that had brought her here were precisely the same, recognition or no. She had already expected her months here in Italy to be difficult, because Mattea was difficult and because she needed to hide her pregnancy while she handled the girl. She had expected her personal feelings to involve exhaustion and exasperation, nothing more.
But no matter what she felt, it was still only a summer. A few short months. Not very long at all.
How could she possibly do anything but stay? Surely she owed her child what this summer promised to deliver, if nothing else. If she couldn’t give her baby its father, she would give it the next best thing: a life without financial insecurity built on the foundation of her father’s money.
It was more than most women in her position had, and she knew it.
Armed with what felt like the first weapon she’d managed to wield since she’d walked down that stair and laid eyes upon the last man she’d expected to see today, Beatrice knocked sharply at the door. She waited, not surprised when there was no answer from within, then knocked again.
When there was only the same pounding music and nothing else, she opened the door and walked inside.
If she’d thought about it, she would have understood that she would not be walking into a dormitory room like the ones the girls lived in at school. Obviously. The Averell dormitories boasted far nicer rooms than any she’d lived in when she was the same age, despite the many complaints from the usual pampered inmates.
Even so, it took her moments to process that Mattea’s rooms were even more spectacular than the guest rooms she’d been shown earlier. She had to find her way through a rabbit warren of interconnected chambers, salons, an indoor hot tub and sauna, what looked like three separate libraries, and an expansive media center. All to find her way to the actual bedchamber, where Beatrice was not in the least surprised to find the notorious Mattea Descoteaux herself.
The girl was a sullen lump beneath a mound of linens in the center of the high, canopied bed, though she was clearly not asleep. She had her knees up and her mobile in her hand, and she did not appear to notice that she was no longer alone.
How could she, in the midst of this racket?
Beatrice looked around for the speakers responsible for the clamor and found them quickly. There were only two of the tiny ones the kids used these days, tossed haphazardly on the polished surfaces of ancient antiques with a thoughtlessness that could only be achieved by someone who had never spent even a moment of her life considering the actual cost of things. Much less the whole of her adolescence.
Not that Beatrice could begrudge her for that. She would not wish the kind of childhood she’d had on anyone, and she’d been lucky enough in the care homes she’d lived in. Far luckier than some.
Nonetheless, the automatic calculations she did whenever she saw anything dear kicked in whether she liked it or not. And it was going to make her dizzy if she kept doing it here. It was like sitting across from Cesare Chiavari’s man again, watching zeros fill his pad. She gathered up the speakers, found the buttons to power them down, and did so.
And when the room was suddenly, glaringly silent, she waited. She stayed where she was, watching the mound in the bed.
Mattea groaned as if attacked. She sat up in a rush of drama and irritation—
Then caught sight of Beatrice.
For a moment, the two of them did nothing but gaze at each other.
Like so many of her students—former students, Beatrice corrected herself—Mattea had been gifted with a significant amount of genetic privilege to go hand in hand with the fortune she was likely to burn through before she was thirty. Where her half brother was dark and brooding, Mattea had the face of a celestial choir girl. Cheeks like a cherub with a sulky mouth and eyes the limpid blue of the lake just outside the windows.
She used her angelic looks to her advantage, always. She had not liked that Beatrice was unaffected.
“I knew that I was stuck in a never-ending nightmare already,” Mattea said, in that cultured, accented English she used that made her seem interesting even to the girls at Averell who shared her background. “Wait, though. Is this a bad trip? Or no, it’s worse than that, isn’t it? I’ve actually died and gone to hell.”
“It’s a delight to see you again too, Miss Descoteaux,” Beatrice replied smoothly.
And it felt like another gift, to slide so easily back into this role she knew so well. It was easy to sound arch and frigid at once. It was easy to take on all her headmistress attributes, as if they were simply another part of her instead of a role she’d taught herself how to play.
When she was playing headmistress, a voice inside her pointed out, there was no room for personal feelings. There was no possibility of any crumpling to the ground and weeping like an opera heroine. There was only her authority and the way she wielded it.
She smiled at the girl. “Am I to understand that you were not made aware that I would be joining you for the summer?”
“Who would make me aware of something so horrific?” Mattea replied, her voice shifting over into that sulky sort of drawl she used when she was of a mind to be the most provoking. “No one would dare.”
Beatrice made as if to consider that a moment, then smiled a bit more pointedly. “I wonder if that is because you treat your family and the staff here to the same outrageous and unacceptable behavior that we were at great pains to do away with over the school year.”
Mattea scowled and even then she looked almost cute instead of sulky and insolent. It was one of her superpowers.
Luckily it had long since ceased to work on Beatrice. In truth it never had.
“I thought you quit,” she said, her expression clearing when Beatrice did nothing but gaze back at her. “Everyone said you did. Obviously, that was the best news anyone had received in ages. A great many parties have been planned for next term, let me tell you.”
“It is true that I am no longer headmistress of the Averell Academy,” Beatrice confirmed. Mildly. “But too many celebrations on your part would, I fear, be premature. Your brother has hired me for the summer. I am to be your constant companion, Miss Descoteaux. Are you not filled with joy at the prospect? I know I am.”
She watched the girl closely. The way she flared her nostrils as if trying not to react while color flooded her cheeks. The way her eyes widened as if she felt betrayed.
Beatrice felt a pang for her, because she knew too well what it was like to have her life forever in the hands of others. She wanted to sympathize, but knew Mattea would not accept it. Not from her.
But what she was really looking for came next, when Mattea pulled in a dangerously deep breath.
“If you begin to scream bloody murder, as I know you love to do,” Beatrice told her quietly, “you won’t like the consequences. Allow me to promise you that straight off.”
“We’re not in that jail you call a school anymore,” Mattea threw right back. “You can’t possibly believe that you’re going to get away with treating me like anything but what I am. A member of the family. And if you work here, I’m your boss.”
“Your brother is my boss, child,” Beatrice said, with a laugh. “And do you know what he hired me to do?” She didn’t wait for Mattea to offer suggestions, though she was sure they would all be creative. “All he asks me is that I keep you under control. Now ask yourself this. Do you truly think that he cares how I do it?”
Mattea’s cheeks grew brighter, and her sense of injury was like a living thing in the room between them. “If I complain...” she began.
“I imagine you complain loud, often, and long.” Beatrice raised her brows. “What have those complaints achieved, do you think?”
She already knew the answer. She knew, very well, the profile of the girls whose families sent them to a school like Averell. Sometimes they truly were dangers to themselves and others, but usually that was something that could be addressed with the proper counseling that their relatives preferred to pretend no one in their august bloodlines required.
More often, the girls were simply lost, like Mattea. Desperate for the attention of the very people who had not only stopped giving them any, but had sent them off to a place like Averell so that they could not be bothered with the behaviors they had likely helped encourage.
It was another reason to be glad Cesare had not recognized her. Beatrice liked people who helped others instead of throwing money at problems and expecting everyone else to clean up the mess.
That was what she couldn’t help but think while Mattea sat there in her bed, looking much too young and as if, once again, a rug had been torn out from under her. This was what Beatrice had reminded the other teachers at the school. When Mattea tried to sneak off the school grounds, taking entirely too many of her classmates with her in the vehicle she’d stolen. When Mattea had broken the House Rules every single day for a month and laughed when given the usual chores as punishment, doing her best to encourage a rebellion in the other students. When Mattea had dyed the hair of every first-year purple, green, and pink the day before the term ended and all the girls were headed home for Christmas with their disapproving families.
During each of these disasters, Beatrice had reminded everyone that, while maddening, Mattea was still a kid. More than that, she was a kid who had lived through a lot of loss in her life. The death of her mother. The loss of her father, who had surrendered his parental rights. Her only family was her brother, now her guardian, who was clearly too busy to deal with her.
And was now in a rush to marry and no doubt produce perfect little children who would not behave the way Mattea did.
No wonder the girl thought she had no course of action but to misbehave.
“This is not something I would say at the school, were we there,” Beatrice told her, because she always thought that the girls who came to her were talked down to quite enough. She leveled with them, like it or not. Mattea was too aware of her place in the world and yet had no power whatsoever. Beatrice could relate to that.
“Is this where you think we’re going to become best friends?” the teenager asked, with scathing disdain. “Because thank you, I’m good.”
If Beatrice could be deterred by teenage contempt, she would not have made it through her first day as a teacher, long ago. “I know you like to imagine that I take some pleasure in crushing young girls’ wills, Miss Descoteaux, but you could not be more mistaken. My goal has only and ever been to teach young women how best to use the tools they have to claim their own power and whatever roles they might find themselves inhabiting.”
She lifted a hand when Mattea started to argue. “Negative attention is not power. It leads to this. To my being hired to deal with you for the summer instead of allowing you to do things that you might like to do on your own.”
“You could let me do what I like,” Mattea offered, but not as if she thought Beatrice might.
“No one can trust you to behave in a manner that would allow you independence,” Beatrice said, not unkindly, though she saw the girl hide a wince anyway. “And only you can change that.”
“That sounds like a great laugh. Cheers.”
Mattea was looking away then, as if bored. Beatrice pushed on. “I won’t be surprised at all if you feel you must test me, likely as soon as possible, to see if I really intend to maintain the sort of order here that I did at the school. I can tell you now that I do intend exactly that. And when you decide to push at those boundaries, remember this. You have yet to set me a test I did not pass, Mattea. If I were you, I would learn from that.”
Beatrice waited for a moment, watching the color deepen in Mattea’s cheeks and wash all over her face. She didn’t point out that she could see it or that she knew it meant there was a war going on inside the girl. What she did was incline her head as if they’d come to an agreement. “The first thing we will be instituting are reasonable hours, many of them quiet. Regular meals, regular exercise, no subjecting the whole of Tuscany to your music. This is nonnegotiable.”
“I don’t get up before noon and I don’t exercise,” Mattea shot back, the temper making her flush then, the way it always did. Beatrice assumed it felt better than the misery. “You can’t make me.”
Beatrice saw no need to argue about that. Not yet. “You look out of sorts, Mattea,” she said instead. “As if you stayed up too late, slept terribly, and are in dire need of sustenance. If you looked happy, strong, and well rested, it wouldn’t matter what hours you kept or how you cared for yourself.”
“You should do something about your weird obsession with other people’s lives,” the girl told her, with a sneer.
“Prove to me that you can care for yourself,” Beatrice said gently, “and I will not feel the need to impose care upon you.”
This time, Mattea looked something like ashamed, and clearly hated that she did. Because she immediately flung herself backward into her bed and pulled the covers up over her. “Go away,” came her muffled voice.
“You have an hour,” Beatrice told her. “I would like you to rise, shower, and dress yourself in something appropriate for walking. I will need a tour of the house and grounds and would like you to give it to me. That is how you and I will spend our first day together. And no,” she said as the mound of covers shook with obvious outrage, “I will not go off and wait for you somewhere else in this rambling mansion so you can pretend you can’t find me. I’ll be right here.”
The covers moved slightly, so Mattea could peer out at her.
And Beatrice said nothing further. She didn’t need to. She didn’t need to threaten the girl or list out the consequences Mattea might face if she refused. She knew that Mattea was running through all the times Beatrice had been as good as her word—that being every time. And all the times Mattea had bested her—that being none.
They stayed like that, locked in a silent battle of wills, for a long time.
So long that Beatrice had to remind herself that at the end of the day, what Mattea liked most was attention. And she had proved extremely interested in getting Beatrice’s over the course of this last year.
Besides, she was fifteen, very pampered, and thought she was far tougher than she was.
All Beatrice had to do was maintain her cool and refuse to break.
And sure enough, Mattea eventually let out a theatrical groan. She threw the covers back and stormed up and out of the bed. She muttered things that Beatrice did her a favor by pretending not to hear while she stomped into the adjoining bathroom suite and slammed the door.
Beatrice, true to her word, did not quit the bedroom. When she didn’t hear the water go on inside the bathroom, she went and knocked on the door. “Do you need help turning on the water?” she called.
And smiled when she heard a clattering sound that she suspected was a mobile tossed with some force onto a counter. Then something that sounded suspiciously like a scream of rage before she finally heard the sound of water.
She went over to look out Mattea’s windows and was struck once again by the sheer, unimaginable beauty of this place. Mattea’s rooms looked out over a perfectly maintained garden, with summer flowers in full bloom. The hills in the distance were covered in neat rows of vines. Beatrice thought it must be possible to stand here for an eternity and never get sick of the view.
But thinking such things was dangerous, because it led her back to thinking of Cesare.
Something she was going to have to learn how to do without giving herself away. She had the urge to slide her hands down over that thickening at her belly that had become a kind of touchstone, but she didn’t. Because that was giving herself away too and she had to break herself of the habit.
Because nothing mattered more than her child’s future. She needed to keep that at front of mind.
Mattea eventually emerged from the bathroom naked, looking for a reaction she didn’t get. She dressed languidly, then condescended to take Beatrice all around the house, the gardens, and a little swath of the vineyards. By the time they were done, she was wilting about, claiming that she was starving. Beatrice conferred with Amelia and had a proper tea brought up to one of Mattea’s salons.
And she noticed that like most children and all puppies, Mattea was far more biddable when she wasn’t hungry. Once she filled her belly, she stopped trying to prove how bad to the bone she was and was actually rather polite, automatically.
“You’ve gone to such lengths to convince us all you have no manners,” Beatrice pointed out after this went on through a second round of perfectly toasted crumpets. “Apparently that, too, is an act.”
The teenager sniffed. “Your whole thing is an act. I bet you don’t even look fussy like that when you’re alone. I don’t run around in a costume.”
One thing Beatrice knew about kids is that they were often frighteningly accurate.
She didn’t react. “The difference is that ‘my whole thing,’ as you put it, is a job.”
“Whatever you need to believe.” Mattea shrugged, and then set down the last of the crumpet she’d been eating, dripping with jam and butter. “I know what Cesare thinks, but my mother wasn’t the waste of space he pretends. She just didn’t like being alone.” A vulnerable expression moved over her face but she seemed to realize it, so she blinked and looked down at her lap. “She liked pretty things and delicate behavior, so she taught me both, but not because she was all that fragile. But because the more people thought of her as breakable, the better they treated her.”
And there were so many questions that Beatrice wanted to ask at that. About her mother. About Cesare. About whether or not Mattea considered herself breakable, or why she went out of her way not to use the pretty, delicate behavior her mother had taught her—
But the girl stood up, pushing away from the table as if she’d suddenly remembered that she ought to have been in a fury this whole time. “He hired you to be my babysitter because you’re the only headmistress who didn’t kick me out of school within a month. But that just means that I’m better at manipulating you than the others, doesn’t it?”
“That’s one story,” Beatrice said, with a smile. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” Mattea huffed out a sound that managed to convey her bone-deep disgust in all things, but especially Beatrice. “The thing about Cesare is that he thinks I’m an embarrassment. So it doesn’t really matter what I do, does it? The fact that I exist embarrasses him and there’s no getting past that.”
“I’m sure that’s not true—”
“It is true,” Mattea fired back at her, looking flushed with temper again. “Personally, I’m more than happy to live down to every single low expectation he has of me. I’m certainly not going to flail around, desperate for his approval like my mother. And if that means that you get fired too? I’ll consider that a happy bonus.”
“I will make a note,” Beatrice said, watching the girl.
But Mattea was still going. “My brother is no different from my father or any other man. They think that every time they’re ready to move on, they can erase the past, except I have a nasty habit of turning up.” She let out a harsh laugh. “Like a rash.”
Beatrice knew at once that someone had said that to her. Those exact words. And even as she understood that, she knew immediately that it hadn’t been Cesare—because if it had been, she wouldn’t have said it that way.
“If I’m going to be a rash, I’m going to be the itchiest, most unbearable rash there ever was,” Mattea said in a hard sort of voice that sounded a lot as if she was trying to cover over the glint of emotion in her eyes. “This has been a nice try to attempt to win me over, Miss Higginbotham. But it’s not going to work. You might as well give up now.”
“Mattea,” Beatrice replied, setting her tea down with a click, “you could not possibly say anything that would make me less likely to give up. Ever.”
Mattea laughed again, in that harsh way. “That’s what they all say,” she bit out. “And yet they all do. One after the next, like clockwork. You’ll be the same.”
And despite everything—not least the child she was carrying inside her—Beatrice vowed there and then that she would not.
Because she could not help feeling for the girl, abandoned like this. So vulnerable and trying so hard to hide it.
She could not help but think about what she’d want for her own child if, God forbid, she wasn’t here to care for the baby herself.
Thinking of her own child like Mattea, foisted off on someone who did not dote on her as surely as her mother had and would...
But Beatrice could not allow herself to entertain the emotions that swamped her then. She had to focus instead, and so she did.
On the one thing she could do here, and she vowed that she would. That she would help Mattea whether the girl wanted to be helped or not. That one way or another, she would not abandon this girl. No matter what.
Even if she had to fight Mattea’s own brother to do it.