CHAPTER FOUR
SINCEHEHAD installed the confounding headmistress in his household, Cesare had not been aware of his sister in a negative sense at all. No tedious scenes over dinner, a danger to herself and the table settings. No attempts to disrupt his business calls at all hours. No reports of her behavior, delivered in sorrowful tones by Mrs. Morse when he returned from his many trips.
This suggested to him that he had done the right thing, as ever.
And so he had the woman brought before him for a status report at the end of the first week since he had assumed guardianship of Mattea, and she was in residence, that had been...quiet. Usually when his sister was in Tuscany, she made sure to paint the whole of the estate with her particular brand of chaos.
The headmistress herself, oddly haunting though she had appeared to him when they’d met, was doing her job. Nothing else mattered.
It was a lovely summer’s night, warm and ripe with the scent of flowers on the breeze. Cesare had spent the afternoon locked away in his offices, wrapped up in a particularly tense set of negotiations with a business concern in the Philippines. He quite liked the heightened tension of high-level discussions but he liked this, too. Sitting out on his favorite terrace, the one with the sweeping views all the way down to the lake and beyond, enjoying la bella vita with an aperitivo, as the good lord surely intended a Chiavari to do.
Beside him on the small, tiled table, the staff had placed a selection of freshly baked schiacciata, tart olives and sun-dried tomatoes from his own land, and his favorite pecorino, though he was indulging only sparingly tonight. Later, he would fly up to the C?te d’Azur, where he had agreed to attend a weekend-long party in the house of an old friend and business associate. Cesare had never been much for parties, but this one was different. He was going to the party because Marielle was attending, and she expected him to propose.
He had indicated he might. It was high time he did.
And so he took these sweet, calm moments to sit here, looking out at the legacy in question, and let himself think of how nice it would be to take the next step. To settle the enduring question of who he would marry, and when, and apply himself to the next phase.
Cesare knew it was time because it no longer felt like an imposition. It felt like a piece to a long-unsolved puzzle, snapping into place at last. For it would mean that he had followed his late father’s instructions to the letter.
The literal letter.
He no longer carried it with him everywhere he went, but the letter his father had written him so that he might have it long after the old man’s death stayed in pride of place in Cesare’s office. He kept it tucked just beneath the glass of his workspace, so that he could always be reminded of his father’s advice and allow it to be his true north, always.
Vittorio had been elderly when Cesare was born, and Cesare had been off at boarding school for most of his youth. Vittorio had died while Cesare was sixteen and still studying abroad, but he had made certain that his son and heir knew his thoughts on how to maintain the Chiavari fortune, how to expand where possible and hold back when wise. He had advocated in the letter that Cesare wait until he was older and settled to bother with a wife.
Because, he wrote, the risks are too great that a young man will think too little and act too rashly. An older man, having had all the experiences he might wish, will choose a mate that will benefit the family name above all things.
What he had not written about was why he had chosen Cesare’s mother, when he had only lost himself in jealous rages over her. Cesare had come to think of the letter as not only Vittorio’s advice to his son, but a mea culpa over some of his less-than-stellar choices.
Cesare heard the sound of a door opening behind him and turned slightly so he could watch the approach of the headmistress closely. Almost with interest—except there was nothing to catch his interest. The woman was dressed, again, as if she was attempting to disappear in plain sight right there on the loveliest terrace in all of Italy.
Once he thought that, he found himself studying the oversize glasses that covered so much real estate on her face, wondering why anyone would need such a monstrous pair. Because it certainly wasn’t for fashion, of that he was certain. There was nothing fashionable about her. She was a study in a certain brand of put-together drabness that offended him to the depths of his Italian soul.
He might have learned how to control himself and everything around him when he was still technically a teenager, but Cesare had grown up here. Right here, surrounded by what he confidently believed was the most beautiful bit of earth on the planet. He sought out beauty in whatever he did, wherever he went.
What he did not understand was a person who could have improved their appearance, yet did not.
As she came to stand before him, as round and owlish as he had convinced himself he had misremembered, he reminded himself that how she presented herself was no concern of his. The woman he’d hired to wrestle his problematic sister into good behavior whether Mattea liked it or not needed only to accomplish that. She could otherwise be as drab as she liked, with his blessing.
He beckoned for her to take the seat opposite him, there on the other side of the small table. She sank down in the chair with a surprising show of grace, and the strangest reaction rippled through him, making him frown. It wasn’t only that a certain heat bloomed in him, confounding him, when she had displayed so little elegance. When she was so round he could not even manage to discern a figure beneath her garments at all.
That was concerning enough, as a man who considered himself something of a connoisseur when it came to stunning women, but there was something else. It was almost as if she reminded him of something, or someone—
But who could she possibly remind him of? He had only seen her on the day she’d arrived, and now. Perhaps he was simply remembering the way she’d come down the grand stairs, as if there was an elegance deep in her bones no matter what her station in life or what she chose to wear.
Of far more concern was that bizarre surge of attraction—but that he could chalk up to the unusual celibacy he had been practicing for months now.
In any case, he dismissed it.
“I have neither seen nor heard from my sister since your arrival,” he said, waving a hand at the aperitivo that waited beside her to indicate it was hers. “I must congratulate you.”
The headmistress frowned faintly at the drink, as if she thought it might lead her straight into a den of iniquity if she so much as touched the glass.
“I believe your sister is humoring me,” she told him. And when she raised her gaze to his, she smiled. In that way of hers that was neither soothing nor placating, and as such, made him...something close enough to uncertain as to how he should respond.
He was Cesare Chiavari. He was never uncertain, by definition.
It was clear to him that her smile was a weapon.
“Humoring you?”
She sat back in her chair without surrendering the ruthlessly straight line of her spine, a feat he found himself admiring as if it was architectural. “I believe she is attempting to lull me into a false sense of security, so that her next act of defiance will seem all the more dramatic in comparison and, with any luck, also get me fired.”
He considered that. And this strange woman who, everything in him stated with no hesitation, he should not be sitting around with like this. For any reason.
She is dangerous, something in him whispered, but it was connected to that inconvenient heat. He had no choice but to do his best to shove it aside. Hard.
“Do you know what this act of defiance will entail?”
“We have to assume that her target is always you, Mr. Chiavari.” She folded her hands in her lap, managing to look serene and something like regal, for an owl. If not remotely comfortable. “It’s understandable that you are the focal point for these displays.” He must have looked confused, or perhaps irritated, because her brows rose. “Surely the care and interest you have given so generously while raising her marks you as her only remaining family member in any real sense.”
And it had been a very long time since anyone had dared attempt to chastise him. So long, in fact, that he could not remember it ever occurring. Cesare was astonished to find that he felt the faintest hint of something like chagrin trickle through him.
“Are you suggesting that I do not care for my own sister?” He did not say Do you dare? His tone said it for him.
She did not appear to notice. “I believe I said the exact opposite.”
“But it was the way you said it, Miss Higginbotham.”
Again, that sharp smile. “You must have misunderstood me.” He had not. “I am well used to girls like your sister. They all come to the school in the same state. What we try to do is redirect their energies toward more appropriate outlets.”
“And what might that be?” He laughed. “Do you imagine she will take up watercolors? The piano? Perhaps we ought to encourage her to journal, is that it?”
The woman eyed him, again in a way that made him feel slightly discomfited. “Do you think those are the only acceptable outlets for feminine energy? You are aware, I hope, that this is not the Victorian age?”
“Tell me something.” And though he never spoke without knowing exactly where the conversation should go, tonight, somehow, he felt less careful. That, too, felt uncomfortably familiar. “Why are you no longer with the school? I found the statement issued in the wake of your departure notably uninformative.”
“I wanted a change,” she said, after a moment in which he wondered if she planned to answer him at all. “And no, before you ask, I had no desire to take this job. I was thinking more along the lines of something charming that could be left behind at the end of the day. I have long wondered what sort of life that must be.”
“Boring,” Cesare said softly. He didn’t mean to.
Her gaze flew to his, and for a moment, something snapped into place between them, and it was more than a memory. It was like a switch being pulled—
But she aimed that bland smile at him again. “You made me an offer I felt I could not refuse.”
He felt that switch snap back into place and could not have said why he resented it when he didn’t even know what it was for. “It is cheering to know that your morals are no better than anyone else’s, I suppose. You are as avaricious as the rest.”
“Yes,” she said, with that smile at the ready and sharper than before, to his mind. “Of the two of us sitting here, I am the one awash in avarice. You can tell, because you are the lord and master of all you survey. And I sleep in your attic in a room I doubt you have ever entered. But truly, you and I are the very same.”
That might have been a stinging critique—he felt sure it was meant to be, and there were parts that landed on him hard, but that had more to do with imagining her asleep—but then she laughed. And he was not prepared for the sound.
It almost reminded him of another laugh he had heard once, musical and light, a stunning descant to a busker’s cello on a bridge in Venice—
But this was far more pointed. More edgy, and Cesare had no idea why he was allowing that particular memory to pollute his head once more. It had been one night. He was not in the habit of one-night stands, because he was a creature of habit. He preferred regular sex to adventures with uncertain outcomes. He had told himself that it was far better to lock that night away, and he had succeeded.
It had been months now.
Yet another truth was that he’d woken up to find her gone, that mystery woman in Venice, and he had looked for her with a ferocity that he had never displayed for anything else. Or anyone else.
He did not particularly care for that truth.
He had never been a man of passion, not before that night. Not since.
And in any case, it was all for the best that he’d never been able to find the woman he’d met by chance that night. The woman who had melted all over him like fire and silk, and whose innocence had been as miraculous as it was unexpected. A woman who, he had come to think, must have been in a similar situation to his. With a set future before her, like it or not, and only the one, stolen night to pretend otherwise.
He did not like to think about that, either.
But what Cesare knew full well was that he was in no position to marry a woman who could tie him up in so many knots the way his companion had that night. He knew that passion was fleeting and that his true legacy was in the details he managed over the sweep of time. These were the lessons he had learned, not from his father’s letter, but from an analysis of his father’s life. His mother’s life. His sister’s father too.
Whole lives were ruined by the uncertainty of desire. His was not a life of uncertainty—that was its blessing and its curse. Some men in his position took up extreme sports. Fast cars, high mountains. Cesare had never developed the taste for such distractions, too cognizant had he always been that if he died, his family legacy died with him.
And he needed to protect that legacy and provide for it. He had no place in his life for a night like that, so filled with longing and need and something like magic that he could have been anyone. Not Cesare Chiavari at all.
Just a man like any other, struck down by a woman with a single, smoky-eyed glance.
It was all for the best that he had not been able to locate her. He knew that. He did.
“Whatever you are doing,” he said in repressive tones as her laughter died away, as he tried to get rid of that unsettled feeling within himself, “I can only hope it continues.”
“It won’t.” She lifted a hand and demonstrated, making it bob up and down like a dolphin. “There will be peaks and valleys. You cannot expect perfection.”
He did not glare. He was not given to glaring at his staff. Still, he supposed the way he regarded her was stern. “I think you will find that I can. I do. I always expect perfection, Miss Higginbotham. That is what I am paying you to obtain here.”
She did not look as abashed by that as he felt she should. She did not look abashed at all. “I understand that, but we are speaking of a fifteen-year-old girl with feelings. I can be as perfect as it is possible to be. She will not do the same. On that you can depend.” Her lips curved as if she was holding back that laughter again. “Mr. Chiavari.”
He found himself studying the woman as if she was a game of chess, and one he wished to win, when he could not recall ever feeling such a thing about a person in his employ before.
“What do you suggest should be done with her, then?” he asked.
Again, a curve of her lips, but he could still hear that damned laughter, as if it was inside him now. He was struck once more by how haunting it was when it should not have been. When she should have been anything but.
The woman looked like an owl, for God’s sake.
“I don’t know much about family relations, I’m afraid,” she told him, with a disarming directness that he wanted to enjoy—but he knew by now that this woman only attempted a disarm when there were other weapons at her disposal. “I’m an orphan. Both of my parents were only children. So you see, I have never experienced the joys and challenges of the familial state.”
“And yet you have worked with children all this time.”
She tipped her head slightly to one side, as if he was the one who made no sense. “I don’t think one is required to have a family to work with young people. In fact, most families who send their children to Averell do so because they cannot find a way to deal with the child in question. So perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps I am better suited for the job.”
“A job you gave up.”
She took a moment to look out toward the hills. Then she turned that same assessing look on him. “I don’t imagine you will be able to understand. Because of who you are, I imagine you must always be...this. Who you are. I imagine the person you would be was decided from birth.”
“It is called duty,” he told her. “And an abiding interest in my family’s legacy, which stretches back into antiquity.”
“I can see how that could be both a burden and a deep joy,” she said, and he did not understand why that felt to him like a breath, finally released. “I have a duty only to myself and no legacy to speak of, save what I fashion as I go.”
“That sounds very...untethered,” he found himself saying.
Something in her gaze seemed to kindle then, suggesting sparks when there could be none, surely. No switches, no sparks. “But a tether is such an interesting thing, is it not? It can either be a binding, holding us against our will. Or it can be its own safety net, I suppose, holding us fast when we fear we might fall.”
And Cesare wondered if it was the owlishness about her that made him wonder what the difference was between falling and flying free...and then cursed himself for his foolishness. He was not in a position to imagine anything of the kind. He had spent years settling on the appropriate wife and now that he’d located her, he needed nothing to stand in his way.
Especially not himself and this...nonsense.
“I will never know,” he said, his tone harsh.
He didn’t understand why it felt so easy, so natural, to talk with her like this. Of such odd and unnecessary things. Cesare did not normally sit about in the evenings, conversing with his staff. He gave directives and orders, and he was not available for explanations about failures when it came to carrying out those orders and directives. He took pride in the fact that he was not an unkind master, but he was always the master.
He could not think of a single time he had ever forgotten himself.
And he assured himself he was not forgetting himself now.
“I think it is easier for people like me to decide on a change,” she said, as if she knew all the things he was thinking, when of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t begin to understand what it was like to be steeped in his own history with every breath, and to like that. To see it not as a terrible yoke, but as an opportunity. She was tetherless, as she had told him. An insubstantial creature with a life that would never be recorded into stone, as his would be one day, in the gallery of statues and in the family crypt. “I don’t know how you would ever manage to be anything but who you are. The Chiavari heir and all that entails.”
But unlike every other person who had said something like that to him, the round little owl beside him did not sound remotely admiring.
“I have no interest in change of any kind,” he said, but there was something, then, in the way she gazed back at him. That hint of something sparking in her gaze, perhaps.
A kind of knowledge there that should not have existed.
And certainly should not have felt as if it was mirrored in him.
“Yet you are to be married,” she said quietly.
And there was nothing off about the way she said it. What was off was his reaction. Something in him almost...prickled into attention.
But he was Cesare Chiavari and he did not shiver before a woman. Much less his own staff.
“I do not foresee my marriage being any kind of meaningful change,” he told her, gruffly, after a moment. “Why should it be? It is merely a necessary continuation of the existing legacy of this family, this land. The empire that was built here.”
A sort of amusement lit her gaze then. “What a lucky bride she will be, then, whoever she is. To disappear so completely into your...legacy.”
He did not miss the emphasis she put on that last word, and could only hope he did not sound or look as affronted as he felt. “There are many women who would consider that a great honor.”
“I have no doubt that there are.” She paused, and for the faintest moment she looked almost uncertain. But then he thought he’d imagined it when she leaned slightly toward him, her expression intense and her huge glasses catching the evening light. “You do know that it does not have to be all one way or the other, don’t you? You can create your own legacy without tearing down your family’s. They’re not in competition.”
“Forgive me,” he said through his teeth, “but you have no idea what you are talking about. How could you?”
There was something in the air between them then, making the lengthening shadows feel richer all around. Something in him felt electric, but he knew that must be a misinterpretation, because this was not the sort of woman who inspired such reactions in him. This was not the sort of woman to whom he should find himself telling secrets that he would otherwise assume were his to keep to the grave.
A sunset out on the most glorious terrace in Tuscany could not change that.
He would not let it, no matter what she seemed to know about him. She didn’t truly know anything. He knew that. He knew she was only guessing.
Because that was all that this could be.
In any case, being unexpectedly seen and understood in that way—that had only happened the once.
It was all for the best, Cesare kept reminding himself, that he would never see his lady of Venice again. Because that stood as the only night in his life that he could recall actually imagining a different path forward. A different legacy altogether. He had held her sweet body close to his and he had slept, dreaming about all the ways he would change heaven and earth if he had to, if he could keep her.
He had no desire to relive those hours. They had rendered him unknowable to himself, and he could not abide it.
And it had been the height of foolishness, because the woman had disappeared without so much as telling him her name.
Cesare could not understand why this odd, inappropriate owl made him think about that night the way she did. He doubted she knew the first thing about passion and he wished he did not either. It was far too...messy.
He stood, abruptly, and that too was a betrayal of who he was. He had been trained in perfect manners since the time he was small. There was no reason at all he should abandon the habits of a lifetime simply because a headmistress he employed to handle his sister made him uncomfortable.
But he did not sit. Nor excuse himself.
“I have a plane to catch,” he said.
And when her smile widened, it was as if he could hear the words inside her head, pointing out that one did not have to catch a plane that already belonged to him. That it was likely to wait as long as he wished it to.
Only once, in Venice, had a woman looked straight through him, but that night, he had enjoyed it. It had made him feel as if something molten flowed in his veins, and he had wanted nothing more than to burn with her.
Again and again.
Tonight he could not abide it. So he merely turned on his heel and stalked off of his own terrace. Cesare told himself that he was simply removing himself from an interaction that had gone on too long.
He was not running. He was not quitting his own house.
And by the time he made it out to the airfield, he had convinced himself that his reaction had been entirely proper. The headmistress was a maddening woman dressed like an owl and he was the master of the house. He did not have to descend to her level. It had been a compliment that he had condescended to do so for even a few moments, but he would not do so again.
Just as you will not think of that woman in red again either, an arch voice inside him whispered, sounding entirely too headmistressy for his taste.
It was a short flight to the C?te d’Azur, and another short drive into the hills above Nice for this party he had said he would attend. He was a man of his word, was he not? This was the only reason he could think of as to why he did not stop off at one of the medieval villages along the way.
This was the only reason he chose to ignore the notion that walking into this party was like fashioning his own noose.
But when he arrived, everything was as it should be, and there was no noose in sight. His friend’s home was a sparkling chateau nestled in the more dramatic hills of Provence. It was a study in elegance, no detail too small or insignificant. His friend, who he had known since they were young boys in far-off England, was as amusing as Cesare recalled him. The friends and acquaintances he had gathered were the same. And Marielle, the heiress he had picked out to become his bride, shined like a well-set jewel in the middle of the expected splendor.
Everything was perfect. The food, the wine. The conversation was sophisticated, entertaining, and intelligent, and afterward, when there was dancing, Marielle moved in his arms like a song.
So there was no reason that later, when he found himself alone in the rooms that had been prepared for him, he found himself studying the ring he had brought with him for the occasion—unable to explain to his own satisfaction why he had not proposed.
It had been the perfect night for it. He had planned to ask her in the accepted way, not in the center of a dance floor but on a walk in the gardens, perhaps. And yet here he was, alone in his room and still without the fiancée he already knew would accept him.
Was desperate to accept him, by all accounts.
He threw open the French doors that led to the balcony off his bedchamber, wearing nothing but the boxer briefs he slept in when he was away from home, should he have to leap up and handle a fire, overly familiar fellow guests, or other such middle-of-the-night calamities.
It was cool, this high in the hills, and he liked the breeze on his skin. The moon was high in the sky, like a blessing, when what he felt like doing instead of praying was letting out a howl as if he was a wolf after all.
And maybe that strange image was what stuck with him when he finally took himself to bed, promising himself that he would address this strange issue he had created come morning. He would find Marielle and propose to her in sunlight, as if he had not disappointed her tonight.
That was what he told himself as he drifted off to sleep, but the moon shined in and got tangled up inside him, making him more wolfish than a dutiful man should permit himself to become. Maybe that was the reason why he did not toss and turn, but fell instead into a deep, rich dream.
It started off in Venice, as so many of his dreams did. But this time, when he brought his mystery woman back to his hotel, he knelt between her legs and drank deep of those sweet, hot mysteries at her core.
And he licked his way into her until she cried out, and he shocked himself awake.
Because when he looked up to see the face of his lover in that dream, he saw Headmistress Higginbotham instead.