CHAPTER SEVEN
BEATRICEWOKEUP early on the morning after the party, because she had a job to do.
It was possible, she thought as she marched through the hushed, quiet house, that the simple fact of that job was how she had managed to make it through the night unscathed.
Well. Not entirely unscathed. Not really.
But at least she knew that the places where she’d taken hits, where the way Cesare had looked at her as if she was the only woman alive while literally in the middle of his own engagement to someone else—were invisible.
If the appearance of invulnerability was all she had, she would take it. And hope it became true. In time.
Because the alternative was that she would have to live like this forever, with her foolish heart crushed flat.
Mattea had looked stunned by Marielle’s announcement. Then as crushed as Beatrice felt. Then she had looked Beatrice right in the eye and announced to her friends that she intended to make this party one for the history books.
You do not want that, child, Beatrice had told her.
Unsurprisingly, the girls got silly, fast. When the dancing started, the teenagers started stealing bottles of wine and hiding in unused rooms to chug them down, squealing with laughter when caught. When Beatrice finally herded them up to Mattea’s rooms, there was too much music—so loud it was a shock they couldn’t hear it in the civilized party below.
The engagement party, a voice inside Beatrice had kept on repeating, like a death knell.
The girls had pleaded for internet access and when repeatedly denied, had started playing the kind of shrieking, out-of-control games that led to breaking things—or would have, had Beatrice not been there to quietly remove the most delicate objects from their haphazard range.
And then, later, she had been on hand to quietly dispense cold washcloths for clammy brows and buckets for the girls who had chugged the most contraband wine.
Now it was a clear, bright morning, and she could have them sleep, but Beatrice believed in the power of consequences.
So she rousted the lot of them from their slumber, ignoring all the whining with the ease of her years of practice. She dispensed tablets for headaches, insisted each of the girls drink at least twenty ounces of water, and then made the most sullen group of teenagers in Europe keep her company as she stretched her own legs on an extra-long loop through the vineyards.
Twice.
When they came back to the house, drooping and moaning, she had the kitchens deliver up a proper meal to sop up the excesses of their behavior the night before. She shepherded the girls into showers, and supervised their unnecessary makeup and hair routines, all of which went on for ages. It was past midday when she handed off Mattea’s friends, who had only been permitted access for one night, to the waiting SUV that would whisk them off to the airfield.
Beatrice allowed herself not one single moment to concern herself with the night Cesare might have had as an engaged man.
Not one.
When she returned to Mattea’s rooms, she found the girl curled up in a ball on her favorite couch in the media room, looking as if she didn’t know if she wanted to go to sleep...or maybe cry her eyes out. She was everything that was limp and wan, and Beatrice ignored her entirely.
She bustled around the room instead, tidying everything she could. She threw open curtains throughout the suite, opening the windows and the balcony doors to encourage airflow and light, knowing that sooner or later both would revive Mattea.
And she found herself grateful that she was working today. That she had things to keep her busy. She didn’t have time to sit around and think too much about the fact that Cesare had finally, actually, gotten himself engaged.
Engaged. To be married.
It was no longer a theoretical possibility. It was no longer something she needed to look up on her mobile every morning. She hadn’t bothered today, because she already knew the answer. She’d been there to see it with her own eyes.
She couldn’t decide how, exactly, she felt about the fact that it was clear—to her, anyway—that he hadn’t wanted it to happen like that. It had been Marielle who’d seized that moment and made her announcement.
Beatrice had waited for the powerful and mighty Cesare Chiavari to correct her...but he hadn’t.
Instead, he’d looked at Beatrice. And she’d had the most ridiculous urge to claw her way up that long banquet table—anything to get to him—but she didn’t know if her end goal was to save him or to slap him.
What she did know was that she didn’t have the standing or the right to do either of those things.
She’d been grateful when the girls had started acting up, because she would rather handle overexcited teenagers forever than dig into how she actually felt, having witnessed the father of her child allow the whole party to congratulate him on his engagement to another woman.
And the night had been so busy containing her charges, then handling their splitting heads and tender stomachs, that she’d happily had no time to herself to curl up in a ball, hold her baby belly the way she wanted to, and daydream about a night in Venice that seemed farther away now than it had ever been.
“I don’t understand why you can’t just be still,” Mattea moaned then, reminding Beatrice that she was still here. Doing her job. Not in a position to lapse off into daydreams.
Something else she knew she should be grateful for.
“It does no one any good to get stuck in despair,” Beatrice told her, or perhaps she was talking to herself. She kept the bustling going, tidying up every surface that she could find, still as amazed as she always was that packs of girls could make such a mess. “These are called the wages of sin, Mattea. I hope you’re enjoying the rich, ripe fruits of the choices you made last night.”
“Oh, my God,” Mattea moaned with all the drama of an entire theater run. “Why can’t you just say I told you so like a normal person?”
Beatrice almost cackled out a laugh at that, more proof that the emotions she wasn’t letting herself feel were all over the place. She bit it back at the last moment. Then she glanced over at her charge, who had gone from curling in a ball into lounging about like a full opera heroine. Complete with one arm over her eyes, awaiting her inevitable tragic end.
“Did you enjoy having your friends here for the night?” Beatrice asked mildly, because there was no point adding oxygen to opera.
Mattea made a noncommittal noise. “I guess.”
“They all seem particularly high-spirited. I don’t know why they’ve never darkened the doors of Averell.”
That inspired Mattea to sigh and shift to a sitting position. “None of their parents care if they get kicked out of school. It’s not like they need to be educated. They’ll all get their money at eighteen.”
Beatrice sniffed. “Imagine having nothing at all to live for.”
“It’s the opposite of that. It’s just that you get what you’re looking for at eighteen, without having to get old and weird and having to go on yoga retreats to find yourself.”
“Mattea,” Beatrice said, quietly. “I don’t how to tell you this in a way that you will understand, because I’m afraid it’s the sort of thing you have to grow into. But there’s so much life beyond eighteen. So very much. Eighteen is scarcely a memory to hold on to, at my age. It was so long ago. And in the fullness of time, it means so little.”
And she knew as she said it that it was breaking her own boundaries, but that was the trouble with today. She felt broken.
Besides, it was possible she needed to hear those words herself.
“Right.” Mattea only rolled her eyes. “But I’m guessing nobody handed you a memorable trust fund. So.”
“What I got was much better than that,” Beatrice replied, straightening from the bureau she’d been attempting to clean, though she feared the scratches she’d found there might be permanent. “I had no trust fund, you’re quite right. What I was given instead was complete and total independence, and I took it.”
“Sounds great,” Mattea said insincerely, looking and sounding sulky. But Beatrice saw the glint of something else in her eyes. A tiny hint of curiosity she didn’t want to show, but couldn’t hide. “Can I have my mobile back now?”
Beatrice reached into one of the deep pockets in the smock she was wearing and pulled out the girl’s mobile phone, tossing it to her. Mattea missed it and let it clatter to the floor, but then only stared at it where it lay. She didn’t even reach for it when the screen lit up, alerting her to a new notification.
“The thing about my friends is that they’re not really friends,” Mattea said after the screen went dark again. “It’s more like whenever one of us got into trouble in the various schools we all went to, the other ones were there to make it worse. And then, later, talk about how funny it all was. But I think... Sometimes I think that a real friend would do the opposite.”
Beatrice understood this as the heartfelt confession it was, and so she didn’t rush over to Mattea’s side. She sat instead on a chair on the opposite side of the room and kept her expression interested—but not too interested—so as not to overwhelm this moment of teenage vulnerability.
“It seems to me that there’s a difference between friends and fans,” she said when it was clear that Mattea could stare at her mobile on the floor forever. “The fact is, Mattea, you’re excellent at giving a good performance. I don’t mean that as an insult. I watched you do it all year long at Averell. If I had really wanted to punish you, I would have done it with solitary confinement. Because you truly bloom when you have an audience.”
“I’ve had to sit through a lot of therapy,” the girl replied with a shrug. “I know it’s bad. Seeking approval. People pleasing. Childhood trauma, blah blah blah.”
“That’s one take on it,” Beatrice agreed. “On the other hand, you could also channel that particular urge, because it’s something you’re good at, into something more positive.”
“Like what? Multilevel marketing?”
Beatrice couldn’t hold back a laugh then. “I somehow doubt that your future is in tawdry, tiered sales, Mattea. I was thinking something more like acting.”
She watched as the girl’s face went blank for a moment. Then something soft and deeply emotional took root there, making her look young and sweet and almost wistful.
But in the next moment, all of that was gone, replaced by scorn.
“Because of my mother?” She sat up straighter so she could wrap her arms around her chest, and then hold on tight. “What would make you think I would want to be anything like her?”
“Acting is a noble profession,” Beatrice said matter-of-factly. “More than that, it’s an art. I might even call it a privilege. To inhabit the skin of others, to truly have the opportunity to walk in their shoes? That doesn’t sound like work to me. It sounds like a gift.”
Mattea was up and on her feet, then. Beatrice watched in as much amusement as compassion as she began to pace back and forth in the room, protesting this idea that had clearly hit a button for her.
“You don’t understand, because you didn’t know my mother, but that’s the whole problem. No one knew my mother. She couldn’t be known. There was nothing there.” She shook her head. “She was just...a collection of scenes and bits she’d found along the way so she could make herself into her very own personal Frankenstein.”
“By all accounts, your mother was a very accomplished—”
“My mother made a handful of artsy films,” Mattea bit off, sounding cold, though her blue eyes were wild. “And then she married into this family. And after that, the only acting she ever did was pretending she was happy.”
Beatrice didn’t know why that winded her, when she’d never known the woman. She’d only ever seen the same still photographs that everyone else had. She had been shockingly pretty with her sky blue eyes and flaxen blond hair. It was not the least bit surprising to Beatrice that people still wanted to project their imaginations onto a face like that.
“All I’m suggesting is that you might enjoy a bit of theater,” she told Mattea now, as the girl continued to pace. “As a way to channel some of the desire for new experiences into more worthy avenues.”
“So I can be just like her, is that it?” Mattea asked, her voice rising. “Everybody’s favorite when the spotlight is on, but what happens in the dark? What becomes of something so shiny then?”
Once again, Beatrice found herself almost speechless, when she knew she couldn’t let that happen. She knew she had an obligation to show up for the girl. No matter how difficult it was for her. This wasn’t about her.
It didn’t matter that it resonated.
“Mattea,” she began again.
“Our mother,” came a voice from the door, “should have shined like the beacon she was, for all of her days. It is a tragedy among tragedies that she could not.”
And when they both turned toward the sound, Beatrice’s jaw wasn’t the only one that dropped slightly at the sight of Cesare there in the doorway.
Though for different reasons.
He had been in formal attire last night. He was usually in formal attire, Beatrice thought with some surprise, though she had never really put that together before. Here, in his own home, he preferred bespoke suits—as if he liked to remind himself that he was meant to be an institution, not merely a man.
This afternoon he wore nothing but a pair of visibly soft sweatpants and a gray T-shirt whose sole purpose seemed to be clinging to every single plane of muscle in his chest. Not to mention his ridged abdomen.
Beatrice had the great pleasure and deep agony of knowing exactly what was underneath that stretch of gray, as well as the sweatpants that emphasized his strong thighs and seemed to love the most rampantly male part of him too well.
It took her too long to come to the obvious conclusion that he’d clearly just returned from some kind of workout. But then the silly little fool inside of her was far too quick to wonder if that was because he’d woken up this morning and tried to chase his demons away.
Hopefully, the one he’d agreed to marry last night.
You are delusional, she chided herself. And for all you know, his fiancée is lovely. Her only sin is not being you.
Mattea was staring at her brother, with that same mix of too many emotions on her face. But the one that stabbed Beatrice through the heart was hope.
A wild flash of hope.
“It is not her fault that she could not stay as bright as she started,” Cesare told his sister, his voice and his gaze intent. “There are some men who find beautiful things in this world and wish to possess them. They take them in their hands, they hold them too tight, and then they blame the things themselves when they are crushed.”
“Is that what you think?” Mattea’s voice was small. “I used to hear my father yelling at her. That her glory days were long past. That she should have been more grateful he was willing to tolerate her in her decline.”
Cesare made a low noise. “I’m sorry you heard that. You should not have.”
Mattea blew out a breath. “She always said that the best way to make people remember you is to be unforgettable, by any means available. And she could throw parties. She could cause scandals. All I had was school. And my father didn’t remember me when I was home. So I thought I might as well...use what I had to remind him.”
Cesare was still in the doorway, and the darkly intent look he shot Beatrice made everything in her stand on its head. Then cartwheel all around.
As if he knew her. Or at least, as if she had something to do with him showing up here like this.
She wanted so badly to imagine she had gotten through to him somehow. That whether he remembered her or not, something deep inside him knew her all the same.
The way she knew that man he’d shown her in Venice.
The one she persisted in believing was still in him, somewhere.
Right now she didn’t have to look very hard.
Soon enough, it wouldn’t matter what he remembered or recognized, because nothing that occurred in this house or this family would be her concern any longer. Beatrice needed to find a way to hold on to that.
“I have never forgotten you, Mattea,” Cesare told his sister, shifting all of his force and intensity back to her. “I never could. And there’s something I should have told you a long time ago. I am not your guardian because your father wanted to get rid of you. I am your guardian because I demanded that he relinquish you to my care. Because I did not think he was doing a very good job.”
Beatrice knew she wasn’t the only one holding her breath, then. But she was sure that she was the only one who had suggested that he’d been something less than the perfect guardian to his sister. The only one who had wondered if, maybe, he might try being there for her with more than just his money.
She had never felt anything like this. The sheer joy that he had listened. And that he was here now, saying these things to a shaken, lost girl who needed desperately to hear these words, straight from him.
“You seemed to like me more when you saw me less, Cesare,” Mattea said, with that shattering teenage honesty.
Cesare, to his credit, had the grace to take that hit. To look chagrined, and to let his sister see it.
“I realized last night that I have not explained these things to you,” he said, and he did not sound as if he thought that was an excuse. “When I was your age, I was being prepped to run an empire. And the way I made myself memorable was with perfection. Because I could not afford to do anything less. It is possible that I expected you to simply do the same, when you have no empire to run or enemies waiting to see you fall. All you need to do, Mattea, is try not to let anyone take your shine.” He inclined his head. “Even me.”
His sister looked down, and seemed to remember the night before, and the shenanigans she and her cohort had engaged in. Or perhaps it dawned on her that it was not normal for her brother to make appearances here. “You never come to my rooms. Are you going to send me away again? Because I didn’t behave like a proper little princess at your party?”
“Did you not?” And again, Cesare’s dark gaze slid to Beatrice and made her throat go tight. While it seemed everything else in her lit on fire. “I will confess, I did not notice.”
“I contained it,” Beatrice said, shooting for a crisp tone and not quite getting there. “As promised.”
She told herself it was a relief when he turned that dark blue gaze back to his sister.
“I realize that I have not discussed with you what will happen when I marry,” Cesare said. “I only mentioned that I wished to do so.”
“Well,” Mattea said, forthrightly, with a resigned sort of shrug. “You were always going to marry someone like that Marielle.”
Beatrice would have left the room immediately if she could, because this was none of her business. But Cesare was blocking the door that led toward the exit with that unfairly beautiful body of his. And only she knew she’d gotten to taste every bit of that body, thoroughly. And if she closed her eyes, she could taste him again right now.
And it didn’t matter what he knew or didn’t know.
What she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt was that she did not want to stand here and listen to a discussion of his fiancée. It was too much. In a summer of entirely too much, this was...beyond.
She wasn’t sure she could take it.
“What do you mean?” Cesare was asking and not in that quiet, dangerous tone he sometimes used, when he was warning off any follow-up questions. He seemed genuinely interested. “What, precisely, is ‘a woman like her’?”
“Like she’s made of reflective glass,” Mattea said, and she was getting her equilibrium back. It was there in the color that was slowly coming back into her cheeks. Even her tone had returned to its usual dismissiveness. “So she can mirror all that Chiavari legacy stuff you like to go on about. I thought that was why you were getting married in the first place.”
Cesare let out a small sound, as if he had taken a hit to the gut, and Beatrice kept her eyes firmly on the floor. She expected him to launch into a defense of his betrothed.
But he didn’t.
He didn’t, something in her whispered, as if that meant something.
As if it was personal. To Beatrice.
How shameful that she wished it was.
Cesare crossed over to the couch Mattea had vacated. He swiped up the remote control and pointed it at the screen on the far wall. “I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we watch one of the films?”
Mattea reacted as if someone had slapped her. “One of... Our mother’s?”
Cesare sat, clicked through a few menus, then patted the cushion beside him. “I am not an actor in any regard, but I have always been very good at negotiations. And what is a negotiation except a kind of performance all its own? If I were you, I would ask myself what gifts our mother left you. Not what stories people tell about her. Even if those people are me.”
“People sometimes say I look like her,” Mattea said, in a small voice. “They don’t say it nicely.”
“Because beauty like hers is not a gift,” Cesare said, very seriously, holding her gaze in a way that made it clear that he agreed that Mattea resembled her. “It was her curse. People remembered her face, never her. So she thought she had nothing more to offer. But you and I know better, do we not?”
And this time, when he pointed to the cushion beside him, his sister went and sat there next to him. Through one film, then the next.
Beatrice sat through the first one with them, only because when they had both protested when she’d tried to leave. Almost as if they weren’t sure how to be together, she thought. But while they’d watched their mother, she had watched them.
And had wondered if she would have to actually bite her tongue to keep herself from asking all the questions she wanted to ask. Like where was Marielle? What had brought Cesare here to make things better with his sister?
Did this mean he no longer needed her to play her headmistress role?
She was dismayed at how sad the prospect of leaving this place made her, when she should have rejoiced that she could go, her secret still safe with her.
During the second movie they screened, she made her way down to the kitchens and sorted out a late afternoon meal for them. The house was quiet, as most of the guests had left in the first part of the day. The servants’ quarters were sparsely populated as well, as the bulk of the cleanup had already taken place and many were off having well-deserved personal time. Beatrice carried in a tray of food and slid it onto the table nearest the couch, but then stopped short.
Mattea had fallen asleep, her head on her brother’s shoulder. And Cesare was not looking at the screen in front of him, where his mother was riding on a train, looking sadly out of windows streaked with raindrops.
He was looking straight at Beatrice.
“We should find her acting lessons,” Beatrice said, though her voice sounded far more fluttery than it should have. She cleared her throat. “If she’s even a little bit her mother’s daughter, she will be extraordinary.”
Cesare only looked at her, his gaze dark, brooding.
“And I really do think that if she has a place to channel that energy, she might find that making trouble holds far less appeal,” Beatrice continued, though she was aware that something inside of her had caught fire. It was connected to the way he was looking at her, like a livewire that went deep, and everything inside her seemed to...spark.
“Little owl,” he said, which made no sense, “I do not wish to speak any further about Mattea.”
Beatrice wanted to say something, to do something, because she felt she needed to do something—
Especially when he turned, carefully cradling his sister’s head as he shifted her body until she could curl up against the back of the couch and sleep on.
And as Beatrice watched—somehow frozen still—he stood.
Then walked toward her, portent in every step.
Or maybe it was simply in her, the pounding of her blood in her veins. The honey in her limbs, the heat sweet and slick between her legs.
He advanced, she fell back, and she didn’t realize until too late that it was a tactical misfire. Because she let him back her fully out of the room.
Now Mattea was in the room beside them with the film still playing, Beatrice was in some small salon with no witnesses, and then Cesare was there too, taking up all the air. All the space.
All she could see or hear or breathe.
I remember this, something in her said with great satisfaction—
But she couldn’t melt into that. She couldn’t.
“Mr. Chiavari,” she began desperately. “I really think—”
“That is the trouble,” Cesare said.
His eyes were so dark, she thought, and he was so close now, and she was not immune. She had tried for so long now, but she was still not immune.
“The trouble?” she asked.
But she was whispering.
“Too much thinking,” he said, closing the distance between them until her breath felt like his. Until she felt like his, when she knew better.
Cesare studied her face for so long that she thought he might fog up her glasses, but instead he leaned forward, slid his palm over her cheek to hold her face steady, and kissed her.
Finally, he kissed her.
And it made her realize in a searing burst of thank God that every dream she’d had about him since Venice was a lie. It was all smoke and mirrors, fuzzy and filtered.
Because the real thing was so much better.
The taste of him was so much wilder, and far more devastating.
Their mouths fit together the way they always had. As if they’d been carved from the same bit of sensation and their lives had been an exercise in finding their way here. Finding their way home.
And she was too aware that her body was different now, and even more his than it had been that night, little though he knew it.
He kissed her again, then again, then he took the kiss deeper, and sensation was so sharp it felt like she was being lacerated by the pleasure—
But he was engaged to another woman. There was no mistake. She had been there.
And Beatrice could not be the kind of person who did this, could she?
I won’t, she sobbed within. I can’t.
She pushed herself away from him, horrified. Deeply horrified.
Though what she was really horrified about, she could admit only deep inside herself, was that she wasn’t as horrified as she should have been, and certainly not for the right reasons.
Because he felt like hers. He always had.
Yet he was Cesare Chiavari. And she was a former headmistress teetering on the brink of total disgrace.
And she told herself it wasn’t surrender but strategy when she whirled around, wishing she was as nimble as she’d been before she was pregnant, and ran.