CHAPTER EIGHT
THEREWERETOO many things slamming their way through Cesare, then, none of them gentle. All of them catastrophic.
There was a kind of knowing he didn’t want to accept. A recognition—
Yet still, something in him refused it. All of it.
Because what mattered was that he had just proved that he was not the man he’d always believed himself to be. The man he had prided himself on being. The man he had assumed he would always be, so pure and perfect were his intentions and his goals.
It hadn’t even been that hard to walk the path he’d chosen. He’d assumed that was a testament to the strength of his character, or perhaps a simple acknowledgment that he was right to place the family legacy above all else.
But now he understood that he had never been tested.
He had never been tempted.
The man he’d imagined he was, honorable and brave, would never have allowed himself to be claimed by one woman the night before, then kiss a different one come the morning. The man he’d been certain he was all these years would never have found himself in such a situation.
He would have proposed to Marielle ages ago. He would have married her by now.
He never would have paid the slightest bit of attention to a round little owl.
Cesare realized that for the first time in the whole of his life, he had no idea who he was.
The headmistress turned and fled. He could hear her feet down the length of the hall, then the door to Mattea’s suite slam behind her as she burst through it.
Maybe he should take that as a sign. A call to his better self, to be the better man he’d always imagined he was, before today.
But his blood was so hot inside his body that he thought he might scald himself. His sex was so hard it ached. For some reason, he kept mixing up Beatrice and his lady of Venice—
Something hovered, just there, but he didn’t want to accept it.
And before he knew it, he was going after her.
He didn’t see her when he made it to the hallway. Remembering one of the little jibes she’d thrown at him, he made his way to the servants’ stairs and climbed up them, all the way up to the rooms beneath the eaves.
The afternoon light streamed in from the end of the hall. He expected to encounter other members of his staff, only to belatedly remember that he’d given most of them the rest of the weekend off. He thought he should have been able to hear Beatrice in whatever room was hers, and he stood there, trying to control his own breathing so he could hear hers.
And this might have been his house, but he did not feel right about peering into the private spaces of the people who made this house run. Cesare stood there in the hallway, aware that he was having far too much trouble controlling himself.
It was more evidence that he was lost. That he was not himself. That he had no access to the man racked with need who had taken over his body, his mind, all of him—
Because inside him, still, there was a kind of storm. And he had the sense it hadn’t yet hit ground.
A voice inside that sounded a great deal like his memory of his late father whispered, You do not want that, my son. You know where it leads.
Maybe it was a good thing that he couldn’t find his little owl.
To break the tension—or to find his way back to himself, somehow—Cesare walked down to the window at the end of the long, narrow hallway. It was round and high, and when he looked out at first he saw the same view he always did. Rolling hills, cultivated vineyards, olive groves.
His legacy, arrayed before him like a painting, just as he liked it.
He had gone for a very long run this morning, after a long and sleepless night, much of which had been spent at a party he wished he hadn’t thrown, fielding congratulations that sat heavy on him.
Are you pleased with yourself?he had asked Marielle at the end of the night when he walked her to her chamber, because it had seemed expected. And he was a man who always did what was expected, didn’t he?
I will be happy when I am the next Chiavari wife, she had replied, with that same smile. As we have discussed for a long time now.
I did not realize that happiness was in the cards, he had replied, without thinking.
When he should have known better. He and Marielle could live a long life together, fully content with each other, but it was predicated on not allowing such unnecessary glimpses behind the curtain.
Had he really believed, for so many years, that a life like that was what he wanted?
And for the first time, he thought he’d seen the real Marielle there, lurking in the bones of her objectively lovely face.
We will create a perfect legacy, she had said, almost sternly. We will nurture it into something robust that will stand the test of time. What is happiness next to that?
He had turned that question over and over in his head ever since.
It was what had prodded him to run faster and faster on his run, but not because he had come round to Marielle’s way of thinking. Or back to what his own thinking had been when he’d started this search for an unobjectionable wife, who would fit into his life like the mirror his sister had accused her of being, with a lack of heat that had seemed like an indictment.
He had thought about his lady of Venice, as ever. He had thought about Beatrice.
But it was his sister who had weighed heaviest in his thoughts.
His sister, who Marielle believed needed a role model. And more, that she was the perfect person for the position. She, a woman who would pretend that he had proposed because she was tired of waiting—and not because she was so taken with him that she couldn’t bear another moment apart.
He had run faster and farther, knowing that wherever he ran, it would be on land that was his. That the earth beneath him was his legacy. That it would remain long after he was gone, and that was a contentment that nothing could take away.
And more, that he might not count happiness as a virtue worth pursuing—or he never had—but he wanted something better for Mattea.
She deserved, at the very least, to choose.
Beatrice had been trying to tell him these things all along, hadn’t she?
That was what had brought him to her rooms, with dirt from the Chiavari vineyards still on his shoes.
Now he was only regretful that he hadn’t gone to her sooner, to speak to her of the mother they’d shared.
Still at the window, he let his gaze drop straight down to the pool area that only family and staff knew about. It was separated from the rest of the house by high walls festooned with flowering vines, and over time it had become almost exclusively the purview of the staff, because Mattea had a marked preference for the eternity pool on the opposite side of the house, set against a stunning view in the distance, some glorious landscaping, and shade. For his part, Cesare always meant to swim, yet usually found himself running instead.
But today, he stood there, transfixed.
Not because of the pool itself, though it was a sweet turquoise invitation in the golden afternoon light. But because he could see his little owl, marching across the flagstones toward the pool as if on one of her missions. She was still fully clothed in her usual drab, unflattering shrouds of clothing, with what looked like an extra smock today. Her enormous glasses were still on her face, and he remembered that he had felt them pressed against his own cheekbones before.
Why should that wash over him like heat?
And there was something about her mouth that was sitting on him strangely, urging him to think—
But instead, he watched Beatrice, several stories below, as she took herself to the water’s edge. She stood there for a moment, and even from this far away he could sense the tension in her.
Until, fully clothed, she threw herself in.
A different sort of drumming began, deep inside of him.
Because he was perfectly clear what was happening here.
She was washing herself clean. She was washing him off.
Cesare did not like it at all.
And he stopped worrying about what kind of man he was.
Everything seemed to go narrow inside his chest, a taut spiral that was made of stone and fire. Without intending to move, he found himself charging down the servants’ stair. When he got to the bottom, down in the kitchens, he had no memory at all of whether or not he’d passed anyone on his way down. It was all blank space in that fire within him.
He made his way outside, then into the secret pool area through an ancient door set in the thick walls covered in vines that were older than some American cities. The door opened and closed noiselessly, though he would not have cared if it had scared off half the birds in Tuscany. Cesare strode to the side of the pool, scowling down into the water, at first not able to make sense of what he saw.
It looked like there were shadows, everywhere, floating beneath the water—
But he realized in the next moment that what he was seeing were those shroud-like clothes of hers, because she was tearing them off under the surface of the pool.
And the very moment he took that in, his gaze was drawn to the stair across the water, where she was rising up like some kind of mermaid from the very depths of his deepest, darkest fantasies.
Beatrice was completely nude.
And her hair... Her hair was no longer caught up in that achingly tight bun on the back of her head. It flowed down, impossibly long, and the water made it seem as dark and as smooth as ink as it poured down her back.
She turned, as if she heard him. As if she could hear that thundering inside his chest, like it really was a drum.
As if she could feel the ache in his sex.
She froze, there on the stair without a stitch of clothing on a body that was nothing short of a celebration of the female form, looking back over one perfect shoulder toward him.
The first thing he thought was, She’s taken off those hideous glasses.
And then, at last, he recognized her.
He recognized her.
“You...” Cesare breathed.
And that magical miracle of a night in Venice slammed into him, a cascade of heat and longing and need.
Because she was the very same woman. She was his lady of Venice. She was the woman who had exalted him and ruined him, and he had never been the same.
Now that he knew it, he couldn’t understand how he had missed it all this time.
She had lived here, under his roof, and had interacted with him for more than a month and he hadn’t known—
Then again, maybe he had.
Maybe his body had always known the thing his mind had not wanted to accept.
Because there was no other explanation for his obsession with a drab little owl who was here to keep Mattea in line, save this.
In his dreams, he had known. His subconscious had recognized what his eyes did not. There were parts of him that had known all along.
She had been haunting him...because she was here. Not a ghost at all, but the woman he dreamed of each and every night.
And he thought that somehow, this must have been fated all along. Destiny, when he had long believed that Chiavaris made their own destiny, by their will and their legacy alone.
It was no wonder he’d been dragging his feet where Marielle was concerned. It made perfect sense that he had been unable, somehow, to give the family ring to the wrong woman.
Because the woman he truly wanted, the one woman he craved, was right here.
“Sei il mio tesoro,”he said, almost roughly. “Sonno pazzo de ti.”
Because she was a treasure to him, and she’d been right here beneath his nose. And he was more than half-mad for her, in whatever form she took.
But as he watched, feeling as if he had been turned into stone, something changed in her gaze. She took a deep breath. He could see the way she straightened her shoulders.
Then she turned all the way around. And his gaze dropped to take in the unmistakable jut of her belly.
The baby she carried.
Mine, something in him roared at once.
And it was as if everything in him shattered into pieces.
He heard a sound, low and animal, and understood that it was that same roar, from a place he hadn’t known he carried inside.
Because it was as if he had spent the whole of his life trying to figure out who he was, and now he knew.
Now there was no doubt.
Now he was himself, at last.
He made that noise again, and it was like a song. And then he was moving, rounding the edge of the water, and bearing down upon her with intent.
With unmistakable intent.
“Cesare...” she whispered, as if in some kind of apology.
But he did not want words. He had no need for apologies.
He wanted...everything.
It was as simple and as impossible as that, so he kissed her.
Again, and again and again, a slick, hot claiming.
A reminder.
A deep, hot, long-overdue recognition.
He set her away from him, tugged off his own T-shirt, and dressed her in it. It was almost like a dress on her, though her belly made it shorter, and despite that glorious red thing she had worn on the night they’d met, he somehow knew that his lady of Venice who was also Beatrice Higginbotham did not spend a lot of time wearing scandalous, body-baring attire.
It was all for him.
She was all for him.
And Cesare hauled her close, then into his arms, and carried her into the house.
To his bed, at last.