CHAPTER ELEVEN
BEATRICEWASNO stranger to heartache.
But this was different.
Her parents had not wanted to leave her. If they could have lived, they would have. They had not chosen the accident that had taken them away from her.
Cesare was choosing this. He was doing this.
She had barely accepted that she was in love with him, and already, he was tearing her heart out. The worst part was, she knew him well enough by now to know that it was not something he would do lightly.
He truly, honestly believed what he said. That love was toxic. A poison.
That she could stay, but that he would never love her.
He wouldn’t even try.
There was nothing she wanted less than to walk away from him, not now that they’d found their way back to each other, but how could she do anything else?
She turned back to look at him. “Try to understand. My parents died when I was young. And the rest of my childhood wasn’t easy, but I always, always knew that they’d loved me. It made a difference.” Beatrice pulled in a shaky breath. “There were other children in care who didn’t have that, but I did. It was like...a candle in a dark night. You might think that doesn’t matter, but if you do, it’s because you’ve never had to look around for that kind of hope.”
“Don’t think that when I say love is not on the table that that means it will be...” But he couldn’t finish that, whatever gritty thing he’d tried to say. He tried again. “Beatrice... You know you wrecked me that night in Venice. You must know this.”
That jolted straight through her. It was the way he was looking at her now, with that wreckage right there in his dark blue gaze. She felt it wash over her, making her breath come too hard, too fast.
And she knew it would be too easy to give in, to back down. Because she wanted whatever she could get of him—the fact she’d stayed here all summer proved that. But her hair was down now. The truth was out.
Beatrice didn’t think she could pretend again.
There was a very real chance that if she tried, it would kill her.
“I looked for you and I looked for you, but you were nowhere to be found,” Cesare was saying. And I am not a man who does not get what I want. That is not who I am. But I could not find you.”
He was still by the side of the bed, but he had turned toward the door. And he looked different than she’d ever seen him. It was that starkness on his face. As if he’d been stripped down to his elements and what was left was what she saw now, a man haunted.
As if grief lived in him now, too.
Because it had come so close today. She thought she understood. It wasn’t his father, who had been so old. It wasn’t his mother, whose choices he openly questioned. It was his sister, a fifteen-year-old who should have a whole life in front of her, but had nearly seen that snatched away.
And he had watched it happen, knowing that he was the reason she had jumped in that cart in the first place.
“I knew I had to let you go,” Cesare was saying, stark and serious. “But I couldn’t. I dreamed of you every night, though I knew that was not realistic. I knew there was no moving forward with a dream. And you might not think much of the Chiavari legacy, but I was raised to believe it was the only thing that mattered.” He shook his head. “I have made sure that it’s the only thing that can ever matter.”
“You matter, Cesare,” Beatrice whispered. She pointed at the bed. “She matters.” Then she put her hand back on her belly. “And this child matters. That’s your legacy. Don’t you see that?”
He lifted up a hand, as if he intended to order her to stop. But he didn’t.
“I went through the motions, Beatrice. This is what I’m trying to tell you. I did all the right things. I followed the plan my father laid out for me before he died. I—”
“Why?” Beatrice asked baldly. “He sounds like he should have sorted himself out before he dispensed advice to others.”
And for a moment, she thought she’d gone too far. Cesare looked as if he didn’t know if he would collapse beneath the indignity of her remark—or if it might have left a mortal wound.
But he pushed on. “If I could not have the woman who made me think that passion was possible. If I could not find the woman who had torn apart the carefully sewn-up world that I’d been living in for so long, then why not a woman who might as well have been a settee? A dresser? That is all the thought and emotion I put into the question of my marriage. I want you to know that.”
Beatrice realized then that she was holding her breath. And even when she told herself to breathe, she wasn’t sure she was capable of actually doing it.
“And then you arrived.” He shook his head, and she thought he looked one part disbelief, another part wonder, but no little bit of temper in between. “This...absurd woman, marching around my family’s ancestral seat, issuing orders and dressed like an angry little owl.”
“An owl,” she repeated. “You keep saying that.”
“It’s the glasses,” he muttered. “I hate them. I want to bronze them. And I, who have never been seen in the company of a woman not held to be among the most beautiful in the world, found myself in pieces over a little round owl profoundly lacking in every possible way. The headmistress who was here to discipline my sister, but appeared to have censure aplenty for me, too.” He ran an agitated hand through his hair. “I don’t think you can possibly understand how egregious this was. This obsession. This preoccupation with the woman who I should never have even noticed was here.”
“How marvelously tender,” she snapped at him. “I am all aflutter, Cesare. Truly.”
“Why does that not offend me? No one speaks to me as you do, Beatrice. No one except my surly, impossible sister, who everyone assures me will grow out of it once she is old enough to know better, and yet you certainly have not done so.”
“The thing about children, Cesare, is that they do not suffer fools until we teach them that they must.” Beatrice was still frowning at him. “Maybe that is something you should sit with for a while.”
“I don’t need to sit with it,” he threw back at her, his voice rising in a deeply imperfect, un-Cesare manner. Almost as if he couldn’t control himself. “I am Cesare Chiavari. Great men tremble when I enter a room. Women beg for a scrap of my attention. And you—You live in my home. You never seek out my company, I must demand it. You dress to hide your beauty and you want nothing to do with me and my obsession with you grows by the moment.”
“Cesare,” she began, but he ignored her.
“I thought that never being able to find my lady of Venice was the worst thing that could happen. But living without you, thinking that I would never find you, was tolerable only because I came to believe that nothing could possibly be as good as I remembered it being that night.” He shook his head. “But once again, Beatrice, you defy me.”
“Because it’s better,” she whispered. “It’s so much better now.”
They still stood in their respective places, Beatrice frozen by the door and Cesare next to the bed, as if he could not bring himself to step away from Mattea’s prone form. As if something held them in place like two strong hands, holding them apart but not allowing Beatrice to end this by walking out the door.
“I can’t bear it if you leave me again,” he told her then, gruff and low. “And I want all of you. I want my child. I want you, as my wife. My lover. And everything between. And I don’t know how to reconcile this with who I have been, who I have wanted to be for the whole of my life. But Beatrice, I look at you and I do not see the point of my duty. Not if it means losing the only woman who I have ever dreamed about—”
“Oh, my God,” came a sulky, scratchy, deeply disgusted teenage voice from the depths of the bed, and Beatrice felt the tears hovering at the back of her eyes spill over, because she had never heard anything more beautiful. Better yet Mattea’s eyes were open. She was already scowling, clearly cranky and out of sorts, and she was glaring at her brother. It was glorious. “You’re obviously in love with her, Cesare. And you are rude. Why are you shouting like this when I’m obviously dying?”
“You’re not dying,” Beatrice whispered, and she didn’t care if Mattea could see the tears as she moved toward the bed. She didn’t care if Cesare could, too. “You’re not dying, child. Thank goodness, you’re not dying, because I couldn’t bear to lose you. You have to know that I was always here for you first. Always. But I do think you’re going to have a terrible headache.”
“That’s so unfair,” Mattea moaned.
And when Beatrice came over to the bed, Cesare met her at the foot. He drew her close, so that the pair of them were looking at his sister. He gazed down at Beatrice. Then he reached over and ran his thumb below one eye, then the other, collecting moisture as he went.
“I think I’m in love with you, little owl,” he said quietly, and Beatrice felt her heart seem to quiver behind her ribs. He looked over at his sister. “And I have always adored you, since you were red and squalling and tiny. I’m sorry I made you doubt this for even a moment.”
Mattea didn’t look remotely shivery. She made a face at her brother, every bit of her alive with disdain.
“Don’t think you love her,” she told him, filled with the contempt that only a teenage girl could manage. “Or me. Just...love.”
And so, not always easily or gracefully, but always deliberately, Cesare did.