Chapter Seven #2
And this is where the man who spent that night with me comes from.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him already, but all in terms of the role he inhabited: Luc Garnier, private investigator writ large.
It never occurred to me that he might have shrunk himself down to play that part.
Just as it never crossed my mind that when I dreamed up Luc Garnier in the first place, I was dreaming small.
Tiny, comparatively speaking.
I feel as if the blood inside my body is moving foolishly.
Sluggishly. I am too hot, then too cold.
I trail along, farther and farther behind the group, because every piece of art I look at feels like an indictment.
Every glimpse of the rolling fields and hills through the windows feels like a slap.
It’s as if I’m walking through that beautiful body of his, rediscovering him with every room.
Every statue is a clue. Every antique rug or piece of lovely furniture is a hint.
And it doesn’t help that as I think that, I remember the way I explored his actual, physical body, crawling all over him there in that perfect little cottage. Rolling around and around in that bed.
I drift off, my feet taking direction from that insistent beat of my heart, and I’m helpless to do anything at all but follow where they lead me.
I walk and walk, awed by the fact the house all around me is more like a museum.
I take in all the art on the walls, and more, the way it’s arranged in a style that seems haphazard, but isn’t.
After all, when a person has a selection of masterpieces, there is no need to place one in its own space, like a shrine.
When a person is a Marquess, it’s acceptable to pile them all onto walls next to each other in what might be called a collage if a person happens to be poor.
Here, I’m only too aware, this is an expression of breathtaking good taste.
But I become far more interested when I take a turn into the portrait gallery.
I feel as if I’m finally on a scavenger hunt that matters, tracking the evolution of Taio de Luz’s features through time.
It’s immediately apparent that this is the family wing, because the walls are filled with eyes like steeped tea and stern mouths that look cruel in some generations and something a bit more kind in others.
And then, finally, I turn a corner, and see that at last I’ve made it into the modern era. There are portraits, but there are also photographs. First black and white, then full color.
The story of Taio is right here .
A portrait of the round-cheeked baby he was, scowling at the artist. The dreamy-eyed boy he became.
Then, too soon, a somber-looking adolescent standing stiffly behind an older man who looks remarkably like Taio himself does now, and a woman with such stark, strong features that she ought to be off-putting.
But the effect of all those features together somehow works itself out into a striking beauty.
I stand before that one for a long while.
It takes me a moment to understand why. That it’s a family, and as posed and formal as they look, they also look like they…go together.
I sigh at that, and smooth my hand over my belly. “We’ll have this, too. One way or another. I promise we’ll be a family.”
After the portraits come the photographs of a man I recognize. The man who I first met in that gleaming office in Manhattan. The man who took my hand in Cap Ferrat, led me down a path by the sea, and changed everything.
The man who is the father of my child.
I blow out a breath, standing there staring at a face that I have dreamed of every night since the day I met him, my hands resting on the thickness of my belly. I haven’t thought about it quite like that. Not in this place brimming with family in a way my own relatives never could, or would.
But they don’t matter now.
Taio is the father of this baby. I am the mother.
I have to fight a bit, all of a sudden, to keep my breathing even.
I’ve reached the end of this section, but there’s a door at the end of the hall. I look back over my shoulder, but I can’t even hear my tour group. I have no idea where they went. So rather than retracing my steps, I go to the door and open it.
Immediately, there’s so much light that I’m dazzled, and it takes me a moment to realize that I’m standing in some kind of music room. The ceiling is high and arched, like a cathedral. There are delicate settees set here and there.
But most importantly, there is an antique piano in the center. And a man sitting on its bench, ferocious in his focus, playing a melody that I recognize immediately.
It is that same soaring, freewheeling piece of music that I last heard in the Miravakia Investigation offices. That night I nearly pressed my face to the glass so I could continue to look at the beautiful man lounging there on the sofa.
It takes me a long, stunned moment to realize that it is the same man playing that same song. And I feel like I might break wide open.
Because he plays with an intensity, a creative flair, and a brooding specificity that reminds me of nothing so much as being in bed with him. Naked. Wild with desire.
And him so deep inside me that it’s like he made himself a part of me, forever.
I can still feel him now.
The music stops. And I jolt a little at the silence that follows, seeming stretched wide to fit the space the music left behind it.
He stands up from the piano, and I know who he is now. Taio de Luz. The Eighteenth Marquess of this place, these lands.
I know what he was hiding from. I even have a few guesses as to why.
But mostly, I realize that part of me never expected to be in the same room with him again. I can feel that ache inside me, sharper now. And everything else hums, the way it seems I always will when in his presence.
“I’m afraid you have strayed from the public part of the house,” he says, in that voice of his, low and deep and so welcome—so missed—that I almost feel as if I might cry.
Hormones, I tell myself flatly. It must be hormones.
I want to say something suitably cutting. I want to start this off by ripping into him the way he richly deserves.
But I can’t seem to say a word. I watched as his gaze sharpens. He tilts his head to one side in a show of arrogant astonishment, and I understand that even though I have seen that particular gesture before, what I am seeing now is the Marquess .
Not the Marquess playing the role of a lesser man.
As if on cue, he moves his hand to his lapel. And I have seen the entire march of his personal history out in the gallery. Generation after generation of men with precisely this stature and sense of themselves.
It is all right there.
He allows his mouth to curve, another gesture. This time toward courtesy. “I will call a member of staff to come and collect you, shall I?”
I realize that he has not yet realized who I am.
I wait.
He takes a step in the direction of another graceful arch in the opposite direction of where I came from, then stops.
Dead.
My heart picks up speed.
He turns back and I watch as recognition dawns. I watch the expressions that move in rapid succession over his face.
Shock. Bewilderment. Something that looks far too much like a lightning bolt of joy, one that I can feel echo in me—
But maybe I’m imagining that, because too quickly, he scowls.
“What are you doing here?” he demands, his voice low and raw, and nothing like that aristocratic hauteur he used only moments ago. “You can’t be here.”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I replied, impressed with the coolness of my own tone.
I wait for a beat. Then I take my time looking around, taking in this room, and the enormous palace directed all around. I look back at him.
Then I use what I discovered is his proper address, complete with a deliberately awkward curtsy. “ Excelentísimo Senor .”
And I’m sure that I see him pale.
“You really cannot be here,” he says, and he is moving again, coming toward me with a frown on his face, and still I wait.
Because surely, any moment now—
And I watch this happen, too. The way his gaze moves over me, almost greedily, something I recognize because I feel it too.
But I can see when his eyes move over my belly, and then back.
And it is just as satisfying as I hoped. As I imagined. As I dreamed. He stops walking, almost as if he slams into an invisible wall.
He is staring at my belly. I lift my hand and smooth it over the jut of my belly, outlining its shape. He makes the faintest sound. A groan or a prayer, I can’t tell.
Slowly, almost painfully, he raises his gaze to mine.
“Oh, yes,” I say with a soft kind of intensity that isn’t quite malice, but isn’t not malice, either. “We have many things to discuss. Your real name is the least of it.”