Chapter 15 #2
Her breath actually catches, and there—that’s the sound money buys. Not love or forgiveness, but relief, wonder, and temporary erasure.
“Vincenzo,” she whispers, fingers already reaching for it. “It’s gorgeous.”
“I know.”
Her fingers hover over the stones before lifting one careful piece free.
Even without the full styling finished, the necklace transforms the room simply by existing in her hands.
It is beautiful, and she is beautiful while wearing beauty.
I understand enough of aesthetics to know I’ve chosen correctly.
“I am sorry,” I say. “I could have spoken with more grace.”
“That would imply you possess some.”
I almost smile. “You married me anyway.”
She closes her eyes for one small second, pleased despite herself. “You are impossible to hate when you’re spending this much.”
“That’s why I do it.”
The line draws the ghost of a laugh out of her, and some of the tension in the room eases. Good. I gesture for the stylist to help with the clasp, and once it’s fastened and the diamonds are blazing against her throat, I rest my hand lightly on the back of her chair.
She touches it reverently. “You always know how to win me over.”
No, I think. I always know how to calm the immediate problem.
“We can look at surrogacy,” I tell her. “Sometime.”
I feel the subtle change in her body before I see her expression. Relief first, then hope. Then something else, something almost shameful on its own: gratitude. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Soon?”
I shrug one shoulder. “We’ll speak to whoever we need to speak to.”
The happiness that lights up her face is bright enough to hurt if I let myself think about it too long. What she hears is possibility; what I hear is one more compromise that makes sense on paper and will probably ruin some poor child before it ever gets a chance to choose differently.
The awful part is that the thought doesn’t stop me.
Arabella turns and kisses my cheek. “Thank you,” she says softly. “And… I’m glad I won’t have to carry the baby.”
Of course, that’s what makes this possible for her. Not simply the child itself. The distance, the absence of pregnancy, and the clean arrangement of motherhood without the burden of the body doing it.
I know there are women who feel that way. I know practical fear of pregnancy exists. I know the politics of appearance would make surrogacy simpler in some circles and more difficult in others.
Still, hearing the hope in her voice sharpen around that specific point does something odd in me. Not judgment exactly, more like confirmation that whatever children we produce this way will arrive in a house built by strategy first and human feeling second.
I already feel sorry for them. Which is a hell of a thought for a man who hasn’t yet agreed to give them names.
“If that would suit you better,” I say.
“It would,” she says and smiles again, bright and grateful and suddenly young in a way she never lets herself be in public.
I kiss her forehead because it is expected and because she is easy to please when you give her something she can wear or control. “Then we’ll discuss it properly after the gala.”
That is enough.
By the time we arrive at the ballroom, the previous night is all but polished over beneath diamonds, apologies, and the sort of expensive civility that passes for intimacy in our world.
We are magnificent together.
That is the curse of it.
I keep my hand on her waist. She touches my arm when she laughs at something some donor says. I bend my head to hear her over the music and let my mouth brush her forehead once because an old man from the board is watching.
We look polished—intimate enough to reassure, detached enough not to gross anyone out. The exact level of aristocratic affection that keeps rumors bored and investors calm.
It’s almost insulting how easy it is.
Half an hour in, I’m speaking to a finance minister’s wife about hospital expansions and pretending not to notice that the minister himself has spent most of the conversation staring at Arabella’s necklace instead of her face, when I feel someone’s eyes on me.
The sensation is immediate enough that I nearly turn before I’ve consciously decided to. The back of my neck prickles, the room sharpens around the edges, and somewhere under the orchestra and the conversation and the soft chime of crystal, my body goes very still.
I look across the ballroom and find him instantly.
Nikolaj stands across the room near one of the mirrored columns, black tuxedo carved onto him with brutal precision, one hand around a low glass, the other resting loosely at his side in a posture only a fool would mistake for being relaxed.
The ballroom should flatter him and somehow only makes him look more dangerous—hair pushed back, scar over his eye dragged harshly under the chandeliers, and mouth set hard enough to qualify as violence.
He is so beautiful that my chest aches before common sense can intervene… but he is also furious.
His gaze is not on my face, not fully. It lands there, yes, but keeps dropping to the hand I have draped around Arabella’s waist—the hand, the contact, and the easy public ownership of it.
Oh.
Oh.
It hits me all at once and almost takes my breath with it.
Nikolaj Dragovich, Pakhan of the Russian sectors, feared by men twice his age and three times his size, is standing across a charity ballroom and glaring at my wife because I am touching her.
I have to drag my attention back to the conversation before my expression betrays me completely.
Arabella is speaking with the foundation chair about donor tiers.
I answer when required, nod at the appropriate times, and let my thumb make a slow absent stroke against her waist. Because now that I know Nikolaj is watching, I am suddenly a much worse version of myself.
This is immature, dangerous, and entirely beneath a man of my title.
I continue doing it anyway.
Arabella glances up at me mid-conversation and says, “You’re distracted.”
“Never,” I say smoothly, then lower my head and kiss her forehead again because if I’m going to be petty, I may as well commit to the role.
Behind me, glass shatters.
The sound is sharp enough to cut through string music, conversation, and every layer of polished civility in the room. Heads turn, mine among them, because I have all the restraint of a saint until Nikolaj gives me a reason not to.
Across the ballroom, he is still standing by the mirrored column, but the broken glass is at his feet.
His expression has not changed much, which makes the scene infinitely better.
He looks as though the stem cracked itself out of pure fear of being held by him too long.
One of the servers has already hurried in with a cloth.
Nikolaj says something to the staffer without taking his eyes off me, and that’s when I really understand.
He isn’t merely irritated, he is jealous in that dark, ugly, involuntary way men get when they see something marked in public that they believe belongs to them in private.
I nearly grin into my champagne.
God help me, I finally get it.
The kitchen, asking for distance, and the five months of silence that were apparently long enough for memory to return but not long enough to make him civilized about the thought of my hand on somebody else.
All that caution, all that measured space, and still one gala with Arabella on my arm has him snapping crystal in his fist.
It is, I admit, deeply flattering.
It is also irresistible.
So, I decide—with all the maturity of a man who should know better, and the impulse control of the twenty-two-year-old version of myself that Nikolaj first fell in love with against his own better judgment—to be petty.
Arabella smiles up at me, pleased and unsuspecting, and I smile back with practiced gentleness while my pulse kicks under my collar and every mean, hungry part of me pays attention to the man across the room instead of the wife in my arms.