Chapter Two
Pau Calixto could sift through probabilities the way regular humans processed the need to breathe—at lightning speed in a near-muscular response—and he could think of only one potential reason that this woman would be on his doorstep like this.
This particular woman at this specific time.
Clearly without anything like an invitation and by his count, a solid three months after he’d last seen her in the wake of her brother’s wedding.
But he had not gotten anything in this world by getting ahead of himself.
Pau had received an alert that someone was approaching the house, having tripped the usual cameras.
He had pulled up the feed and noted the vintage car with its Italian registration plate and had begun to draw conclusions based on that evidence alone.
When he’d seen the woman behind the wheel, he’d felt a sense of triumph kick in—
Prematurely, he’d lectured himself.
That was ever a recipe for disappointment.
He’d made his way down to the front door, dismissing his hovering staff with a glance, because this was his project. This was his game to win or lose.
And Pau Calixto did not lose.
So all he did was go out and lean a bit in his doorway, here in this grand old folly of a house that his father had loved—perhaps more than he had ever loved another human, but Pau could not blame him for that. Not any longer.
After all, the old man had only ever had one friend in this life. And that had not exactly ended well for him.
“I thrive on difficult news,” he told his best friend’s younger sister, with the kind of calm that he knew could upend boardrooms full of peacocking billionaires who expected their big personalities to carry weight.
“And had I known that you wished to visit me, Leontina, I would have extended an invitation. There can surely be no need to show up like this, so precipitously and without warning.”
She was no peacocking billionaire, like her father—though Pau thought that Umberto’s net worth had perhaps been downgraded quite a bit at this point. Umberto’s daughter did not sputter and huff the way he would have done. All Leontina did was smile.
And Pau had made a small, personal study of that smile in the brief time he’d spent in her presence three months back. He had determined that it was practiced. Deliberate.
A tool she wielded, he’d decided. That made her smile the kind of game he could appreciate and admire.
A lot like the clothing she was wearing now.
He had observed her for a few days before the wedding at her father’s ostentatious castle, set down in the midst of the Tuscan hills like someone had discarded it out of pique.
She had dressed much like she was now, in shapeless pieces of clothing that she seemed to choose only from the ugliest possible shades, as if she was competing with herself to find the least flattering cut and color.
Soon, he came to understand that she did it so that the eyes of her father and all of his self-important guests bounced right off of her.
He had gone to the wedding with the express purpose of meeting her, and so he had made a point of finding her in the midst of the festivities—something that had not been easy to do.
He’d had to hunt her down—meaning, he found himself watching her during all the pompous events that Umberto had put on, all in an effort to celebrate himself rather than the happy couple.
Pau had watched the girl who seemed to be trying to disappear into the wall coverings.
He’d watched as she’d now and again reacted to something someone was saying, usually Umberto or one of the guests like him.
She had only showed the slightest flash of personality now and again, but he’d seen it. He’d noted it.
The roll of an eye. A checked sigh. A pursed lip, momentarily there and then gone.
He had also watched her shift back to become the wall itself, literally disappearing before the very faces of those who had elicited her tiny reactions in the first place.
It was like she was wearing an invisibility cloak that she could put on and take off at will.
More impressively, it worked.
He had been forced to acknowledge that if he hadn’t been looking for her specifically, it might have worked on him, too.
If he hadn’t been determined to study her, he might have missed those moments that hinted at the real woman behind the shy and retiring act—because that’s what he thought it was. An act.
If he hadn’t decided in advance that he would seduce her, he would have missed her altogether—an indictment that Pau had not exactly been pleased with. But then again, when was the truth comfortable? That wasn’t germane one way or the other. It was still the truth no matter how he felt about it.
Then, of course, there had been her attire at the actual wedding itself.
When suddenly it was as if she’d found an entirely new wardrobe that she’d had secreted away somewhere the whole time, while she’d been shuffling around in rags instead.
It was as if she was an entirely new woman, if only for the one day.
Like something out of a fairy tale, he thought now.
He had to remind himself that he was not a fanciful man. He was hardly one to tuck up with a book of fairy tales and glut himself on Cinderella stories—but the fact was, Leontina had glowed.
Her dark hair had spilled down all around her in thick waves, making her dark jade eyes gleam.
It had been impossible not to see her then.
Not only to see her, but to fully appreciate that the supposedly mousey and forgettable Leontina was, in every way, an heir to the same genetic cocktail that had made her brother one of the most sought-after men in all of Europe.
Simply put, Leontina was stunning. Mouthwateringly so, no matter how disconcerting he’d found it.
And once he’d seen it, he couldn’t unsee it.
Not even when she was up to her usual tricks, like today.
She had her hair twisted severely back from her face and wore absolutely no makeup.
If he didn’t know better, he might think that her shape matched that of the dress she wore, because that thick, drapey fabric gave no hint of the body beneath it. All quite deliberate, he thought.
She even looked…rumpled. As if she hadn’t slept well, and might possibly have tried to get a few hours’ sleep in that shapeless sack she wore. She looked very much as if she’d been in this car for days.
He thought that perhaps she had been.
That, too, suggested that she was here for the precise reason he hoped she was.
But he could not permit himself to celebrate anything in advance. He could not allow himself to do anything but wait—as excruciating as that wait might have been.
He told himself it would be worth it. After all, as the saying went, if a man sat by a river long enough, the bodies of his enemies would float on by. It only took patience. Commitment. Dedication.
All things he was not only good at, but had long since perfected.
“Shall I tell you why I’m here?” she asked after a long moment. And though she sounded calm, he thought he saw a slight tremor move over her. That intrigued him almost more than the rest of her act did. “On your doorstep—and yes, regrettably, without an invitation?”
He didn’t let himself react to the note in her voice that he doubted most ever heard.
That hint of strength that he’d seen that night, but had second-guessed ever since.
Perhaps he only wished that she was more sharp and tough than she seemed.
Because that would make what he was doing less distasteful, surely.
Not that it mattered, he knew. He would do it either way.
The truth that Pau had spent these months coming to terms with, no matter what happened, was that he had set out to do exactly what he had done. It had not been a spur-of-the-moment idea. It had been a plan he had set out to execute, and had.
And while he could tell himself flattering fairy stories about strength and inner resilience on her part as he liked, the facts remained the facts.
He had deliberately set out to seduce his best friend’s younger sister, at that same best friend’s wedding, with one very precise goal in mind.
There would come a reckoning one day. This he did not doubt, because he knew his best friend. Sooner or later, Giaco would express his feelings on what Pau had done, and he doubted very much that he would enjoy what happened then.
But he could not allow himself to think of it. If he did, he would not move forward—and he had to move forward. His father deserved this justice, no matter what damage it would do to Pau and Giaco’s friendship.
He shoved it out of his head.
And it didn’t matter why Leontina was here today. His goal had either been achieved, in which case certain other steps would be put into motion. Or it had not been achieved, and if that was the situation, he would set about doing it all over again until his goal was within his grasp at last.
His body, he noted, did not view that possibility as any sort of chore.
But that was another truth he did not wish to examine. Not now.
He wondered if she could sense it all the same. If she knew the imperatives his body was issuing, somehow, because as she walked toward him—looking frumpy and delicious at once, as he was beginning to understand was her specialty—he thought he could see that awareness in her gaze.
That same awareness he had been so certain he’d seen all over her at the wedding.
Now, as then, he did not argue or explain or debate anything with her. He did not do such things, full stop. When Pau Calixto spoke, he made certain his words were received as pronouncements befitting laws.
Never debates.
He said nothing at all.
And Leontina took her time reaching him there at the doorway. He noticed she did not hurry either, and he liked that. These little hints of defiance pleased him, and not only because they suggested that she’d been precisely who he’d thought she was that night.