Chapter Three #3
They carried on in exactly the same careful way until the day of their wedding one week after her arrival in Spain, where, if possible, everything became even more stiff and formal.
It was a swift and unemotional ceremony on one of the many terraces with sweeping views of the vine-covered land.
The weather was bright and blue, but not too hot, as if the sun knew better than to get too carried away over such a matter-of-fact ceremony.
The priest had clearly been briefed, because he kept his comments to a minimum.
They exchanged their vows quietly and without fuss.
Pau had produced rings before the ceremony and they both placed the appropriate one on each other’s appropriate hand.
Really, it was like they were acting out a wedding instead of participating in one, Leontina thought.
Until, when bid by the priest, they pressed their lips together.
That did not feel at all like acting.
She felt a kind of shock race through her at the brush of his warm mouth against hers but it was so fleeting and gone so quickly that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined that, either.
Even though she could remember kissing him the moment they’d moved indoors and were alone in her father’s castle—the way she had moved closer to him and dared to kiss him right there in the hall, the way his mouth had opened on hers with all of that immediate, fiery heat, the way he had wrapped his arms around her and ate at her mouth as if he was starving for the taste—
Leontina had to remind herself that he had decreed there would be no demands.
Even if, that night, there had been nothing but demands. And the meeting of those demands.
Again and again and again.
After the wedding concluded with none of the fanfare normally associated with such a moment, she and Pau stayed behind once the priest and the two witnesses—both staff that Leontina suspected that he had chosen for their unreadably wooden expressions—took their leave.
When he made no move to follow them, she thought perhaps one of them would say a few words. Or ought to, anyway, though she found her throat strangely dry.
Not to mention the flush she was sporting because she was reliving their night together in her head, to no avail.
Pau stared out at the vines. Always the vines.
Leontina thought she saw a muscle working in the hinge of his jaw.
But when he looked at her, his gaze was cool.
“Our child will now be legitimate. And you need not worry about your father’s dynastic aspirations any longer.
I believe we have handled the situation with grace, Leontina. ”
“The very picture of grace,” she managed to say, though it felt inadequate.
And largely untrue, given all the things they’d done that first night at the castle to make all of this happen.
Though this was still not the time to start thinking about all that, she cautioned herself when her brain took the opportunity to flood her with images from the bed they’d shared.
And the chair. And the rug before the fireplace. And the shower. And the bath—
She reached down, subtly she hoped, and pinched her own side. Hard. Until the images faded. Because if he could pretend there wasn’t all that wild heat swimming about between them, so could she.
Leontina thought he might say something else since he was still standing there before her, that muscle working in his jaw. But instead he inclined his head in that way of his that she was coming to hate, turned with something like military precision, and left her there as he marched into the house.
For a long while, she simply…stayed there. Right where she was.
Right where he’d left her.
Leontina stood at the rail, staring straight ahead, taking in the sweep of the earth before her. The imposing, copper-hued Montsant Mountains that rose in the distance. The rugged land itself, cultivated now but in no way free of its wildness.
It was a beautiful afternoon. She could hear birds singing. The buzz of lazy insects. The air smelled of sage, rosemary, and oregano. There were leafy green trees she was fairly certain were hazelnut. The sun danced over everything, making it gleam like the diamond she now wore on her hand.
She was pregnant, married, and—once again—entirely alone.
Leontina did not realize until that very moment that she had expected that things would be different, now.
She hadn’t understood that she was holding on to that possibility until this moment, when it was so obviously unattainable.
She hadn’t understood that deep inside her, she’d been holding out a secret little spark of hope that coming to Spain, tracking down Pau, and successfully marrying someone who she was reasonably certain was in no way a monster like the rest of her father’s questionable choices of potential spouses would lead somewhere.
That all the things she’d felt that long, hot night might mean something.
All those impossible things that felt like magic in the moment but had taken on different hues later. When she’d missed her first period. When she’d started to imagine her baby and the man who’d fathered it.
She’d begun to wonder if those moments of connection were more than the heat of it all. That they truly meant that she might have set out to seduce the one person alive who could actually make her feel alive.
Herself, at last.
A whole woman who could laugh and love and be praised for these things instead of made to feel like something was terribly wrong with her.
She’d imagined that it was possible that Pau Calixto was not merely her escape plan, but her fate.
Or at least, when she was feeling more practical, she’d imagined that it all could mean something. She could admit, now, today, that she’d hoped it could. Or lead somewhere once she made it here.
Or maybe, she thought now, a little more bitterly than she liked, just end up with me less alone for once.
But even as she thought that, her hands snuck down and found their way over the swell of her belly.
She had only really just started to show.
It was still something she could conceal, if she liked.
In the dress she’d chosen today, a pale blue because she hadn’t felt that the full on bridal approach was warranted, she doubted anyone could see a bump at all.
Yet she knew it was there.
She knew her baby was right there.
Meaning she was literally not alone, no matter how she might feel. There was another human inside her, and something about that seemed to wash over her like the breeze on her face. Like the priest’s blessing.
Like the wishes she’d never dared make out loud, but had somehow held tight inside her all along.
Maybe that was why, later that evening, she did not wait for a formal summons to another meticulously polite dinner with the man who was now her husband and some days—like today, their wedding day—might as well be a robot. Still dressed in her wedding attire, she went in search of him instead.
Leontina wandered through the old, sprawling monastery, wondering how many old fingerprints were hidden behind the polished walls, the modernized rooms. How many ghosts were here with her, watching her as she walked down one long hall and into another.
She didn’t know the house well, but it was laid out flat, so it was easy enough to follow one hallway to its end, retrace her steps, and then go down another one until she found herself in a whole wing of the house she’d never seen before.
But she knew immediately that it was his.
Leontina fancied that she caught that scent of his as she walked down the hall, hints of vetiver and cedar clinging to the very walls the way she’d thought they’d clung to her for days after the wedding.
And all the way down at the end of the hallway, though she glimpsed other rooms as she passed—sitting rooms, parlors, entertainment caves, and all of them stuffed full with even more books—she found him in an office that had its own door to the outside and a stairway that led down to what she knew were the vineyard’s commercial offices.
Leontina was certain that she made no noise, but he turned anyway, making her wonder if he was as aware of her she was of him.
But then, she’d known that he was the night of her brother’s wedding. She’d known the moment she walked out into the reception that he was watching her.
She’d felt his eyes on her as she moved.
It had felt like they were in a dance from the start.
And when he turned now, he wasn’t prepared for her. She could see the difference at once. Because when his eyes met hers, they widened—
Like that, she understood at last.
This was all a mask. That volcanic lover who’d turned her inside out and taught her things about herself that she wasn’t entirely certain she wished to know—
The man who had shown her how sensual her body was, and all the things that she could do with it—
He was right here.
He had been here all along.
It was that wildfire flash, lighting up that dark gaze of his, and then gone when he collected himself.
But what it told Leontina, with the same certainty she’d felt out on that terrace earlier, was that she wasn’t alone in her marriage, either.
No matter what he might pretend.
And so when Pau frowned at her while he crossed the room toward her, she didn’t smile. She didn’t try to make this easy and polite and practical again.
“Is something the matter?” he asked, in that distant, cool, vaguely quizzical voice of his.
Leontina decided that she really did hate it. “That’s a loaded question on this of all days. Surely even you can see that.”
He let that quizzical expression on his face shift into something that was somehow colder, more resigned—and yet indicated that she was not making any sense. And she hated that, too.
That was the kind of expression that had led to all those stilted dinners, and she was done with them. God, she needed to be done with things that made her feel like she was stuck under her father’s thumb.
She needed to feel anything—everything—but alone.
And so when he drew even closer, scanning her as if he expected to find her with some sort of head wound to justify her appearance in this sacred temple of corporate glory—his office—she stopped waiting. She stopped wondering if he was going to do something to shift the balance between them.
Instead, Leontina swayed forward, as if she was perhaps losing her balance.
When he moved to take her arm, she flowed toward him. Closer in, he smelled as marvelous as she recalled—better. She went up on her toes, slid a hand up to cup the nape of his neck, and kissed him.
Not the way she’d kissed him outside today, chaste and infuriating.
Leontina kissed him the way she’d wanted to kiss him for three months.
Deep and hot and filled with all the wildness and wonder he’d taught her himself.