Chapter Four #2
He shoved that word away. It didn’t make sense, not here.
Not when the entire point of his existence was to live up to his father’s exacting expectations.
To do it even better than his father had done, and thereby somehow make good on this thing his father had loved.
To preserve both the legacy his father had nearly lost and Pau’s own along with it.
A legacy that would then carry over to the child she carried, even now.
A chain that bound them all together, holding them tight, throughout generations—something far better, and far more real, than the emotional ties he knew some families spoke of. He believed the Calixto way was better.
Laudable even, he thought, but that didn’t change the fact that they were potentially on display.
He stood and put his clothing to rights, then wordlessly helped Leontina back into her dress. Then he put physical distance between them as quickly as he could.
“That can obviously not happen again,” he said, the chill in his voice frigid even to his own ears. “This is a business, not a brothel.”
Leontina only gazed back at him, her green eyes entirely too calm. “I hate to be that person, but a brothel is a business.”
“It is not my business,” he returned. He found himself sliding a hand over his hair and stopped himself, because Pau Calixto did not fidget.
“I see no need for us to dine together tonight. I will have the staff deliver a tray to your rooms. I appreciate that we were wed today and perhaps emotions were running high, but I thought I made this clear.”
Now she looked…interested. Maybe. As if this was a lecturer she’d caught at university, quite by accident, and she thought she might pull up a chair and listen in.
Then that was literally what she did. She moved over to his desk and settled herself in one of the chairs in front of it, and he despised the fact that she looked perfectly put together when he was contending with a heretofore unknown fidgeting problem.
Her dark hair didn’t look the slightest bit out of place and if he hadn’t known exactly where that glow she wore came from, he might have tried to convince himself that it was simply cosmetics at play.
Her dress was wholly unwrinkled despite what they’d just done.
The ring he’d slid on her finger with his own hands earlier caught the light.
Pau found himself wishing that she was still concealing herself in her baggy sackcloth missing only the attendant ashes, but he hadn’t seen the faintest hint of the dress she arrived in. Not in days.
“Please be clear again,” she encouraged him, with that damned smile of hers that he knew meant she was handling him. “I would hate to accidentally misinterpret anything that happened between us.”
Like, for instance, a disgraceful display of animalistic urges on the floor of his office. He could see that she was thinking that, though she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to say it.
Pau was fairly certain that there was only one way to interpret what had happened between them today, but he didn’t want any part of that. He wanted her pregnant. He wanted her married, and to him. He wanted to shove all of that at Umberto, make it hurt, and watch as the vile old man took it in.
He’d always thought that this would be best achieved with Leontina clearly married to him and a whole child that could not be ignored between them.
The perfect family despite Umberto’s vicious little games.
He’d been planning it all out for years. But in all of that planning, he had never considered that he might have his own, unpleasantly emotional reaction to all of those things. It had never occurred to him to solve for that in advance, because never in his life had his cock had a mind of its own.
Pau could not in good conscience allow it to drive his behavior now.
He frowned at Leontina, sitting there so prettily across the desk from him. Still looking as if this was an academic exercise when, as far as he knew, she had never seen the inside of a university classroom. Or possibly any classroom at all, now that he thought about it.
Umberto had not seemed to notice that she existed until she came of age, as her brother always told it.
But he shoved that ugliness aside. “That night at your brother’s wedding was a mistake, as I think we can both agree.”
He waited for her to murmur her agreement at that, on cue, the way everyone else did when he gave them such openings. But Leontina didn’t make a sound. She only gazed back at him, and waited.
Pau couldn’t say he cared for that, either. It made him wonder if she could tell that he was lying. That he did not view that night as a mistake at all. But how could she?
He pushed on. “We were both careless, though I blame myself.”
“It would be rather silly to blame the virgin, wouldn’t it?” she asked, and he thought her voice was just a little too dry. But he didn’t pursue it.
“Now we have done the decent thing,” he continued, nodding as he spoke. “We have executed our duty in the time-honored fashion. We have married. The child will have a name.”
“In fairness, the child would have a name either way,” Leontina said.
Musingly, he was almost sure, except he rather thought there was something a bit harder behind the easy tone she used.
“It’s not as if, were I to give birth on my own, I would somehow overlook the naming part and force the poor child to stumble about namelessly, is it? ”
“That is not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” Again, that beatific smile that he was truly beginning to loathe.
“It’s only that I find these agreements we make so fascinating, don’t you?
A child has no name unless its father claims him.
That claiming legitimizes the child’s birth, when surely, being alive is all the legitimacy a child needs.
Do you ever wonder why it is we all agree to these things without ever actually discussing them? ”
“Money,” Pau shot back curtly. “Property. Land and legacy. But I think you know that too, Leontina.”
“In any case,” she said smoothly, smile in place, “our fully legitimate child is on the way. Congratulations to you, Dad.”
He expected to feel horror at that, but horror was not at all the sensation that moved through him. Pau realized that, once again, he was somehow unprepared for this moment. He, who had never been unprepared for anything.
But it kept happening.
With her it seemed to happen with alarming regularity.
He had certainly not been ready for her to kiss him like that, on that first night or today.
It was as if he had no defenses against her—and now this.
Pau had thought of little else but her pregnancy and their marriage, and her belly beneath his hands had been a revelation, but her calling him Dad—even though he knew she was doing it to be provocative—seemed to unlock something inside him.
Something he also hadn’t looked at yet, when he was the sort of man who looked at everything from every angle at least a thousand times by rote.
Yet not this astonishing truth: He was going to be a father.
And whatever revenge he could enact upon Umberto Tavian because of that, and would, the fact remained. Pau himself would be a father to a child. He would be responsible for shaping the child, just as his father had shaped him.
It felt…sacred. Overwhelming. Beautiful.
He had to look away and he could not account for the tightness in his throat. His chest. He was tempted to imagine he was ill when he never succumbed to the illnesses that plagued others.
“I would appreciate it if you joined me in pretending that this scene today did not happen,” he said stiffly.
“We’ll get along quite well if we keep to our own places and the timelines we’ve already agreed upon.
I have no idea what it is you do all day, but I do not wish to be disturbed when I am working. ”
“Books,” she said.
Opaquely.
When he only stared at her, Leontina smiled—but it was a different smile this time. He felt it like a blow straight through his chest, because he recognized it. He’d seen it before, but only when they were both naked, tangled up together in his bed at the castle.
He could even remember what they had been talking about.
She had been telling him the story of how she’d managed to foil her father’s plans for her this far into her twenties, when Umberto had made it clear that if it were up to him, he would have sold her off on her eighteenth birthday and been done with it.
Her invisibility powers, such as they were, had involved servants’ quarters and a certain blank expression that she’d pulled out to show him, somehow transforming her lovely face into something dull and easily ignored.
Then she’d smiled, just like this.
“I beg your pardon?” He said it stiffly because that damned smile, filled with joy of all things, was having the same effect on him now that it had then.
A catastrophic effect, to his mind, because it tempted him to forget himself completely.
“I read books,” she told him, gently, as if she didn’t expect him to follow.
“I realize that’s not a career, but that’s what I do.
My father couldn’t be bothered to send me off to university and he’d long since grown bored of my tutors well before I turned sixteen.
So I decided to educate myself. I feel it’s something of a lifelong pursuit. ”
“Yes. Well.” He found himself clearing his throat. “We have no shortage of books here.”
He was sure he saw her gaze get more intent. “Are they all yours?”
“Mine, yes.” Now his chest felt even tighter.
“Many were my father’s, though he preferred more nonfiction than I do, I believe.
Even my grandfather was a reader, which is surprising because otherwise, he preferred life’s more active indulgences.
Gambling. Pretty woman. A private island or two in warm climates where he could relax with said women who, it must be said, flocked to him. They mourned en masse at his funeral.”