Chapter Four #3
The papers had talked of it for ages, all those beautiful women in black, mourning a man who had been faithful to none of them—and under the eye of his long-suffering widow, who had famously acted as if she didn’t see a single one of them.
Bernat had always been deeply scathing about his father.
Not much of a husband or father, he’d always said.
It’s a wonder he didn’t burn the whole estate down, the way he carried on.
Pau could only imagine how apoplectic his father would have been if the estate had been at risk.
The true measure of a Calixto man, he’d always believed.
It was one more reason for Pau to hate Umberto.
Pau might not have thought that his father was a particularly dab hand at parenting, but that wasn’t the point of the family.
The point of this family was the wine and the history.
Umberto had stolen that from Bernat. And Pau could not bear the knowledge that his father had died thinking he had failed.
He could not bear it.
“I’ll start reading my way through your house, then,” Leontina was saying. “And I also do not wish to be disturbed when I’m deep in a book. But you do know what they say, don’t you?”
“I have never given the slightest bit of weight to what they say,” he retorted, perhaps more harshly than necessary. He tried to claw his way back to calmness as he continued. “I don’t even know who they are.”
“In this case, they are me.” Leontina laughed, and that laughter moved all over him, like light.
As if she knew the dark place he’d gone and could bring him back that easily.
“But I do truly believe that you can really find the bones of a house, or a person I suppose, if you know what they read. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll start digging up your family graves, Pau. Who knows what we might find?”
She smiled broadly, but he found that unsettling—and not only because he knew what was buried here, and why. Nothing he needed dug up. Nothing he wanted to haul out into the bright sunshine.
Nothing she needed to worry about until the child was here and it was finally time to make certain his revenge hit the way he’d planned it would. And Pau did not allow himself to wonder how she would react to that, because it didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
He found everything that had happened there in his office more than merely unsettling, if he was honest, because he had the unpleasant notion that it did, in fact, matter to him what Leontina would think.
What she would do. It kept him awake that night, or perhaps it was his unruly cock and all those images in his head that he’d seen fit to add to today.
Either way, she haunted him.
And he intended to officiously turn her away if she tried to find him again in the days that followed, but of course, she didn’t.
Pau was the one who found himself wandering like a ghost in his own house, peering into rooms until he found her. When he did, it was as she’d said. She was always surrounded by books. Always frowning slightly, sometimes playing with her lower lip, completely lost in the pages that she turned.
He had not realized that when she said that she read books, what she’d meant was that she inhaled them. Consumed them.
Became them.
He told himself that he was not the least bit jealous of the attention she lavished upon inanimate objects.
But he did insist that the staff usher her to dinner a week or so later, choosing a different room to dine in the way he always did, because they had never had family dinners when he was a child and he was determined to find the best one before the child arrived.
Tonight he was as close to agitated as he allowed himself to get, for he’d barely seen her except in those stolen ghost glances, when she hadn’t even known he was there.
Speaking of things he had not thought to plan or expect, because Leontina was forever a wildcard.
“I do hope you can control yourself,” he found himself saying, stuffy and frigid, when she entered the room.
He hadn’t seen her up close in a while. He’d been driving himself crazy remembering the taste of her. That sea-salt-and-honey scent that was only hers, and made him hard even to recall. The sounds she made. The way the heat of her held him, clutched in tight.
Maybe that was what made him unduly ferocious tonight—but all she did was laugh.
Leontina laughed, and then she reached over and patted him on his jaw as if he was a child.
“Don’t worry,” she said. Soothingly. “I am also quite hungry tonight. For food.”
And as she swept past him, settling herself at the table and digging into the platters of food that waited for them, Pau didn’t follow.
Because a different truth was dawning upon him.
He found himself turning, slowly, and gazing upon her. Upon this woman who, now that he considered it, wasn’t behaving at all the way he would have expected her to.
Pau had spent the last ten days wondering what was happening to him. Was she a witch, to get beneath his defenses like that? What was all of this?
But tonight it was as if all the oddities in her reactions to him snapped together, finally forming a full picture.
Because it finally occurred to him that he’d been operating under the mistaken impression that her physical innocence meant she was innocent in all other ways too—when this did not track.
She had told him as much, had she not? She had shown him her disguise—and the fact that she was here with him in Spain meant that she’d handily foiled her father’s plans for her, when that was something that had taken him and Giaco years upon years to accomplish.
Now, at last, Pau remembered the way she’d been dressed at that wedding. A complete departure from the way she’d dressed in the days before to scuttle unnoticed about the castle—and he’d been watching her. It had been night and day, in fact. So night and day that it had to have been planned.
Meticulously planned, he thought now, because it wasn’t as if she’d been tottering around, looking awkward and uncomfortable, the way women sometimes did when they decided to try on a new look but didn’t know if it suited them.
Leontina, quite obviously, knew exactly what suited her.
She’d been a dream come true, all sex and elegance.
It wasn’t only that. Now that he considered it, she hadn’t spoken to anyone else at that wedding, aside from the briefest interaction with her father and a few words with her brother and new sister-in-law after the ceremony.
A lot like she’d been focused on Pau—and only Pau—all along.
He had to sit with that, because it had literally never occurred to Pau that it was remotely possible that his best friend’s younger sister, famously sheltered and hidden away in an actual castle with a drawbridge, could possibly have her own agenda.
And had enacted this agenda. Was enacting it now, he rather thought.
Pau found himself walking over to the dinner table in something of a daze. He took his seat and found his wineglass, though a taste of his family’s finest vintage did nothing to clear his head.
She had been innocent. He had known that going in, but in the moment it had taken precious little to convince her to come along with him.
He had felt the wildfire chemistry between them too and had chalked it all up to that unexpected connection, but it had all been…
smooth. Especially once she kissed him and set it all in motion.
And he had been so focused on the end result that it hadn’t occurred to him to question what she was doing.
But now he saw her. He truly saw all of her.
Pau thought about how she had taken charge in his office, kissing him in a way she had to have known would lead exactly where it had led.
He thought about how the same thing had happened at her father’s castle. Leontina had been the one to sway closer to him as it got dark. She had been the one to put her hand on his arm and she had also been the one to press her lips against his.
And he’d taken it from there—but Pau had always been good at probabilities. He wasn’t certain how he’d missed them so completely this time.
But he could calculate them swiftly as he took in his wife’s happy expression as she ate. Bordering on content, even, in circumstances that should have been a bit more delicate, surely. A bit harder to come to terms with.
Pau understood at last that she’d been playing him all along. That she’d walked into that wedding reception with every intention of making happen what had, indeed, happened. Over and over and over again that night.
And that meant a great number of things, all of which he would need to sort through.
But tonight, he could only focus on the most important of those things.
She had been playing him this entire time while he’d actually felt some measure of shame that he’d seduced her the way he had. He’d had his reasons for doing it, but he’d still felt bad about the whole thing.
Once again, he thought about that memory that had surfaced earlier, of her showing him how she could hide in plain sight. How she could hide herself so that people could look at her and see right through her.
How she had shown him exactly how she did it.
And yet he had never put those things together. Until tonight.
Now he finally realized that she’d been seducing him in turn. That it had all gone swimmingly because they were both seducing each other.
The only difference now was that she didn’t know that he’d figured her out.
He sat with that all through dinner.
“You let me know when you’re finished being brooding and silent,” she said to him, soothingly, when dinner was finished.
She had one hand on her belly and he thought she did that unconsciously now.
Holding on to the child as she got up from her seat and stood there. He liked that more than he should have.
But he said nothing in reply, and that made her laugh again.
Not, he thought, the way an innocent caught up in a game she hadn’t understood she was playing would act. If he was certain of nothing else, he was certain of that.
“Very well, then,” she said. “I’ll go back to tracking down clues about you in all the books you left with weathered pages and broken spines. I wonder which one of us will know the other one better when I’m done, Pau.”
Something in him roared at that, though he couldn’t tell if it was a warning or simply a reaction. Not that it mattered.
He listened to her footsteps as she walked away, back down the hallway, and likely back to a stack of books to lose herself in. He didn’t call her out. He didn’t tell her he knew what she’d been doing.
Instead, he thought, why not keep playing the role he’d already been castigating himself about?
Pau could act like the dark seducer he thought he’d been for her. It wasn’t any kind of hardship. Staying away from her was the hard part—and why should he bother? He had only been doing it as he felt he owed it to her, as some kind of apology for having seduced her into this mess.
But he hadn’t, had he?
He took another pull from his wine, and started calculating the best line of attack.
Because an attack it was, and Pau had always been excellent at building an offensive.
And maybe, while he was at it, he’d fuck the truth right out of her at last.