Chapter Five #3
When the baby moved inside her, she understood.
Up until this moment, she’d been pregnant. It had been something that was happening to her, though she spoke to the baby and sang it songs—but most of her thoughts about the future were loose. Vague. She’d been a pregnant woman carrying a child who was still mostly abstract.
Today she’d become a mother. Just as Pau had become a father. They had become the parents of the little boy they would meet in just under half a year from now.
It was all a good deal more real than it had seemed this morning. Their son had taken shape, and in so doing, changed the shape of everything around him.
No wonder this all felt sacred.
No wonder this need to know the man she shared her body and her child with felt so desperate.
Pau did not speak. Leontina could feel all that electricity simmering in him and crackling in her, too, as he opened the passenger door for her. Then he took her hand as he helped her inside, though she didn’t require assistance. She thought she might have refused it on any other day.
But today was special.
And it was like the world stopped for a moment. She felt as if they froze in place. He could have held her hand for an hour, a day, a lifetime. When, realistically, it couldn’t have been more than a few scant seconds.
He pulled away and closed the door, and for a moment she sat alone in the warm interior of the car with everything inside her a jumble of sensation, emotion, and something far more dangerous, like hope.
It stuck with her even though he barely spoke a word on the drive back to the vineyard.
That night, he sent word that he would not meet her for dinner in another new dining room, as was their usual custom.
Leontina took a tray in her rooms and felt rather more philosophical about it than she might have on another night. She understood. Everything now was shaped like a small baby boy they had yet to meet. To her it was so simple. Almost funny.
They’d had so much sex and yet it was a few quiet moments marinating in the realization that they were having a son together that had knocked everything sideways.
She supposed it made sense that he needed a moment to calibrate.
Maybe she should be grateful, she thought. Maybe this was nothing more than an excellent opportunity for her to catch up on her sleep.
She crawled into bed early and dreamed of him, and then, later, woke up when she felt the mattress bend beneath the weight of another body.
“Pau,” she murmured sleepily. “What are you—”
“You’re giving me a child,” he said fiercely. “My true legacy, Leontina.”
And the way he kissed her then set her soul on fire.
The way he touched her took her outside herself entirely.
He was slow, unhurried. He took his time, pulling off the nightclothes she wore and murmuring his appreciation at the roundness of her breasts, the swell of her belly.
And as he settled between her legs, holding them open with his wide shoulders, the sound he made was one of simple, stark male approval.
And then he set his mouth to the core of her and licked her straight off the precipice, sending her streaking out into the night like a comet.
One orgasm wasn’t enough. She cried out, and shook all around him, and he simply began again. And then again, adding his fingers, turning his head to press kisses to her shaking thighs—and the odd nip that seemed to keep her trembling right there on the edge.
She was both outside herself and never more firmly in her own body when he shifted again. He rolled so he could strip off the lounging trousers he wore, then came back over her to pull her legs up high and set them upon his shoulders so he could slide in deep.
His cock seemed bigger than before, or maybe she was simply over-sensitized tonight, because with one stroke she was nearly there. Another, and she was flying
Pau only laughed, settled in, and kept going.
And the whole of the world narrowed down to the pace he set. The way his strong hands wrapped around her legs to keep her in place as he plunged deep inside her, sending her spinning out with no focus at all but the fire in his dark gaze.
Like they were one. Like there was nothing between them, nor ever could be, but this connection. This heat. This wildfire that had been theirs from the very start.
It was the opposite of loneliness. It was an intense searching, a communion, a new wholeness.
When she broke again, she screamed.
Pau heard her and it seemed to inflame him, because his thrusts became less measured, less sure. He pulled her legs apart and came down between them, holding himself up on his elbows so that he was not crushing her belly.
It was so deep, so perfect, so good that she felt herself shoot back up to that precipice. And when he released himself deep inside her with a roar, she felt the scalding heat of it, and joined him.
Leontina woke again in the gloom of the predawn. For a moment, she didn’t know what woke her. She felt disoriented until she saw Pau sitting at the end of the bed, his head bent down.
She felt scraped hollow then, as she watched him. And she didn’t know why she didn’t reach out. Why she didn’t tell him she was awake.
He looked so lonely. He looked the way she sometimes felt, and the way she so deeply had not felt yesterday that it actually hurt her to think it was possible that he could feel that way right now.
Maybe she was frozen into staying still.
Whatever it was, Leontina didn’t move until he got up—eventually—and padded silently out of her room. She didn’t move until she heard his footsteps fade away, down the hallway, headed back across the old house again.
And then she couldn’t move, because she felt swamped with self-recrimination. Because she couldn’t help but think they ought to have been falling in love. That they might have been.
But the fact remained that she was a liar on a fundamental level.
And clearly Pau knew that—whether consciously or unconsciously—because that had not been the demeanor of a happy, expectant father.
Leontina hated herself, and that was no new feeling.
Her father had made it clear that she was to blame for her mother’s death, and maybe this was why. Maybe Umberto had been uniquely positioned to see exactly what sort of terrible person his daughter was, because he’d watched what she’d done to her own mother.
She felt the tears come and she wiped them away furiously, because she didn’t deserve them.
How could she live with herself now, knowing that this, too, was her fault?
How could she live with herself knowing—even worse—that because of her manipulations, she was really no better than her father after all?
When she’d been so certain that she was better?
This had all seemed like a reasonable game to play, once upon a time. She’d wanted an escape plan. Pau had been an excellent candidate. It had helped that she’d felt an instant attraction to him when she’d seen him.
Now he was not only her husband, and her lover, but the father of their son.
None of it seemed reasonable anymore.
She tried to go back to sleep, resolved that she would go ahead and tell him the truth, because it had to be better for it all to be out in the open.
Even if he hated her for a time, she thought he might come around eventually, and at least that way they would be built on something real. Not these lies.
Surely it would be worth blowing everything up if it meant they could start fresh and become real.
But in the days that followed, there never seemed to be a good time to tell him. The harvest took all of his attention during the day and when he came to her it was in the dark, late at night, and the wild passion between them seemed at a fever point.
She thought maybe she was at her fever point too, or maybe she was simply a coward, because she couldn’t seem to bring herself to throw a bomb into the middle of things as they were.
Leontina told herself that the slower seasons would come soon enough, and she would find the right moment there. In the quiet. In the cold before their child was born.
Maybe then it would be the sort of bomb they’d survive.
It was the beginning of her second month in Spain, halfway through October, when a different bomb altogether strolled into the old monastery, charmed his way past the staff who should have been better prepared to hold off intruders—even the sparkling kind—and walked in on Leontina and Pau as they shared one of their dinners.
This night they were clustered close together on a small balcony, festooned everywhere with lantern light, in defiance of the chill in the air.
“How cozy,” said Giaco, lounging bonelessly in the entryway, his eyes that were so like Leontina’s taking in the scene. Leontina herself was frozen solid.
She thought it was something like panic.
“I’ve heard the most extraordinary rumor,” her brother continued when neither one of them managed to offer a greeting.
“I usually ignore anything that comes out of our father’s appalling mouth.
But he did insist that in defiance of all logic, my biddable, obedient sister had finally run away from his tender ministrations and paternal devotion.
This seemed unlikely enough. Imagine my surprise, when I convinced Umberto’s security detail to tell me what they’d found when they investigated it, that all signs seemed to indicate that my baby sister was shacked up with my best friend in what I can only imagine—for my sanity and your continued ability to draw breath, Pau—is a deeply platonic relationship.
They have, naturally, decided to delay telling my father this until someone could come in person and lo, I nominated myself to be that person. ”
His gaze dropped, almost lazily, to where Pau had taken Leontina’s hand over the table some while ago to fiddle with the wedding rings he’d put there, as had become his habit.
Leontina couldn’t breathe. Pau seemed to have gone to stone.
But her brother, as always, was not similarly encumbered.
“Tell me,” Giaco said, with a smile that went nowhere near his eyes, too intensely focused were they on his best friend in all the world, “why I shouldn’t I kill you here and now? Brother?”