Chapter Eight #2
“In any case,” his friend murmured, sounding significantly more pleased with himself than Pau thought he should tonight, “you must realize that I have always known that my father intended to sell Leontina off. It has long been one of his great, sick obsessions that he can create a mighty and impregnable dynasty by auctioning off his only daughter like some kind of raffle prize.” Giaco lifted a shoulder, then dropped it, though the way he looked at Pau seemed almost…
knowing. “Had you come to me and told me you wanted to marry her, whether because you thought that would be an excellent way to stick the knives in deeper into my father’s back—and I agree with you, it’s perfect—or whether you simply liked her, I would have had the same response.
You have long been the finest man I’ve ever known, Pau.
I would have been delighted to support you in this venture, had you only told me about it in advance. ”
“Thank you,” Pau said dryly. “Speaking of sticking knives in.”
This time, his friend did not try to hide his smile.
“In any case, it is done now,” Giaco said.
He waved a hand. “My sister is not unhappy, she informs me, and so I therefore have no complaint. And, of course, we know that you have never allowed a stray feeling to take purchase within you, so no worries that this will become any sort of emotional quagmire.”
He lifted his glass, still smiling, though Pau found that he was in no way reassured. And that, in fact, it felt as there were purchases aplenty within him that he could not have named if his life depended on it.
But Giaco was smiling at him, even more broadly now. “Now we are brothers in truth, old friend. That is our celebration.”
That was what they did for the rest of that evening, though it was a far cry from the sort of celebration they might have had in their university years, or any of the sorts of celebrations Giaco was famous for.
Not to mention those that had gotten him forcibly removed from many places.
But it suited who they were now, Pau thought.
Though when he thought it, he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to compare his marriage to his friend’s. That seemed…dangerous.
They spoke of the plots they’d brought to fruition. They laughed about the brash proclamations they’d made when they were eighteen about the lives they would lead, and how pleased they were that most of them had not gone anywhere.
When they parted later that night, Pau had the staff lead Giaco to one of the guest suites, but not before they clapped each other on the back. And called each other brother yet again, meaning it perhaps more than they had before.
The moment Giaco disappeared, making the overly charmed staff member giggle as they went—because he might have been happily married but he was still Giaco Tavian, after all—the only thing Pau could think about was Leontina.
But that felt loaded tonight. His face ached from his best friend’s fists. He’d had to defend what had happened between him and Leontina when, deep down, he wasn’t certain he should. Or even wanted to, because Leontina was his wife and they were having a son and what else should matter but that?
Especially when there were too many of those pressure points still, bearing down on him in ways he couldn’t explain away. No matter how he tried.
Still, the fact that Giaco was under the same roof made Pau feel a lot as if this house was still a monastery. He thought he’d shower, see if he needed to put something cold on his face, and call it a night.
But when he went into his bedroom to change out of his clothes, he stopped dead, because she was there.
Leontina was in his bed, her dark hair spread out on the pillow and her eyes closed, looking like every fantasy he’d ever pretended he didn’t have of her. She looked like a painting. Painfully perfect and bright—
And then she made it that much better when she opened her eyes as if she sensed him standing there at the foot of the bed.
“I was going to come find you,” he said, though until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he’d been lying to himself about calling it a night. That he could no longer imagine a night without her.
That he would have found her tonight no matter if Giaco was sleeping across her doorframe.
The smile she gave him then bore no resemblance to that false one she trotted out on social occasions, and it only became more precious to him the more he saw it.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this,” she told him.
“Why are we in different wings of this enormous, sprawling house? It’s tedious, Pau.
And soon enough, I will be entirely too large to be waddling all around, trying to find you every evening. ”
That simply, that easily, the whole night seemed to coalesce inside him. His lip was split still, and tender. He did not need to look in the mirror to know that his eye was likely blackening with every breath.
And yet, somewhere inside his chest, it was like he was someone new.
Things between Giaco and him had been solved—despite his friend’s knowing looks that he still could not entirely define—and that could only be a good thing.
But it was a weight he hadn’t entirely understood he was carrying, not really. Not until now, when it was gone.
And now there was Leontina. In his bed, where every last part of him seemed to shout that she belonged.
He didn’t know why he was so determined to fight the very thing he’d wanted to happen.
That he’d made happen. That he had envisioned being, perhaps, more distant than this—but why was he opposed to a marriage that, run probabilities though he did, he could only describe as significantly healthier than most of the other ones he’d ever witnessed?
Including his own parents’ marriage, which had always seemed more businesslike to him than anything else, though not for his mother’s lack of trying.
After she had left him for her current life in Melbourne, Australia—where she assured her son, when she bothered to ring, that she was much-adored by her many lovers and did not care to ever return to Spain, where she had withered on the not-exactly-proverbial vine—Pau thought his father had been pleased.
No need to even pretend to care about anything but the vineyard.
He’d been barely ten when she’d left and he’d always vowed that should he marry, even if it was for purely business-related reasons, there would be no withering.
Yet here was Leontina, ripe with his child and in his bed, and he was standing about questioning…anything?
“I will inform the staff to move you in at once,” he told her, perhaps more intently than necessary. He saw the answering heat in her green eyes. “After all, Leontina, we are husband and wife.”
“Indeed we are,” she agreed, her gaze grave.
She sat up and he saw that she was wearing one of those silken little gowns that he’d discovered he quite enjoyed.
Slinky little straps on the shoulder and then slippery silk everywhere else.
Her belly looked tighter, rounder, tonight.
Her hair tumbled down around her and the scent of it teased his senses.
Pau was convinced that he had seen no greater beauty in all his days.
“There is something I have to tell you, Pau,” she said, and her gaze grew even more serious.
“That sounds rather dire,” he pointed out. “I hope this conversation will come with fewer face punches. I believe I’ve had my fill for the evening.”
“I don’t know if it is dire or not,” Leontina replied, sounding as if she was choosing her words with care.
“Or rather, I have felt terribly guilty about this for months. I’ve wrestled with myself about whether or not to tell you at all.
It could be that telling you is purely selfish.
Yet part of me thinks that if I tell you, even if you find it difficult to forgive me right now, you will in time.
Another part of me thinks that the sin was mine and so, too, should this be mine to live with. ”
“I think you had better tell me what it is,” Pau said, though he suspected he knew.
Because, as he had told her once already, he somewhat doubted that the girl who had saved herself for her brother’s wedding, and had then spent that whole, long, transformative night in his arms the way she had, could then…
wander off into a life of scandal and excess within a few months.
Still. He already knew this woman, his wife, contained more multitudes than most. “Because the more you explain it without telling me, the more dire it seems.”
Leontina blew out a breath. She folded her hands over her belly, and for a moment he thought he saw pure anguish in her eyes.
Pau found he hated it.
“My brother came here because he was convinced you’d somehow tricked me,” she told him with great solemnity. “That you took advantage of my innocence and used it against me.”
“I believe that most people will assume that’s exactly what I did,” he told her, though he could feel that pressure within him, seeming to expand as she gazed at him. “I am not sure that isn’t a perfectly valid description of what happened.”
“Well, it isn’t. You didn’t take advantage of me at all.” She said that fiercely. Unapologetically, even. “I had every intention of seducing you that night, Pau. I’d read up on it.”
“You’d read up on it?” he asked, doing his best not to laugh.
Then found that he was stunned that he wanted to laugh in the first place.
It was as if the real price of this marriage was becoming the sort of man he’d never thought he was allowed to be.
Not when there was so much work to be done and the family honor to uphold.
But he shoved that aside. “Where did you read up on it, may I ask?”