Chapter Nine #3
Especially because the longer the silence drew out between them, the more tense that jaw of his became.
Giaco either didn’t notice, or did notice and didn’t care.
He threw himself into his seat, helped himself to a generous pour of the blackest coffee, and beamed around the table.
“I can only hope that you were up half the night, performing acts so salacious and degrading that you are hungover from them today. Yes, even you, Leontina. You are a pregnant, married woman who can have no claim to pearl clutching, surely.”
Pau looked as if he might possibly have died inside, though his expression did not change.
“Good morning, Giaco,” Leontina said, with a smile. “I understand that you take great pleasure—or did, certainly—in spreading your exploits hither and yon like some kind of sport But I do not.”
To her surprise, her brother actually blinked. “Of course you don’t,” he said, in a voice that was very nearly chastened. “My apologies. Sometimes I forget myself.”
“Sometimes we all do,” Leontina said, though she glanced over at Pau while she said it. It was a pointless enterprise, since Pau was apparently pretending to be made of stone today.
But she could remember too clearly how it had tasted when he’d lost himself in her mouth, no matter how much strong torrefacto coffee she let herself sip.
After breakfast, she and Pau took Giaco on a tour of the vineyards.
It was beautiful, as always, but for Leontina it was an opportunity to listen to Pau talk with great animation about this thing he did here.
These ancient vines and the land they were a part of.
All these things that made him who he was.
The things he actually loved.
She could almost convince herself that he wanted to melt.
That all she had to do was find a way to heat him up.
But when the tour was done, Pau went and locked himself up in the office with her brother for what she was pretty sure was a business conversation. Though for all she knew, they could have been planning new revenge schemes.
Afterward, Giaco took his leave—with another big hug that had her teary-eyed again—and then left Leontina and Pau alone again.
Or rather, as alone as anyone could be in the middle of a busy vineyard.
She didn’t see Pau again until the evening, when she was quite surprised to find herself summoned to dinner.
“I was certain I’d been relegated to a tray on my own,” she said to the maid, who looked horrified.
“No, madam,” she stammered. “The master was very clear that you are to join him.”
“I am honored,” Leontina replied, and had to fight not to sound acerbic.
She took her time dressing, more because it made her feel as if she was wearing armor than because she thought it would have any specific effect on him.
The house was as sprawled out as ever and so she took her time finding yet another little corner of the place that Pau could make into a dining room for an evening.
When she found it, she swept in, and then paused when she found him waiting at the windows, his back to her.
They had been in this dining room before, she realized belatedly. Then she wondered if they would continue to cycle through dining areas forever—but that wasn’t how she greeted him. He wasn’t in a space to entertain her questions, always meandering and with a thousand tangents.
That was what happened when a person’s education involved wandering around a library at will and following rabbit holes wherever they might lead on the internet.
But tonight she looked at that cold, hard line of his spine and arranged her face appropriately. “I was so surprised to receive an invitation to dine with you, Pau. After last night, I was certain you were going to avoid me for weeks.”
“I believe we’ve had enough childishness in this marriage already,” he said in that same arctic tone. She didn’t like it any better tonight.
And that was clearly meant to be a dig, Leontina knew. She didn’t take it as one, because she refused to accept that love had anything to do with childishness. He only wanted her to think so. Because it suited him for her to think so.
Because this man’s reaction to his feelings was to turn them into vengeance.
It bothered her that she still didn’t know why.
She might have some guesses—since she knew a thing or two about unavailable fathers—but she didn’t know. He hadn’t told her.
Today she had to wonder if he ever would.
She didn’t react. She also didn’t take her seat at the table. They stood there, on opposite sides of the room, as if they were facing off. Leontina let her hand rest on her belly and tracked the way his gaze followed the gesture, then jerked away.
As if he didn’t want to think too closely about their child. Not when he was so busy impersonating granite.
“There’s an attraction between us,” he said after a moment, and Leontina was quite certain she wasn’t imagining the patronizing note in his voice. It set her teeth on edge, but she didn’t let herself outwardly react. She suspected that was what he wanted. “I imagine that surprised us both.”
He said that last part as if he was being magnanimous. Leontina laughed.
“It didn’t surprise me,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Because I knew what you looked like. I suspect you were the one who was a little more surprised.”
He didn’t like that. She could see that all over his face. But he nodded. “That’s likely true. Nonetheless, our connection has proven to be far more volatile than anticipated.”
“Is that another way of saying that you had no intention of ever permitting yourself to have a single feeling where I was concerned?” she asked, perhaps too cheerfully.
Because she could see that her cheerfulness bothered him—and she might not think that it was fair to call anything that was happening here childishness, but she was only human.
She studied that absurdly perfect face of his and she could see the tightness of his jaw. The flatness of his lips. And that darkness in his gaze.
It made her wonder if he even knew what he felt about anything.
Though it was certainly not cheerful.
“I was trying to protect you,” he said shortly.
“But you’ve indicated protection is unnecessary.
After all, you were under the impression that you seduced me.
” His gaze seemed darker. “The truth is, Leontina, this has nothing to do with you. It’s what you represent.
You are your father’s last remaining hope to reclaim his standing in the nasty little worlds he inhabits.
But I wanted to make sure that he has as little hope as he gave my father in the end. ”
Suddenly, Leontina felt significantly less cheerful. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What did Umberto do to your father?”
Pau made a bitter sound. “He befriended him. At Giaco’s wedding, I saw that your father has his own vineyard now. That’s a new enterprise, isn’t it? Ten years old or so, I would bet.”
“I believe there were vines there before,” Leontina said, though she felt a sense of foreboding. “But no one cultivated them. Not before I was around fourteen or so. That was when they got more serious.”
“I don’t know if you know this,” Pau said, and he was still standing so straight, so tall, there by the window.
Everything about him was dark and forbidding, and she knew this was about feelings because beneath it all, she could see that he was furious.
“One of the things your father loves to do is find new ways to damage new people. After all, ruining the same people over and over is only so much fun. When he decided to start cultivating his wine, he naturally thought that he ought to branch out by connecting with established vintners. They were an exclusive group. Two in California, two in France, one in New Zealand, and my father here in Spain.” His mouth took on a bitter curve.
“Not one of them is in business any longer. And my father is dead.”
Leontina stared back at him, trying to patch that together with the sense of foreboding she felt. “What exactly are you saying?”
Pau’s dark eyes flashed. “My father thought he found a friend, and he loved nothing more than to talk at length about the one and only topic that interested him. While my mother was here, she liked to complain about his one-track mind. I think everybody found him too much, but it was who he was.”
He paused then, and it seemed to hurt him to swallow. His eyes were even darker. Leontina found herself wondering if Pau might have been the only one who didn’t find Bernat Calixto to be too much—and that made her heart clench.
Yet Pau pushed on. “So when he found a friend who couldn’t hear enough about his vines, his varietals, his soil composition, he had no barriers. No sense of self-preservation. He told your father everything he could possibly want to know, and in so doing, my father destroyed himself.”
His eyes seemed to glow then, with the kind of temper Leontina had never seen on him before.
“Because, naturally, your father did not want a friend. Your father has never had a friend in his life. He wanted information. And he took it. Every single one of the men he reached out to either died from the stress or went bankrupt, while your father’s new enterprise did quite well because of them. Imagine that.”
“I can imagine that quite well,” Leontina said with a certain quiet fury of her own, because she hated this story.
And not only because she hated that her father had gotten his talons into Pau’s family, too.
“That’s what he does. That’s who he is. I’m so sorry, Pau, that your father got caught in his crossfire. ”
“I appreciate that, Leontina, yet I don’t find sorry to be enough,” Pau hurled back at her.
“My father loved only one thing. And your father took it from him. My mother beat her head against that wall for as long as she could. Part of me thinks that when she finally left, it was out of exhaustion. She was just so tired of trying to be the focus of my father’s attention and never getting there.
” He shook his head. “And when I tell you that he never loved me either, I’m not looking for sympathy.
It is simply the truth. And I can accept that, because I knew how much this land and our legacy meant to him.
” His dark eyes seemed to burn straight into her.
“What I cannot accept is your father knew too, and took it from him anyway.”
“My father is a terrible person,” Leontina said, and perhaps she sounded a little impatient. “But this is well known. This is who he is. My question for you, Pau, is what do you love?”
“I loved my father,” he bit out, and it was shattering.
She thought she would have preferred it if he’d hauled off and slapped her instead. It was that shocking.
That intense.
Because somehow, he sounded as arctic as before, and all she could think of was a little boy like the one she carried inside her own body. A little boy with dark eyes looking up to a man who did not possess the capability of returning that emotion.
So what could Pau possibly imagine except that love was unrequited, and then nothing but loss and grief?
It was heartbreaking.
At least Leontina had been lucky enough to have her brother. Whether they were close or not didn’t matter. His very existence had helped her get over that helpless parental love early on, because Giaco was so bright and irrepressible and Umberto had hated him, too.
Once she’d understood that hate was all her father did, all he was capable of, she found ways to get healthier. She loved her books. She loved her escape fantasies. And sad though that might have been, it was better than this.
“Of course you loved him,” she said quietly. “You are nothing if not dutiful, no matter what you get in return.”
He didn’t like that. She could see it all over his face like a kind of anguish, but he slashed his hand through the air as if he was casting that aside. Maybe her, too.
“You are my final act of revenge, Leontina,” he told her coldly.
So coldly, though his eyes were that dark gold, and they were bright now.
“Because that is how I will honor my father’s memory.
Your father nearly took the only thing my father loved from him.
It came so close that I believe it killed him.
Struck him down where he stood. I can only hope that learning that I have returned that favor will do the same for Umberto. ”
“It will anger him,” Leontina said. “But surely you must realize by now that my father does not feel anything. Ever.”
“If it angers him, all the better,” Pau growled.
“But—” she began.
“We leave tomorrow,” he told her. When she only stared back at him without comprehension, his gaze darkened even more, like a new, worse storm coming in. “I’m taking you back to the castle.”