Chapter Eleven
Leontina could feel her heartbeat going wild inside her. She couldn’t tell if she was terrified or determined or some mix of both, and all of it seemed to be wrapped up in how much she didn’t want to say any of the things she’d just said to him.
But it was all true. She’d felt like a kind of warrior queen walking into the front hall of the monastery in Spain today. She’d felt powerful and she’d known that it got to him. That she did. That her silence worked its way beneath his skin.
She’d been able to ride that wave all the way here.
It had held even after she’d walked into the castle, finding it as unpleasant and oppressive as ever.
It had been a struggle not to run for one of her hiding places.
But Pau had been at her side and the truth was, Leontina found she really didn’t mind the idea of sticking it to her father.
He’d certainly had it coming.
The reality of that moment, on the other hand, she’d found had made her feel hollow.
After Umberto had first looked as if he’d meant to strike her belly—her child—and had then thrown himself through the air in her direction as if he dearly wished to do her—his child—bodily harm, she’d understood what that hollowness was.
A kind of grief. It tasted like despair, but it wasn’t. It was a mourning.
For the little girl she’d been here who had learned how to hide because solitude and concealing herself was an act of love, one she showed herself, and it was all she got.
For the young woman who had been told all the ways she could be useful, but was never valued as anything but an object to trade at a market.
Little more than a trinket who mattered only if some man could be convinced her price was worth paying.
It wasn’t like these things were new. Leontina had been quite aware of what her life was all along. What was different was her. Or more accurately, the baby she carried inside her.
Leontina had understood in a flash, while her father lay in a heap on the floor, his face red and his head bloodied from the impact, that the things she had put up with, the life she’d lived, the entire toxic swamp of this place and her father and everything that came with it were going to end right here.
She wished she could care about her father’s welfare, but she couldn’t.
What she knew was that she would never let that man anywhere near her child.
Not only that, her child would never experience the things she had as a girl.
Her son was already loved and adored beyond reason and Leontina hadn’t even met him yet.
And her son would only hide if he was playing a game.
She could feel the sheer intensity of how much she loved him and what she would do to protect him and how she would make certain that even if no one else in the world loved her boy, he would know that she did. He would know.
And as all of that had rushed through her, she’d known that she needed to be done with these schemes and plots, these revenge scenarios and where they led.
Because it was always to the same place, wasn’t it?
Her father had tripped and fallen on the cold stone floor and no one had rushed to him. He had done nothing but bully and plot his whole life, and this was where it ended.
She loved Pau. The more she accepted that, the more she was sure that it had been there from the moment she’d met his gaze. From the moment she’d felt the intensity he carried within him, before she’d felt how he expressed it.
Like she had been waiting for him all her life and it was worth it, to be locked away in a castle all that time, if it meant she got to have him after all. Leontina thought she would dream about the time they’d spent together for the rest of her life.
But there was no way in hell that she would raise her child in this mess. No possible way.
And she’d said these things to him here, in the castle, where she could hide from almost anything but the reality of her life here. She’d said it so she couldn’t think better of it and let years pass, only to end up trapped in exactly the place she knew she didn’t want to go.
The truth was she expected Pau to go arctic again, and walk away.
But instead, he went pale.
Then suddenly, everything about him blazed.
Pau moved toward her so swiftly that she didn’t have time to react. Then his hands were on her upper arms, holding her to him. His face was so close to hers that she almost thought she could taste him, and there was a look she’d never seen before in his eyes.
She found she was holding her breath.
“I will not live without you, Leontina,” he hurled at her. “I will not do it. And you will not raise this child—my child—without me, either.”
Of all the things she’d thought he might say, it wasn’t that.
She’d thought maybe he would sternly lecture her about legacies.
Or the papers they’d signed. Or the promises they’d made, none having anything to do with spite or love or anything but the kind of coolheaded, emotionless agreements that Pau Calixto was known for.
But she couldn’t let herself believe him. She might have been willing to risk herself because her heart told her she needed to, but this wasn’t about her. It couldn’t be.
“I will not raise a child with you in a cauldron of spite,” she shot right back at him.
“There is no cauldron,” he retorted, and his fingers dug into her shoulders as he spoke, but she didn’t mind.
She thought that here, now, she was finally seeing the real Pau.
“I thought that this would be a victory, after all the plans I’d made.
I thought that all of this would feel different once it happened.
Once he knew. But we got here, and he was just the same tiny, little man he’s always been, and the only thing I care about is you. ”
That made her heart stutter, but she shook her head. “I’ve seen no evidence to support that. In your books or anywhere else.”
“I married you,” he thundered at her. “I sought you out, allowed you to seduce me, and did everything in my power to get you with child, woman. What did you think was happening?”
“I let you seduce me,” she countered. “And I wanted a baby. I needed a reason that you would have to marry me, and I knew you would if there was a child involved, because that’s the kind of man you are.
I never expected to fall in love with you, but here we are.
” She made a face. “Or here I am, I suppose I should say.”
Pau made a low noise, like some kind of growl.
“How would I know if I was in love with you or not?” he gritted out at her, his grip intense but his gaze even more so.
“How would I know what love is? There was my mother, who loved only my father, but he barely saw her and she left him. There was my father, who loved only the land, the vines, the Calixto legacy, and it as good as killed him. What am I to think love is?”
Leontina felt breathless. “You could start—”
But he shushed her by pulling her even closer to him.
“And then there’s you,” Pau said. “Sister to the only human being on this planet that I would tell you I actually do love. My only friend. The only man I trust. And I betrayed him, because I decided that you were the only revenge worth taking on a man I shouldn’t have cared about at all.
Because what is Umberto Tavian to me? I own him.
I ruined him. He’s nothing—and I am a man of figures and plans, Leontina.
I do not feel. I do not pine. I made myself into a human spreadsheet for a reason. ”
But his hands moved, then. One to the swell of her belly, the other to carefully cup her cheek as he moved even closer. “So all I can think is that all of this time, all of these wild and impossible feelings—it’s all been about you.”
Leontina liked that. She more than liked it.
Still. “You would have tried to seduce me at that wedding no matter who I was, as long as I was his daughter,” she said, though she pressed her cheek deeper into his palm.
“I would have,” he agreed, his voice low.
“But I wouldn’t be obsessed. I wouldn’t suffer from these sleepless nights, unable to think or rest or do anything at all but pine over you.
I wouldn’t see you wherever I go. I wouldn’t dream of you when I’m lucky enough to actually fall asleep.
I sweat you out. I bury myself in my work.
I lament you. I curse you. And yet none of it is any good.
You’re still here.” He moved his hand from her belly to his chest and thumped himself right where his heart beat.
“You’re right here, Leontina, and I can’t get you out. I don’t know how.”
He sounded tortured. Leontina slid her hand over his, the one he held to her cheek, and that made his breath come out of him in a sigh.
“If that’s not love,” Pau said to her, his voice low and his eyes dark, “then it is some terrible disease that is killing me as I stand here. Either way, it’s your fault.”
And as declarations went, Leontina thought that this one was the finest she’d ever heard. All this from a man who hardly knew how to feel? She felt as if he’d written her sonnets.
She found herself smiling, her cheeks were damp, and as she moved closer to him and slid her hands over that tight jaw of his, she kissed him.
Once, then again.
“I don’t think you’re dying,” she told him, not able to keep the laughter out of her voice. “These are your feelings, Pau. Welcome.”
“What I feel is more like cardiac arrest,” he said, frowning, but when she moved to place her hand over his heart, he covered it with his.
“I bet it’s not,” she said, unable to stop smiling at him. “Though I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”
“Is there a test for this?” he asked, sounding grumpy and ruined, wounded, and hers.
That was the part that mattered. Hers.
“There is,” Leontina said, and wound her arms around his neck. “It’s called happily ever after, Pau. It’s forever, at a minimum. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes.”
Then she took her husband by the hand, led him to her childhood bed where nothing of interest had ever happened, and properly seduced him, at last.
Fully aware that as she did it, he seduced her right back.
And what did it matter who seduced who, when in the end, they found themselves tangled up with each other and wound too tight to ever let go.
So they never did.