And just when she thought she couldn’t rise one more degree of arousal, couldn’t take one more second of this onslaught of sensation, nature took over again and her climax swept her up into the heavens above them.
He stiffened, tightened his grip on her and stopped breathing exactly as she did. Then he shuddered and ragged cries sounded against her neck while she opened her mouth in a silent scream, all of her world shattering around her, leaving her destroyed, never to be the same again.
Angelo touched a kiss to the top of her spine as he finished zipping her dress.
She let her hair fall and adjusted her mask as she turned to offer her mouth to his.
He took a final, lingering taste of her, trying to memorize the exact plump shape of her lips with the sweep of his tongue. When he drew back, he searched through the faint light cast by the party on the far side of the house, aware that he would spend the rest of his life looking for this pointed chin, that wide mouth and elegant forehead framed by this fall of dark hair.
Against his better judgment, he almost asked for her name, but she spoke first.
“We should get back.” There was a creak of misery in her voice. She caught at his hand and pressed his knuckles to the hot pulse in her throat. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
It was an impossible situation. He wasn’t supposed to be here. And much as he was enthralled by her sexually, he didn’t know if he could trust her. It was best to leave this as a torrid, dream-like encounter.
“I’ll go first and distract the guards. They won’t be alarmed I’ve been up here.”
“Because you’re a woman?” Females could be treacherous. His grandmother had been one of the cruelest. But the guards might be tempted to frisk him if they caught him leaving a private area. He appreciated her giving him a clear path of escape.
“Until we meet again,” he said as he adjusted his mask and hat.
“In another life,” she said with a melancholy pang in her voice, turning away to begin her descent.
With one ear cocked for voices or a return of her footsteps, he moved into the corner of the patio. He flicked on his cell phone for light and noted that, aside from a thorough cleaning of the moss that took root every winter, the new owners had left the bricks exactly as he remembered them. He only had to move a planter of dormant flowers to expose the familiar, hexagonal brick beneath. He pried it up with the blade of his pocketknife and shone a light in to check for vermin or prevent a nasty spider bite.
The space was dry and empty—except for the tobacco tin. He drew it out and opened it long enough to see the glitter of jewels and the head of a small plastic wolf—one of his own treasures tucked away so his brothers wouldn’t steal it, melt it, or otherwise use it to torment him.
In the distance, the music stopped. A male voice said something about costume judging.
With a well-practiced move, Angelo smoothly set the brick back into place. He slid the tin into the pocket of his cloak as he straightened.
Moments later, as he slipped down the stairs and past the sign that read Family Only, his brain quit replaying the most exquisite lovemaking of his life and made the connection.
The guards wouldn’t be alarmed at her presence in a private area because she was family.
He swallowed an imprecation and waited to look at his phone until he had melted past the party perimeter and hiked through the orange grove to his car. It took two swipes to bring up a photo of the new owner of the estate, Rico Montero. Another swipe and there was Rico’s sister, Pia.
Angelo knew that pillowy bottom lip. Intimately. He knew how her vanilla skin tasted. The silk of her hair against his brow still tickled him with sensual memory.
His lover wasn’t a cast-off mistress of a playboy or a daughter of a businessman trying to elevate her circumstances. Her forlorn, It’s a memory. A good one had made him think she lived some sort of deprived existence, but how rough could her life be?
He knew women could be in an abusive situation without it being apparent to the world, but Pia held a lot of aces. She earned dividends from the family corporation run by her brothers, lived in a small but elegant house in a very exclusive neighborhood. Her social media page was covered in photos of exotic landscapes.
She came from a family exactly like Angelo’s father and brothers—titled and entitled. Angelo already knew the Montero brothers’ scandalous affairs with vulnerable women, a PA and a housemaid, had been papered over with quickie marriages, the Duque’s political career and the family’s positions of power and wealth left unscathed.
As for Pia, her fine-boned features were even more patrician and elegant without the mask. She was photographed at the occasional gala, her smiles unapproachable, her poses as deliberately nonchalant as a fashion model showing off a runway gown.
That lissome figure had been delightfully supple. He experienced a latent pulse of heat recalling the feel of her writhing beneath him, but she wasn’t his type. He preferred bubbly, outgoing women with real jobs. Ones whose motives and interest in him were crystal clear. He had learned the hard way that his wealth made him a target for the decidedly mercenary members of either sex.
He threw his phone onto the passenger seat and pulled away, disgusted with himself for giving in to impulse with someone so wrong.
It wasn’t the snobbery of an upstart toward the bastion of old money or the petulance of being shut out of that privileged life and therefore wanting to tear it down. His contempt went far deeper. Someone must have known what had gone on in that cottage on the Gomez estate all those years ago, but they had chosen to ignore it. They had continued associating with monsters, enabling Angelo’s father and brothers to enjoy a level of status they had no right to. His father should have been jailed and, when the old baron died, Angelo should have received a portion of his estate.
Despite being fourteen and away at boarding school, still grieving his mother’s suicide, Angelo had been abandoned and turned onto the street. Angelo was convinced his brothers had deliberately burned down his mother’s cottage, both for the insurance money and to prevent him returning to live there.
Angelo had scrambled to survive and if his brothers had left him to make his new life, he might have left them to living their old one. Instead, when they realized a cache of jewelry was missing, they had come after Angelo, accusing him and his mother of theft.
Given the way Angelo had been living, his brothers had believed him when he’d said he didn’t have anything but the shirt on his back, but they had been convinced he knew where the jewelry was hidden.
As he proved tonight, Angelo had had a very good idea where his mother had buried the treasure, but no amount of being knocked around or intimidated had got that secret out of him. Instead, he had bit his split lip and resolved to destroy them, no matter how long it took.
Angelo could have come forward as the baron’s bastard anytime in the last decade and a half, demanding his share of their father’s estate through legal channels. Aside from having no desire to acknowledge that half of his DNA, it would have been expensive. Until the last few years, he hadn’t been able to afford that sort of fight. It also would have turned his mother’s anguish into nothing more than sordid muckraking in the press. He couldn’t do that to her memory.
Besides, he had perversely enjoyed his brothers’ fruitless search. If they had ever managed to unearth the jewels, he would have staked his claim. It was, after all, compensation his mother had taken with the knowledge she would never be left anything by Angelo’s father beyond the use of a run-down cottage.
As far as Angelo was concerned, this tin of jewelry was his inheritance, fair and square.
He might have let his brothers go to their graves thinking the fortune well and truly lost if the masquerade ball hadn’t presented such a perfect opportunity to collect it. If they hadn’t sold the estate in such an underhanded deal and put
his mother up for auction as if they were philanthropists for doing so…
They made him sick.
As he reached the field where his helicopter waited and climbed aboard with the weight of the tin in the pocket of his cloak, he considered when and how he would reveal to them that he did indeed possess what his mother had taken.
He wanted them in the weakest possible position, fully on the ropes, when he dealt this blow. Currently, they were still living off the proceeds of selling the estate to Rico Montero. Those funds would run out quickly, given Darius’s gambling habits and Tomas’s recent divorce. When they began to look hungry, Angelo would tip his hand.
It would drive them crazy. They would want to stake a claim, but doing so would force them to admit their family connection. They would have to admit how Angelo had come to exist and how his mother had got her hands on these diamonds and pearls.
Angelo would enjoy seeing them twist and turn against each other when that happened.
Like every nearly perfect caper, however, there was one witness who could blow the whole thing apart. Pia Montero.
She could place Angelo on the estate this evening.
If she discovered who he was.
CHAPTER THREE
Six weeks later…
“WOULD YOU EXCUSE me a moment?” Pia said to her mother and Sebastián.
She didn’t wait for her mother’s permission or even glance to read what was likely an expression of disapproval. Her mother probably thought she was giving in to nerves, but Pia didn’t care. She rose abruptly from the table and hurried to the toilet, where she lost every bite of the lunch she’d just eaten.
What on earth?
She wrung out a cloth and dabbed the perspiration from her wan face, shocked at the violence of her sudden illness. She’d been feeling odd all week, thinking she might be coming down with something, but she wasn’t running a fever. She wouldn’t dare accuse her mother’s chef of anything less than using the freshest ingredients.
That left one obvious explanation before she went down the road of blood panels for exotic diseases.
But it was impossible. Her cycle had arrived the day after the masquerade ball. That ought to mean she wasn’t pregnant. However, she realized with another roll of her tender stomach, she hadn’t had a period since.
She couldn’t be pregnant. Couldn’t. Her mother’s top tier, preferred choice for Pia’s husband was in the dining room right now.
Think, she commanded her rattled brain, but she was too shaken and confused to even recall the dates and count the weeks properly.
She would put off reacting until she’d had it confirmed, she resolved. And she would take a test immediately.
She fought her composure back into place and returned to the dining room, but didn’t retake her seat.
“I’m very sorry, Mother. I’m not feeling well and have to go home. May I call you later in the week to try this again, Sebastián?”
“Let me drive you home.” He rose and set aside his napkin.
“I wouldn’t want to impose. Mother’s driver collected me. I’ll have him run me back.”
“Not at all. Thank you for lunch, La Reina. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”
Pia’s mother offered a meaningless smile and tilted her cheek for his air-kiss, but her glance toward Pia warned that a lecture would be forthcoming.
Moments later, Pia was beside Sebastián in his sports car.
Through lunch they had established that they both enjoyed scuba diving and beachcombing. He mostly worked out of Madrid, but had holidayed as a child in Valencia and would love to settle in this area once he was raising a family. His mother bred show dogs and he had taken a runt out of pity. He admitted to shamelessly spoiling it, which had made her mother smile stiffly while Pia had experienced a weak ray of optimism. Perhaps they could have a successful marriage after all.
“I’m very sorry,” she apologized again. “I’ve been fighting something all week and should have canceled.”
“In sickness and in health, right?” His bold calling out of today’s less than subtle agenda made her stomach roil all over again. She couldn’t lead him on if she was carrying another man’s child.
“Sebastián, I think we should slow down.”
He took his foot off the accelerator, instantly alert. “Oh, you mean—” He glanced at her, then made an abrupt turn into the parking lot of a mechanic’s garage. “Did I say something to offend you?”
“Not at all. But something has come up that makes me think it’s best if we put off discussions until the new year.”
She tried for a polite smile and a poker face, but the longer he searched her expression, the more culpable she felt. She had to look away.
He cleared his throat, then spoke carefully. “It may surprise you to hear there are very few circumstances that would put me off what we’re contemplating.”
She licked her numb lips. “You don’t realize how serious this circumstance might be.”
“I think I do.” He sounded so grave, so sure, she closed her eyes in dread.
Was it obvious? Would rumors circulate before she’d had a chance to confirm it? To discover the identity of the father and tell him?
For the first time since she was a child, her eyes grew hot and her throat swelled with the urge to cry.
“My family wants this alliance quite badly, Pia. I’m not without a checkered past that you would have to accept. Offering solutions and protection to one another is the point of this sort of partnership. Please talk to me about anything you view as an impediment to our moving forward. I’m quite sure I can accommodate you.”
She wanted to goggle at him, unable to believe he would be willing to take on another man’s child, but he reached across and squeezed her hand with reassurance.
She swallowed and found a faint smile. “Let me call you later in the week, after I’ve had time to think some things through.”
“Of course.”
He took her home, but she only stayed long enough to double-check her dates and call her sister-in-law.
An hour later, she was halfway up the coast. She stopped at a village market and bought an off-the-shelf pregnancy test, took it into a service station restroom and sat in her car a long time afterward, absorbing the fact that she was carrying a baby.
The baby of a man she didn’t know. At all.
She was a smart, responsible woman. How could she have been so careless?
She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that both her brothers had been through this. That maybe some dark and desperate part of her had sabotaged herself into this position, hoping to find a version of the happiness Cesar and Rico had both found.
That sort of thinking was beyond illogical. It was self-destructive.
And genuinely impossible when she didn’t even know her lover’s name.
But that was why she wanted to see Poppy.
She put her car in Drive and returned to the scene of the crime.
Half an hour of mutual admiration with her two-year-old niece restored a little of Pia’s equilibrium.
Despite the circumstances, she looked forward to motherhood, she realized with a small bubble of optimism. She wouldn’t be a distant, coldly practical woman like her mother, even though she already knew La Reina would judge her harshly for showing affection toward her child. She scolded Sorcha and Poppy for it often and Pia could still hear her mother rebuking her own nanny for hugging her.
Don’t spoil her. She’ll become dependent.
Yes, it must have been the early hugs, not the lack of them thereafter that had turned Pia into the withdrawn, insecure, social-phobic person that she was.
“Will you go with Nanny while I talk to your mamà?” Pia asked Lily.
Lily gave Pia’s neck a fierce hug and said, “I yuv you,” in English, bringing tea
rs to Pia’s eyes as the small girl waved bye-bye on her way out the door.
She would have that soon—someone who would say those words and mean it, every day.
“I think I got some good ones,” Poppy said, setting aside her camera as they entered the lounge. “Thank you. I’m making an album for Rico for Christmas. I don’t know what else to get the man who has everything.”
Pia’s brother Rico had been in a bad place after his brief first marriage had ended in tragedy. Then he had discovered that Poppy had had his daughter in secret. Since locating them, he’d become more like the brother Pia recollected from her earliest years, before he left for school; the one who was patient and protective, willing to sit with an arm around her so she felt safe as she watched an evil witch in a children’s movie.
“Coffee? Wine?” Poppy offered.
Pia faltered as she realized she was off alcohol and likely coffee, as well. Good thing she had barely touched what her mother had served.
“I came from lunch at Mother’s. Nothing for now, thank you.”
“Did she say something about the auction? Is that why you’re here?” Poppy winced as she sat. “When you said you wanted to ask me about it, I thought you wanted the auctioneer’s card.” She picked it up from a side table. “Am I in trouble?”
“No. But I would like that, if you don’t mind.” Pia pocketed the card. “No, Mother is quite pleased you broke records on the fund-raising, even if she doesn’t agree with your methods.”
“Because of the painting,” Poppy said heavily, shoulders slumping.
“I meant the costumes. Mother thinks that sort of thing is a gimmick. What are you talking about? Which painting?”
“The one from the attic. The young woman. She’s the reason I raised so much. The bidder paid a ridiculous sum.”
“I remember it. Who bought it?” She held her breath.
“That’s the trouble. I don’t know.”
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