Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “Important,” I told him in reply because it was, just not for the reasons he thought.

  “Indeed. He wants to solidify our partnership with a marriage. You know how it’s done, son.”

  I did. I knew better than most.

  But marrying Agatha Howard was so far out of the question, I couldn’t even entertain it. She was a wild factor in my carefully planned long game, and even though I was loathe to waste time on her, if she was in the parlor ready to be set up like a good little lady, it was as good a time as any to take her pulse and see how I could play her off.

  I closed down my computer as I always did just in case Noel got the urge to snoop and somehow made it past my elaborate security system, and then swiveled out of my chair.

  “I’ll go to her, but don’t expect me to rejoice over the union,” I told my father blandly as I did up my suit jacket button. “If she’s anything like other British ladies, she’ll be a boring shag.”

  Noel laughed, clapping me on the back as I moved by him as if we were old boys drinking scotch in London gentlemen’s club. “That’s what slaves are for, my lad.”

  I fought the urge to shrug off the weight of his hand on my shoulder and moved through the door without acknowledging his comment.

  “Proud of you, son,” he said, just loudly enough for me to hear it down the hall.

  Once upon a time, a very long time ago, those words would have been more precious than gold.

  Now, the only thing more precious than gold to me was an Italian woman by the name of Cosima who had enchanted me as surely as Circe the sorceress.

  Riddick fell into step behind me at some point down the long hallway that cut straight through the center of the house like a spine. He stayed closed to me now, closer than before. I wasn’t certain if it was because I’d never trusted him with my secrets before the disappearance of my wife and he felt further moved to guard me now that I’d acknowledged our friendship, or if it was because we’d entered a new, even darker and more dangerous world since then, and he knew vigilance at all times was paramount to getting out of this crux alive.

  Either way, he escorted me to the antechamber where Agatha awaited behind a closed white and gold door.

  “What do we know about her?” I asked as I stared at the intricate gold leaf work that scrolled over the door like vines. I knew enough already, but Riddick was the font of my information, the well other informants poured their buckets full of secrets into.

  “Not much, milord. She is a society queen, but she has few hobbies other than horse riding and visiting a sickly aunt across the pond at least three times a year for extended holidays.”

  “An aunt?” The information rang false. Agatha Howard was known as an ice princess. I very much doubted she had an uncharacteristic soft spot for some elderly relationship she couldn’t have known very well given the distance between them. “Look into that, will you, Rid?”

  “Yes, milord.”

  I shot him a look over my shoulder and raised a brow. “Do I look presentable enough to approach a potential bride?”

  Riddick’s impenetrable expression cracked with the twitch of his lips into a brief grin. “Polygamy suits you well.”

  I chuckled softly, letting the small reassurance of intimacy scour through me. It was too infrequent these days, Riddick my only true comfort. A sad thing for a man nearing forty to realize he has very little in the way of friends.

  Then I thought of James, the prime minister helping me to corral and take down the Order, and I smiled.

  Few friends, I decided, but important ones.

  Noel had already committed multiple felonies with my money and support. He didn’t know what was coming for him, but I did.

  Personally, I thought Noel would look just fucking dandy in prison orange.

  I pushed open the door, prepared to deal with a vapid, bored aristocrat I would easily temper and eventually ignore.

  Instead, I was greeted with an Agatha Howard I had never seen before.

  She paced the room like a caged beast in grey cords and a black velvet blazer that wonderfully showcased her slim, long form. Her hair tossed madly over her shoulder in a riot of blond curls as she spun to face me, her nostrils flared, her hands clenched at her sides, and when she opened her mouth it was to deliver words like a series of hard blows.

  “Listen to me and listen well, Lord Thornton. I absolutely, unequivocally will not marry you. If you can’t stomach the reject, tough cookies. I’m in love with someone else, and I won’t be sold like cattle for the better financial interests of my family. Now, you have a choice. You can either help me get out of this snit, or you can pressure me into it and face the consequences.”

  I fought the urge to grin. Her ferocity reminded me so much of Cosima I felt her absence pulse in my chest like a second heart, a broken one with an out of tune beat.

  “Dare I ask how you might enact these consequences on a lord of the realm? One who happens to yield as much power and even more wealth than your own family?”

  She snarled at my cool tone and the blasé way I undid my suit jacket and took a seat in one of the darned uncomfortable 18th century chairs imported from France. There was so much hatred in her eyes that I nearly lost the urge to laugh.

  I’d missed female animosity. It was such good fun.

  “I’ll make your life a living misery. I’ll get every woman in my circle to spread absolutely heinous rumors about you and your laughable manhood. I’ll spit in your face each time you talk to me. I’ll fight you tooth and bloody nail before I ever let you bed me, but I’ll also frighten away any slut willing to sleep with you. I. Will. Make. Your. Life. Hell,” she spat.

  I crossed one foot over the other knee and leaned farther back in the chair, lounging comfortably as a king in his throne. She growled. Again, I fought the urge to laugh the manic humour out of my inflated lungs.

  Instead, I raised a cool brow, and said, “I’m afraid you’d have your work cut out for you, Agatha. My life has been a living hell since I was old enough to cogitate.” I stared at her for a long moment, watched the passion flicker like flames in her eyes, how it heated her skin to a flushed and mottled red. That kind of passion could not be banked, at least not for long. She was willing to fight and probably die for that love she spoke of, and she would not be deterred.

  I could understand such passion, such verve, because it had driven me for the past twelve months.

  “I’ll expose your father,” she barked, then hesitated, clearly surprised by her own indiscretion. Then she straightened and narrowed those big blue eyes at me. “I’ll expose him. You see, I know something you don’t. Noel took my father’s private jet to Rome the day before your mother died.”

  Everything stilled. Even the dust motes spiraling through the air, catching in the light cast by the fire burning in the pink marble hearth seemed to freeze as I held my breath and fought through the brutal impact of the new information.

  It took minutes. Long moments when I reeled internally, careful to keep my exterior façade placid before because it was instinctual after so many years and because I wasn’t yet totally sure if I could trust the irascible woman across from me.

  “You’re sure?” I said finally, proud of the flatness in my tone.

  She blinked, then frowned, leaning forward and speaking louder as if I hadn’t heard her properly the first time. “Well, of course, I am. I wouldn’t just got about saying such a thing, no matter how much I may not want to marry you. My father and Noel were best friends before he passed away. They did everything together, and this was no exception. Obviously, Noel couldn’t fly commercial or take his own jet if he was going to do something unspeakable… something like murder his own wife.”

  “You can’t possibly know if Noel did that or not,” I said by rote because Noel truly had programmed me beautifully.

  “No,” she agreed. “Although, he returned the morning after her death, and he never told anyone, so far as I can tell, that he ever went to Italy aroun
d that time. Why would he keep it a secret?”

  Why would he?

  Well, the answer was bloody obvious, wasn’t it?

  My father had really done it.

  The woman he had wooed and brought back from Italy, the woman he had seemed to love despite his myriad of flaws and countless slaves, the woman who had certainly loved him back regardless of those qualms, had been murdered by her own husband.

  By my father.

  I closed my eyes as pain tore through every layer of my being like a fissure cracking open in the earth, shifting tectonic plates and dislodging old, settled fossils and sediment so that everything was different, everything was new and aching.

  “Fuck,” I breathed on an explosive breath as the air punched from my lungs.

  Dante and Salvatore had been right all along.

  A small, shaky part of me had always wondered, always secretly suspected their truth was the truth. But it was so much easier in principle than in practice to turn your back on what you knew to face a new and horrible truth about what you had always believed in.

  So, I had believed in my father.

  What a colossal, life-altering mistake.

  I fought the urge to surge out of my chair, storm down the hall, and attack him. To drag him by the hair down to the dungeon and string him up in chains like a spider’s web and slowly eat away at him with whip and weapon until he begged for death.

  He had killed my mother. Taken the only family member who had ever loved or nurtured Dante or me away from us, and for what?

  For what?

  The question resounded through my head like a gong strike.

  It was only one of the many reasons I remained seated and resolved to carry out my plan to the very end. Noel would be imprisoned, not dead, and there was greater satisfaction in knowing he would rot in the slums of some dank prison with the very sort of people he’d detested all his life.

  I wanted that for him.

  I wanted him to experience what a living hell felt like as I had for years.

  Agatha stared down at me, her face suspended between sympathy and ire. I didn’t blame her for her cruelly delivered epiphany or her indecision in the obvious face of my grief. In the past year, I had been the poster boy for the Order. In the entirety of my life, I had been one of its most groomed champions.

  Of course, she wouldn’t know that everything was different. That everything had started to change the day Noel beat me in place of Yana, the day my mother was pushed to her death, the day Cosima saved me on the streets of Milan, and then again, the day she was taken from me.

  She couldn’t know I’d been fighting against the tidal flow of my preordained destiny hand and tooth for so long, I couldn’t even remember what peace felt life.

  Fuck me, I was tired.

  Bone-deep exhausted.

  I just wanted the Order gone, Noel—fucking monster of a man—punished for his myriad of crimes, and my sweet topolina back at my side.

  God seemed determined to prove to me that I asked for too much.

  I was fucking determined to prove Him, fate, or whatever the fuck might work against me cosmically, wrong.

  I took a small, steadying breath and decided to risk my plan by entrusting Agatha Howard with a portion of my truth.

  “My life has been a hell,” I said, “since I was old enough to realize my father was a monster, and it was made once more unbearable when I realized that monster might have killed my mother. Now, poor, spoiled Agatha, it is utterly intolerable because the one woman I’ve ever loved with all my being has been taken from me by the very men who wishes to unite us against our wills. So, you tell me, what option of yours do you think I will choose?”

  She stared at me as she deflated, punctured through the chest by my quelling words. A long, gusty sigh leaked out her slack mouth, and she suddenly seemed much smaller.

  “You hate them too,” she whispered, her shock robbing her voice of any strength.

  “It’s not a matter of hate,” I explained as if to a child. “It’s a matter of revenge.”

  She folded weakly into the chair across from me and blinked hard. “So you’ll help me?”

  “No, Agatha.” I grinned so wickedly that she jolted upright once more. “I am the man with the plan. You will help me.”

  “Six months later, with the help of Agatha and James, Noel was arrested for fraud, embezzling, and money laundering,” I finished explaining to Cosima, who was curled up on her side much like the black cat at our feet into a tight ball, a sleek black silk robe her only adornment.

  Even fresh faced with wet, ropey hair, she was still so goddamn beautiful it was hard to breathe whenever I looked at her.

  She blinked those big melted butter eyes at me as she absorbed my words, and for once, I couldn’t read her thoughts in her expressive features. Her silence and calm deliberation unnerved me, but I didn’t fidget or press into her silence with a series of blunt questions. She deserved time to process, especially given the tumultuous nature of my story.

  “Noel beat me.”

  It was my turn to blink, and I did so hard, black spots eroding my vision when I opened my lids again to focus on her.

  “That’s why I left,” she explained without intonation, her voice more American than I had ever heard it, stripped of the Italian and British that made her tone so lyrical. “I left because he pulled me away from the crowd, dragged me into the dungeon by my hair, and beat me the way he once beat Yana…he even had his youngest son beat me with him.”

  “Youngest son?” I asked hollowly.

  It surprised me that after years of monumental discoveries, betrayal, and changes, I could still be so affected by new information.

  But it fucking rocked me.

  My bones seemed to split under the pressure, my skin so tight and hot I thought it would crack open and my entire body would shift into something less human, something bestial, and that I would remain like that for the rest of my life, deformed by treachery, cursed by the sins of my father.

  Then the warm press of a hand was on my cheek and the sweet, spicy musk of Cosima’s perfume was in my nose, cracking through the blackness rotting my soul like dawn light over the horizon.

  I looked up and locked my eyes to her, needing that anchor to keep me from flying into a rage.

  “Xan,” she said softly as her thumb rubbed over the abrasive stubble covering my cheek. “Noel married Mrs. White in secret just after your mother died, and together, they had a son.”

  “Mary takes care of her sister and her boy, Rodger,” I said, working through it, bringing the image of a dark blond-haired boy to my mind’s eye.

  He wasn’t a handsome lad, but I could see, now that it was forced on me, how he shared similarities with Noel.

  With me.

  “Fuck.” I tossed the bed clothes off me, overheating even in the cool room, even in my black boxer briefs. “Fuck, bloody fucking, fuck.”

  Cosima nodded solemnly. “That’s about the gist of it. He told me Rodger was a contingency plan in case you turned out just like Dante.”

  “You mean, in case I decided to form my own mind instead of blindly attaching myself to his?”

  She flinched at the arctic frost of my words, but my Cosima didn’t back away. Instead, she pressed closer, her breasts softly crushed to my chest, her long legs tangling with mine.

  All I could see was her beautiful face and those priceless eyes.

  Nothing could have ever calmed me more.

  “He beat me because he could see what we had together, and it scared him. He didn’t want you to be punished by the Order or to lose sight of what he wanted for you.”

  “He didn’t want to be punished through me, and he didn’t want to lose sight of his own narcissistic, maniacal goals.”

  “That too,” she agreed. “I didn’t want to go, Xan, you have to know that.”

  I rolled my forehead across hers, brushing our noses together just to feel the luxe texture of her skin on mine, her breath hot a
nd sweet on my lips. If I could have, I would have crawled inside her loveliness and dwelled there, safe and harboured forever.

  In her own strange way, Cosima was my safety and my savoir. She might not have been called on to defend me bodily, but her spirit was my shield even when she’d been absent from me for years. She was my inspiration both in that I was driven by the need to be with her again and in that I admired her more than I ever had anyone else. No one was so beautiful, so resilient, and so loving as my beauty.

  Case in point, she was comforting me while divulging the details of the wicked beating she had endured at the hands of Noel.

  “When did he take you?”

  “Just before I found you to say goodbye.”

  “How could that be true? I fucked you against a wall…” I read the flashback of pain in her eyes and turned to concrete. “Are you fucking kidding me? I fucked you against a wall whilst you were suffering from a torn up back? A back torn up by my own father not a hundred yards away in my very own home on our fucking wedding day?”

  She winced. “Xan, what would you have had me do? I’d just been beaten, and he threatened me not just with my life, but yours! I dare anyone to come up with a better idea than I did in complying. Noel had just exposed how deeply deranged and extraordinarily ruthless he could be. I was not going to test that further.”

  “Who is your Master?” I demanded.

  “Xan—”

  “No, topolina, who the fuck do you answer to?”

  I was close enough to see her pupils blow open, the black eating away at the gold until it was only a thin frame for her darkness. “You, Master.”

  “That’s right, me. If you think for one moment, I wouldn’t have believed you had you told me what happened, that I wouldn’t have stormed into the dungeon, strung up that monster and skinned him alive for you, woven that flesh into a tapestry that you might use for fucking darts, you are madly mistaken. Have I ever done anything to make you believe I wouldn’t kill for you? Even die for you?”

  She bit her plush lower lip, indenting the pink flesh so neatly, I was driven to do the same.