“It is a pity, Amelia, that I am not convinced.”
“I would rather die than spend the rest of the night with you, much less the rest of my life,” she hurled at him.
With, she could admit, a lot more of that poor, brokenhearted teenager inside her than she wanted to admit.
But His Excellency didn’t erupt into arrogance.
“No need to fling yourself off the side of the mountain,” he said drily instead. “Especially not as now, I’ll be forced to save you.” He waved a languid ducal hand, taking in the whole of the cabin around them. The jagged peaks outside. The snow and the dark. “Consider this your chance to prove yourself to me. There is nothing for miles in any direction but you and me. No hint of wealth or consequence to be found. I would expect a typical gold digger, like—”
“If you say like my mother, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.”
Teo nodded, though it wasn’t any kind of surrender. More like noblesse oblige.
“You may have forced us into this,” he said instead. “But that doesn’t mean you get what you want.”
“Clearly.”
“We’ll stay here as long as it takes,” he said quietly. “If you didn’t plan this to extort me, it’s your opportunity to show it.”
She shook her head. “And if I feel no particular need to prove myself to anyone, thank you, because I’m a grown woman who doesn’t actually require your approval to take her next breath?”
Teo considered her, all black-gold flame and that stern mouth of his. “Then, cariña, I fear you are in for a very hard winter.”
CHAPTER SIX
AT FIRST SHE clearly thought he was kidding.
“We’re not staying here all winter,” she said.
“Are we not? That is entirely up to you, Amelia.”
And Teo watched impassively as she stared back at him, obviously waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the punch line to roll out and break the tension.
Instead, he gazed back at her and let the moment stretch out.
He had no intention of making things easier on her.
Especially because the more he looked at her, the less he understood how he had failed to recognize her last fall. She’d worn very bright lipstick, it was true, but there was no disguising that lush, sensual mouth.
There never had been.
And it settled on him, with a weight he wouldn’t call heavy, exactly, that this was the first time he could indulge himself when he looked at her. She was no longer too young. She wasn’t his stepsister. And she wasn’t wearing a theatrical mask to hide behind.
Teo had already resigned himself to the fact that she was carrying his son. He knew all the implications. He had always known precisely who and what he was.
And the longer she stared back at him, trying to read his intentions, the more he became aware of something else in him that he suspected had been there a good, long while. A heat that seemed to grow into a kind of roar—
But he was not a man who succumbed to his passions. The only time he could remember doing so, in fact, was last fall at the Masquerade.
The Duke of Marinceli was expected to play host at the Masquerade, not nip off into a private room with a strange woman. Teo had never allowed himself such spontaneity. His entire life was a monument to plotting, planning and premeditation.
He had not said anything in that quiet drawing room when the passion between them had been spent. He had hardly known himself. He’d watched his masked redhead as she smiled at him. Had he recognized that mouth of hers even then? Was that the reason her smile had settled so heavily on him, like a reprimand?
She had slipped from the room. And Teo had not been sorry to discover that when he rejoined the ball, she had disappeared. He’d been less sanguine when he’d woken the following morning as hungry for her as if none of that had happened.
Teo had spent the months since assuring himself that one small indiscretion could not possibly count against the backdrop of a lifetime of responsibility. He had been certain.
And now he was here. With her.
Worse, it was more difficult by the moment to convince himself that his body wasn’t having the same enthusiastic response to her that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. Something he would have been happy to blame on a spectacular woman dressed to cause a riot, the way she had been at the Masquerade.
But Amelia wasn’t dressed to do much of anything today, unless it was to highlight her general unsuitability for the role her pregnancy had thrust upon the both of them. Teo had not imagined his wife—his Duchess—in the sort of clothing a regular person could obtain at one of the strange shopping malls they apparently favored. He had certainly never entertained the notion that she might be an American.
And if he allowed himself to think about Marie French again, he didn’t know what he might do—
He stopped.
He let the silence between them drag on, and thought about the situation he’d created for the two of them instead.
This cabin had been a favorite retreat of his grandfather, the Seventeenth Duke. He’d kept it stocked with essentials, including the whiskey he preferred in the evenings—and that Teo only permitted himself to sample here.
He stood, enjoying the way Amelia stiffened as if she was bracing herself for an attack, and went to help himself. Then he selected a book from the broad, sprawling collection generations of his ancestors had left here for nights like this, and then settled himself in by the fire to enjoy a peaceful evening.
Or to appear to enjoy a peaceful evening, as if he didn’t care what she did—when the truth was he was aware of every breath she took.
Entirely too aware.
“You’re...just going to sit there and read?” she asked at one point, sounding strangled.
He’d taken his time looking at her. “What else do you suggest I do?”
And he’d enjoyed the way she flushed far too much.
When he was ready to take himself to bed, he did so without further comment, leaving her to her own devices. He heard her start to say something, then bite it back.
Uncertainty could only make the seriousness of their situation more clear to her, he told himself, feeling very nearly self-congratulatory as he climbed into the bed. And if this gambit of his had more to do with revenge? He was fine with that, too.
He kept telling himself that as he lay there in bed, glaring at the ceiling, everything inside him tense and too hot. He decided it was fury, because it should have been.
Because she was going to marry him, sooner or later, and he didn’t know if he was more insulted at the prospect of marrying so below himself—or at the fact she seemed more insulted than he was.
Because his life had taken a drastic left turn when it was meant to proceed as a gentle, straight line—when he’d gone to great lengths to make sure it did—and it was all her fault. It was that damned dress she’d worn. It was her bright red lips and the molten heat of her.
He played and replayed that night last fall in his head, which was not helpful. And he tried to make himself forget that she was just there, in the next room...
Also not helpful. Or successful.
And Teo was not at all surprised, come the dawn when he finally gave up on his restless sleep, to find her curled up in a ball on the sofa where he’d left her. There were empty wrappers of nutrition bars on the table, telling him what she’d had as her dinner. She’d piled a selection of throws on top of her to keep her warm, which tugged at him in ways he planned to ignore, and had let the fire go out.
It struck him as an excellent opportunity to educate her in how this little retreat of theirs was going to go.
And maybe he took a little too much pleasure in waking her up, keeping his voice and expression stern as he asked her what she thought she was doing.
“It’s winte
r in the mountains,” Teo continued, staring down at her as she blinked sleepily, then looked around in confusion. “You cannot allow the fire to go out, Amelia. Surely a woman who plans to give birth to a child—and presumably care for it and keep it alive and well—should have better survival skills.”
She was still wearing her clothes from the day before. Her long blond hair was in a glorious snarl, and she only shoved it out of her way as she pushed herself up to sitting position. Then she frowned at him. Blearily.
And there wasn’t a single part of that he should have found attractive. Or appealing. She was common. Unrefined. A pageant of inelegant, indecorous vulgarity.
But tell that to the hardest part of him.
“I wasn’t planning on raising my child in a shack on the top of the mountain, actually,” she said, adding that knee-jerk defiance of hers to the list of her sins. That she was not impressed with him or his position and consequence was clear.
He found her...confounding.
“Is it that you don’t know how to build a fire?” he asked, folding his arms and making his voice into granite. “I find this difficult to believe. Surely you must have some use.”
“I have never built a fire, no,” she said, “because I prefer to gaze at nature from afar rather than fling myself into the midst of it and hope for the best.”
He only stared at her, fascinated against his will by that stubborn jaw of hers. And the echo of that mulishness in her sleepy gaze, a thick purple at this hour.
“I don’t camp,” she said. “My skills run more to finance and asset allocation, not to mention good old-fashioned companionship. Fire starting never seems to be on the menu.”
“Of course not. Because why would Marie French teach her daughter anything useful?”
“Your obsession with my mother is not a good look,” Amelia said mildly. It was only that brighter gleam in her eyes that told him the truth about her temper. “Though it’s humanizing, certainly. In the sense that it makes you just as boring and run-of-the-mill as any other man I’ve ever met.”
She was trying to get under his skin, and what irritated Teo was that it was successful. More successful than he wanted to admit, in fact. But that didn’t mean he had to show her that it was working.
The trouble with Marie French wasn’t only that she’d married his father, both usurping and staining his mother’s memory. Because there were a number of women who had done the same thing after she had whom he disliked, but not with this same fervor. And it wasn’t only that Marie’s station was so decidedly below the de Luzes, though that had certainly always confounded him. His problem was that his father had been besotted with her in a way that the old Duke had never been with anyone else. Including Teo’s mother.
That wasn’t something he intended to forgive.
No matter that he was now bound to the daughter, with chains he knew he’d never break.
Even if they choked him.
“Let me explain to you how this will work,” he said, looking down at her, and he was sure that he could see her fight to stay where she was. That jaw of hers tensed farther, and he flattered himself that she was struggling with her urge to leap to her feet and face him on more equal footing. “You have two choices.”
“Choices? What choices? I thought you relieved me of such things when you abducted me yesterday.”
He didn’t smile, exactly. “There are always choices, cariña. They may not be good choices, but they always exist.”
“This is pointless.” Amelia rubbed at her face. Then scowled at him, as if she’d been hoping that he was a bad dream and if she rubbed her eyes, he’d go away. “You must know that I don’t want to marry you. I certainly don’t want to coparent with you.”
“I beg your pardon? Coparent?” He pronounced the word as if it offended him. It did. “I am unaware of any such designation, thank you. I plan to parent my child, personally and completely. It does not require a prefix.”
“Funny, I remember your father talking about the fleet of nannies who raised you,” she replied. “And if memory serves, you felt you had been raised beautifully. So did he.”
“I am not my father.”
And it was not until his words hung there between them that Teo understood how profoundly he meant that.
But that wasn’t something he planned to excavate at dawn. With the daughter of the woman who had singlehandedly ruined the old man.
“You can lock me away for the rest of my life and I won’t change my mind,” Amelia was saying, her voice ringing as if she was making her own vows.
Teo only smiled. Darkly. “Then I fear we will stay here a very long time indeed.”
She regarded him steadily, though certainly not politely. “I thought you were offering me choices. Not a prison sentence.”
“A prison is a prison, Amelia, and you chose these bars when you decided to sneak into my party and deceive me last fall.” He dared her to look away, but she didn’t. And that only made him want to reach out and get his hands on her again—the very opposite of what he should have wanted. “It is up to you how you would like to serve your time, that is all.”
“How appealing.” Her voice was crisp, her violet gaze sharp. “It’s becoming less and less of a mystery how the most eligible bachelor in the world has remained single and unattached all this time.”
Teo did not spend a great deal of time questioning himself. There was no need—he was the Duke. That was the beginning and the end of it and there was no one in his life who dared question him.
Much less mock him.
To his face.
He could not say he enjoyed the experience, not least because it forced him to face the fact that he was perhaps more precious than he’d always imagined he was. Because for a hot, wild moment, all he could focus on was his need to make her pay for her temerity—and surely a man of his stature should have been secure enough in his place to laugh off rudeness and slights alike.
Then again, the method of payment he had in mind had nothing to do with laughter.
He reminded himself that he had not brought her here, to the very top of a mountain his family had owned since the Crown of Aragon ruled the area in the twelfth century, to concern himself with her rudeness. It was her defiance he intended to conquer.
And would. Because his firstborn son would have his name. There was no other option.
“We have a certain chemistry,” he said now, which struck him as a vast understatement. The mouth he had so enjoyed last fall, so luscious and red, should not have called to him as it did now. Bare and unsmiling. Her hair a disaster. Her gaze insolent at best. “Some marriages start with far less than that.”
“Marriages that took place in the first century, perhaps.” Amelia pushed to her feet then, bringing the soft throw with her and clutching it to her chest as if she was preserving her modesty. When she was still wearing all her clothes. “I understand that the Marinceli family is stuck in the past. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay there, Teo. Or that you have to drag me down with you.”
He’d been standing there over the sofa, looking down at her. And a gentleman would have stepped back as she rose, to give her space.
Teo had been raised a gentleman, but that didn’t seem to apply here. He couldn’t seem to access the manners that had been imprinted on him so long ago they were usually second nature to him. He didn’t move—and was instantly rewarded for that with the simple pleasure of watching her tilt her chin up. Then tip her head even farther back so she could raise her gaze to his—all the way up to where he towered above her.
He liked the way her cheeks flushed. And the way that curiously magnetic temper of hers lit the violet of her eyes, making them gleam all the brighter.
“The Marinceli family is timeless,” Teo said, almost amused. “It doesn’t matter what century it is, we endure.”
“Is that one o
f my choices? Because I’ll go ahead and pass on enduring right now. That sounds like a joyless march to a grim death. No, thank you.”
Teo blinked. No, thank you was not the typical response to any offer he made. It certainly wasn’t the expected reaction to an invitation to join the family. This woman was maddening.
He wanted to believe she was simply ignorant, but she had spent those years in Spain. With his father, and with him, too. There was no question that she might not know precisely who and what the Marincelis were.
Teo was perilously close to losing his self-control. “When you are ready to stop this foolishness, accept reality and take your place at my side, you are welcome to sleep with me in the bed.”
He watched the pulse in the base of her neck go wild. He felt an answering beat in his own neck. And far lower, where he was too hard, too ready.
Amelia took her time swallowing, delicate and deliberate at once. “You’re saying you want me to have sex with you.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice low. Dark and rich. “A great deal of sex, one can only hope. Have we not already demonstrated that that is what we do best?”
“We’ve demonstrated that we can do it,” she shot back. “But whether or not the one time makes it the best, I couldn’t possibly say.”
“I can think of a way to find out.”
Amelia sniffed as if the notion revolted her, but he was still too close to her. He could see the truth in her flushed skin, her dilated eyes.
“I get to sleep in the bed only if we’re having sex. Am I getting the terms of your little blackmail attempt right?”
Teo shrugged as if he didn’t care either way. He felt that he really shouldn’t have cared either way, but that did not appear to be in the cards.
“It’s not a blackmail attempt, cariña. It’s a choice. If you wish to share the bed, you must consider it the marital bed. That hardly seems unfair.”
“I have no intention of marrying you,” she said, with insulting directness. “Or sharing a bed with you. Under any circumstances whatsoever, Teo.”
Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella Page 8
