The Sicilian's Forgotten Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  But Cenzo had smiled, that was what she remembered chiefly from that first day. That smile. It was as if he’d carved it down the length of her spine with the dullest knife in his possession.

  “Meeting you is but a formality, cara,” he had said. “Our wedding, now I have agreed to it, is a foregone conclusion.”

  Josselyn, despite a lifetime of having the necessity for good manners at all costs pounded into her, had turned on her heel and run. Not into the sea, only off toward the woods, a choice she would have a lot of time to regret.

  Over the next year, she had spent entirely too much time remembering Cenzo’s laugh as she’d run, chasing her from the room. Following her into sleep. Disturbing her wherever she went.

  But her father had not been swayed by any arguments. He hardly acknowledged them, much less any talk of laughter. He had chosen Cenzo Falcone for his only daughter and that was an end to it.

  Josselyn had assured herself that this time, she might defy him. This time she would stand up to him, because surely—though he had spent years telling her of his plans to assure her safety even after he was gone, and what he expected her to do—he could not mean he truly expected her to marry a stranger.

  But he did.

  She had tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that while Cenzo was a stranger to her, their families had long been connected. Their fathers had been friends since university, and Archibald had spent time palling around with his friend and Cenzo’s mother in places like giddy London and the South of France. Long before Archibald had married Josselyn’s mother, then lost her. And before Cenzo’s father had died, as well.

  Archibald had told her these stories since she was a child. Surely, she thought that first year, the fact that she and the forbidding man she was to marry had both lost a parent should work in their favor. It should connect them, that enduring grief.

  She’d convinced herself it would.

  If she couldn’t change her father’s mind, it would.

  A year later, she had met Cenzo once again.

  This time, the occasion was their engagement party, to be held in a restaurant high in a Philadelphia skyscraper with views to die for and Michelin-starred food to tempt the well-heeled guests. Josselyn had not staged a protest, no matter how many times her friends offered to act as getaway drivers. She had been dressed and, she’d thought, prepared.

  Her schemes to escape her fate had all ended in nothing, because her tragedy was that she understood her father. She knew why he wanted her to do this archaic thing. And she had never managed to mount a satisfactory rebellion because she cared too much about him to hurt him. It had been only the two of them for so long, and they were the only ones who knew what they’d lost. They were the only ones who still felt the ghosts of Mirabelle Byrd Christie and young Jack wherever they went.

  Josselyn didn’t have it in her to defy him. Not when all that was required of her was no more than had been asked of countless women through the centuries.

  Including her own mother.

  That was the argument that had worked the best. The one that had allayed a great many of her fears. Because Mirabelle had been nineteen when she’d become engaged to Archibald, twenty when she’d married him, and barely twenty-one when she’d had Jack. Her notably stern father, Bartholomew Byrd, had arranged the match himself. Mirabelle had famously sobbed on her wedding day and had locked herself in the bathroom of the fancy Philadelphia hotel that was the first stop on the couple’s honeymoon later that night.

  And yet despite such inauspicious beginnings, Josselyn’s parents had fallen in love.

  Trust me, her father had told Josselyn the morning of her engagement party. All I want for you is what your mother and I had.

  And Josselyn had wanted that too. Really, she did, she’d decided. She’d taken care with her outfit, choosing a gown that she was certain could only please the implacable man she was to marry. Even if it did not, because men were nothing if not inscrutable, she felt confident it would look beautiful in all the society pages and her father would feel honored by her acquiescence. She had lectured herself, repeatedly, to remain openhearted. To trust in her father, as he’d asked, because surely he would never choose for her a man who was truly as harsh and inhuman as Cenzo seemed to be.

  Remember, she had told herself, you have that connection.

  She’d ordered herself to cast aside all the gossipy tidbits she’d collected about him over the past year. The many stunning and often famous ex-lovers, all of whom seemed broken when he finished with them. Broken, yet never spiteful, no matter how publicly he had tossed them aside. Josselyn knew too many things about him. A collection of details that together created an overwhelmingly ferocious mosaic and did nothing at all to calm her fears. Like his father before him, Cenzo had come to the States for his education, spending his formative years at Choate before going on to Yale. At Yale he had distinguished himself as a great intellect and excellent football player, then had gone on to Harvard Business School, where he parlayed a small fraction of his fortune into the beginnings of the multinational Fortune 500 company he had sold off five years back. For another fortune, and then some.

  They claimed he’d done it simply to prove he could. That a man born with too many silver spoons to count had made his own.

  Where Cenzo Falcone walked, the Italian papers liked to claim, the earth shook.

  Josselyn had laughed at that in the privacy of her bedroom in her father’s house. But she had not laughed when Cenzo had arrived that night to pick her up. For she was sure that she could feel the ground beneath her feet buckle when he strode inside.

  He had studied her as if she was a bit of livestock on the auction block.

  And despite herself, Josselyn had found that she was biting her tongue, hoping that he did not find her wanting.

  Cenzo had not spoken. He was a vision of rampant masculinity, somehow elegant and breathtakingly ruthless at once. His evening clothes only seemed to call attention to the width of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, and the wide swathe of muscled chest in between. Most men of Josselyn’s acquaintance looked somehow antiseptic in evening clothes, but not so Cenzo. He seemed to burn bright where he stood. He was alarmingly raw and shockingly vital, so that it was hard to look at him directly.

  She’d had the unnerving notion that though this man might pretend that he was civilized, though his blood ran hot with the dawn of too many civilizations to count, he was not.

  He was not.

  A notion that was only compounded when he, still silent, came to take her hand.

  Josselyn had frozen still, even though his touch had made a new, insistent heat roar through her. But it was good that she hadn’t leaped away at his touch, because he was not caressing her or making advances. He was not holding her hand. He was sliding a ring into place.

  “The ring has been in my family for too many generations to count,” he had informed her, his ancient eyes gleaming with a light she could not have begun to read, though it made her skin prickle. “It is always worn by the bride of the eldest Falcone son and heir.”

  As if she lived in a cave and had never heard of the Sicilian Sky.

  Standing in her wedding reception, Josselyn looked down at the famous deep blue diamond. It was a remarkable heirloom, passed down for centuries and possessed of its own myths. It had been stolen in the sixteenth century but recovered after much accusation and suffering. There had been duels to procure it, intrigue and backstabbing across generations. And it was no dainty, elegant ring. It looked like what it was. A twelve-carat stamp of ownership in the ornate setting it had enjoyed since the Industrial Revolution. The mark of the ferocious clan who had wrested power from almost every European government that had ever existed, yet had both lived and thrived.

  It had fit Josselyn’s finger perfectly.

  Today, Cenzo had slid a deceptively simple band of gol
d onto her finger. His expression in the church had been grim. His eyes had glittered while his absurdly male jaw had been hard. His vows had fallen against her like threats.

  But it was that band of gold that seemed to Josselyn to be made of concrete, even now. She looked down at her hand and it no longer looked like hers. Not with that blue diamond weighing down her hand. Not with that gold ring that declared her a wife.

  His wife.

  The music stopped playing and Josselyn looked up to see what was happening in this reception of hers. Only to find everyone looking at her with varying degrees of pity and speculation. She looked around to see Cenzo—her new husband, God help her—moving through the crowd that fell back to allow him through. Like a knife through butter.

  Directly at her.

  She told herself it was excitement. Hope. Even happiness. But the truth was that as he bore down upon her, a look of hard triumph on his face, Josselyn felt as if she was on the verge of a full-scale panic attack.

  But she could not allow it, no matter how her heart pounded.

  Pull yourself together, she ordered herself. She looked to the side, possibly in search of the nearest exit, but instead her gaze fell on her father. Archibald, beaming at what he saw before him. Filled with all the hope and happiness she couldn’t feel herself.

  Josselyn reminded herself, again, why it was she did this thing.

  It was for the man who had raised her so gently in the wake of her mother’s and brother’s deaths. The man who had not fobbed her off to nannies or servants as she knew so many in his position would have.

  The man who had dried her tears, who had held her and comforted her.

  Now it was her turn. This was her chance to comfort him.

  And so when Cenzo Falcone—the beautiful calamity she had married today and who might well be the end of her—stopped before her and extended his hand, Josselyn smiled. Brightly, as if this truly was the happiest day of her life.

  Then she screwed up her courage and took it, letting him lead her away from all she’d ever known.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CENZO FALCONE BURNED.

  And his wife’s hand in his had not helped matters any.

  Hours later, high above the Atlantic in one of his fleet of private jets, he sat in his office while his palm yet stung. He flexed it, scowling down at his own flesh when what he wanted was to storm down the length of the plane and find her. And make her account for her unexpected effect on him.

  Josselyn had politely excused herself not long after they’d taken off, eyes demurely downcast—no doubt to hide her skepticism of this whole enterprise, and he could not have said he blamed her—and Cenzo had let her go.

  Graciously. Magnanimously.

  Because she might as well get used to the fact that she was his wife before he showed her what their marriage would entail.

  That same old roaring thing in him stirred anew.

  Cenzo called it his dragon. The beast that lived in him and had done since his father had taken his own life. The creature that roared and spouted fire, clawed and fought, and had led him here at last. To Archibald Christie and the one and only thing he held dear.

  My daughter is my one true treasure, the old man had said when he’d had the temerity to contact Cenzo. When he had seemed wholly unaware of the damage his inattention had done when it mattered most. I hope I can entrust her to your care.

  And Cenzo had known his duty as a Falcone—the last Falcone in his branch of the ancient family—from a very young age. Regardless of his feelings on the subject, he knew that he must marry. It was up to him to continue the bloodline. To make certain that the Falcone legacy did not end with him, nor get shunted off to one of the distant cousins his mother always called those circling vultures no matter how obsequious they were.

  Still, he had always assumed that he would do that particular duty...later.

  Much later.

  But when Archibald Christie had made his astonishing offer, there was not one single part of Cenzo that could refuse it. Because it was immediately clear to him that there could be only one thing better than taking out his revenge on the old man who deserved whatever he got, and it was this.

  He would destroy the daughter instead, and make Archibald live with that for the rest of his miserable life.

  A task that he would have set himself to with the same intensity no matter the circumstances, but one that had taken on a different shape since the day he’d actually met the daughter in question. He had seen any number of pictures. Once he had agreed to come to Archibald in his remote summer retreat in deepest Maine, Cenzo had studied up on the girl. He wanted to know everything about her. He wanted to learn her inside and out.

  Because the more he knew, the more he could use it against her.

  And against her vile father.

  He had seen from the pictures that she was lovely. Lovelier than the daughter of his enemy had any right to be, he had thought when he’d seen the first round of photographs. And far more attractive than those bloodless Americans usually were, always swanning around so enamored of their history when it amounted to very little in the grand scheme of things. Cenzo could trace his family to the Holy Roman Empire. What was anything American but a blink of an eye next to that?

  What he had not been prepared for was the reality of his enemy’s daughter, standing there looking like some kind of beach bum that day in Maine. Unstudied. Artless. He had expected her to vamp a bit. To make at least some attempt to flirt with him, for that was what women did when they found themselves alone with the great Cenzo Falcone.

  Instead, Josselyn Christie had looked at him as if he defied understanding—and not in the way he usually did, by simple virtue of being himself—and had run.

  It had troubled him all throughout the following year as he’d set about making his arrangements and, far more daunting, preparing his embittered mother to accept what must happen. He had pored through the reports his people delivered on Josselyn, looking for scandals. Anything to shift the balance, to make the daughter at least as compromised as her father, and best of all—to give him ammunition.

  He did not care to ask himself why he, Cenzo Falcone, required ammunition to deal with a poor little heiress being sold into his keeping.

  And in any case, there was nothing.

  There was only the stain of her, seeped deep into his skin, surprising him at the strangest moments.

  Then came their engagement party, when he had bestowed upon her the Sicilian Sky that he had only before then seen gracing his own mother’s hand. The stone that had caused as much trouble as it ever had joy. More, perhaps. Such was the weight of history.

  But what purpose is there in joy, his father had liked to say, if it does not carry with it the weight of sorrow? You cannot have one without the other, mio figlio. They only make sense when they are fused together into one.

  His mother had always been the more severe of his parents, and rarely worried herself overmuch about the unlikely appearance of any joy. Though Cenzo knew that Françoise Falcone did not consider herself dour so much as realistic—and French.

  And since her husband’s death, the Widow Falcone had also felt that it was her sacred duty to protect the Falcone name—and interests—at any cost. She had not wished to hand over the ring to an upstart American, no matter what Cenzo planned to do with her.

  The stone is worth a fortune or two, certainly, Françoise had said, back when it was valued for a mere fifty-five million euros. But its true value is that others covet it. And the more they covet it, the shinier it seems. This has always been so. The myth of it makes it far more valuable than any mere piece of jewelry.

  And she had always made it clear that while not every woman had risen to the occasion of wearing such an iconic heirloom throughout its storied history, she did not intend to fall beneath its weight. Nor had she. She had still worn
it years after Cenzo’s father had died, spine straight and tall, her eyes forever trained on the glory of the Falcone name. And had required no little coaxing to relinquish it when Cenzo had asked, though she had claimed that had everything to do with its intended new recipient and nothing at all to do with the fact she’d grown to consider it truly hers.

  The ring is only ever on loan, Maman, Cenzo had murmured. It can never truly belong to anyone.

  She had shaken with the force of her distaste. It is the chain of custody that I find objectionable. And perverse.

  He had not had to remind her that the ring was his by rights, and had been since his father had drawn his final breath. He had not needed to.

  And he had resented how it looked on Josselyn’s finger, how it caught a new light. He had more than resented it—he’d told himself he had actively disliked it. That it was dislike that had moved in him, forging a new path of fire.

  What else could it have been?

  But now he was suspended between the moon and the vast ocean below, and he was not a liar. Not even to himself. Not ever. He might have pretended there in the foyer of her father’s house, because the ring on her finger had disconcerted him. He was too attuned to its history, perhaps. He was too aware of the things that tended to happen when the ring changed hands. Wars and ruin, horror and shame...though not in recent centuries.

  He had lied and told himself that his reaction was nothing but distaste for the task before him, however necessary. But the engagement party had told him the truth. There had been dancing, because there was always dancing at these things no matter what year it was. Old formalities never died. And because it was expected, he had led his fiancée to the floor so that other wealthy people could gawp at them.

  A public service, he had told himself, as none of the guests were the sort who liked to read the society pages to see things they believed they ought to have witnessed in person.

  That night, Josselyn’s dark hair had been glossy, caught up at the nape of her neck in something quietly elegant—complicated enough to suggest a bit of drama without actually committing to it. Her dress had been a revelation after the beach clothes he’d seen her in before. There was no disguising her figure in the gown she’d chosen, a sweep of red held at one shoulder by a clasp of sparkling jewels.