Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  As if she could be tossed from this chamber at any moment to her death far below.

  Angelina couldn’t breathe. But then, she suspected that was the point.

  She only dimly realized that Benedetto had let go of her hand when she’d walked inside the room. Now he stood in the doorway that led out to the rest of the suite and its more modern, less stark conveniences.

  Perhaps that was the point, too. That inside this chamber, there was nothing but her marriage bed, a fire that would not be lit this time of year, and the constant reminder of the precariousness of her situation.

  And between her and the world, him.

  “Is this where it happens, then?” She turned to look at him, and thought she saw a muscle tense in his jaw. Or perhaps she only wished she did, as that would make him human. Accessible. Possessed of emotions, even if she couldn’t read them. “Is this where you bring your wives, one after the next? Is this where you make them all scream?”

  “Every woman I have ever met screams at one point or another, Angelina,” he said, and there was a kind of challenge in his gaze. A dark heat in his voice. “A better question is why.”

  But that impossible heat pulsed inside her, and Angelina didn’t ask. She moved over to the bed and as she moved, remembered with a jolt that she was still dressed in her wedding gown. And between her legs, that pulsing desire he had cultivated in her thought it had all the answers already. She ran her hand over the coverlet when she reached it, not at all surprised to find that what she’d seen gleaming there in the dark red linens were precious stones. Rubies. Hard to the touch.

  She pressed her palm down flat so that the nearest precious stone could imprint itself there. She gave it all her weight, as if this was a dream, and this was a kind of pinch that might jolt her awake.

  Did she want to wake up? Or would it be better still to dream this away?

  You keep thinking something can save you, something in her mocked her. When you should know better by now.

  Angelina’s palm ached, there where the hard stone dug into her flesh. And the man who watched her too intently from across the room was no dream.

  She already knew too well the kind of magic he could work on her when she was wide awake.

  Outside, she could hear the thunder of the sea. The disconcerting summer sky stretched off into the horizon.

  But here in this castle filled with the plunder and fragments of long-ago lives, she was suspended in her white dress. Between the bloodred bed and the husband who stood like a wall between her and what remained of her girlhood. Of her innocence.

  Whatever was left of it.

  And suddenly, she wanted to tear it all off. She wanted to pile all the girlish things that remained inside her into that fireplace, then light a match.

  Angelina was tired of being played with. She was tired of that dark, mocking gleam in his eye and that sardonic curve to his mouth. Of being led through a castle cut off from the mainland by a man who trafficked in nightmares.

  She’d married him in a veil, but he had peeled it back when he claimed her mouth with his, there in front of witnesses.

  She wanted to burn that down, too. No more veils of lace or ignorance.

  If this was her life, or what remained of it, she would claim it as best she could.

  She pressed her palm down harder on the coverlet, until it ached as much as she did between her legs.

  Then Angelina faced the husband she couldn’t quite believe was going to kill her like the rest. But she had to know if that was the real dream. Or a false sense of security six other women had already felt, standing right where she was now.

  “I don’t want to talk about screaming,” she said.

  He looked amused. “That is your loss.”

  “I have a question, Benedetto.”

  She thought he knew what she wanted to ask him. There was that tightening in his jaw. And for a moment, his black eyes seemed even darker than usual.

  “You can ask me anything you like,” he said.

  She noticed he did not promise to answer her.

  But Angelina focused on the question that was burning a hole inside her. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened to the six who came before me?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “AS YOU WISH,” Benedetto said. His own voice was a rumbling thing in the bedchamber of stone, like thunder. Though outside it was a mild summer afternoon inching its way towards evening. “If you feel the shade of the marital bed is the place for such conversations.”

  He did not wish. He would prefer not to do this part of the dance—and he would particularly prefer not to do it with her.

  The things he wanted to do with her deserved better than a castle made of unbreakable vows to dead men. She deserved light, not darkness. She deserved a whole man, not the part he played.

  His still-innocent angel, who came apart so beautifully while the sea closed in around them. His curious Angelina, who would open doors she shouldn’t and doom them both—it was only a matter of time.

  His brand-new wife, who thought he was a killer, and still faced him like this.

  Benedetto had expected her to be lovely to look at and reasonably entertaining, because she’d showed both at her dinner table the night they’d met. He had developed a deep yearning for her body over the course of the past month.

  But he didn’t understand how she’d wedged herself beneath his skin like this.

  It wasn’t going to end well. That he knew.

  It never did.

  And he had a feeling she was going to leave her mark in a way the others never had.

  “Do you do the same thing every time?” she asked, as if she knew what he was thinking.

  Benedetto couldn’t quite read her, then. It only made him want her more. There was a hint of defiance in the way she stood and in the directness of her blue gaze. The hand on the wide bed shook slightly, but she didn’t move it. Or hide it.

  And he could see fear and arousal all over her body, perhaps more entwined than she imagined. He didn’t share his father’s proclivities. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t admire the things trembling uncertainty mixed with lust could do to a pretty face.

  She tipped up her chin, and kept going. “Did you marry them all in bright white dresses, then bring them here to this room of salt and blood?”

  It was a poetic description of the chamber, and he despised poetry. But it was also the most apt description he’d ever heard of what he’d done to this room after his grandfather had died. Benedetto had gutted it and removed every personal item, every hint of the man who’d lived and died here, every scrap that a ghost might cling to.

  Because that was what he and his grandfather had done together after his grandmother had died, and it seemed only right to continue in the same vein.

  And because he was haunted enough already.

  “Where else would I bring them?” he asked softly.

  “Tell me.” Her gaze was too bright, her voice too urgent. “Tell me who they were.”

  “But surely you already know. Their names are in every paper, in every language spoken in Europe and beyond.”

  “I want to hear you say them.”

  And Benedetto wanted things he knew he could never have.

  He wanted those nights in that stark conservatory in her father’s ruined house, the wild tangle of music like a cloud all around them, and her sweetness in his mouth. He had wished more than once over this past month that he could stop time and stay there forever, but of all the mad powers people whispered he possessed, that had never been one of them.

  And innocence was too easily tarnished, he knew. Besides, Benedetto had long since resigned himself to the role he must play in this game. Monster of monsters. Despoiler of the unblemished.

  He had long since stopped caring what the outside world thoug
ht of him. He had made an art out of shrugging off the names they called him. His wealth and power was its own fortress, and better still, he knew the truth. What did it matter what lesser men believed?

  What mattered was the promise he’d made. The road he’d agreed to follow, not only to honor his grandfather’s wishes, but to pay a kind of penance along the way.

  “And who knows?” his grandfather had said in his canny way. With a shrug. “Perhaps you will break your chains in no time at all.”

  Benedetto had chosen his chains and had worn them proudly ever since. But today they felt more like a death sentence.

  “My first wife was Carlota di Rossi,” he said now, glad that he had grown calloused to the sound of her name as it had been so long ago now. It no longer made him wince. “Her parents arranged the match with my grandfather when Carlota and I were children. We grew up together, always aware of our purpose on this planet. That being that we were destined to marry and carry on the dynastic dreams of our prominent families.”

  “Did you love her?”

  Benedetto smiled thinly. “That was never part of the plan. But we were friendly. Then they found her on what was meant to be our honeymoon. It was believed she had taken her own life, possibly by accident, with too many sleeping pills and wine.”

  “Carlota,” Angelina murmured, as if the name was a prayer.

  And Benedetto did not tell her the things he could have. The things he told no one, because what would be the point? No one wanted his memories of the girl with the big, wide smile. Her wild curls and the dirty jokes she’d liked to tell, just under her breath, at the desperately boring functions they’d been forced to attend together as teenagers. No one wanted a story about two only children who’d been raised in close proximity, always knowing they would end up married. And were therefore a kind of family to each other, in their way. The truth was Carlota was the best friend he’d ever had.

  But no one wanted truth when there was a story to tell and sell.

  Benedetto should have learned that by watching his parents—and their sensationalized deaths. Instead, he’d had to figure it out the hard way.

  “Everyone agrees that my second wife was a rebound,” he said as if he was narrating a documentary of his own life. “Or possibly she was the mistress I’d kept before, during, and after my first marriage.”

  He waited for Angelina to ask him which it was, but she didn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to know. And he doubted she would want to know the truth about the understanding he and Carlota had always had. Or how his second marriage had been fueled by guilt and rage because of it.

  Benedetto knew his own story backward and forward and still he got stuck in the darkest part of it. In the man he’d allowed himself to become. A man much more like his detestable father than he’d ever imagined he could become.

  When Angelina did not ask, he pushed on, his voice gritty. “Her name was Sylvia Toluca. She was an actress of some renown, at least in this country, and a disgrace to the Franceschi bloodline. But then, as most have speculated, that was likely her primary appeal. Alas, she went overboard on a stormy night in the Aegean after a well-documented row with yours truly and her body was never found.”

  “Sylvia,” his new wife said. She cleared her throat. “And I find I cannot quite imagine you actually…rowing. With anyone.”

  Benedetto detached himself from the wall and began to prowl toward her. His Angelina in that enormous white gown that bloomed around her like a cloud, with those dark pearls around her neck and eyes so blue they made the Italian sky seem dull by comparison.

  “I was much younger then,” he told her, his voice a low growl. “I had very little control.”

  He watched her swallow as if her throat hurt. “Not like now.”

  “Nothing like now,” he agreed.

  She swayed slightly on her feet, but straightened, still meeting his gaze. “I believe we’re up to number three.”

  “Monique LeClair, Catherine DeWitt, Laura Seymour.” Angelina whispered an echo of each of their names as he closed the distance between them. “All heiresses in one degree or another, like you. There were varying lengths of courtship, but yes, I brought each of them here once we married. All lasted less than three months. All disappeared, presumed dead, though no charges were ever brought against me.”

  “All of them.”

  He nodded sagely. “You would be surprised how many accidents occur in a place like this, where we are forever pitted against the demands of the sea. Its relentless encroachment.” He stopped only scant inches from where she stood, reaching over to trace her hand where it still pressed hard against the bejeweled coverlet. “The tide waits for no man. That is true everywhere, though it is perhaps more starkly illustrated here.”

  “Surely, after losing so many wives to the sea, a wise man would consider moving inland,” Angelina said in that surprising dry way of hers that was far more dangerous than the allure of her body or even her music. Those only meant he wanted her. But this… This made him like her. “Or better still, teach them to swim.”

  “Do you know how to swim?” he asked, almost idly, his finger moving next to hers on the bed.

  “I’m an excellent swimmer,” she replied, though her color was high and her voice a mere whisper. “I could swim all the way to Rio de Janeiro and back if I wished.”

  He watched the way her chest rose and fell, and the deepening flush that he could see as easily on her cheeks as on the upper slopes of her breasts.

  “I applaud your proficiency,” he said. “But I am only a man. I can control very few things in this life. And certainly not an ocean or a woman.”

  She did not look convinced.

  “And your last wife?” she asked, her breath sounding ragged as he began to trace a pattern from the hand on his bed up her arm, lazy and insinuating. “The sixth?”

  “Veronica Fitzgibbon.” Benedetto made a faint tsking sort of sound. “Perhaps the best-known of all my wives, before marrying me. You might even call her famous.”

  “More than famous,” Angelina corrected him softly as his hand made it to the fine, delicate bridge of her collarbone and traced it, purely to make her shiver. “I doubt there’s a person alive who cannot sing at least one of her father’s songs. And then she dated his drummer.”

  “Indeed. Scandalous.” He concentrated on that necklace of hers, then. The brooding pearls against the softness of her skin. The heat of her body, warming the stones.

  “She lasted the longest. Three months and two days,” Angelina whispered.

  He made himself smile. “See that? You do know. I thought you might.”

  “She crashed her car into a tree,” Angelina told him, though he already knew. He’d spent two days in a police station staring at the pictures of the wreckage as the authorities from at least three countries accused him of all manner of crimes. “On a mountain road in the Alps, though no one has ever been able to explain what she was doing there.”

  “There are any number of explanations,” Benedetto corrected her. “Most assume she was fleeing me. And that I was hot in pursuit, which makes for a delicious tale, I think you’ll agree.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “Alas, I was giving a very boring lecture at a deeply tedious conference in Toronto at the time.”

  “And how will I go, do you think?” she asked, a different sort of light in her blue eyes, then.

  He hated this. He had disliked it from the start, though a truth he’d had to face was that he’d found a certain joy in the details. The game of it. The end justifying the means. But here, now, with her and that bruised look on her face and his own heretofore frozen emotions unaccountably involved this time—he loathed it all.

  “I have already told you,” he said quietly. “We all die how we live. It is inevitable.”

  “But—”

  “A better question to ask,” he said quietly, cutting h
er off, “is why any woman would marry me, knowing these things. These assumptions and allegations that must be true, because they are repeated so often. There must be a fire after all this smoke, no? Why did you say yes, Angelina?”

  He watched, fascinated, as goose bumps shivered to life all over her skin. And she shifted, there where she stood. “I had no choice.”

  “Will we be starting this marriage off with lies?” Benedetto shook his head. “Of course you had a choice. Your father promised me a daughter. Not you in particular. Had you refused to marry me I had two others to choose from.”

  “My mother made it very clear that none of us were permitted to say no, no matter what.”

  “That must be it, then.” He didn’t quite smile. It was too hard, too furious a thing. “But tell me, Angelina, how do you rationalize away the many times you came apart in my hands?”

  “I don’t rationalize it.” Her blue eyes flashed. “I deplore it.”

  “I don’t think you do,” he told her, and he moved his hand to her jaw, tilting her head so that her mouth was where he wanted it. “I think you’re confusing hunger for something else. But then, you did spend all that time in the convent, did you not? I’m surprised you feel anything at all save shame.”

  “I have a full complement of emotions, thank you. Chief among them, revulsion. Fury. Disgust.”

  “I want you too, little one,” he said, there against her mouth. “I hear the seventh time is the charm.”

  She made a tiny little noise, protest and surrender at once, and then Benedetto took her mouth with his.

  Because a kiss did not lie. A kiss was not a story told around the world, losing more and more truth each time it was sold to the highest bidder.

  There was only truth here in the tangle of tongues. In the way her body shuddered beneath his hands. In the way she pressed herself against him, as if she would climb him if she could.

  He could taste her fear and her longing, her need and her hope.