Leontina, quite obviously, knew exactly what suited her.
She’d been a dream come true, all sex and elegance.
It wasn’t only that. Now that he considered it, she hadn’t spoken to anyone else at that wedding, aside from the briefest interaction with her father and a few words with her brother and new sister-in-law after the ceremony.
A lot like she’d been focused on Pau—and only Pau—all along.
He had to sit with that, because it had literally never occurred to Pau that it was remotely possible that his best friend’s younger sister, famously sheltered and hidden away in an actual castle with a drawbridge, could possibly have her own agenda.
And had enacted this agenda. Was enacting it now, he rather thought.
Pau found himself walking over to the dinner table in something of a daze. He took his seat and found his wineglass, though a taste of his family’s finest vintage did nothing to clear his head.
She had been innocent. He had known that going in, but in the moment it had taken precious little to convince her to come along with him. He had felt the wildfire chemistry between them too and had chalked it all up to that unexpected connection, but it had all been…smooth. Especially once she kissed him and set it all in motion. And he had been so focused on the end result that it hadn’t occurred to him to question whatshewas doing.
But now he saw her. He truly saw all of her.
Pau thought about how she had taken charge in his office, kissing him in a way she had to have known would lead exactly where it had led.
He thought about how the same thing had happened at her father’s castle. Leontina had been the one to sway closer to him as it got dark. She had been the one to put her hand on his arm and she had also been the one to press her lips against his.
And he’d taken it from there—but Pau had always been good at probabilities. He wasn’t certain how he’d missed them so completely this time.
But he could calculate them swiftly as he took in his wife’s happy expression as she ate. Bordering oncontent, even, in circumstances that should have been a bit more delicate, surely. A bit harder to come to terms with.
Pau understood at last that she’d been playing him all along. That she’d walked into that wedding reception with every intention of making happen what had, indeed, happened. Over and over and over again that night.
And that meant a great number of things, all of which he would need to sort through.
But tonight, he could only focus on the most important of those things.
She had been playing him this entire time while he’d actually felt some measure of shame that he’d seduced her the way he had. He’d had his reasons for doing it, but he’d still felt bad about the whole thing.
Once again, he thought about that memory that had surfaced earlier, of her showing him how she could hide in plain sight. How she could hideherselfso that people could look at her and see right through her.
How she had shown him exactly how she did it.
And yet he had never put those things together. Until tonight.
Now he finally realized that she’d been seducing him in turn. That it had all gone swimmingly because they werebothseducingeach other.
The only difference now was that she didn’t know that he’d figured her out.
He sat with that all through dinner.
“You let me know when you’re finished being brooding and silent,” she said to him, soothingly, when dinner was finished. She had one hand on her belly and he thought she did that unconsciously now. Holding on to the child as she got up from her seat and stood there. He liked that more than he should have.
But he said nothing in reply, and that made her laugh again.
Not, he thought, the way an innocent caught up in a game she hadn’t understood she was playing would act. If he was certain of nothing else, he was certain of that.
“Very well, then,” she said. “I’ll go back to tracking down clues about you in all the books you left with weathered pages and broken spines. I wonder which one of us will know the other one better when I’m done, Pau.”
Something in him roared at that, though he couldn’t tell if it was a warning or simply a reaction. Not that it mattered.
He listened to her footsteps as she walked away, back down the hallway, and likely back to a stack of books to lose herself in. He didn’t call her out. He didn’t tell her he knew what she’d been doing.
Instead, he thought, why not keep playing the role he’d already been castigating himself about?
