Pau could act like the dark seducer he thought he’d been for her. It wasn’t any kind of hardship. Staying away from her was the hard part—and why should he bother? He had only been doing it as he felt he owed it to her, as some kind of apology for having seduced her into this mess.
But he hadn’t, had he?
He took another pull from his wine, and started calculating the best line of attack.
Because an attack it was, and Pau had always been excellent at building an offensive.
And maybe, while he was at it, he’d fuck the truth right out of her at last.
Chapter Five
As cold, distant, and relentlessly practical as their first week together had been, that was how outrageously, dangerously hot it all became as the season mellowed deeper into a vibrant fall.
Because Pau had shifted everything after that scene in his office. He’d swept her up into his arms and carried her to his bedroom, where there was no sign ofpracticalitiesor coolness of any kind.
It was almost as if he’d decided to make every night like that first night, to see if he could literally take her apart that way—
But she told herself she was being dramatic. It was just that he’d finally accepted the wildfire chemistry between them, that was all. If she found him ferocious in his need, brimming with an intensity that would have been too much if she didn’t want him with the same deep fervor—well.
She told herself that it only proved that she’d been right all along. There wassomethingbetween them after all. There was this fire that only seemed to burn brighter and hotter every night.
That was enough, she assured herself. It was more than she’d ever had before. It had to be enough.
It was harvest time and Calixto Estates was very busy. The vineyards were always buzzing and the house itself was never as quiet as it had been the week leading up to their wedding. Sometimes Leontina wondered what might have happened if she’d simply waited and let events unfold as they would. Would all of this activity have swept her up in it anyway? Would she have felt differently about things if she’d seen Pau in action, pitching in to help with his own two hands? Would she have learned to think of the land first, the way he did?
Because she was fairly certain that he could have left those things to the hired hands and seasonal workers who worked the harvest every year, but he didn’t. He liked to be out there in the middle of everything. She thought, after growing up with Umberto, who never dirtied his own hands with anything, she would have found this impressive.
She would have felt even guiltier about tricking such a good man into marriage.
But Leontina would never know for sure because, once again, she hadn’t waited to see what would happen after their wedding ceremony. She hadn’t kept a respectful distance the way Pau had intended that they would. She’d jumped in and made things happen, which she would have said was not her personality at all—
Except it appeared that it was. Where he was concerned, anyway.
And yet she was just as happy that things had gone the way they were supposed to, she thought one morning as she woke in her usual state of dazed, dark pleasure in Pau’s bed.
She stretched and confirmed that he had already left the bed and the room, which was typical. The man never seemed to sleep much. And Leontina knew this because he kept her up half the night, every night. Because there seemed to be no limit to the ways they could explore all the different shades and temperatures of the wildfire that only seemed to blaze hotter between them the more they indulged it.
Most mornings she felt seared through, head to toe and back again.
Because once the man decided to do something, apparently—he did it full on.
This particular morning, she found her hands on her belly as she murmured her usual greetings to the child she carried. She was aware that her bump seemed bigger now. Just as she was aware that for all her talk of choices, the only ones that truly mattered now were the ones she made for and about this child.
Even if it didn’t seem that way in the middle of the night when all she could seem to do was sob out Pau’s name and beg him for more.
She sat up in his bed and basked in the light that beamed in from the bank of windows set into the old stone walls. Everything was rendered golden like honey, and she felt as if she was bathed in it as she padded over to those windows and looked down, her gaze moving over the usual bustle of activity below. When she found Pau there, right in the thick of things, she felt that familiar pang go through her once again.
It was becoming a part of her now, that sharp ache. That mixture of longing and guilt, breathlessness and shame that seemed fused to her bones.
And yet looking at him was a balm as much as it sometimes felt like a punishment—because she knew she didn’t deserve this man. Even from her vantage point, she couldfeelthat air of command and certainty he wore the way other men wore their shirts. She could see the way the others looked to him, leaped to do his bidding, and always seemed pleased to be near him.
She was familiar with those sentiments.
The whole world knew that Pau Calixto was a good man. He had made his straightforwardness and moral code central to his success. He had made it clear that there were no skeletons in his closet, nor ever would be.
This was why her father had worked so hard to rehabilitate her brother’s image, thinking it would convince Pau that the Tavian family was not as reprehensible as most assumed thanks to Giaco’s behavior. And Umberto’s behavior, Leontina had thought—though had never dared say—because no one who’d met the man had anything nice to say about him unless they wanted something from him.
It was almost poetic that she was the one who had come along and put Pau’s moral goodness to the test, she thought. Maybe the snide papers had been right all along when they’d talked about the Tavian family’s deep rot within—they’d just got the wrong sibling.
