And then shecouldn’tmove, because she felt swamped with self-recrimination. Because she couldn’t help but think they ought to have been falling in love. That they might have been.
But the fact remained that she was a liar on a fundamental level.
And clearly Pau knew that—whether consciously or unconsciously—because that had not been the demeanor of a happy, expectant father.
Leontina hated herself, and that was no new feeling.
Her father had made it clear that she was to blame for her mother’s death, and maybe this was why. Maybe Umberto had been uniquely positioned to see exactly what sort of terrible person his daughter was, because he’d watched what she’d done to her own mother.
She felt the tears come and she wiped them away furiously, because she didn’t deserve them. How could she live with herself now, knowing that this, too, was her fault? How could she live with herself knowing—even worse—that because of her manipulations, she was really no better than her father after all?
When she’d been socertainthat she was better?
This had all seemed like a reasonable game to play, once upon a time. She’d wanted an escape plan. Pau had been an excellent candidate. It had helped that she’d felt an instant attraction to him when she’d seen him.
Now he was not only her husband, and her lover, but the father of their son.
None of it seemedreasonableanymore.
She tried to go back to sleep, resolved that she would go ahead and tell him the truth, because it had to be better for it all to be out in the open. Even if he hated her for a time, she thought he might come around eventually, and at least that way they would be built on something real. Not these lies.
Surely it would be worth blowing everything up if it meant they could start fresh and becomereal.
But in the days that followed, there never seemed to be a good time to tell him. The harvest took all of his attention during the day and when he came to her it was in the dark, late at night, and the wild passion between them seemed at a fever point.
She thought maybe she was at her fever point too, or maybe she was simply a coward, because she couldn’t seem to bring herself to throw a bomb into the middle of things as they were.
Leontina told herself that the slower seasons would come soon enough, and she would find the right moment there. In the quiet. In the cold before their child was born.
Maybe then it would be the sort of bomb they’d survive.
It was the beginning of her second month in Spain, halfway through October, when a different bomb altogether strolled into the old monastery, charmed his way past the staff who should have been better prepared to hold off intruders—even the sparkling kind—and walked in on Leontina and Pau as they shared one of their dinners. This night they were clustered close together on a small balcony, festooned everywhere with lantern light, in defiance of the chill in the air.
“How cozy,” said Giaco, lounging bonelessly in the entryway, his eyes that were so like Leontina’s taking in the scene. Leontina herself was frozen solid.
She thought it was something like panic.
“I’ve heard the most extraordinary rumor,” her brother continued when neither one of them managed to offer a greeting. “I usually ignore anything that comes out of our father’s appalling mouth. But he did insist that in defiance of all logic, my biddable, obedient sister had finally run away from his tender ministrations and paternal devotion. This seemed unlikely enough. Imagine my surprise, when I convinced Umberto’s security detail to tell me what they’d found when they investigated it, that all signs seemed to indicate that my baby sister was shacked up with my best friend in what I can only imagine—for my sanity and your continued ability to draw breath, Pau—is a deeply platonic relationship. They have, naturally, decided to delay telling my father this until someone could come in person and lo, I nominated myself to be that person.”
His gaze dropped, almost lazily, to where Pau had taken Leontina’s hand over the table some while ago to fiddle with the wedding rings he’d put there, as had become his habit.
Leontina couldn’t breathe. Pau seemed to have gone to stone.
But her brother, as always, was not similarly encumbered.
“Tell me,” Giaco said, with a smile that went nowhere near his eyes, too intensely focused were they on his best friend in all the world, “why I shouldn’t I kill you here and now?Brother?”
Chapter Six
Pau stood immediately. It felt as if he’d been beset by some terrible, sudden onset arthritis like the kind that had plagued his grandmother in the end. It made the whole of his body ache. It made him wonder for a moment if his legs would hold beneath him and keep him upright.
Maybe there was a part of him that wished he truly would collapse—and the cowardice in that notion almost knocked him sideways all on its own.
Because the truth was, he had always known this moment would come. He had simply wished there would be more time before it arrived. He’d wanted the child to be here in the world with them, the better to take his little family before her father to show him how fully and completely the old man had lost his grip.
How useless his little plots were.
How pointless he was, in the end—the way that he’d made Bernat feel.
