Especially when there were too many of thosepressure pointsstill, bearing down on him in ways he couldn’t explain away. No matter how he tried.
Still, the fact that Giaco was under the same roof made Pau feel a lot as if this house was still a monastery. He thought he’d shower, see if he needed to put something cold on his face, and call it a night.
But when he went into his bedroom to change out of his clothes, he stopped dead, because she was there.
Leontina was in his bed, her dark hair spread out on the pillow and her eyes closed, looking like every fantasy he’d ever pretended he didn’t have of her. She looked like a painting. Painfully perfect and bright—
And then she made it that much better when she opened her eyes as if she sensed him standing there at the foot of the bed.
“I was going to come find you,” he said, though until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he’d been lying to himself aboutcalling it a night. That he could no longer imagine a night without her.
That he would have found her tonight no matter if Giaco was sleeping across her doorframe.
The smile she gave him then bore no resemblance to that false one she trotted out on social occasions, and it only became more precious to him the more he saw it. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this,” she told him. “Why are we in different wings of this enormous, sprawling house? It’s tedious, Pau. And soon enough, I will be entirely too large to be waddling all around, trying to find you every evening.”
That simply, that easily, the whole night seemed to coalesce inside him. His lip was split still, and tender. He did not need to look in the mirror to know that his eye was likely blackening with every breath.
And yet, somewhere inside his chest, it was like he was someone new. Things between Giaco and him had been solved—despite his friend’sknowing looksthat he still could not entirely define—and that could only be a good thing. But it was a weight he hadn’t entirely understood he was carrying, not really. Not until now, when it was gone.
And now there was Leontina. In his bed, where every last part of him seemed to shout that she belonged.
He didn’t know why he was so determined to fight the very thing he’d wanted to happen. That he’d made happen. That he had envisioned being, perhaps, more distant than this—but why was he opposed to a marriage that, run probabilities though he did, he could only describe as significantly healthier than most of the other ones he’d ever witnessed?
Including his own parents’ marriage, which had always seemed more businesslike to him than anything else, though not for his mother’s lack of trying. After she had left him for her current life in Melbourne, Australia—where she assured her son, when she bothered to ring, that she was much-adored by her many lovers and did not care to ever return to Spain, where she had withered on the not-exactly-proverbial vine—Pau thought his father had been pleased.
No need to evenpretendto care about anything but the vineyard.
He’d been barely ten when she’d left and he’d always vowed that should he marry, even if it was for purely business-related reasons, there would be nowithering.
Yet here was Leontina, ripe with his child and in his bed, and he was standing about questioning…anything?
“I will inform the staff to move you in at once,” he told her, perhaps more intently than necessary. He saw the answering heat in her green eyes. “After all, Leontina, we are husband and wife.”
“Indeed we are,” she agreed, her gaze grave. She sat up and he saw that she was wearing one of those silken little gowns that he’d discovered he quite enjoyed. Slinky little straps on the shoulder and then slippery silk everywhere else. Her belly looked tighter, rounder, tonight. Her hair tumbled down around her and the scent of it teased his senses.
Pau was convinced that he had seen no greater beauty in all his days.
“There is something I have to tell you, Pau,” she said, and her gaze grew even more serious.
“That sounds rather dire,” he pointed out. “I hope this conversation will come with fewer face punches. I believe I’ve had my fill for the evening.”
“I don’t know if it is dire or not,” Leontina replied, sounding as if she was choosing her words with care. “Or rather, I have felt terribly guilty about this for months. I’ve wrestled with myself about whether or not to tell you at all. It could be that telling you is purely selfish. Yet part of me thinks that if I tell you, even if you find it difficult to forgive me right now, you will in time. Another part of me thinks that the sin was mine and so, too, should this be mine to live with.”
“I think you had better tell me what it is,” Pau said, though he suspected he knew. Because, as he had told her once already, he somewhat doubted that the girl who had saved herself for her brother’s wedding, and had then spent that whole, long, transformative night in his arms the way she had, could then…wander off into a life of scandal and excess within a few months. Still. He already knew this woman, his wife, contained more multitudes than most. “Because the more you explain it without telling me, the more dire it seems.”
Leontina blew out a breath. She folded her hands over her belly, and for a moment he thought he saw pure anguish in her eyes.
Pau found he hated it.
“My brother came here because he was convinced you’d somehow tricked me,” she told him with great solemnity. “That you took advantage of my innocence and used it against me.”
“I believe that most people will assume that’s exactly what I did,” he told her, though he could feel that pressure within him, seeming toexpandas she gazed at him. “I am not sure that isn’t a perfectly valid description of what happened.”
“Well, it isn’t. You didn’t take advantage of me at all.” She said that fiercely. Unapologetically, even. “I had every intention of seducing you that night, Pau. I’d read up on it.”
“You’dread up on it?” he asked, doing his best not to laugh. Then found that he was stunned that hewantedto laugh in the first place. It was as if the real price of this marriage was becoming the sort of man he’d never thought he was allowed to be. Not when there was so much work to be done and the family honor to uphold. But he shoved that aside. “Where did you read up on it, may I ask?”
“The internet is a font of information,” she told him, frowning slightly. “With a great many illustrations. I knew that you’d attend the wedding. I read up on you, too. It was all part of my plan. I knew that my father was going to try to marry me off and I decided that I wanted to choose my own destiny.”
