He was very tall, with dark hair and fathomless dark eyes, and every part of him was lean and hard and commanding. His shoulders were broad and his hips were narrow and when she thought of him she always imagined him in a crisp, bespoke suit made in some or other dark fabric.
Even though today he wore only a pair of trousers and the sort of T-shirt that looked casual and likely rivaled the cost of the vehicle she was driving.
He did casual clothing as effortlessly as he did business attire. Leontina hadn’t known that before now. It seemed a critical oversight on her part, because now there was no pretending that he didn’t have one of the finest male forms she had ever beheld—and she had made a study of the male form, in fact. As a part of her education.
Surely that was what the internet was for, even in a mean old man’s drafty castle.
But she looked up again and had to admit that despite the triumph of muscle and sinew that made him into something like art, it was his face that seemed to stake a claim deep within her. That stern, forbidding, uncompromising face.
She was already breathless, but thatfacemade it worse.
Those dark eyes of his looked black from a distance but she knew, close up, that they contained threads of gold and the hint of green. He had a nose that made her think of predatory things—raptors, perhaps. Or great hawks. His mouth was stern and unsmiling, but the trouble was, she knew what he could do with it.
It felt like minimizing him to say that he wasbeautiful, because a word like that could not begin to contain him or describe him. It was too…soft.
When everything about this man was hard. Looking at him felt the way she imagined it would feel to be a bit of coal crushed down into diamonds.
And yet, just like on the day of her brother’s wedding, she couldn’t bring herself to look away from him.
Pau Calixto, the man who had ruined her father, according to the whispers in the cellars. The man who was in cahoots with her surprisingly devious brother, a shock to all, but especially to Umberto, who had imagined he was making a deal with Pau himself.
Pau Calixto, the man who was, though he didn’t know it yet, the father of her baby.
Leontina forced herself to smile. She wished, suddenly, that she’d thought to pack something a little bit more elegant than the shapeless, serviceable dress she’d been wearing since leaving Tuscany.
But she couldn’t do anything about that. There was only this.
Her exit strategy whether he liked it or not.
“Hello, Pau,” she said, not exactly brightly. Though not, perhaps, as measured as she might have liked, either. “You might want to brace yourself. I’m afraid I’ve come with some potentially difficult news.”
Chapter Two
Pau Calixto couldsift through probabilities the way regular humans processed the need to breathe—at lightning speed in a near-muscular response—and he could think of only one potential reason that this woman would be on his doorstep like this.
This particular woman at this specific time.
Clearly without anything like an invitation and by his count, a solid three months after he’d last seen her in the wake of her brother’s wedding.
But he had not gotten anything in this world by getting ahead of himself.
Pau had received an alert that someone was approaching the house, having tripped the usual cameras. He had pulled up the feed and noted the vintage car with its Italian registration plate and had begun to draw conclusions based on that evidence alone. When he’d seen the woman behind the wheel, he’d felt a sense of triumph kick in—
Prematurely, he’d lectured himself.
That was ever a recipe for disappointment.
He’d made his way down to the front door, dismissing his hovering staff with a glance, because this was his project. This was his game to win or lose.
And Pau Calixto did not lose.
So all he did was go out and lean a bit in his doorway, here in this grand old folly of a house that his father had loved—perhaps more than he had ever loved another human, but Pau could not blame him for that. Not any longer.
After all, the old man had only ever had one friend in this life. And that had not exactly ended well for him.
“I thrive on difficult news,” he told his best friend’s younger sister, with the kind of calm that he knew could upend boardrooms full of peacocking billionaires who expected their big personalities to carry weight. “And had I known that you wished to visit me, Leontina, I would have extended an invitation. There can surely be no need to show up like this, so precipitously and without warning.”
She was no peacocking billionaire, like her father—though Pau thought that Umberto’s net worth had perhaps been downgraded quite a bit at this point. Umberto’s daughter did not sputter and huff the way he would have done. All Leontina did was smile.
