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“Everyone told my grandmother that she was making a bad bet on one of those Furlans,” he said after a moment or two passed. “That it would all end in tears. But she defied them and did it anyway, to her sorrow.”
“Are you all so bad, then?” Annika smiled when his gaze moved back to hers, even though he looked remote again. “I thought it was only you.”
She was used to him smiling more these days. There was that crook in the corner of his mouth, but it went beyond that, too. Sometimes he grinned widely, the autumn sun pouring all over him as if the grin had summoned it. He laughed more and more as the days went by, usually a wicked, sensual sound, there against her skin.
The world might have been spinning them into another winter’s darkness, but between them, the light only grew.
Yet she was reminded that he was still Ranieri Furlan as he gazed back across the table now, his expression taking on that grave, grim coldness she knew so well. Even if she hadn’t seen it since they’d left New York.
And maybe it told her everything she needed to know about herself that seeing it now only made her shiver with delight. It made her want him, as if she had never had him at all.
It made her wonder why, exactly, she had told herself she hated him all these years. All these long years when he had always looked at her this way. When he had always been so inaccessible, so remote.
And all the while, there’d been this hunger deep inside her, just waiting for him to feed it.
But she had asked him a question and he was answering it. She tried to squirm in her chair unobtrusively.
“It is not that we are bad in the ways you might imagine,” he told her, his gaze dark. “On the contrary, we usually do quite well for ourselves. But sooner or later, we are presented with choices. And almost without exception, we choose our own pride over everything else.”
“You have to give me examples, Ranieri.” He had mentionedpridebefore, she was certain. But... “Pride can mean anything.”
She thought she saw his jaw tense. Or maybe she only wanted the excuse to reach over and touch him, to soothe him... But she kept herself from it, curling her fingers around the delicate stem of her own wineglass instead. Though she hardly needed intoxicants when she was in his presence.
“Take my grandfather,” Ranieri said, sounding distressingly cold and sober. “My grandmother was descended from Florentine nobility. She could have chosen anyone, yet she had eyes only for him. And this was a different time, you understand. So no matter their affection for each other, it was accepted practice that a man of my grandfather’s station would secure the family line, then seek his pleasures where he chose.”
“Mistresses,” Annika said, though the word tasted bitter on her tongue. “You can just say the word.”
Ranieri’s eyes gleamed in a way that sent a cold shiver down the length of her spine. “My grandfather had only one mistress then. By all accounts, she was magnificent. The toast of Italy. There was not a man alive who did not want her.”
Ranieri returned his attention to the room. More specifically, to the mantel above the fireplace. She followed his darkening gaze to a set of framed photographs and took the moment to study them. The dark-haired woman, laughing in one photo but too serious in the next.
Annika could see Ranieri in her face.
She felt a strange little tickle then, a kind of foreboding, and wanted almost desperately to stop this conversation. She knew how she would do it. She could launch herself across the table, then sink to her knees and take him in her mouth the way he’d taught her.
It would be a distraction, perhaps. But it would also make them both happy. She knew that as well as she knew her own name.
But she didn’t dare do it. She didn’t quite dare.
He was opening up to her, and no matter how being naked with him moved her, no matter what it showed her about the both of them, Annika understood that this was real vulnerability. That him telling her stories could never be dismissed asjust sex.
A stray memory moved in her then, of her reaction when he’d told her that he had not initially intended to be faithful in this marriage. How outraged she’d been at the very idea, and that had been long before she’d developed this unhealthy, possessive fixation on his body.
Onhim.
She did not want to be married to any man who kept a mistress. And she specifically did not want to share Ranieri with anyone.
But she did not need to risk saying those things out loud, because she already knew she had no right to feel them. That was not what this was. That was not what they’d agreed. This one, miraculous year.
She cleared her throat. “I take it your grandmother was not pleased with this arrangement,” she said instead.
“My grandmother was raised to accept these things as all women of her class did,” Ranieri said, his voice seeming to grow darker and more forbidding by the word. “At first, it did not occur to her to object to what was common practice. But then she made the critical error of falling in love.”
“With your grandfather?” Annika asked, hesitantly.
“He was in love with her, too,” Ranieri said, but he sounded almost bitter. “She bore him a son, then two more. Both of them always said that those were happy years. Who knows how long that could have continued? But instead, my grandmother asked my grandfather to give up this mistress of his.”
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable.”
