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It was like a mountain crumbling on top of him, sucking him under and crushing him there.
And Cristiano understood, with a pang of a deep, harsh grief, that this take on his beloved grandfather was not something he could unknow. It was not something he could pretend he hadn’t seen.
“I do not think I will cry,” he said to the grandmother he should have known all these years, his voice low. “If I am honest, I would sooner dig out my eyes and feed them to the crows.”
She hooted derisively. “What do crows want with a rich man’s eyes?”
He should not have been here, no matter what revelations might have come to him overnight. Making this her problem was proving that he was like all the rest of his family. That he was just like them, selfish to the core.
Cristiano had no idea what he hoped to gain.
But he stayed where he was, there on the porch of this cottage he’d avoided for most of his life.
“Grandmother,” he said, with a stiff formality that in no way matched the moment but he thought she deserved nonetheless. “I’ve come to talk to you about love.”
“Love?” The old woman cackled. “Your father was a drunk and his father a liar. They raised you in their spitting image. Too rich, too pampered and cruel with it. What can you possibly know of love?”
He didn’t flinch away from the glare she settled on him.
“Nothing at all,” he said quietly.
His grandmother studied him for what felt to Cristiano like a very long time. A lifetime, perhaps. The lifetime he might have known this woman, if things had been different. If his grandfather had been the hero Cristiano had always seen in him, instead of the man he was.
“If there is no love, there is no life,” she said at last, and again he had the sense of some enchantment after all. Some spell she was casting as she spoke, and not because she was a witch. But because she might well be magic. “You can live on, mind. But it’s nothing but going through the motions. I would not have imagined a Cassara would care about this distinction. You don’t have to be fully alive to count all the money, after all.”
“I have a wife,” Cristiano heard himself say, as if the words were torn from somewhere deep inside him. Torn from the mouth of a version of himself he had never been—a version of himself who did things like ask for advice. “She says she loves me.”
This old woman looked at him with canny, clever eyes, as if she’d known him all his life. And knew him better than he knew himself.
“But you, naturally, cannot be asked to concern yourself with the petty concerns of the heart. Not when you have sweet things to shove down throats. Sugar in place of character will never end well, boy. What do you want me to do? Build your poor wife a cottage next door? Or direct her to a coffin like your mother’s?” And there wasn’t the faintest trace of age in the look she leveled on him, then. “Those are the only two options for Cassara wives, as I understand it.”
Cristiano did not argue, though he wanted to. Desperately.
“There has to be a third option,” he said, his voice gruff. “There has to be.”
“There is.” His grandmother lifted her cane and pointed it at him. “You. Change yourself, boy. Not her. She’s changed enough already if she’s with you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHENTHEDOORto her bedroom swung open, Julienne told herself that she was prepared.
Because what had this last month or so since their wedding been if not an exercise in preparation?
She arranged her face in a polite smile. She’d become good at it, she thought. She would remain calm and cool no matter what. She would not give up, the way his grandmother had, no matter the provocation. She was not sacrificing herself, no matter what Fleurette thought, she waschoosing—
But the usual litany she chanted at herself blew away like smoke.
Because the man who came to the door was not her husband.
It was Cristiano, but a version of him she had not seen in a long time.
Not since that night in Monte Carlo, in fact. The second time around, when he had proven to her that, in truth, she hardly knew him at all.
He’d proven it again and again, deliciously.
And that’s the reason you’re in this state now,she reminded herself tartly.About to have a baby in a marriage that feels like you’re choking and drowning, daily.
She might have resolved to live with it. But the man who slammed the bedroom door behind him made her jump a bit, there in their bed where she was propped up against the pillows, supposedly reading a book on breastfeeding.
