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She could save herself and let her family do as they would.
But she only gazed back at him, breathing too heavily, and did not move an inch to extricate from this man who held her tight in his grip—though he was not touching her at all.
“I want you desperate, always,” he told her, his voice that same, serious command. “I want you wet and needy, Angelina. When I look at you, I want to know that while you look like an angel, here, where you are naked and only ever mine, you are nothing but heat and hunger.”
“Do you mean...?”
“I mean you should touch yourself. Taste yourself, if you wish. I insist. As long as you are always ready for me.”
She understood what he meant byreadyin a different way, now. Because it was one thing to read about sex. To read about that strange, inevitable joining. She understood the mechanics, but was not until now, so close to her wedding night, that she understood that it would be far more than merelymechanical.
Benedetto’s head tilted slightly to one side. “Do you understand me?”
“I do,” she said, and his smile was dark.
“Then I do not think, little one, that you need to worry overmuch about murder.”
That was the last time she’d seen him.
She pushed herself upright in her bed this morning, her head as fuzzy as if she’d helped herself to the liquor in the drawing room when she didn’t dare. Not when she had Benedetto to contend with and needed all her wits about her.
And it shocked her, as she looked around her room, that there was a lump in her throat as she accepted the reality that this room would no longer be hers by the time the sun set.
Her bedchamber had already undergone renovations, like so much of the house had in the past month. It already looked like someone else’s. Plush, quietly elegant rugs were strewn about the floors, taking the chill away. She’d forgotten entirely that once, long ago, there had been curtains and drapes and a canopy over her bed, but they were all back now.
He’d given her back her childhood so she would know exactly what she was leaving behind her when she left here today.
She got up and headed to her bathroom, walking gingerly because she could feel the neediest, greediest part of her ripe and ready—just the way he wanted her. But she paused in the doorway. Because she could no longer hear the symphony of the old pipes.
And when she turned on the water in her sink, it ran hot.
Angelina ran herself a bath and climbed in, running her hands over her slick, soapy skin. Her breasts felt larger. Her belly was so sensitive she sucked in a breath through her teeth when she touched it.
And when she ran her hands between her legs, to do as he’d commanded her, she was hotter than the water around her.
Then hotter still as she imagined his face, dark and knowing, and made the water splash over the sides of her tub onto the floor.
But too soon, then it was time to dress.
Margrete bustled in, her sisters in her wake like sulky attendants. And for a long while, the three of them worked in silence. Petronella piled Angelina’s hair on top of her head and pinned in sparkling hints of stones that looked like diamonds. Dorothea fussed with her dress, fastening each of the parade of buttons that marched down her spine. Margrete called in Matrice, the notably less surly housemaid now that there was money, and the two of them packed Angelina’s things.
Petronella did Angelina’s makeup. She made her younger sister’s face almost otherworldly, and did something with her battery of brushes and sponges that made Angelina’s eyes seemed bluer than the summer sky.
Matrice left first, wheeling out Angelina’s paltry belongings with her.
And there was no need to keep her hiding place a secret now, so Angelina let her mother and sisters watch as she walked over to the four posts of her bed, unscrewed one tall taper, and pulled out her grandmother’s pearls.
Her sisters passed a dark look between them while Angelina fastened the dark, moody pearls around her neck and let the weight of them settle there, against her collarbone.
And then her mother led her to the cheval glass.
The dress had arrived without warning two weeks before the wedding. Angelina had tried it on and let the seamstress who’d arrived with it take her measurements and make her alterations. The dress had seemed simple. Pretty. Not too much, somehow.
But now there was no escaping the dress or what it meant or what would become of her. She stared into the mirror, and a bride stared back.
The dark pearls she’d looped around her neck looked like a bruise, but everything else was white. Flowing, frothy white, while her hair seemed silvery and gleaming and impossible on top of her head.
She looked like what she was.
