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Though she almost laughed at the thought of modesty after...that. After the past month, after this drive—what was left for him to take?
But, of course, she knew the answer to that.
And imagining what she had to lose here in this place made it difficult to breathe.
The castle keep rose on all sides, the stone gleaming in the summer afternoon light. The sunshine made it seem magical instead of malevolent, and she tried her best to cling to that impression.
But her body felt like his, not hers. Even her breath seemed to saw in and out of her in an alien rhythm.
His, she thought again. Not hers.
Benedetto swung out of the car but Angelina stayed where she was. The drive from the airfield had been a blur of heat, need, and the endless explosion that was still reverberating through her bones, her flesh. Still, she could picture the car eating up the narrow road that flirted with the edge of the incoming tide on what was little more than a raised sandbar. Some of the waves had already been tipping over the edge of the bar to sneak across the road as Benedetto had floored his engine. It was only a matter of time before water covered the causeway completely.
And all the molten heat in the world, all of which was surely pooled between her legs even now, couldn’t keep her from recognizing the salient point here in a very different way than she had when she was merely thinking about Castello Nero instead of experiencing it herself.
Which was that once the tide rose, she would be stuck here on the island that was his castle.
Stranded here, in fact.
“How long is it between tides?” she had asked at the family dinner table one night while Benedetto was there, oozing superiority and brooding masculinity from where he lounged there at the foot of the table, his hot gaze on her.
Because she might have already betrayed herself where this man was concerned, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t read up on him.
“Six hours,” Dorothea had said stoutly.
“Or a lifetime,” Benedetto had replied, sounding darkly entertained.
She could feel her heart race again, the way it had when she’d been back in the relative safety of her father’s house. But it was much different here, surrounded by the stone walls and ramparts. Now that this was where she was expected to stay. High tide or low.
Come what may.
The door beside her opened, and he was there. Her forbiddingly beautiful husband, who was looking down at her with his mouth slightly curved in one corner and that knowing look in his too-dark eyes.
And his hand was no less rough or insinuating when he helped her from the sports car. No matter where he touched her, it seemed, she shuddered.
“Welcome home, wife,” he said.
The ancient castle loomed behind him, a gleaming stone facade that seemed to throb with portent and foreboding. It had been built to be a fortress. But to Angelina’s mind, that only meant it could make a good prison.
The summer sky was deceptively bright up above. The castle’s many towers and turrets would surely have punctured any clouds that happened by. Her heart still beat at her, a rushing, rhythm—
But in the next moment, Angelina understood that what she was hearing was the sea. The lap of tide against the rocks and the stone walls.
She didn’t know if that odd giddiness she felt then was terror or relief.
When she looked back at her husband, that same devil that had worked in her the first night he’d come to her father’s house brushed itself off. And sat up.
“Why do you call me ‘wife’ instead of my name?” she asked.
“Did you not marry me?” he asked lazily, giving the impression of lounging about when he was standing there before her, his hands thrust into the pockets of the dark bespoke suit he wore that made him look urbane and untamed at once. “Are you not my wife?”
“I rather thought it was because all the names run together,” Angelina said dryly. “There have been so many.”
She didn’t know what possessed her to say such a thing to the man who had rendered Margrete Charteris silent. Or how she dared.
But to her surprise, he laughed.
It was a rich, sensuous sound she knew too well from back in her father’s conservatory. Here, it seemed to echo back from the ancient stone walls, then wrapped as tightly around her as the bodice of the wedding dress she wore.
