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“I never forget a name.” He inclined his head to her. “Angelina.”
Hearing her name in his mouth made the echo of his dark laughter inside her seem to hum.
Benedetto took his time shifting his gaze from her then. He focused on something behind her, then nodded.
That was when Angelina realized they were not, as she’d imagined, alone out here in this medieval keep. She turned, her neck suddenly prickling, and saw an older woman standing there, dressed entirely in black as if in perpetual mourning. The housekeeper, if she had to guess, with a long, drawn face and a sharp, unfriendly gaze.
“This is your new mistress,” Benedetto told the woman, who only sniffed. “Angelina, may I present Signora Malandra, keeper of my castle.”
“Enchanté,”the older woman said in crisp, cut-glass French that did not match her Italian name.
“I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance,” Angelina murmured, and even smiled prettily, because Signora Malandra might have been off-putting, but she was no match for Margrete Charteris.
“Come,” said Angelina’s brand-new husband, once again fixing that dark gaze of his on her. “I will show you to the bedchamber.”
Thebedchamber, Angelina noted. Notherbedchamber.
Her heart, having only just calmed itself, kicked into high gear again.
He did not release her hand. He pulled her with him as he moved, towing her through an archway cut into the heavy stone wall. Then he drew her into the interior of one of the oldest castles in Italy.
She still felt off balance from what had happened in his car, but she tried to take note of her surroundings.Should you have to run for your life,something dark inside her whispered. She tried her best to shove it aside—at least while she was in her husband’s presence.
Unlike the house where she’d grown up, Castello Nero was flush with wealth and luxury. Benedetto took her down corridors filled with marble, from the floors to the statues in the carved alcoves, to benches set here and there as if the expectation was that one might need to rest while taking in all the art and magnificence.
He laughed at her expression. “Did you expect a crumbling Gothic ruin?”
She blinked, disquieted at the notion he could read her so easily. “I keep imagining kings and queens around every tapestry, that’s all.”
“My family have held many titles over time,” he told her as they walked. Down long hallways that must have stretched the length of the tidal island. “A count here, a duke there, but nobility is much like the tide, is it not? In favor one century, forbidden the next.”
Angelina’s family considered itself old money rather than new, but they did not speak in terms ofcenturies.They were still focused on a smattering of generations. The difference struck her as staggering, suddenly.
“The castle has remained in the family no matter the revolutions, exiles, or abdications that have plagued Europe,” Benedetto said. “Titles were stripped, ancestors were beheaded, but in one form or another this island has been in my family since the fall of the Roman Empire. Or thereabouts.”
Angelina tried to imagine what it must feel like to be personally connected to the long march of so much history—and to have a family castle to mark the passage of all that time.
“Did you grow up here?” she asked.
Because it was impossible to imagine. She couldn’t conceive of children running around in this shining museum, laughing or shrieking in the silent halls. And more, she couldn’t picture Benedetto ever having been a child himself. Much less engaging in anything like an ungainly adolescence. And certainly not here, in a swirl of ancient armor and sumptuous tapestries, depicting historical scenes that as far as Angelina knew, might have been the medieval version of photo albums and scrapbooks.
“In a sense,” he replied.
He had led her into a gallery, the sort she recognized all too well. It was covered with formal, painted portraits, she didn’t have to lean in to read the embossed nameplates to understand that she was looking at centuries of his ancestors. The sweep of history as represented by various Franceschis across time. From monks to noblemen to what looked entirely too much like a vampire in one dark painting.
Benedetto gazed at the pictures on the wall, not at her. “My parents preferred their own company and my grandfather thought children were useless until properly educated. When my parents died my grandfather—and Signora Malandra—were forced to take over what parenting was required at that point. I was a teenager then and luckily for us all, I was usually at boarding school. It felt like home. I was first sent there at five.”
Angelina had never given a single thought to the parenting choices she might make one day, yet she knew, somehow, that she did not have it in her to send such a tiny child away like that. Off to the tender mercies of strangers. Something in her chilled at the thought.
“Did you like boarding school?” she asked.
Benedetto stopped before a portrait that she guessed, based on the more modern clothing alone, might have been his parents. She studied the picture as if she was looking for clues. The woman had dark glossy hair and a heart-stoppingly beautiful face. She sat demurely in a grand chair, dressed in a gown of royal blue. Behind her chair stood a man who looked remarkably like Benedetto, though he had wings of white in his dark hair. And if possible, his mouth looked crueler. His nose more like a Roman coin.
“There was no question of liking it or not liking it,” Benedetto said, gazing at the portrait. Then he turned that gaze on her, and she found the way his eyes glittered made her chest feel constricted. “It was simply the reality of my youth. My mother always felt that her duties were in the providing of the heir. Never in the raising of him.”
“And did... Did your parents...?”
Angelina didn’t even know what she was asking. She’d done what due diligence she could over the past month. Meaning she had Googled her husband-to-be and his family to see what she could find. Mostly, as this castle seemed to advertise, it seemed the Franceschi family was renowned for wealth and periodic cruelty stretching back to the dawn of time. In that, however, she had to admit that they were no different from any other storied European family. It was only Benedetto—in modern times, at any rate—who had a reputation worse than that of any other pedigreed aristocrat.
