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“All of them.”
He nodded sagely. “You would be surprised how many accidents occur in a place like this, where we are forever pitted against the demands of the sea. Its relentless encroachment.” He stopped only scant inches from where she stood, reaching over to trace her hand where it still pressed hard against the bejeweled coverlet. “The tide waits for no man. That is true everywhere, though it is perhaps more starkly illustrated here.”
“Surely, after losing so many wives to the sea, a wise man would consider moving inland,” Angelina said in that surprising dry way of hers that was far more dangerous than the allure of her body or even her music. Those only meant he wanted her. But this... This made him like her. “Or better still, teach them to swim.”
“Do you know how to swim?” he asked, almost idly, his finger moving next to hers on the bed.
“I’m an excellent swimmer,” she replied, though her color was high and her voice a mere whisper. “I could swim all the way to Rio de Janeiro and back if I wished.”
He watched the way her chest rose and fell, and the deepening flush that he could see as easily on her cheeks as on the upper slopes of her breasts.
“I applaud your proficiency,” he said. “But I am only a man. I can control very few things in this life. And certainly not an ocean or a woman.”
She did not look convinced.
“And your last wife?” she asked, her breath sounding ragged as he began to trace a pattern from the hand on his bed up her arm, lazy and insinuating. “The sixth?”
“Veronica Fitzgibbon.” Benedetto made a faint tsking sort of sound. “Perhaps the best-known of all my wives, before marrying me. You might even call her famous.”
“More than famous,” Angelina corrected him softly as his hand made it to the fine, delicate bridge of her collarbone and traced it, purely to make her shiver. “I doubt there’s a person alive who cannot sing at least one of her father’s songs. And then she dated his drummer.”
“Indeed. Scandalous.” He concentrated on that necklace of hers, then. The brooding pearls against the softness of her skin. The heat of her body, warming the stones.
“She lasted the longest. Three months and two days,” Angelina whispered.
He made himself smile. “See that? You do know. I thought you might.”
“She crashed her car into a tree,” Angelina told him, though he already knew. He’d spent two days in a police station staring at the pictures of the wreckage as the authorities from at least three countries accused him of all manner of crimes. “On a mountain road in the Alps, though no one has ever been able to explain what she was doing there.”
“There are any number of explanations,” Benedetto corrected her. “Most assume she was fleeing me. And that I was hot in pursuit, which makes for a delicious tale, I think you’ll agree.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “Alas, I was giving a very boring lecture at a deeply tedious conference in Toronto at the time.”
“And how will I go, do you think?” she asked, a different sort of light in her blue eyes, then.
He hated this. He had disliked it from the start, though a truth he’d had to face was that he’d found a certain joy in the details. The game of it. The end justifying the means. But here, now, with her and that bruised look on her face and his own heretofore frozen emotions unaccountably involved this time—he loathed it all.
“I have already told you,” he said quietly. “We all die how we live. It is inevitable.”
“But—”
“A better question to ask,” he said quietly, cutting her off, “is why any woman would marry me, knowing these things. These assumptions and allegations that must be true, because they are repeated so often. There must be a fire after all this smoke, no? Why did you say yes, Angelina?”
He watched, fascinated, as goose bumps shivered to life all over her skin. And she shifted, there where she stood. “I had no choice.”
“Will we be starting this marriage off with lies?” Benedetto shook his head. “Of course you had a choice. Your father promised me a daughter. Not you in particular. Had you refused to marry me I had two others to choose from.”
“My mother made it very clear that none of us were permitted to say no, no matter what.”
“That must be it, then.” He didn’t quite smile. It was too hard, too furious a thing. “But tell me, Angelina, how do you rationalize away the many times you came apart in my hands?”
“I don’t rationalize it.” Her blue eyes flashed. “I deplore it.”
“I don’t think you do,” he told her, and he moved his hand to her jaw, tilting her head so that her mouth was where he wanted it. “I think you’re confusing hunger for something else. But then, you did spend all that time in the convent, did you not? I’m surprised you feel anything at all save shame.”
“I have a full complement of emotions, thank you. Chief among them, revulsion. Fury. Disgust.”
“I want you too, little one,” he said, there against her mouth. “I hear the seventh time is the charm.”
She made a tiny little noise, protest and surrender at once, and then Benedetto took her mouth with his.
