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He said nothing. He only indicated with his chin that she should climb into the hot water, so she did.
Then she sat there, relaxing against the sloping side, the warm water like an embrace. The heat holding her the way he had. She thought he would climb in with her, but instead, with a long, dark look she had no hope of reading, Benedetto left her there to soak.
Something curled around inside her, low and deep, so she stayed where she was to indulge it. The water felt too good. She was too warm, and outside the sea danced beneath the stars, and flirted with her. She could not bring herself to climb out.
Angelina didn’t think she slept, there in a bathtub where she could so easily slip beneath the water to her death—in a place that hinted at death around every corner. But she was still startled when there were hands on her again, and she was suddenly being lifted up and out of the warm water.
But in the next moment, she knew it was him. And the knowledge soothed her.
It felt like a dream, so she didn’t really react as Benedetto wrapped her in a towel and set about drying her himself. She had tied her hair in a knot on top of her head and she could feel the curls from the heat, framing her face, in a way she had never liked—but she did not have the energy to do anything about it.
She blinked, realizing that he had showered. She could smell the soap on him. And all he wore now were a pair of low-slung trousers. Somehow that felt more intimate than his nakedness.
For the first time, Angelina actually felt shy in this man’s presence.
The absurdity did not escape her, after the things he’d done to her in her father’s house. The things he’d done to her tonight. She should have been immune to him by now. Instead, he toweled her dry and then wrapped her in the softest, most airy robe she had ever felt in her life, and she suddenly felt awkward. Exposed.
She thought he would say something then. The way he looked at her seemed to take her apart, his dark eyes so unreadable and his mouth in that serious, somber line. But he didn’t. He ushered her from the room, with a certain hint of something very nearly ceremonial that made her heart thud inside her chest.
“Where we going?” she asked.
And it was times like these, when she was walking next to him—close enough that they could have been hand in hand if they were different people—that she was more aware of him than was wise. How tall he was. How beautiful and relentlessly male.
How dark and mysterious, even though he wore so little.
And she was forced to confront the fact that it wasn’t the things he wore that made him seem so dangerous. So outrageously powerful. It was just him.
The master of Castello Nero. The boogeyman of Europe.
Her husband. Benedetto.
“You did not think that was the sum total of your wedding night, I hope.” There was the faintest hint of a smile on his hard face. “We have miles to go, indeed.”
That didn’t make her heart thud any less.
Angelina followed him down the hall inside the grand suite and noticed that all the doors stood ajar. All the doors in the castle were wide open, now that she thought of it, save the one he’d showed her out in the hallway.
She thought of reinforced steel and heavy oak. Hidden stairs to a secret tower.
And she didn’t know why it made her pulse pick up.
“Do you live here now?” she asked. His brow arched, as if to say,We are here, are we not?She could almost hear the words and felt herself flush, ridiculously. But she pushed on. “I mean to say, after spending all that time in boarding school. And knowing that your own parents did not spend much time here, from what you said. When did you move back yourself?”
“After my grandfather died,” he replied. Not in the sort of tone that invited further comments.
“Were these his rooms?”
But she already knew the answer. She eyed a portrait on the wall of an old man gripping a cane with a serpent’s head as its handle, while staring down from his great height with imperious eyes that look just like Benedetto’s.
“When I was young,” Benedetto said, his voice sounding something slightly less than frozen through, “my grandfather entertained me for at least one hour every Sunday in his drawing room here. He asked me fierce and probing questions about my studies, my life, my hopes and goals, and then explained to me why each and every one of them was wrong. Or needed work.”
He stopped at a different door, and beckoned for Angelina to precede him.
“He was a terrifying, judgmental, prickly old man who would have been a king in a simpler time. He was never kind when he could be cutting, never smiled when he could scowl, and I miss him to this day.”
Angelina was so startled by the indication that Benedetto had emotions or feelings of any kind that she almost stumbled on her way into the room. And it took her a moment to realize that the reason she didn’t recognize it outright as the private dining room she’d seen when she’d first walked into the suite was because it was transformed.
There were candles lighting up the table, and clearly not, as in her parents’ house, because of worries about an impending electric bill. Because out in the hallway, lights were blazing. The candles were here to set a mood.
