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“I already told you that the primary purpose of my existence is to produce an heir,” he told her stiffly. “It was why I married Carlota and why we planned to consummate a union that was never passionate.”
“I remember the story. But that hardly sounds like reason enough to inflict your unhappy childhood on another baby.”
“My childhood wasn’t unhappy.” He heard the outrage in his voice and tried to rein it in. “My grandmother—” But he stopped himself. Because Angelina already knew too much about him. He had already given her too much. Benedetto gritted his teeth and pushed on. “Ordinarily, this is when I offer my wives the opportunity to produce the Franceschi heir themselves.”
“Surely they signed up for that when they said, ‘I do’?”
He ignored that, and the flash of temper in her blue gaze. “Should you choose that route, life here will continue as is. At the end of a year, if no heir is forthcoming, the same offer for a new life will be made to you. If you’re pregnant, however, the expectation would be that you remain until the child is five. At which point, a final offer will be made. If you choose to go, you can do so, with one stipulation. That being, obviously, that you cannot take the child with you. If you choose to stay, we will have contracts drawn up to indicate that you may remain as much a stranger to the marriage as you wish.”
He cleared his throat, because this was all standard. This was the labyrinthine game he and his grandfather had crafted and it had served him well for years. But Angelina was staring at him as if he’d turned into an apparition before her very eyes. When this was usually when that sort of gaze faded and a new one took its place. The sweet, bright gleam ofwhat if.
“Of course, in your case, everything is different,” he said, forcing himself to keep going. “I always leave after the wedding. Usually while they are locked in the bathroom, pretending not to be terrified that I might claim a wedding night. Then I wait to see how long it takes each wife to open the door to this tower. Once she does, we have this discussion.”
Again, the way she looked at him was...different.
He cleared his throat. “But your choices might be more limited, regrettably, because you could already be pregnant. I’ll confess this has never happened before.”
Her lips parted then, and she made a sound that he couldn’t quite define. “Are you telling me...? Are you...? Did you not sleep with all your wives on your wedding night? On all your wedding nights?”
“Of course not.” He belted that out without thinking. “Nor do I touch them beforehand. I may be considered a monster far and wide, Angelina, but I dotrynot to act like one.”
She let out a laugh, a harsh sound against the storm that battered at the windows outside. “Except with me.”
Benedetto ran a hand over his face, finding he was only more unsettled as this conversation wore on. Instead of less, as was customary—because he always knew what his wives would choose. He always knew none of them had marriedhim.They’d married his money and hoped for the best, and this was him giving it to them.
“The truth is that you were different from the start,” he told Angelina, grudgingly. “I had no trouble whatsoever keeping my hands to myself with the rest. It was all so much more...civilized.”
He found himself closing the distance between them, when he shouldn’t. And he expected her to flinch, but she didn’t. She stood her ground, even tilting up her chin, as if she wanted him to do exactly this. As if she wanted him to make it all worse.
Benedetto slid his hand along her cheek, finding it hot and soft, and that didn’t solve a single one of his problems. “But you played for me, Angelina. And you wrecked me. And I have been reeling ever since.”
Her mouth moved into something far too stark to be a smile. Far too sad to be hers. “That would sound more romantic if you weren’t threatening to kill me, one way or another.”
“No,” he gritted out. “As it happens, you are the only wife I have slept with on a wedding night.”
Her eyes seemed remarkably blue then. “What about your second wife? Your mistress? Surely she—”
“She was paralytically drunk after our reception,” he said, not sure if that darkness in him was fury, anticipation, or something else he’d never felt before. Something as overwhelming and electric as the storm outside. “And I was little better. I am afraid, Angelina, that you are unique.”
“I feel so special,” she whispered in that same rough tone, but she didn’t jerk her cheek away.
Even so, Benedetto dropped his hand. And for a moment, they stood there, gazing at each other with all these secrets and lies exposed and laid out between them.
He could feel the walls all around him, claiming him anew. For good this time.
When she left him, as he knew she would because they always did, perhaps he would give up the fight altogether. In another year he could be nothing more than another statue, right here in this room. Another stop along the tour.
There was a part of him that longed for the oblivion of stone.
There was a part of him that always would.
“Why?” she asked, her voice a quiet scrape of roughness that reminded him, forcefully, that there was no part of him that was stone. That there never had been, especially where she was concerned. “Why would anyone go to all this trouble?”
“I will answer any and all questions you might have,” he told her, sounding more formal than he intended. Perhaps that was his last refuge. The closest he could get to becoming a statue after all. “But first you must choose.”
“As you pointed out, I might already be pregnant,” she replied, her arms crossed and even the wildness of her long blond hair a kind of resistance, silver and bright against the bare walls.
Why did he want nothing more than to lose himself in her—forever? How had he let this happen?
