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But Angelina looked at him as if, should he only allow it, he could be a man.
He didn’t know how he stayed on his feet when all he wanted was to collapse to his knees. To beg her to stop. Or to never stop. Or tothinkabout what she was doing here.
To him.
“Angelina,” he managed to grit out. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“But I do.” And this time, when her lips curved, it looked like hope. “Benedetto, you asked me to marry you, and I said yes. Now I’m asking you the same thing.”
“Angelina...”
“Will you marry me? And better yet—” and her smile widened, and it was all too bright and too much and his chest was cracking open “—will youstaymarried to me? I’m thinking we can start with a long, healthy lifetime and move on from there.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“YOUMUSTBEMAD,”Benedetto said, his voice strangled.
Angelina couldn’t say she wasn’t. Maybe the next step was searching out convicted killers and making them her pen pals, as he’d suggested. But she rather thought the only killer who interested her was this one, who’d only ever been convicted in the court of public opinion. And who hadn’t killed anyone.
“There is no third option,” he said, his voice like gravel. But there was an arrested look on his face that made her heart lurch a bit inside her chest. “I made certain promises long ago. Whether you carry my child now or not is immaterial.”
She’d been talking about babies as if she was talking about someone else, but the possibility that it had already happened, that it was happeningeven now,settled on her, then. She slid a hand over her belly in a kind of wonder. Could it be?
This whole night so far had been like one of her favorite pieces of music. A beautiful journey—a tour of highs and lows, valleys and mountains, storms and sunlight—and all of it bringing her here. Right here.
To this man who was not a monster. No matter how badly he wanted to be.
Her heart had known all along.
“I could do it your way,” she said softly. “I could sign up for the heir apparent program. I could keep signing up. We could make it cold-blooded and chilly, if you like. Is that what you want?” There was something so heartbreaking about that, but she knew she would accept it, if it was what he had to offer. She knew she would accept anything if it meant she could have him, even the smallest part of him—but she saw something like anguish on his hard face, then. “Or is it what you think you deserve?”
And for a moment the anguish she could see in him seemed as loud and filled with fury as the storm outside. It was hard to tell which was which—but her heart knew this man. Her heart had recognized him from the start.
It recognized him now.
“It’s all right if you can’t answer me, Benedetto,” she said. She went to him then, stepping close and putting her hands on his chest, where he was as hot to the touch as she recalled. Hotter. She tipped her head back, searching that beautiful, forbidding face of his. “If you can’t bring yourself to answer, you don’t have to. But tell me how we got here. Tell me why you do all this.”
He made a broken sound, this dark, terrible man who was neither of those things.
She didn’t understand why she knew it, only that she did. Her heart had known it all along. That was why, though she’d feared for her loneliness and sanity here, she had never truly believed she was in actual, physical danger.
He wasn’t any more a butcher than she was. And once that truth had taken hold of her in this empty chamber, all the others swirling around her seemed to solidify. Then fall in behind it like dominoes.
She didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want to learn how to scuba dive or to live in a caravan. She didn’t want to run a spa in a far-off city, or collect grapes and goats.
She wanted him.
Angelina wanted to look up from her piano to find him studying her, as if she was a piece of witchcraft all her own and only he knew the words to her spell.
Because only he did.
God help her, but she wanted all those things she’d never dared dream about before. Not for the youngest daughter in a family headed for ruin. The one least likely to be noticed and first to be sold off. She wantedeverything.
“Benedetto,” she said again, because it started here. It started with the two of them and this sick game he clearly played not because he wanted to play it, but because he believed he had no other choice. “Who did this to you?”
Then she watched in astonishment as this big, strong man—this boogeyman feared across the planet, a villain so extreme grown men trembled before him—fell to his knees before her.
“I did this to me,” he gritted out. “I did all of this. I am my own curse.”
