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Angelina didn’t think. She sank down with him, holding his hands as he knelt there, while all around the tower, the storm outside raged and raged.
The storm in him seemed far more intense.
“Why?” she breathed. “Tell me.”
“It was after Sylvia was swept overboard,” Benedetto said in a low voice, and the words sounded rough and unused. She didn’t need him to tell her that he’d never told this story before. She knew. “You must understand, there was nothing about my relationship with her that anyone would describe as healthy. I should never have married her. As much for her sake as mine.”
He stared straight ahead, but Angelina knew he didn’t see her. There were too many ghosts in the way.
But she was fighting for a lifetime. She didn’t care if they knelt on the hard stone all night.
She held his hands tighter as he continued.
“Sylvia and I brought out the worst in each other. That was always true, but it was all much sicker after Carlota died. All we did was drink too much, fight too hard, and become less and less able to make up the difference. Then came the storm.”
His voice was ravaged. His dark eyes blind. His hands clenched around hers so hard that it might have hurt, had she not been so deeply invested in this moment. In whatever he was about to tell her.
“It took her,” Benedetto grated out. “And then I knew what kind of man I was. Because as much as I grieved her, there was a relief in it, too. As if the hand of God reached down and saved me twice, if in horrible ways. Once from a union with a woman I could never make truly happy, because she loved another, and then from a woman who made me as miserable as I made her. The rest of my life, I will have to look in a mirror and know that I’m the sort of man who thought such things when two women died. That is who I am.”
“You sound like a human being,” Angelina retorted, fiercely. “If we were all judged on the darkest thoughts that have ever crossed our minds, none of us would ever be able to show our faces in public.”
Benedetto shook his head. “My grandfather was less forgiving than you are, Angelina. He called me here, to this castle. He made me stand before him and explain how it was that I was so immoral. So devoid of empathy. Little better than my own father, by his reckoning, given that when my grandmother died he was never the same. He never really recovered.” His dark, tortured eyes met hers. “There is nothing he could have said to wound me more deeply.”
“Was your father so bad then?” She studied his face. “My own is no great example.”
He made a hollow sound. “Your father is greedy. He thinks only of himself. But at least he thinks ofsomeone. I don’t know how to explain the kind of empty, vicious creature my father was. Only that my grandfather suggesting he and I were the same felt like a death sentence.”
“Did you point out that he could always have stepped in himself, then?” Angelina asked, somewhat tartly. “Done a little more parenting than the odd hour on a Sunday? After all, who raised your father in the first place?”
And for moment, Benedetto focused on her instead of the past. She could see it in the way his eyes changed, lightening as he focused on her. In the way that hard mouth of his almost curved in one corner.
“What have I done to earn such ferocity?” he asked, and he sounded almost...humbled.
“You saved me from a selfish man who would have sold me one way or another, if not to you,” she said, holding his hands tight. “You gave me a castle. A beautiful piano. And if I’m not very much mistaken, a child, too. What haven’t you given me, Benedetto?”
He let out another noise, then reached over, smoothing a hand down over her belly, though it was still flat. She thought of the oddly heightened emotions that had seemed to grip her this last month or so. The strange sensations low in her belly she’d assumed were due to anxiety. She’d felt strange and out of sorts for weeks, and had blamed it on her situation.
But knelt down the hard stone floor of this tower with Benedetto before her, his shoulders wider than the world, she counted back.
And she knew.
Just like that, she knew.
All this time she’d considered herself alone, she hadn’t been. Benedetto had been here in the shadows and more, she’d been carrying a part of the both of them deep inside her.
Her heart thumped in her chest, so severely it made her shiver.
“My grandfather reminded me that I have a distant cousin who lives a perfectly unobjectionable life in Brussels. Why should he not leave all this wealth and power to this cousin rather than to me if I found it all so troublesome that I had not only married the most unsuitable woman imaginable, but failed to protect her?” Benedetto shook his head. “He told me that if I wanted to take my rightful place in history, I must subject myself to a test. A test, he made sure to tell me, he did not imagine there was any possibility I would win given my past behavior.”
“Did he want you to win?”
He took a moment with that. “All this time I’ve assumed he wanted to teach me a lesson about loneliness. But I suspect now it was supposed to be a lesson about love.”
Benedetto gathered her hands in his again, tugging her closer, and all of this felt like far more important ceremony than the one that had taken place in her father’s house. There were no witnesses here but the sky and the sea. The storm. No family members littered about with agendas of their own.
It was only the two of them and the last of the secrets between them.
“My grandfather tasked me with finding women like you,” Benedetto said. “Precisely the sort my father had preyed upon, in his time. Women with careless families. Women who might want to run. Women who deserved better than a man with a list of dead wives behind them. I would marry them, but I would not make them easy about my reputation. I would bring them here. Then I would leave them after the wedding night and let them sit in this castle with all its history and Signora Malandra, who is always only too happy to play her role.”
