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The flames rose higher.
He felt scalded. But what he saw was an angel.
Angelina,something in him whispered.
For it could be no other.
Her sisters were attractive enough, but he had already forgotten them. Because the third, least known Charteris daughter stood next to her mother along one side of a formally set table, wearing a simple dress in a muted hue and a necklace of complicated pearls that seemed to sing out her beauty.
But then, she required no embellishment for that. She was luminous.
Her hair was so blond it shone silver beneath the flickering flames of a chandelier set with real candles. Economy, not atmosphere, he was certain, but it made Angelina all the more lovely. She’d caught the silvery mass back at the nape of her neck in a graceful chignon that he longed to pick apart with his hands. Her features should have been set in marble or used to launch ships into wars. They made him long to paint, though he had never wielded a brush in all his days.
But he thought he might learn the art of oils against canvas for the express purpose of capturing her. Or trying. Her high cheekbones, her soft lips, her elegant neck.
He felt his heart, that traitorous beast, beat too hard.
“Here we all are,” said Anthony Charteris, all but chortling with glee.
And in that moment, Benedetto wanted to do him damage. He wanted to grab the man around his portly neck and shake him the way a cat shook its prey. He wanted to make the man think about what it was he was doing here. Selling off a daughter to a would-be groom with a reputation such as Benedetto’s? Selling off an angel to a devil, and for what?
But almost as soon as those thoughts caught at him, he let them go.
Each man made his own prison. His own had contained him for the whole of his adult life and he had walked inside, turned the key, and fashioned his own steel bars. Who was he to cast stones?
“This is Benedetto Franceschi,” Charteris announced, and then frowned officiously at his daughters. “He is a very important friend and business partner.Veryimportant.”
Some sort of look passed between the man and his wife. Margrete, once a Laurent, drew herself up—no doubt so she could present her bosom to Benedetto once more. Then again, perhaps that was how she communicated.
He remained as he had been before: vaguely impressed, yet unmoved.
“May I present to you, sir, my daughters.” Margrete gestured across the table. “My eldest, Dorothea.” Her hand moved to indicate the sulky, too self-aware creature beside the eldest, who smirked a bit at him as if he had already proposed to her. “My middle daughter, Petronella.”
And at last, she indicated his angel. The most beautiful creature Benedetto had ever beheld. His seventh and last wife, God willing. “And this is my youngest, Angelina.”
Benedetto declared himself suitably enchanted, waited for the ladies to seat themselves, and then dropped into his chair with relief. Because he wanted to concentrate on Angelina, not her sisters.
He wanted to dispense with this performance. Announce that he had made his choice and avoid having to sit through an awkward meal like this one, where everyone involved was pretending that they’d never heard of the many things he was supposed to have done. Just as he was pretending he didn’t notice that the family house was falling down around them as they sat here.
“Tell me.” Benedetto interrupted the meaningless prattle from Charteris at the head of the table about his ancestors or the Napoleonic Wars or some such twaddle. “What is it you do?”
His eyes were on the youngest daughter, though she had not once looked up from her plate.
But it was the eldest who answered, after clearing her throat self-importantly. “It is a tremendous honor and privilege that I get to dedicate my life to charity,” she proclaimed, a hint of self-righteousness flirting with the corners of her mouth.
Benedetto had many appetites, but none of them were likely to be served by the indifferent food served in a place like this, where any gesture toward the celebrated national cuisine had clearly declined along with the house and grounds. He sat back, shifting his attention from the silver-haired vision to her sister.
“And what charity is it that you offer, exactly?” he asked coolly. “As I was rather under the impression that your interest in charity ball attendance had more to do with the potential of fetching yourself a husband of noble blood than any particular interest in the charities themselves.”
Then he watched, hugely entertained, as Dorothea flushed. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then she sank back against her seat without saying a word. As if he’d taken the wind out of her sails.
He did tend to have that effect.
The middle daughter was staring at him, so Benedetto merely lifted a brow. And waited for her to leap into the fray.
Petronella did not disappoint. Though she had the good sense to look at him with a measure of apprehension in her eyes, she also propped her elbows on the table and sat forward in such a way that her breasts pressed against the bodice of the dress she wore. An invitation he did not think was the least bit unconscious.
“I consider myself an influencer,” she told him, her voice a husky, throaty rasp that was itself another invitation. All of her, from head to toe, was a carefully constructed beckoning. She did not smile at him. She kept her lips in what appeared to be a natural pout while gazing at him with a directness that he could tell she’d practiced in the mirror. Extensively.
