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He savored the feel of her silky skin beneath his palm. “Ah, but you see, I am not confused in the least.”
“If you do not let go of me, right now, I will scream,” she told him.
He only smiled at her. “Go ahead. You have my blessing.” He waited, and cocked an eyebrow when she only glared at him. “I thought you were about to scream down the villa, were you not? Or was that another metaphor?”
She took what looked like a shaky breath, but she didn’t say anything. And she still didn’t pull her elbow away. Rodolfo moved a little closer, so he could bend and get his face near hers.
“Tell me what game this is,” he murmured, close to her ear. She jumped, and he expected her to pull free of him, but she didn’t. She settled where she stood. He could feel her breathe. He could feel the way her pulse pounded through her. He could smell her excitement in the heated space between them, and he could feel the tension in her, too. “I am more than adept at games, I promise you. Just tell me what we’re playing.”
“This is no game.” But her voice sounded a little broken. Just a little, but it was enough.
“When I met you, there was none of this fire,” he reminded her, as impossible as that was to imagine now. “We sat through that extraordinarily painful meal—”
She tipped her head back so she could look him dead in the eye. “I loved every moment of it.”
“You did not. You sat like a statue and smiled with the deepest insincerity. And then afterward, I thought you might have nodded off during my proposal.”
“I was riveted.” She waved the hand that wasn’t trapped between them. “Your Royal Highness is all that is charming and so on. It was the high point of my life, etcetera, etcetera.”
“You thanked me in your usual efficient manner, yes. But riveted?” He slid his hand down her forearm, abandoning his grip on her elbow so he could take her hand in his. Then he played with the great stone she wore on her finger that had once belonged to his grandmother and a host of Tisselian queens before her. He tugged it this way, then that. “You were anything but that, princess. You used to look through me when I spoke to you, as if I was a ghost. I could not tell if I was or you were. I imagined that I would beget my heirs on a phantom.”
Something moved through her then, some electrical current that made that vulnerable mouth of hers tremble again, and she tugged her hand from his as if she’d suddenly been scalded. And yet Rodolfo felt as if he might have been, too.
“I’m not sure what the appropriate response is when a man one has agreed to marry actually sits there and explains his commitment to ongoing infidelity, as if his daily exploits in the papers were not enough of a clue. Perhaps you should count yourself lucky that all I did was look through you.”
“Imagine my surprise that you noticed what I did, when you barely appeared to notice me.”
“Is that what you need, Rodolfo?” she demanded, and this time, when she stepped back and completely away from him, he let her go. It seemed to startle her, and she pulled in a sharp breath as if to steady herself. “To be noticed? It may shock you to learn that the entire world already knows that, after having witnessed all your attention-seeking theatrics and escapades. That is not actually an announcement you need to make.”
Rodolfo didn’t exactly thrill to the way she said that, veering a bit too close to the sorts of things his father was known to hurl at him. But he admired the spirit in her while she said it. He ordered himself to concentrate on that.
“And now you are once againthisValentina,” he replied, his voice low. “The one who dares say things to my face others would be afraid to whisper behind my back. Bold. Alluring. Who are you and what have you done with my dutiful ghost?”
She all but flinched at that and then she let out a breath that sounded a little too much like a sob. But before he could question that, she clearly swallowed it down. She lifted her chin and glared at him with nothing but sheer challenge in her eyes, and he thought he must have imagined the vulnerability in that sound she’d made. The utter loneliness.
“This Valentina will disappear soon enough, never fear,” she assured him, a strange note in her voice. “We can practice that right now. I’m leaving.”
But Rodolfo had no intention of letting her go. This time when she turned on her heel and walked away from him, he followed.
