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VICTORIAWASNOTas heedless of her brand-new husband’s feelings as she might like to pretend.
Because Ago Accardi was the most darkly beautiful man she had ever encountered in her life. More than that, he was the only man she had ever so much as kissed. And things had gone great deal further than kissing, that night in her uncle Edward’s garden. Sometimes, even now, the only thing she could think of was the possessive way his mouth had moved over hers. And the magic he’d taught her was in her own body, the body that he had so easily made his.
She thought about Ago entirely too much. There was no pretending otherwise on that score.
But today, at last, she was free.
Twenty-four years old and finally—finally—free.
And despite how masterful and overwhelming Ago seemed to her, with that brooding fury his stern face—to say nothing of the way he’d stamped that hard kiss upon her lips—the fact that she had finally escaped her father’s grasp was the only thing she could concentrate on.
Especially when Everard shook off the priest, then charged down the narrow little lane to catch up to her and Ago.
It was a bright day, but cold. She could feel every single goose bump that rose on her skin, and didn’t much care if it was the crisp air that reminded her it was nearly December, or the glowering man beside her. Because she felt wholly alive, at last.
Because she wasfree.
And over her dead body would the child she carried ever find itself locked up in a cage the way she’d been all this time. It didn’t matter how pretty it was. A cage was a cage.
She was sure that Ago would agree. One hand moved over her belly and stayed there, protectively. Ago had to agree.
After all, he hadn’t bought her for breeding purposes like all the other men her father had let sniff around her would have done, if they could have met his price. What had happened between them in that garden had been organic and unexpected.
Or he wouldn’t have been so...undoneafterward.
This time, she knew the goose bumps were thanks to her memories, not the chilly breeze.
“I hope you’re happy,” her father seethed at her when he caught up to them. He didn’t spare a glance for Ago—but then, he’d been thundering at Ago every chance he got, for the past two weeks. Victoria wasn’t too proud to listen at doors. “After all the work I put into you. After everything I gave you. This squalid ceremony is the thanks I get for all I did.”
“You mean, when you raised me?” she asked mildly. “After my mother died? As was your responsibility, as my only remaining parent? Was that what you did for me, Papa?”
“To be married like this,” he continued in the same tone of aggrieved outrage, because he wasn’t listening to her.
Victoria wasn’t sure that he had ever listened to her. As long as she kept the same serene and vaguely cheerful look on her face, she could say just about anything to him and he wouldn’t register it. That was what she was to him—a bit of white noise.
“The shame,” Everard intoned. “And the temerity to wear a white dress over your obviously pregnant belly. I’m glad your mother isn’t alive to see the depths to which you’ve sunk, Victoria.”
Victoria winced at that, though it was nothing new. And tame, really.
Her father had shouted far worse when her condition had become impossible to hide. Some women, she knew—because she had read half the internet in a panic—managed to keep their pregnancies hidden to the day they gave birth. But then, most women probably didn’t have to contend with the kind of scrutiny her father had kept her under since she was small.
She opened her mouth to do what she always did, and deflect her father’s actual hurtful words away from her.
But beside her, Ago stiffened. “Have a care, Everard,” he said, in that wintry voice of his that haunted her, silk and steel. “You are speaking to my wife.”
It occurred to Victoria then that rather than this being a simple matter of freeing herself from her father’s clutches, she had instead turned her life into more of a frying pan to fire scenario. Yet she was going to have to wait to succumb to anxiety over that, because right now, having anyone at all speak to her father like that was...
Well, it was delightful.A lovely wedding gift, Victoria told herself.
Even if Ago turned out to be an ogre, at least she would have this.
“I’ll talk to my daughter any way I like,” her father retorted, scowling at Ago as if he could scare him off with the beetling of his brows.
“But she is no longer merely your daughter, is she?” asked Ago, with that implacable, unyielding iron that had always made him seem, to her, like so much more than merely a man. And today made her consider him nothing less than heroic. “She is wife to the current Accardi heir, and mother to the next. Victoria Cameron is no more. May I present to you, Everard,La SignoraVictoria Accardi.”
Ago said her name as if she was a stranger. He said it not just with his usual Italian-inflected English, lyrical and poetic, but as if she herself was Italian. As if he had made her so, today. He even glossed over thecin Victoria, as if her name wasVittoria.
As if she had disappeared in him as surely today as she had ever disappeared beneath her father’s too-tight grip.
