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“‘Prison-like’?”she echoed, but kept her voice free of all but the mildest curiosity. The sort she might employ if making an inquiry about train timetables or some other such tedious thing. She wasn’t sure she had ever been more proud of herself. “That sounds unduly aggressive, surely.”
“While your father has been entertaining himself by upbraiding me at every opportunity,” Ago continued in that low, cold voice of his, clearly unaware that she had blown up, right there in front of him, “I have been considering the situation we find ourselves in.”
She was frozen solid, stuck in her seat. Victoria didn’t think she could have risen to her feet if her life depended on it, and so she did not try. She stayed where she was, furiously trying to make herself over into a study of polite indifference.
“Have you indeed?” she asked. “Personally, I always recite old poetry in my head while he lectures me.‘My father moved through dooms of love,’and so on. As you do.”
“I’m not a man of passion, Victoria.” Ago’s voice was little more than a growl. Maybe that was why the way he said her name seemed to settle deep inside her, like some kind of deep foundation. And again, there was that glittering thing in his gaze that felt like another detonation. “Despite the impression you may have of me.”
She knew she should say something. Something witty and amusing to pop the tension in the room. The tension thrumming inside her. But somehow, Victoria couldn’t seem to speak. It was as if his hand gripped her throat, though he sat down the length of the table. It was as if he was preventing her from saying even one of the words that crowded there on her tongue, too tangled up was she in stormy dark blueglitteringand her sudden inability to think of anything but Ago Accardi andpassion...
“I’m a careful man,” he told her. “Unlike my brother, who has done as he pleased since infancy, my life has always been an expression of my duty. I have always thought first and foremost of my responsibilities, for I owe nothing less to both those who came before me, and those who will come after.”
He inclined his head at her rounded belly as if he was anointing his heir then and there, and Victoria stiffened. She found herself folding her hands over her belly and comingthis closeto frowning at him straight out.
Because she did not want him turningher childinto...whatever he was, so grim and humorless, thank you.
“Your brother never seemed the least bit unaware of the fact he was an Accardi,” she pointed out, though she was not the authority on Tiziano Accardi, by any means. Despite having been very nearly married off to him, she thought she’d only spoken to him about four times in her life.
Still, the younger Accardi brother left a lasting impression. She’d concluded long ago that it was onlybecausehe was an Accardi that he was always so over-the-top—though even he had settled down now that he’d found the right woman. The right woman who was, thankfully, not her.
“I love my brother,” Ago replied, dark and gruff. “He is the only family I have left, so I do not begrudge him the happiness he appears to have discovered in so unlikely a place. But his commitment to playing the role of the world’s greatest cad did nothing but cause me difficulties. The more outrageous his behavior, the more scrupulously correct mine has always been. And yet there are already whispers about you, Victoria. There will be those who will never believe that your child is not Tiziano’s. And this, you see, I cannot allow.”
She still felt that phantom hand at her throat, and tighter now. And for some reason, her eyes seemed determined to tear up.
“People will always whisper,” she managed to say. “It has nothing to do with what you will or will not allow. Even you, Ago, cannot control the world’s favorite pastime. They will all gossip merrily no matter what you do.”
“Perhaps,” he said, but not as if he truly believed that he, Ago Accardi, could not bend the world to his will if he chose.
He pushed back from the table then, and stood. And the way he stood...affected her.
A new kind of detonation rolled out inside her, but this one was all heat and flame.
It was as if Victoria had somehow been so focused on what her wedding would bring her, personally, that she’d...overlooked the groom.
Not that there was anyoverlookingAgo.
But for some reason, now that he was standing there before her and they were alone—andmarried—the only thing she could focus on was how straight and tall and relentlesslymasculinehe was. How his body was a symphony of lean muscle, somehow filling out his dark, bespoke suit with an edgy ferocity that only looked smooth and sophisticated from a distance. Up close, or contained in a small dining room, he seemed to be made entirely of sparks. They made the very air she breathed sizzle as she inhaled.
And as he looked at her with those eyes that should not have been dark blue, not with all that dark brown hair, the sizzle only deepened until it felt a great deal like an open flame.
“Mia mogliettina,”he said, very distinctly, and while she didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, calling hermia mogliettina, it was clear the words were not any kind of endearment, “I do not have to control the world. I need only control my life. And now that we are wed, that means you. My little wife.”
Again, she felt that choking sensation, but this time it seemed to link up with all of those sparks, shifting straight over into the kind of crackling, dancing flames she associated with that night in her uncle’s garden. The night she tried her best not to think about, because it was all too...hot and intense and outside the bounds of everything her existence had ever been, before and after.
Victoria wanted to leap to her own feet, possibly even run from the room, but all she could seem to do was stare at him.
In horror, she told herself primly.You are flushed straight through withhorrorat the thought of Ago Accardi’scontrol.
Though that was not how she would describe the way he’d held her in that garden and—
Focus, she ordered herself, with no small amount of disgust at her own susceptibility, then and now.He’s talking about imprisonment, not passion.
“You will stay here,” he was saying, sounding and looking matter-of-fact, at best. As if he was delivering some kind of corporate status report instead of the terms of her new life sentence. “For the remainder of your pregnancy. You will, naturally, have the finest medical care. I will import the finest obstetricians from around the globe and they will attend to you. Whatever you want, it will be yours. But you will stay here, out of sight. You will give birth to the child and I will make certain that you have all the care options any woman could want. Nannies, nurses, tutors. Neither you nor the child will lack for anything. And only after a suitable interval, when the child is older and the world has moved on from counting months and remembering old scandals, will it be permissible for you to do as you like.” He considered, his eyes dark. “Within reason, of course.”
The words didn’t really make sense. Victoria studied him as best she could when everything inside her was flame and horror and passion and revolt, and she had no idea what expression was on her face. Something she knew better than to let happen when in the presence of a man who thought he ruled over her. In fact, she had not let it happen—even once—since she was a girl.
But she could only feel that hand at her throat and the mad din within her.
