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Whatever Ago saw on her face seemed to satisfy him well enough, for he nodded. In that curt way of his, that, Victoria realized, was mere punctuation to whatever decree he might have made. It indicated only that he, again, was finished with the topic at hand. It onlylookedas if he was interacting. It was only a gesture, pretending to be courteous when he was anything but.
So finished was he, in fact, that he was heading for the door.
Because he didn’t require a conversation, she understood with a start. He had never intended to have one. He had delivered his intentions and that was all there was to it, by his reckoning.
Her pulse began to pound.
“Sorry,” Victoria said, and it was a greater battle than she wanted to admit to keep her tone even. Or anything close to even, because she didn’t think she’d quite made it there. “Did I hear you correctly? You intend to sequester me here? Lock me up and throw away the key...for years?”
Ago stopped, having drawn even with her seat on his way for the door. And he seemed to look down at her from a far greater height than his own six feet and then some. “I wish for you to disappear, Victoria.”
“Is that...” She cleared her throat todo somethingabout that phantom chokehold because it was that or succumb to...too many things to name, and she had the terrible fear that if she gave in to even one, she would be locking herself up and tossing away the key. Victoria couldn’t allow that. “Is that a threat?”
A faint crease appeared on his noble brow. “A dead wife would hardly be less of a scandal.”
She nodded sagely at that, and even managed to affect a somewhat thoughtful expression, as if this was all some kind of academic discussion. Instead of what sounded like a rather detailed plan for her life in exile. “But whenever you grant me permission to reemerge, many years from now, won’t that cause its own scandal?”
“The truth is that you are considered so virtuous—or so overzealously policed by your father—that you already cause very few ripples,” he told her, and Victoria had the distinct impression that he thought he was giving her some kind of compliment. When to her ears, it sounded a lot like he was suggesting she was invisible. Did he truly believe any woman wanted to hear that? “It is my wish that you simply...disappear beneath the waves entirely. When you reemerge, as you put it, it will be as a thirty-something mother of a child past the toddler years entirely. No one will care, and that will be an end to it. The important thing is to put distance between any whispers of my brother and the legitimacy of my heir.”
How small she felt, with Ago peering down at her the way he was. The great man dispensing his judgment, her own wishes as insubstantial as the mist creeping in outside as the weather turned. Victoria had already lived like that. She did not intend to repeat the experience. She climbed to her feet as gracefully as she could under the circumstances.
Once she rose, she smoothed down her wedding gown, watching the way Ago’s dark gaze moved to her bump—to the child they’d made—then away.
It should not have left her with the lingering impression of heat, nor the stain of his hard kiss upon her lips once more.
As if he’d left a mark.
“That’s the matter of my confinement sorted, then,” she said, with a demure calm that had always soothed her father in his worst rages. She even smiled, because she was good at that, too. “A bitLion in Winter, I grant you. But what of the rest of our marriage?”
Ago’s jaw tightened. She could see a muscle flex there, and it was fascinating. More than fascinating. But she was not foolish enough to do what everything in her yearned to do, and reach out. She doubted very much that he would care for it if she tried to touch him.
Instantly, that was the only thing she wanted to do. So much so that it hurt—it actuallyhurt—that she couldn’t.
The way he studied her made her wish he really had locked her up in a tower, like the queen in her favorite play.
“In many ways, Victoria,” Ago said after a moment, in a voice that seemed to rumble through her and around her, winding its way down the length of her spine and then settling in that heated space between her legs that only he had ever touched, “you were, on paper, the perfect candidate to become my wife. I won’t deny that I considered you for myself for some time. Long before I thought of you for my brother.”
This, she was given to understand by the intensity of his expression and the timbre of his voice, wasnota compliment.
“What an honor,” she managed to murmur.
In a manner that he clearly did not find sarcastic, because he carried on speaking. “But it was quickly apparent to me that my brother’s needs were the greater. And once you were linked to my brother, however tenuously, it would be scandalous to take you for my own.”
Victoria was feeling slightly better now that she’d gotten to her feet, but she still hadn’t quite reached the level of calm competence she preferred to feel when contending with domineering men. Still, if she knew anything in this life, it was to make use of what she had.
“Forgive me any impertinence,” she said in as subdued a tone as she could manage, as if it was only out of the deepest politeness that she was not casting her eyes to the ground before him. Or casting herself down to tug at the cuff of his trouser, fully prostrate and obsequious, as she imagined men like him preferred. Her father certainly did. “But is that not exactly what happened in my uncle’s garden?”
Again, that muscle in his jaw went wild. Beating much like her own pulse.
“It was my intention only to express my deepest apologies for what occurred—or did not occur—with Tiziano last Christmas,” Ago bit out.
This time, she was not able to keep a rueful note from her voice. “So you said. Later that night.”
With a certain ferocious anguish that she had spent months sifting through, in the privacy of her own thoughts.
“Today I’ve taken responsibility for my actions in a way that honors you, me, the Accardi legacy, and the child we have created,” he told her, as if rendering a verdict. There was very little she could do but gaze back at him, that familiar panic mixing with a kind of astonishment inside of her, and tipping over. “But I am afraid, Victoria, that the kind of woman who would succumb to such indiscretions outside in a garden where anyone might have seen her is disqualified by definition from any true consideration to become the wife I imagined I would take.”
“And yet I am your wife nonetheless,” she said with great dignity, because it was that or point out the idiocy of what he just said to her. Then again, why not both? “Though it hardly seems fair that you blame me for something you took part in.”
