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‘I thought only the Brits drank tea?’ he teased, refusing to allow this fresh hit of arousal derail his determination for control.
She gave a delicate one-shouldered shrug. ‘I always wanted to be British.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘I love their gardens.’
That amused him. ‘Really? You wanted to be British because of their gardens?’ He’d never met a woman under the age of thirty who had any interest in gardens whatsoever.
‘The British love their gardens and make such an effort with their flower beds, and their seasons are so much more pronounced than in Monte Cleure so you can watch them unfold like a living calendar. They have the barren wasteland of winter, but then the first appearance of shoots appear in early spring and then, by the time summer comes, their gardens just bloom with colour. Even their autumns are beautiful, when the leaves change and everywhere’s all russet and gold.’
Although delivered as quietly as she always spoke, there was an animation in her voice and a light in her eyes he’d never heard or seen before.
‘What do you think of my—our—garden?’ Seeing her eyes widen fractionally before her lips started pulling into the fake smile that had rarely made an appearance all that week, he stopped it fully forming by shaking his head and giving a short laugh. ‘Don’t try and lie. You don’t like it. I can tell.’
Her mouth dropped open. ‘How?’
Now he was the one to shrug. ‘It is something I have noticed. When you’re afraid you’re going to say something you believe could be incriminating, you put your mask on so you can hide your real thoughts behind it.’ Strangely, the mask she used to hide behind was the only time he was able to read her. Stripped of it, her composure was too strong for him to read anything she didn’t want to give away. ‘It’s okay,’ he added nonchalantly. ‘I understand it will take time before you trust that you can speak freely with me.’
Their talk the last time they’d shared her bed had opened Amadeo’s eyes to the factors that had made his wife the way she was. He assumed it was the knowledge of those factors that had seen him spend a full week of engagements with her without once getting irritated by her in those few times her mask had slipped back on. A telephone conversation with Dominic’s estranged sister, the Princess Catalina, had revealed Elsbeth had spoken the truth about the power Dominic had extended to himself over his family. Things were worse there than even he’d suspected.
Dominic was playing a clever game, he grudgingly admitted: principality-wide reform to keep the investment flowing in—Monte Cleure was a billionaires’ playground—but behind the scenes turning the House of Fernandez back into a medieval court where he reigned supreme. Centuries ago, Amadeo’s ancestors had had the same uncontested power over their people...until the people had risen and toppled them. He doubted such a toppling would happen to Dominic, not while his people enjoyed the highest incomes and lowest taxes in the western world. Only an internal coup would oust him.
Elsbeth’s father was Dominic’s uncle, the most senior royal courtier in the House of Fernandez. Any coup would need his backing, but when he’d said this to Catalina she’d laughed. ‘Your father-in-law is Dominic’s biggest supporter. It will never happen.’
The uncle of a tyrannical monster would be grandfather to any children Amadeo and Elsbeth had. It was a thought that sickened him and he was trying hard not to let his reaction further colour his feelings for the man’s daughter. Although his growing attraction to her was undeniable, attraction was a chemical thing that sooner or later would burn itself out. His marriage, however, would last until death. Amadeo would never forget that Elsbeth was a Fernandez by blood, contaminated to her soul, but he had to believe he could come to accept her as a Berruti. As his wife.
Trying to loosen the sudden tightness in his chest with a long inhale, he gave a quick encouraging smile. ‘Go on, tell me. What would you change about our garden?’
Her face screwed up a fraction before she blurted out, ‘All of it.’
‘It’s that bad?’
‘It’s not bad at all. It’s very ordered and pretty.’
‘But you say it as if ordered and pretty were a bad thing,’ he countered, catching her out with the tone of her own words.
‘They’re not if you like that kind of thing,’ she protested, half laughing. ‘It’s just that I like the English country cottage style where there’s much less order and different varieties, sizes and colours of flowers are clustered together all higgledy-piggledy.’
He couldn’t help but smile at her turn of phrase. Higgledy-piggledy. He would never have imagined his neat, ultra-composed wife would consider higgledy-piggledy to be a good thing. ‘Have you spent much time in England?’
She shook her head ruefully. ‘None at all. But I watch all their gardening shows. You went to boarding school there, didn’t you?’
He nodded.
‘And are their gardens as beautiful as in the television shows?’
‘I didn’t take any notice of them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I was a teenage boy and flowers and gardens were not my thing,’ he answered drily.
He caught a sudden knowing flash in her eyes. ‘No, I don’t suppose they were,’ she said, and in that instant Amadeo was taken back to his adolescent boarding school years, where he’d experienced a degree of freedom away from his country and castle walls that had never been repeated. Images flashed in his mind of lazy weekends spent in the local town with friends, catching the eye of pretty girls with knowing smiles, gropes and fumbles by riverbanks, illicit cigarettes and smuggled alcohol.
Those had been halcyon days of rampant hormones, the constant prickles of awareness capable of turning into full arousal at the sight of a short skirt rolled up a few extra inches, and as Amadeo gazed into his wife’s eyes he realised there was something similar in the thrill of awareness that so often zipped through him for her as he’d felt in his teenage years. It had to be the thrill of forbidden fruit, because was anything more thrilling than when it was forbidden? Would he still desire to speed full throttle around the Ceres National Racetrack if it wasn’t against the rules and so forbidden?
And would he still desire Elsbeth as much as he was growing to if he hadn’t made her forbidden to himself?
