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She turned then, not at all surprised to find him only a couple of steps above her. Still, it was enough that she had to crane her head back to look at him, making her feel something like seasick.
And all the while the moon poured in through the windows, making love to him, wreathing him in all that silver.
He looked like some kind of pagan god, clad only in silk that rode dangerously low on his hips. The whole of his chest just gleamed there, impossibly beautiful, as if he was a Michelangelo piece, sculpted out of marble or dipped in bronze, made for no other purpose than to create awe in all who beheld him.
It worked.
But he had asked her a question, so she ignored that awestruck feeling inside. She ignored the bronze, the silvery light, the marble expanse of his perfectly formed chest—and the knowledge that if she moved closer, he would not be as cold as he might look in all this moonlight. He would be hot to the touch. The heat of him would soak into her, making her feel warm and alive, though even that was nothing next to his taste. His scent.
And she knew she would carry that with her, too.
“I want you to let me go because I’m asking you to,” she told him softly, so softly that she hoped he couldn’t hear the tightness in her throat. “And Ago. Please remember that I have never asked you for anything. Only this.”
“Because you do not need to ask,” he growled at her, his voice like thunder, rolling through her, warning her. Making everything in her seem to stand at attention. “Have I not provided everything you could possibly want? I make you cry out in joy, it is so intense. I clothe you. I import your childhood, so that you might feel easy here. I gave you Christmas. What else do you want?”
She found herself rubbing at the sides of her belly, as if that could somehow make the pain that was building inside again go away. “I don’t want to be treated like apet, Ago. Why can’t you understand?”
But she knew even as she asked that he didn’t understand. That he couldn’t.
Maybe it was unfair to even ask such a thing of him. Then again, she remembered how she’d felt, standing there outside his office and listening to the things he said to her father. Andfairnessno longer felt like much of a priority.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she told him, hardly recognizing her own voice, it sounded so...ragged. Something like torn. “After all, how could I expect you to treat me differently than you treat yourself? Tethered to this place. To this legacy of yours. To the things old men told you that you have taken as gospel, holding them to you so tightly you can’t see past them.”
“All I see is a woman who has been given everything, yet still wishes to shirk her responsibilities,” he ground out.
“I never asked for these responsibilities.”
“And you imagine I did?” he retorted. He shook his head. “I was unaware that responsibilities became a menu, to be chosen or not chosen as one pleases. I have never known such luxury. And I’m sorry to tell you this,mia mogliettina, but that is not a luxury available to you, either.”
“Well, it bloody well should be,” Victoria threw back at him. She was still holding her sides and now she was panting a little, though she couldn’t have said if it was because of the temper that coursed through her, or whatever that pain was inside her now, that felt more and more like a deep throbbing thing.
She tried to make herself breathe through it.
He came down to her step and his face looked so hard, almost cruel in the moonlight. Yet when he reached out to wrap his hand around her upper arm his grip, though firm, was not painful. She knew he controlled himself even now.
For some reason, that did not please her at all.
“You and I do not getshoulds, Victoria,” he seethed at her. “It seems to me that what you wish you had was a different life. Sadly, that is not a choice available to you. I’m sorry that your childhood was difficult. Whose wasn’t? And some might claim that all of this is the wanderlust that you were not permitted under your father’s thumb, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the truth is that you’re trying to outrun the inevitable.”
She forgot the pain inside her, the way her head ached, to scowl at him. “And that’s you, I suppose? You consider yourself inevitable?”
“I am inescapable,” he told her, his gaze a bright and glittering warning. “But what is inevitable is that you are about to become a mother. However you may feel about your childhood, it is over now. There is no going back. There is no undoing this. I think this scares you down to your marrow.”
“While I think you’re projecting,” she threw right back at him, even though, in and around the discomfort she felt in her belly, something seemed to...quake.
“I don’t need to project such things,” he bit out at her. “I know exactly who I am, and that was never a child like some, left to amuse myself as I pleased. Unlike you, I do not mourn the loss of something I never had. Because I know its purpose.”
His hand tightened, just slightly, on her upper arm, and something flared between them.
And all Victoria could think about was the wordlove. It seemed to expand inside of her, like some kind of inexorable balloon, filling up all the available space and crowding everything else out—
Yet all the more painful because she knew that wasn’t the word he would choose.
It wasn’t what he was going to say.
“The Accardi legacy,” he intoned, because of course that’s what he said. Because to him, that was the only thing that mattered. “And I have tried to make this easy for you, Victoria.”
She managed to crack out a kind of laugh at that. “Have you? Funny,easyisn’t the word I would have chosen.”
