Massimo did not smile. “I kneel for no one.”
“Noted,” she said mildly.
His eyes narrowed as if he was searching for sarcasm, for any hint of rebellion. But he wouldn’t find it. She had learned long ago, in her endless dealings with her father, that challenging a man like this directly was not the most effective strategy. Instead, she changed tactics.
“I will, of course, require time for study. I put off university to be by my mother’s side.” Catarina hadn’t actually applied for university or even thoroughly considered this path, but it was one of many roads to freedom she had entertained before her father had dropped this marriage into her lap. Her comment was a test of sorts, she supposed, one that she had the uneasy feeling Massimo might fail. Too late, Catarina realized she should have asked for the results much earlier.
Massimo didn’t react to the mention of her mother, let alone offer the condolences that usually followed any reference to their family’s devastating loss. Instead, he waved a dismissive hand. “You can schedule that with my assistant to ensure it doesn’t conflict with the functions we will attend.”
Catarina smiled pleasantly at him as she digested his words, trying to ignore the heaviness that weighed in her gut. This man was as autocratic as her father, but a future with him would be much worse. Giuseppe d’Avalos loved her, and regardless of how ham-fisted his attempts to steer her life had been, she had never once doubted that his intentions were true. He only wanted the best for her.
But Massimo Carandini didn’t care about her happiness. That much was clear. This man hadn’t sworn on her mother’s deathbed to take care of her. Instead, he was looking for an expensive, showy decoration, paid for with the kind of upscale exchanges that were made in a study filled with the scent of grappa and cigars. None of the fruits of those deals would come her way if she married this man. Massimo would treat her like a prop, brought out when he needed her and put away afterward. Catarina had been stuck in her father’s gilded cage for the past two years, as they’d struggled to find a way forward in a world without her mother. But Massimo’s cage would be much smaller, and he wasn’t even pretending it would be gilded.
Catarina had told herself she would go through with this marriage for her father’s sake, but staring at the cold, implacable man in front of her, she was no longer sure she could. And yet, she had to. Her father had rested the future of his business on this union. And no matter how different they were, she loved her father and wanted to please him. She wanted to allow him to rest easy. But how could she promise her life to a man like Massimo? There had to be a solution. It was just so hard to think rationally when he was so close. His body seemed to call to hers.
She smiled pleasantly at Massimo as he glared at her, and she found herself searching for a chink in his armor of demands and control. This was a man who didn’t even think to downplay his arrogant commands on their first meeting, before she had even agreed to their marriage. Clearly, Massimo didn’t have enough people in his life who said no to him.
“I do so look forward to our next meeting, but I am afraid I have business to attend to this morning,” she said. “Unless you were expecting a romantic walk through our gardens first…”
She followed her delicate jab with a bland smile. A flash of surprise crossed his face, as if the last thing he’d expected was this poke at him followed by a dismissal. It disappeared immediately, but the glimmer of satisfaction inside her lasted longer.
“We will have plenty of time to talk about future expectations,” he said, his low voice rich and ominous.
That voice slid through her, leaving her breasts heavy and heat pooling between her legs. This was what made him so dangerous. Her body didn’t seem to care about cages, gilded or not, even if they belonged to closed-off men with iron wills. Despite everything he’d said, she still had the inexplicable urge to run her fingers over his full lips, so improbably sensual against the hard set of his jaw. Though she’d all but told him to leave, a part of her ached for him to protest, to close the distance between them and press her mouth against his lush lips. If just his cheeks were enough to spark heat inside her, what would his lips do to this feeling inside her?
But Massimo didn’t kiss her. He just stared at her with that cold, assessing gaze, as if he was calculating her use to him. Then, without another word, he turned and walked out the door.
Catarina stood in place for a long time, in the middle of the library, the shelves of books glowing red and orange in the light from the windows. But she wasn’t thinking about books. She was thinking of Massimo and those deep brown eyes that, for a few moments, had seemed to be a window into a more private part of him.
No. She must have imagined those few moments, imposing her own spin on the distinctly less charming reality of her life. It wouldn’t be the first time. She’d spent enough of her childhood entertaining herself with her imagination to know how easily ideas could turn fantastical.
Later that evening at dinner, Catarina smiled pleasantly across the table through course after course as her father ticked off characteristics that made Massimo the perfect husband: money, family name—tarnished but redeemed—and multiple estates for her exploration. She didn’t miss his unspoken assumption that this list should make her happy, and she didn’t say a word, just murmured in assent and let her father talk.
As he continued his expounding, Catarina found herself thinking about her mother. How would her father’s ideas about marriage have played out if Maria Nordland had lived? Even before her mother’s death, her father’s overprotective tendencies had been stifling at times. That he loved Catarina had never been in doubt, but he had never quite figured out what to do with her, swinging wildly between indulgent and strict. Her mother had protected her from her father’s efforts to raise the society girl that he had always assumed someone of their station would become. In that path, Catarina had no interest. She had only sporadically attended the all-girls boarding school, tucked away in the Italian Alps, staying just long enough to learn languages and anything of interest before she took off to be by her mother’s side for their next adventures. A flurry of tutors had ensured she’d passed all her exams, but many of the finishing school lessons this academy prided itself on were lost on Catarina. After eighteen, she had resisted her father’s more pressing calls for an appropriate future and assumed the position of her mother’s full-time travel companion. Her life might have glided on like that for years, but her mother’s stage-four breast cancer diagnosis five years ago had changed everything.
From that day on, Catarina’s life had been turned upside down. Her mother had been her only real friend, and when they traveled, it was as if the two of them had existed in their own little world. At the age when she might have entertained the idea of university or some small stretch of independence, she grew even more attached to her mother. At every single one of those last performances, she and her father had sat, side by side, in tears, bonded by their mutual love and impending loss. During those last months, the world had closed. It was then that her mother’s last wishes were uttered, the wishes that had haunted both Catarina and her father since that day. She had eavesdropped outside the heavy door to her parents’ bedroom, unwilling to miss a moment of what was left of her mother’s voice.
“Protect her,” her mother had said to her father. Her mother’s voice had been so soft, so weak, so unlike the larger-than-life music that had shaped Catarina’s world. “She will be lonely when I am gone. Make sure that she is protected for the rest of her life.”
If Catarina hadn’t eavesdropped that day, she never would have understood what was behind her father’s clumsy attempts to push her in one direction, then the other. But when he announced the plan for her marriage across the heavy dinner table, surrounded by portraits of generations of the d’Avalos family, a rare smile had teased at her father’s lips. He had found his solution, the way to fulfill his promise to his beloved wife, and that decision was final. Her mother would have been horrified. This was decidedly not what Maria Nordland had meant, and yet to point out that Catarina knew her mother’s intentions better than he did would devastate him. So she’d said nothing. Not yet. Not until she got her head around a solution that would untangle the mess that was winding its way around her life.
Since the day her father had announced the marriage proposal, Catarina had buried herself in her books and traveled, trying desperately not to think about this rapidly approaching future. She’d visited her mother’s family in Oslo, just to hear them speak the secret language she and her mother had shared. But her cousins’ homes were haunted by her mother’s ghost, so she’d left them and retreated to the towering place her father had built for her mother, with its mix of Scandinavian sensibilities and an Italian flair for luxury. It was perched on the mountains that rose up from the deep blue Norwegian fjords, dramatic and immovable.
As she listened now to her father wax prosaic over the future that Massimo would bring her, Catarina found herself thinking once again about that place. It was her and her mother’s retreat from the world, the place that truly felt like home. It felt like freedom. Catarina alone had inherited it, as her father never had any interest in the stark beauty of his wife’s home country. As she nodded at her father’s long soliloquies, an answer to her predicament came to her, an answer that would free her from the vise that seemed to be tightening around her chest.
Late that night, long after her father had disappeared down the hallway of the master suite, Catarina packed her bags full of soft wools and fleeces and slipped out of the house. She alerted the pilot of their family’s jet that she needed to make a quick trip to Norway, confident that her years of impromptu trips with her mother would mean the crew wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary. Definitely not something that her father should be alerted of.
Catarina wasn’t running away; at least that was what she told herself on the taxi ride to the airport. She was simply making some space to think. Her father would find her, of course, but with any luck it would take a few days for him to catch up. Knowing her father and his aversion to snow, he was more likely to send someone else to collect his daughter. By then, she would have a plan, because as much as she wanted to please her father, her mother’s voice would always speak louder.
“Someday, my little songbird, you must fly on your own.” The words still rang in her head. Maybe this wasn’t exactly the sort of flight her mother had had in mind, but it was only now that Catarina fully understood why her mother had spoken these words, now that a marriage to Massimo Carandini threatened to take this possibility away.
Catarina had always been a quiet, obedient daughter for her father, but at her core, she was her mother’s child. Tomorrow morning, when he found himself alone at the breakfast table, he would be reminded of that fact.
Chapter Three
“ISAIDI was not to be disturbed,” Massimo said impatiently into the speaker of the phone that sat in the middle of his desk. In front of him lay three newspapers, all featuring speculations of his engagement. While his family’s contentious history with the paparazzi had done much damage to both the Carandini name and the brothers’ childhoods, Massimo found that some amount of the inevitable publicity could be used strategically. Like, for example, the shot of him pulling up at the d’Avalos family home that he was currently looking at. Massimo was in the middle of reading the article, appropriately flattering thus far, when his assistant’s voice had interrupted him.
“Giuseppe d’Avalos is on the line,” she said.
