Really, it was like they were acting out a wedding instead of participating in one, Leontina thought.
Until, when bid by the priest, they pressed their lips together.
That did not feel at all like acting.
She felt a kind of shock race through her at the brush of his warm mouth against hers but it was so fleeting and gone so quickly that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined that, either.
Even though she could remember kissing him the moment they’d moved indoors and were alone in her father’s castle—the way she had moved closer to him and dared to kiss him right there in the hall, the way his mouth had opened on hers with all of that immediate, fiery heat, the way he had wrapped his arms around her and ate at her mouth as if he was starving for the taste—
Leontina had to remind herself that he had decreed there would be nodemands.
Even if, that night, there had been nothing but demands. And the meeting of those demands.
Again and again and again.
After the wedding concluded with none of the fanfare normally associated with such a moment, she and Pau stayed behind once the priest and the two witnesses—both staff that Leontina suspected that he had chosen for their unreadably wooden expressions—took their leave.
When he made no move to follow them, she thought perhaps one of them would say a few words. Or ought to, anyway, though she found her throat strangely dry.
Not to mention the flush she was sporting because she was reliving their night together in her head, to no avail.
Pau stared out at the vines. Always the vines. Leontina thought she saw a muscle working in the hinge of his jaw. But when he looked at her, his gaze was cool. “Our child will now be legitimate. And you need not worry about your father’s dynastic aspirations any longer. I believe we have handled the situation with grace, Leontina.”
“The very picture of grace,” she managed to say, though it felt inadequate.
And largely untrue, given all the things they’d done that first night at the castle to make all of this happen. Though this was still not the time to start thinking about all that, she cautioned herself when her brain took the opportunity to flood her with images from the bed they’d shared. And the chair. And the rug before the fireplace. And the shower. And the bath—
She reached down, subtly she hoped, and pinched her own side. Hard. Until the images faded. Because ifhecould pretend there wasn’t all that wild heat swimming about between them, so could she.
Leontina thought he might say something else since he was still standing there before her, that muscle working in his jaw. But instead he inclined his head in that way of his that she was coming to hate, turned with something like military precision, and left her there as he marched into the house.
For a long while, she simply…stayed there. Right where she was.
Right where he’d left her.
Leontina stood at the rail, staring straight ahead, taking in the sweep of the earth before her. The imposing, copper-hued Montsant Mountains that rose in the distance. The rugged land itself, cultivated now but in no way free of its wildness.
It was a beautiful afternoon. She could hear birds singing. The buzz of lazy insects. The air smelled of sage, rosemary, and oregano. There were leafy green trees she was fairly certain were hazelnut. The sun danced over everything, making it gleam like the diamond she now wore on her hand.
She was pregnant, married, and—once again—entirely alone.
Leontina did not realize until that very moment that she had expected that things would be different, now. She hadn’t understood that she was holding on to that possibility until this moment, when it was so obviously unattainable. She hadn’t understood that deep inside her, she’d been holding out a secret little spark of hope that coming to Spain, tracking down Pau, and successfully marrying someone who she was reasonably certain was in no way a monster like the rest of her father’s questionable choices of potential spouses would lead somewhere.
That all the things she’d felt that long, hot night might mean something.
All those impossible things that felt like magic in the moment but had taken on different hues later. When she’d missed her first period. When she’d started to imagine her baby and the man who’d fathered it.
She’d begun to wonder if those moments of connection were more than the heat of it all. That they truly meant that she might have set out to seduce the one person alive who could actually make her feelalive.
Herself, at last.
A whole woman who could laugh and love and be praised for these things instead of made to feel like something was terribly wrong with her.
She’d imagined that it was possible that Pau Calixto was not merely her escape plan, but her fate.
Or at least, when she was feeling morepractical, she’d imagined that it allcouldmean something. She could admit, now,today, that she’d hoped it could. Or lead somewhere once she made it here.
Or maybe, she thought now, a little more bitterly than she liked,just end up with me less alone for once.
