But even as she thought that, her hands snuck down and found their way over the swell of her belly. She had only really just started to show. It was still something she could conceal, if she liked. In the dress she’d chosen today, a pale blue because she hadn’t felt that the full on bridal approach was warranted, she doubted anyone could see a bump at all.
Yet she knew it was there.
She knew her baby wasright there.
Meaning she was literallynotalone, no matter how she might feel. There was another human inside her, and something about that seemed to wash over her like the breeze on her face. Like the priest’s blessing.
Like the wishes she’d never dared make out loud, but had somehow held tight inside her all along.
Maybe that was why, later that evening, she did not wait for a formal summons to another meticulously polite dinner with the man who was now her husband and some days—like today, their wedding day—might as well be a robot. Still dressed in her wedding attire, she went in search of him instead.
Leontina wandered through the old, sprawling monastery, wondering how many old fingerprints were hidden behind the polished walls, the modernized rooms. How many ghosts were here with her, watching her as she walked down one long hall and into another.
She didn’t know the house well, but it was laid out flat, so it was easy enough to follow one hallway to its end, retrace her steps, and then go down another one until she found herself in a whole wing of the house she’d never seen before.
But she knew immediately that it was his.
Leontina fancied that she caught that scent of his as she walked down the hall, hints of vetiver and cedar clinging to the very walls the way she’d thought they’d clung to her for days after the wedding. And all the way down at the end of the hallway, though she glimpsed other rooms as she passed—sitting rooms, parlors, entertainment caves, and all of them stuffed full with even more books—she found him in an office that had its own door to the outside and a stairway that led down to what she knew were the vineyard’s commercial offices. Leontina was certain that she made no noise, but he turned anyway, making her wonder if he was as aware of her she was of him.
But then, she’d known that he was the night of her brother’s wedding. She’d known the moment she walked out into the reception that he was watching her.
She’d felt his eyes on her as she moved.
It had felt like they were in a dance from the start.
And when he turned now, he wasn’t prepared for her. She could see the difference at once. Because when his eyes met hers, they widened—
Like that, she understood at last.
This was all a mask. That volcanic lover who’d turned her inside out and taught her things about herself that she wasn’t entirely certain she wished to know—
The man who had shown her how sensual her body was, and all the things that she could do with it—
He wasright here.
He had been here all along.
It was that wildfire flash, lighting up that dark gaze of his, and then gone when he collected himself.
But what it told Leontina, with the same certainty she’d felt out on that terrace earlier, was that she wasn’t alone in her marriage, either.
No matter what he might pretend.
And so when Pau frowned at her while he crossed the room toward her, she didn’t smile. She didn’t try to make this easy and polite andpracticalagain.
“Is something the matter?” he asked, in that distant, cool, vaguelyquizzicalvoice of his.
Leontina decided that she really did hate it. “That’s a loaded question on this of all days. Surely even you can see that.”
He let that quizzical expression on his face shift into something that was somehow colder, more resigned—and yet indicated that she was not making any sense. And she hated that, too.
That was the kind of expression that had led to all those stilted dinners, and she was done with them. God, she needed to bedonewith things that made her feel like she was stuck under her father’s thumb.
She needed to feel anything—everything—but alone.
And so when he drew even closer, scanning her as if he expected to find her with some sort of head wound to justify her appearance in this sacred temple of corporate glory—his office—she stopped waiting. She stopped wondering if he was going to do something to shift the balance between them.
Instead, Leontina swayed forward, as if she was perhaps losing her balance.
