Pau could only imagine how apoplectic his father would have been if the estate had been at risk. The true measure of a Calixto man, he’d always believed. It was one more reason for Pau to hate Umberto. Pau might not have thought that his father was a particularly dab hand at parenting, but that wasn’t the point of the family. The point ofthisfamily was the wine and the history.
Umberto had stolen that from Bernat. And Pau could not bear the knowledge that his father had died thinking he had failed.
He could notbearit.
“I’ll start reading my way through your house, then,” Leontina was saying. “And I also do not wish to be disturbed when I’m deep in a book. But you do know what they say, don’t you?”
“I have never given the slightest bit of weight to whattheysay,” he retorted, perhaps more harshly than necessary. He tried to claw his way back to calmness as he continued. “I don’t even know whotheyare.”
“In this case, they are me.” Leontina laughed, and that laughter moved all over him, like light. As if she knew the dark place he’d gone and could bring him back that easily. “But I do truly believe that you can really find the bones of a house, or a person I suppose, if you know what they read. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll start digging up your family graves, Pau. Who knows what we might find?”
She smiled broadly, but he found that unsettling—and not only because he knew what was buried here, and why. Nothing he needed dug up. Nothing he wanted to haul out into the bright sunshine.
Nothing she needed to worry about until the child was here and it was finally time to make certain his revenge hit the way he’d planned it would. And Pau did not allow himself to wonder how she would react to that, because it didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
He found everything that had happened there in his office more than merelyunsettling, if he was honest, because he had the unpleasant notion that it did, in fact, matter to him what Leontina would think. What she woulddo. It kept him awake that night, or perhaps it was his unruly cock and all those images in his head that he’d seen fit to add to today.
Either way, she haunted him.
And he intended to officiously turn her away if she tried to find him again in the days that followed, but of course, she didn’t.
Pau was the one who found himself wandering like a ghost in his own house, peering into rooms until he found her. When he did, it was as she’d said. She was always surrounded by books. Always frowning slightly, sometimes playing with her lower lip, completely lost in the pages that she turned.
He had not realized that when she said that she read books, what she’d meant was that sheinhaledthem.Consumedthem.
Became them.
He told himself that he was not the least bit jealous of the attention she lavished upon inanimate objects. But he did insist that the staff usher her to dinner a week or so later, choosing a different room to dine in the way he always did, because they had never had family dinners when he was a child and he was determined to find thebestone before the child arrived.
Tonight he was as close to agitated as he allowed himself to get, for he’d barely seen her except in those stolen ghost glances, when she hadn’t even known he was there.
Speaking of things he had not thought to plan or expect, because Leontina was forever a wildcard.
“I do hope you can control yourself,” he found himself saying, stuffy and frigid, when she entered the room.
He hadn’t seen her up close in a while. He’d been driving himself crazy remembering the taste of her. That sea-salt-and-honey scent that was only hers, and made him hard even to recall. The sounds she made. The way the heat of her held him, clutched in tight.
Maybe that was what made him unduly ferocious tonight—but all she did was laugh.
Leontina laughed, and then she reached over and patted him on his jaw as if he was a child.
“Don’t worry,” she said. Soothingly. “I am also quite hungry tonight. For food.”
And as she swept past him, settling herself at the table and digging into the platters of food that waited for them, Pau didn’t follow.
Because a different truth was dawning upon him.
He found himself turning, slowly, and gazing upon her. Upon this woman who, now that he considered it, wasn’t behaving at all the way he would have expected her to.
Pau had spent the last ten days wondering what was happening to him. Was she a witch, to get beneath his defenses like that? Whatwasall of this?
But tonight it was as if all the oddities in her reactions to him snapped together, finally forming a full picture. Because it finally occurred to him that he’d been operating under the mistaken impression that her physical innocence meant she was innocent in all other ways too—when this did not track.
She had told him as much, had she not? She had shown him her disguise—and the fact that she was here with him in Spain meant that she’d handily foiled her father’s plans for her, when that was something that had taken him and Giaco years upon years to accomplish.
Now, at last, Pau remembered the way she’d been dressed at that wedding. A complete departure from the way she’d dressed in the days before to scuttle unnoticed about the castle—and he’d been watching her. It had been night and day, in fact.Sonight and day that it had to have been planned.
Meticulously planned, he thought now, because it wasn’t as if she’d been tottering around, looking awkward and uncomfortable, the way women sometimes did when they decided to try on a new look but didn’t know if it suited them.
