“I am so sorry,” he said, and she heard no theatrics in his voice. No drama. He sounded sincere and it broke her heart in ways nothing else could have. “I can’t tell you how much I wish that you did not love him. Because I must tell you, Pau loves nothing but his vines.”
He pulled back, and studied Leontina’s face, and clearly didn’t like what he saw there, because he squeezed her shoulders again. “Leontina. I have known him since we were eighteen. He’s the coldest man I have ever met, which brings me no end of delight because I take pleasure in poking holes in that chill. But I cannot think of anyone I would prefer you to love less, because he will not return those feelings easily.”
Or at all, he did not say, and yet it seemed to hang between them anyway.
“Thank you for that,” she managed to get out. “But I fear it’s too late.”
This time when she burst into tears, he let her cry on his shoulder. He rubbed her back. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t soothing or that she didn’t love this new familiarity with the older brother she had always idolized.
But it didn’t fix anything, either.
Particularly not her heart, because it had been beating for Pau alone for far longer than she wished to admit.
Even to herself.
Chapter Eight
When Pau returnedto the dining room, he brought staff with him, and had them add a place setting the small table. He found the Tavian siblings standing together at the balcony, watching him too closely with matching sets of wary jade green eyes.
“I assume the two of you are no strangers to awkward family dinners,” he said.
They only stared back at him and Pau was not one to wait upon permission anywhere—much less in his own house. He waved his hand at the table in some kind of invitation, then seated himself.
After moment, Giaco and Leontina followed.
He took this as the victory it was. Or, at the very least, as an improvement on letting his best friend punch him in the face.
“Now, at last, I feel at home,” Giaco said with a big sigh and a matching smile when the silence stretched on too long. “There’s nothing that excites me more than a heavily pregnant silence, unless it is a perfectly placed and diabolically subtle insult that lands four hours later, then keeps recipient up all night.”
“Remind me when that was,” Leontina murmured, and aimed that smile of hers at her brother. “When you were subtle, I mean?”
Giaco laughed—genuinely this time—and Pau thought that perhaps it was all a bit lighter after that. A bit easier.
And whatever Leontina and her brother had spoken about when he was out of the room, the atmosphere seemed different between them, too. As if they’d finally found some common ground. Or a way to bridge the years that their father had certainly never fostered.
Not for the first time in his life, though for the first time in a long while, Pau wondered what it would have been like to have a sibling. To have someone else to share all of these experiences with, good and bad and everything between. His cousin had been around when he was younger, but not in the same way. And though he knew, of course, that there was a significant age differential between Leontina and Giaco, there was still also a shared sense ofwhothey were.
They had both grown up in that castle. They had both lost their mother. They both still detested their father, openly.
They were Tavians.
He could not help but think it must make things easier, to carry such a load together.
In fact, he knew it did. Because all the things he’d done to prepare the chessboard to take down Umberto had been something he had done with Giaco. He hadn’t been a lonely vigilante, out there chasing down the man responsible for his father’s death, like every fantasist Hollywood loner film he’d ever accidentally seen.
The taking down of Umberto Tavian had been a joint enterprise, and no wonder these last few months had felt so off. Pau might have been an only child. He might have felt a deep responsibility to this land and the family’s legacy and the business too, but he hadn’t been alone in this fight of his since way back when he was a teenager.
It made sense that this solo venture of his had made him feel so much like a stranger to himself. That notion seemed to kindle something deep inside him, a bright pop of something like self-incrimination—because it couldn’t be anything else, he told himself sternly. It couldn’t be the way he’d felt standing in that examination room, his hand held fast between Leontina’s taut, rounded belly and her palm. The strange, rubbery, glorious sensation of his own child reaching out to him there—as if his son already knew him.
Just as it couldn’t be the fact that, revenge or no revenge, he had found it remarkably difficult to keep Leontina out of his head since he’d first laid eyes on her in Italy. He’d studied her, looking for a way in, and had found contradictions and disguises. Then she had come to him, and he’d found a kind of communion he hadn’t known existed—
But that was merely sex, he told himself harshly, and not something he needed to think about in the presence of his friend. Her brother. The architect of the current swelling on his face.
They ate. They talked of incidental things that caused no dark ripples. The grape harvest. How Giaco and Ivy were getting on with things now that the glare of the paparazzi was perhaps beginning to ebb. The connective tissue of their lives that could, Pau supposed, have a thousand reasons to intertwine that had nothing to do with the behavior of one old ogre of a man they all hated.
They talked of the health of the baby. Giaco advanced his choice of name for the child, which was, to no one’s shock, Giaco.
When Leontina laughed at that—laughed and laughed, with no artifice in sight—Pau found thatpoppingsensation inside him even more impossible to ignore. It was the careless joy on her face. It was the way she wiped at her eyes, but not because she was sad.
