BEATRICE READ HER charge’s intentions absolutely right, Cesare was forced to admit. He told himself he was delighted that he had chosen the right headmistress for the job. He told himself he had believed in her all along—or he would not have authorized his man to pay her as much as he was paying her.
That night they’d met in the garden, Mattea had snuck out by climbing down the side of the house using the trellis and an evidently too-hardy vine. When she hit the ground, she wandered into one of the outbuildings and trashed it.
Cesare had the place quietly set to rights before morning and had instructed the staff to say nothing about it. And later that same day Beatrice informed him, with that smile of hers, that Mattea seemed almost spooked by that response. That lack of response that was far louder than any threats or lectures.
Which was precisely what they wanted, she claimed.
Not that it kept Mattea from trying again. And again.
But every time his sister acted out, no matter how big or bad the behavior, Cesare did the same thing and had it handled before morning. He set guards on her windows to track her nighttime trail of destruction, though he warned them to never let her see them. And slowly, Mattea’s attempts to wreak a little bit of havoc...ebbed.
Before his eyes, without a single thundering lecture or threat of such things as incarceration, he watched his sister’s entire demeanor shift.
What he could not understand was why he was so annoyed.
Or rather, he understood that it was Beatrice herself who was getting to him, personally, for all the same reasons he could not explain. Not the success she was having with his impossible sister. He was thrilled about that. But the way she mystified him without even seeming to try.
Then again, not understanding Headmistress Beatrice Higginbotham, or her effect on him, was becoming a significant issue all around. As was that dream, which kept coming back to him no matter how he tried to exhaust himself to keep it at bay.
That night in the garden he’d thought he was dreaming when he’d seen her sitting there in the dark, like the very fantasy he’d been trying to walk out of his head.
The walking wasn’t working.
But since then, he’d avoided more shadows with her, too.
“If I may raise a personal matter,” the woman herself said in that prim, arch way of hers at one of their weekly meetings. It was coming on to the end of July by then. And he could not help but notice that she had taken on an internal sort of shine. He found it deeply disturbing, which was to say, he could not look away. Cesare was fairly certain that if he set her next to the moon, she would have out-glowed it.
And then he was forced to question where such terrible poetry was coming from, deep in his historically unpoetic soul.
“That is highly irregular,” he said in quelling tones. “But I will allow it.”
Her hazel eyes met his across the width of his desk. And held. “This job was presented to me as a temporary one. Predicated entirely on your betrothal, and then your wedding. I was given to understand that this would all happen in the course of the summer. This summer.”
Cesare could not have said why he disliked, so intensely, that a round little owl—who seemed to get ever rounder by the day, to his eye—should mention the betrothal that hadn’t happened yet. Or the wedding he should have started planning already.
Just as he could not comprehend how he, who had never dragged his feet where his duty was concerned, had now been doing so for months.
He gazed at her with as much arrogant amazement as he could manage. “I’m struggling to understand how or why this is a topic of conversation you feel is appropriate to raise with me.”
“It will be August tomorrow,” she said, in that gently intense way she used on Mattea all the time. Cesare did not appreciate the comparison. “Time is running out.”
He sat back in his chair, pleased—and that was the right word, he assured himself—that he had moved their meetings to his office. Better to keep things on the right foot with no more meetings on a lovely terrace at sunset. Better to make sure his father’s letter was at hand. Even if they were having an inappropriate conversation about his personal life anyway. “Do you imagine that I will have any trouble marrying in whatever timeline, accelerated or otherwise, that I wish?”
Her eyes seemed to glitter. “I only want to make sure that you’re aware that my timeline cannot go past August.” When he raised a brow, he thought she nearly flushed, then wondered why he wanted her to. What that would mean. “That was the agreement that was made.”
There was no reason that should scrape at him. What did he care what life this woman had waiting for her out there, wherever she was from?
“As it happens, I have decided to throw a great party,” he found himself saying. “My intended will be here, of course. I thought perhaps I might use this party as an opportunity to propose.” He stared at her. “If, that is, my plans for my personal life meet with your approval, Miss Higginbotham.”
And he didn’t think he was the only one who felt the tension in the room, then.
“I’m sorry if I overstepped,” Beatrice replied, and she sounded appropriately apologetic. But there was that way she was looking at him. There was that challenging glint in her gaze. He doubted very much that she was apologetic at all. “My interest in the matter is only in how it relates to my calendar. You understand.”
He did not understand.
Just as Mrs. Morse did not understand when he informed her, perhaps a bit shortly, that he intended to throw a gala.
“You mean next year, surely?” the woman sputtered.
When she never sputtered.
“I mean next week,” Cesare growled.
He had hired the indomitable housekeeper when he was leaving England, and his schooling, so he could come back to Italy and somehow take charge of the Chiavari empire. She had been overseeing the domestic workings of an entire public school’s worth of posh boys, all of them neck-deep in too many pedigrees to count. At eighteen, he had thought she was a marvel.
He still did.
She proved herself to be exactly that when all she did was force a smile. “Everyone adores a summer party, Mr. Chiavari.”
And she set about making it happen.
Most people could not throw a grand party on a moment’s notice and expect anyone of worth to attend. Certainly not in the depths of summer, when so many people were committed elsewhere and had been for months.
But he was Cesare Chiavari. People would always do his bidding. Besides, most of Europe would kill for the opportunity to have a nose about the famous Chiavari estate, known for generations as the jewel of Tuscany. To prove his magnanimity, and perhaps to predispose her to consider behaving, he even told Mattea that she could invite some friends.
And yet as the party drew closer, he was...not right.
If he was a different sort of man, he might have called it agitation. But Cesare did not get agitated. He did not allow himself that lack of self-control.
Still, he found himself awake late into the night, holding that ring in his hand and turning it this way and that as if a new view of it might change things.
But no matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine it on Marielle’s slender fingers.
When he thought of the ring that had once belonged to the grandmother who had died before he was born, he thought instead of the hands he’d seen clenching down hard into the bedcovers in his Venetian hotel. The fingers that had scraped their way down his back, leaving marks that had taken a long time to heal.
Marks he had missed once they were gone.
And worse by far, every time he closed his eyes, every time he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed of Beatrice.
Something about the woman drove him absolutely mad.
None of it made sense.
But Cesare was certain he had mastered it the night of the party.
Because he needed it mastered. Tonight was the night he would propose to Marielle, making her the next Chiavari wife, and ushering in the next era of the family legacy.
He should have been filled with the deep contentment that came from taking one more step toward the future he’d always known awaited him, the way he had at the start of the year. Back when he’d decided that it was time to stride with confidence into the next phase. The phase that had always been planned for him.
Cesare told himself that was exactly what he felt. Contentment. Though tonight it seemed like nothing so much as a deep pressure in his chest.
The guests had been trickling in all day, taking up residence in the guest quarters here in the house and in cottages spread out all over the property. The staff had prepared the estate, making it sparkle even more than it usually did, and Mattea—perhaps in anticipation—had kept her nighttime activities to the barest minimum. The last night she’d snuck out she’d only gone and sat by the lake for a time. There had been no cleanup crew required.
Perhaps you should view it as a gift for your betrothal, that infernal headmistress had suggested.
Now Cesare stood at the bottom of the grand stairs, waiting for the night—and his future—to begin. Content straight through. And as he watched, Marielle started down one side of the Y-shaped stair, making her way down from the guest wing side of the gallery. She was dressed to shine, and she took her time with each step, no doubt expecting that he would take the opportunity to appreciate her.
He did, Cesare assured himself. Of course he did.
From the other side of the gallery, Mattea ran down the opposing arm of the Y, entirely too fast for anything approaching the propriety she ought to show, given her position. He frowned at her as she shot past him, but he didn’t bother to react to the insolent face she made.
His gaze was caught by the woman who followed after her, dressed in what he assumed must be a formal version of her usual shroud, hair scraped back and what looked like the faintest hint of lip color somewhere beneath her monstrous glasses.
And suddenly, irrevocably, he was faced with an unpleasant truth he had been avoiding for a very long time.
To the left, there was Marielle. She was all that was elegant. The sort of woman men wished to possess simply because she looked like what she was: expensive and exclusive and out of most men’s reach. Blonde and slim and tall, she glided instead of walking. She had the sort of long neck that was made to showcase dramatic jewels. She had a pleasing face that would always look good in a photograph. She knew precisely how to style herself to look her best at every occasion. She made a good impression without even trying.
And to the right was a woman who looked like nothing so much as an owl, feathers ruffled in perpetual outrage—or, perhaps, condemnation. She was decidedly round. She dressed in dark-colored shrouds and would look like a dark orb in any picture. Her glasses had ridiculously heavy frames that hid most of her face. She was not precisely a servant, but she wasn’t a guest, either, and even the usually unimpressed Mrs. Morse had indicated that she liked the headmistress. Like everyone else in the house who was not a surly teen.
Yet it was a truth he could no longer deny that he spent uncountable hours imagining what it would be like to get his hands into that strict bun of hers and let her hair fall free. He had spent many, many nights wondering what her hair even looked like. Was it long? Thick? Did it curl when left to its own devices?
And that was but one, small fraction of his obsession with the woman.
He didn’t understand it, but it had been happening for a while. And only now, faced with both Marielle and Beatrice practically side by side, could he accept this thing that baffled him as much as it made him uncomfortably hard.
He did not want the woman he intended to marry. Not like this. Not with a deep hunger that seemed to have no bottom.
Cesare wanted that little owl.
In a manner he would call desperate, if he were someone else.
And sometimes, in moments like this one, when her steady gaze was on his and something in the hazel depths glittered, he suspected she knew it.
But it was not as if that knowledge was any help to him. Not now. Not ever, a voice in him growled.
For any number of very good reasons, but particularly the blonde, lovely, and blue-blooded reason who glided down the rest of the stairs to stand before him. Presenting herself for an inspection that she likely expected would end in adoration.
What was the matter with him that he could not give even that to her?
“I have very few requirements,” Marielle said quietly after a moment. “But one of them is that you at least try to pay attention to me when we are alone.”
And she said that with her winning smile, the one that he could tell was lovely but left him cold. Because it turned out that what he wanted in a smile was a bit of weaponry. A dangerous edge, a hint of chastisement or judgment. Not centuries of breeding, apparently, with the perfect manners to match.
As he thought these things, his little owl passed behind them, and Cesare realized that she existed completely beneath his intended’s notice.
The way she should have existed beneath his.
“My apologies, Marielle,” he murmured, drawing her arm through his. “I will attempt to focus my attention where it ought to go.”
But he didn’t. Because Cesare was aware of the typically determined sound of Beatrice’s footsteps as she disappeared, ducking out of the great hall into one of the open, airy salons that flowed one into the next, clearly in search of Mattea and the friends who’d joined her for the weekend.
If he was not so afflicted by his own round, drab owl, Cesare would pay no more attention to the doings of his sister. He would assume that the person he’d hired to handle her was doing the job.
And yet as he led Marielle into the salon where the most important guests were already gathering ahead of the banquet, none of them fifteen-year-olds, he found he could barely track the conversation. Instead, he wondered if this was what he had to look forward to for the rest of his life. All of this gentility and talking around things, or past them. It had never occurred to him that cocktail conversation was nothing more than a means of passing the time. And that the fact that there were those who felt that it should be elevated to an art—and judged those who could not manage the task—suggested that the people indulging in such pastimes were idle enough that they required a certain kind of wit to animate the time allotted to conversations like this, because they had little else to do with it.
He stood slightly back from the group, watching Marielle play games he knew she’d been coached in since the cradle. She was good at all of it, of course. It was one of the criteria he had judged her on.
She had gotten high marks across the board. She was innocent, but had not spent her formative years locked away in a tower, like some. She was bright, educated. She was a keen runner and enjoyed testing her times in the races she ran. She’d had multidisciplinary interests at university yet had gone into charity work upon graduation, though not the way so many other heiresses did. She was not merely marking time. The charity she worked with was more hands-on and she’d spent a significant amount of time getting her hands dirty. And while Cesare did not require a wife with dirty hands, he admired her dedication.
But most importantly, Marielle had been raised to prize a strong legacy above all things. She had her own. As many questions as he had asked her about her future prospects, she’d had the same number of queries for him. She’d wanted to know what it would mean to be a Chiavari, how her children would be received by the world, and how best they could craft a life for them that could honor both of their august bloodlines.
She was a woman who knew her worth and expected her treatment to match.
And yet as he watched her shine in her own inimitable way, all Cesare could think was that she was...a lovely chandelier, made to give off good light, but always dependent on her surroundings to reach full strength.
He broke away from the group and told himself it was only because he, as host, needed to greet the rest of the guests. But he made short shrift of that and soon found himself moving through the parade of salons until he found the little huddle of teenagers in the one farthest away from the one he’d been standing in.
And Beatrice was there in the middle, somehow managing to have all the magic and mystery of moonlight. As if she was the moon itself.
She saw him coming and walked away from the group, but not before muttering a few words that Cesare did not have to hear to know were sharp.
“Surely you have better things to do, Mr. Chiavari, than monitor the children,” she said crisply. Likely to make sure the teenagers heard her refer to them as children.
Because this woman did not appear to concern herself with him or his wishes at all, and he should have hated that.
Cesare knew that under any other circumstances, with any other woman, he would.
“I’m making certain that everything is under control,” he said, because...he needed to say something, didn’t he.
He needed to explain why he’d sought Beatrice out like this, when all the guests who mattered waited for him at the other end of the house. And a glance at his sister showed that she had a bit of hectic color in her cheeks, and a look in her eyes that usually led to bad decisions, but he supposed that was only to be expected with her friends in the room.
“They look as if they’re plotting something,” he said.
Beatrice did not have to follow his gaze. “Because they are. They’re teenagers. That’s their job. I can guarantee you that unfortunate decisions will be made, but the hope is that I can minimize any collateral damage.”
“I would think your role is to prevent it.”
“My goal for the evening is not to prevent scandalous behavior, Mr. Chiavari,” Beatrice said with that serenely patient smile. “But to keep it off the internet. To that end, I’ve confiscated every single one of their mobiles. I have the staff on high alert. All you need to do is concentrate on your party.”
Cesare realized in that moment that he’d forgotten all about the party.
Something in him turned over at that. As if it was yet another message he couldn’t afford to ignore.
Though he tried anyway.
Later, at the banquet table, he watched Beatrice sit with her usual smile in the midst of a pack of teenagers, managing to keep them at a dull roar, with only hints of high-pitched mirth running through the lot of them like an electric current now and again.
But he must have been staring that way for too long. To his right, Marielle stirred, gazing down the length of the table, and then beaming when she looked back at him. “I’m so looking forward to getting to know your sister, Cesare.” She paused. Delicately. “She seems like such a colorful girl.”
And Cesare found that he did not care for anyone’s critiques of Mattea, save his own. He did not frown at Marielle. Not quite. “My sister has not had an easy time of it.”
“What I hope, Cesare,” Marielle said, reaching over and putting her hand over his on the tabletop where everyone could see, “is that I might offer myself as some kind of role model for your sister as she moves through these formative years. As we both know, a reputation is a legacy waiting to happen. Sometimes it happens against one’s will.”
Cesare discovered in that moment that he was not particularly interested in discussing either reputations or legacies when it came to Mattea. And he realized he hadn’t thought enough about the fact that any wife he brought home might feel, as Marielle clearly did, that it was her job to instruct Mattea on how to behave.
Everything in him balked.
Because there was only one woman he trusted to keep his sister’s best interests at heart. Only one he would allow to chastise her. Only one who he would ever permit to speak to Mattea as if she was simply a girl, instead of his sister.
And he was not at all certain that Mattea needed a self-professed role model who he had earlier this evening compared to a light fixture.
“Marielle,” Cesare began, pulling his hand out from under hers.
He watched panic flash over her features. Or perhaps it something else, something more like determination.
Either way, Marielle leaned in. And without waiting for any sign from him, she pressed a swift kiss to his mouth.
Then she turned, beaming down the length of the table, and let out a laugh that was nothing short of peals of joy, wholly unsuited to the moment.
It made the rest of the guests fall quiet, as he understood then that she’d known it would.
“Cesare and I are getting married!” she cried, clasping her hands to her chest.
And the analytical part of Cesare’s brain could not blame her. He had told her he meant to propose, then he hadn’t. This was supposed to be a business arrangement. It shouldn’t matter in the least that she was the one who had called his bluff here.
Especially when she did it so masterfully, leaking a tear or two and throwing herself into congratulatory hugs and praise on all sides as everyone surged to their feet and clustered around the happy couple.
Making it impossible for him to correct her.
Cesare was aware of friends and acquaintances slapping him on the shoulders, offering him the expected felicitations, but his focus was on the far end of the table. The teenagers looked confused. Mattea looked worryingly stone-faced.
And then, though he knew it would hurt—and did not wish to ask himself why—he found Beatrice.
She appeared to be studying her empty plate with tremendous focus, but as if she could feel the weight of his gaze upon her, she looked up.
And for moment, there was only that.
There was only them.
There was an honesty between them, at last. Too late. An acknowledgment. An unspoken certainty that made the pressure in his chest all the worse.
When she finally pulled her gaze away, Cesare found himself bereft.
And more than that, engaged.