AT FIRST VALENTINO thought that he must be having a stroke. A cardiac event of some kind. The first strange note was that none of his staff would meet his eye. He noticed it when his man met him in the drive, as he always did. And instead of exchanging the usual polite few words, he had simply tended to the luggage and hustled away.
But it did not take more than two steps into his house to understand why.
First he assumed he was dying. Or had died. He was not sure which was preferable.
Nor did he need anyone to tell him what had happened here. He could put it together.
She had transformed the house into...a cacophony. There was no other word for it.
“Yes,” came her voice, and he realized that he’d said the word out loud, having followed the explosion of color on top of color, next to pattern and more color, all the way down the great hall and back. “It is a great, glorious cacophony of emotion. Behold it. Learn to love it. That’s what it’s for.”
Valentino took his time turning to look at this woman. This madwoman who he had married, who was sitting on his steps like a wild creature someone must have dragged in from the sea. Her hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a brush since he’d left. Somehow it looked redder and thicker and much, much wilder, an impression she was helping along by being barefoot. Though it was nearly December and despite the sunny days, it was not warm. She otherwise wore paint-splattered overalls and some kind of torn shirt beneath them. Like an urchin instead of the wife of one of the richest men alive and a princess in her own right.
But what he couldn’t seem to look away from was that defiant look on her face.
“And what,” he asked in as calm a voice as he could manage, which was perhaps not very calm at all, “did you imagine my response would be to this outrage?”
“I hoped, of course, that you would see it as the gift that it is,” Carliz replied, almost merrily, to his ear. “But if you can’t, then I think it’s a reasonable enough trade.” When he stared at her without comprehension, she smiled. “You do not wish me to express my emotions, Valentino. So you can look at them.”
The strangest part was that he was not as irate, as awash in fury, as he should have been. He should have been cut straight through by this act of destruction when he had told her exactly what this house meant to him in its pristine state. This time he had been betrayed by his wife, who claimed to love him just as others had—and Valentino clearly needed to take a hard look at why there was such a long line of these betrayals throughout his life.
But as he stared at her, what he regretted was not that he had essentially handed her the means to strike at him like this by ordering her to fit in with the house. But that he had not taken her along with him on his trip.
It reminded him of that vow he’d made himself right after the wedding. He had wondered who, exactly, he had been trying to teach a lesson. Because Carliz was not only the one woman he could not forget, she was also the only person he could not tuck away into an appropriate compartment, never to think of again.
She was a curse. If his trip had been a test, he had failed it. Has he been as haunted by her in all the hotels he’d been forced to stay in, in all the cities he’d visited, as he was here.
Maybe that was why he did not react the way he might have even ten days ago. He did not lecture her. He did not attempt to order her to do this or that.
Instead, he looked at the colors. At the shapes and images. And it was a bit of a shock to see that she was actually a good artist when he’d thought her interest in art was that of a dilettante. If he was a different sort of man, he might consider this house a masterpiece and congratulate himself for giving her the perfect canvas.
But he was the man he’d been fashioned into right here on this island.
And it was time she understood that this was not a game he was playing.
“Very well done,” he told her. The weariness of travel seemed to fall away the more he gazed at her, but there was a cure for that. He was about to show her. “If you’re so visual that you felt the need to deface every surface of my home, then perhaps you should see for yourself.”
She looked intrigued. He had known she would. “Tell me more.”
He lifted a brow toward her...costume. “You will need to dress in something that does not make you look like a street urchin I swept up on my way back. Like some kind of dust mite.”
“My darling man,” she said, with that laugh he did not wish to admit that he had missed. But there the truth of it was. He had missed it. “I am the Princess Royal of Las Sosegadas. If I start appearing in public dressed like an urchin, everyone else will, too.”
All the same, she went and she changed her clothes and when she came down she looked breathtakingly, simply sophisticated. Precisely as he’d known she would.
And that was when he took her to see his father.
It was faster to drive to his father’s house, but he wanted to make all of his points as best he could. He wanted to make sure she fully understood him.
Because one thing he understood, now that he had seen what she’d done to his house—a perfect example of what she’d been doing to him, for years down—was that he had lost. Whatever fight this was, whatever strategy he’d imagined he could employ to gain the upper hand, it had all come to nothing.
She had won.
And so all that was left to him was to show her precisely what it was she could claim as her prize. What she had to look forward to. What would become of the pair of them, thanks to this insistence of hers on haunting him wherever he went.
He blamed himself. Of course he did. He had turned out to be exactly the kind of man he’d always sworn he would transcend.
But first, he walked with her.
“Many stories have been told about this island,” he said as he led her out behind the house and onto a path that led away from the hill and its view over the water, up along the cliffs. “No one believes that anyone in my family is related to the most famous bearer of our surname, though there have been many ideas about who else we might have been. All that is known for certain is that the island was the province of goat herders for a long while, as it is of no strategic importance to anyone. And eventually, it came into the possession of one of my ancestors. It is said the ancestor in question was particularly beguiled by the island’s pastoral charm.”
“It is a rare island that does not have some or other charms.”
Carliz walked beside him, seeming to keep pace with him effortlessly despite the increasing roundness of her form. She had gotten even bigger while he’d been away, and it amazed him that it suited her. All this ripeness.
When he glanced at her now, she wasn’t looking at him. Her gaze was out on the water, watching the way the late fall light danced over the waves, silver and gold at once. She had tamed the bohemian he’d seen on his stairs quickly. Her hair was now twisted back into a knot on her head that looked nothing short of sophisticated. What she was wearing was not in itself extraordinary. A pair of trousers cut beautifully, boots that gripped the uneven path beneath them, and a sweater wrapped around her that looked at least as soft as cashmere, the better to keep out the chill of the ocean air.
Though all around him, the island smelled like cinnamon instead of salt.
“You are a chameleon,” he said.
She laughed at that, and the look she shot his way was appraising. “I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment. I think.”
“You seem to fit in wherever you go, effortlessly.”
“Not effortlessly,” she corrected him. “It’s supposed to look that way though. I’m glad it does.” Carliz seemed to feel his frown on the side of her face and when she looked over to confirm it, she made another low noise. “I was about to say that you should know this, but there’s no reason you should. Your family has its measure of fame and notoriety, but it isn’t the same as mine. Being a member of a royal family isn’t the same thing as being famous. Or even notorious. We are public property, no matter what sort of monarchy it is that we belong to. And so every interaction requires public service, in one form or another. My sister and I were taught from a very young age that there was very little as important as making everyone around us feel comfortable. She is actually better at it than me, but you wouldn’t know it.”
“She’s too lofty, then?”
Carliz shook her head. “That’s not what I meant at all. It’s only that she’s the queen, you see. So no matter how hard she works to make people comfortable around her, what they see is the queen. Nonetheless, practicing being effortless is the bulk of what we did growing up. I think other children played. We practiced.”
He walked on and the fact that they were next to a cliff with a terrible drop to the rocks below did not escape his notice. He thought it was fitting. He had spent the whole of his life vowing that he would not be like his mother. That he would not be like any other member of his family, in any regard. And here he was all the same.
Wrecked as surely as if he had tossed himself over the side.
A threat his mother had liked to make with regularity.
“There was only one person in my family who ever seemed effortless,” Valentino said, though he had to force himself to say these words. He had spent so long not saying them. “And by that, I mean he was effortlessly cruel. He took pleasure in everyone else’s pain. After my mother died, he only got worse. And over time, it became clear to me that my brother’s reckless charm, as I have heard it called, was modeled directly on his. I vowed that I would be like neither of them. That I would honor those who came before me instead.”
“You mean your mother?”
“I mean my grandparents, who deserved a far better son than the one they got.” He blew out a breath, not liking that even talking of these things made him feel...not himself. All jangly and rough inside. “I have done my best to fill that gap, or so I thought. And then, instead, I allowed myself to get embroiled with you.”
“Well and truly embroiled,” she said, sounding perfectly cheerful.
“I’m trying to explain myself to you,” he told her darkly, everything in him...in a terrible kind of pain he could not begin to name. “This does not come easily.”
“What you are doing, Valentino, is walking along a cliff in late November, making dark mutterings that never quite come to the point,” she said. Gently enough, though there was a thread of something like exasperation beneath, to his ear. “Remember, you didn’t save me any pain these last few years. You caused it. Pretending this wasn’t happening didn’t make it go away. It just made it hurt more.”
“That was not my intention.”
“But it’s what happened.” She shrugged as if it was nothing. “Lucky for you, I love you anyway.”
“Why?” he bit out. “Why have you been so certain, all along?”
She looked at him curiously. “Because I saw you,” she said, as if it was simple. “I looked across a ballroom in Rome and there you were. I saw you. I recognized you. I knew you.” She shrugged. “I can’t explain it.”
And she didn’t even wait for his reaction to that, or look for it. That was how comfortable she was with the words. The sentiments themselves. He thought of all those bold shapes and bright colors, on every surface. Demanding that he see.
But she simply kept talking. “And now look. Despite all of that, here we are anyway.”
“Yet I am the only one who knows where we really are,” he told her. “You will understand shortly.”
She did not reply to that cryptic remark. They walked further, just over the next rise, and then he pointed. Down below, down a narrow set of stairs cut into the side of the hill, was the stretch of land his father liked to call The Peninsula. It was a relatively narrow bit of rock and sand that stuck out from the top of the island, and it was the site of the first house. Now it was known as Bonaparte’s Folly, which was an apt a name as any, Valentino supposed.
“Welcome to hell,” he said darkly.
He did not mean that to be amusing. So he was surprised when beside him, Carliz laughed.
And she was still laughing as she started for the stairs, gliding down them in a light-footed sort of way that made it clear she had no idea what she was getting herself into.
But that was the point of this, he reminded himself. His father was always issuing summons, Valentino only occasionally responded to them, and that was how they’d been banging along for ages now. Left to his own devices, he didn’t think he would respond at all, but anytime he leaned in that direction, Milo had a terrible habit of showing up at the worst possible times. And for the express purpose of embarrassing his son.
His revenge, Valentino knew. Because he did not like to be ignored.
At the bottom of the stairs, Carliz was already marching for the house that stood there, dark and imposing like all the nightmares he’d had as a child. He had to hurry to catch up with her, and when he did, she only tossed him a look and kept going.
“I’m not afraid of your father,” she told him.
Valentino ran a hand through his hair, a childhood tell he’d thought he’d beaten out of himself long since. “I’m not afraid of him either. But I don’t underestimate how good he is at what he does, either.”
“I understand.” She kept her eyes on the house before them, a true antique building that had been updated only in parts—those parts being the bits of the house his father liked. The rest of the old pile could fall off into the sea for all he cared. Mind you, he still held on to every heirloom, every painting, every bit of the heritage the house contained, because he knew that worrying about how casually he might destroy it kept Valentino up at night.
“I don’t think you do understand,” he gritted out to Carliz as they walked. “But you will.”
She stopped then, just short of the grand entrance. “My father was in no way the devil. I loved him dearly. But I was a disappointment to him and he told me so. And because he told me those things when I was very young, very impressionable, I have given them an undue weight over the rest of my life.”
He only stared back at her, certain he did not know what she meant. And even more certain that he did not wish to know.
“But I have come to understand that all of us choose our own shadows,” she told him, her treasure chest eyes locked to his. “Just as we choose our own pleasures. They are ours to pick through, discard, or carry forever. We decide.”
“You will see,” he told her, filled with prophecy and doom—and that same pain beneath. “There is a reason my father lives on an island, instead of in the center of a glittering city. He has a habit of repelling almost everyone he comes into contact with. It’s better by far if he remains in seclusion.”
“Excellent,” she said, and her lips curved in a way that really made him wish he had not come here with her. It made him wish that he had expressed his feelings on the topic of paint selection and artistic license in the manner they both enjoyed most, but it was too late. The die was cast. He could already hear stirrings from inside. “I’ve always wanted to ask a hermit what exactly it is they do all day. Sort through their thoughts? Tell themselves stories, as if a stuck on a desert island? I’ve always wondered if they think less or more than other people while all alone.”
“My father thinks of only one thing,” Valentino told her as the locks on the door were thrown, locks Milo had ostentatiously put there to lock them all in when Valentino’s mother’s behavior was at its worst. He kept them, all these years later, as an immediate reminder of those turbulent years. The screaming, the fighting. Broken glass and sobbing into the morning. “How to be the center of attention in all things.”
Then the door was thrown open, and there stood Milo himself.
Smiling affably.
Valentino had often thought that one of life’s great injustices was that his father did not resemble the kind of person he was inside. Because if he did, he would be gnarled and pockmarked and ridden with marks, poisoned from the inside out. Instead, he stood tall, with a full head of thick, dark hair. He was a vain man, and policed the lines on his face, comparing his looks to anyone he considered an enemy—which was to say, everyone he’d ever met. He was also partial to staring at his sons and despairing, loudly, that they should have received the great bounty of his genes while giving him so little in return.
As if their mothers had not been involved at all.
Milo was not as tall as either Valentino or Aristide. Valentino thought he got shorter every time they met, though maybe that was only wishful thinking on his part.
Though he would have seen them coming from one of his many windows, Milo took the time to stare at Valentino as if his appearance was a surprise. His lip curled, and Valentino could see the spark that usually preceded one of his cutting remarks in the light of his eyes.
But he didn’t say a word. He only turned his attention to Carliz, because he thought that the only reason a beautiful woman existed was to admire him.
And because he was likely hoping it would provoke Valentino.
Yet what Valentino felt was what he had when he was young, when he’d known that it was somehow his fault his mother was trapped on the island. Forced to live with Milo because of Valentino. Because Valentino was born, she was imprisoned.
It was possible she might have said so herself on some of her less lucid evenings.
He had tried to put himself between his mother and Milo, so he could protect her. And it had taken him most of his life to understand that she had not wanted protection. Not his. Not anyone’s. What she’d wanted was attention. Milo’s attention, specifically.
But she’d never cared how she got it.
Nonetheless, he was grown now and Carliz was his wife, not his mother. And he knew too well that not only would his father take far too much of a delight in it if he betrayed his usual composure by trying to take fire for her—but Carliz herself would not like it.
Milo still stood in the doorway, blocking it, his gaze moved insultingly over Carliz’s entire body. Up, then down, and then back again to focus on her round belly.
Valentino thought his jaw might break, he was clenching it so hard.
“Well, well, well,” Milo murmured, making a meal of it all in that odious tone of his. It dripped like acid down Valentino’s spine. “How nice of our famous party girl princess to drop by and say hello to someone so unimportant as her husband’s only blood relative. Full blood relative I mean.”
Valentino had made a mess of all of this. He understood that more keenly now than ever. He had let himself do the precise thing he’d known he could never do, not without ending up like his poor, lost mother—strung out on passion, destroyed by claims of love.
But he did not like the way his father was looking at his wife. Any more than he liked the way Milo made that distinction in their blood, as if Aristide wasn’t Milo’s full blood relation as well.
Most of all he hated the fact that he could see straight through his father, and yet the man’s relentless nastiness worked all the same.
But before he could say or do anything, or haul Carliz out of here before she was poisoned too, she laughed.
That absurd confection of a laugh that she was rightly famous for. This was one of the ways she sparkled hither and yon, all over the globe, like a mirror ball.
“I’d be tempted to take exception to that,” she said as the laughter faded, reaching out and tapping Milo on the arm as if he was standing there telling a set of jokes. As if they were friends. “But I’m not the type that takes against a friendly bit of hazing amongst family. Especially when I’m sure you know better, Signor Bonaparte.”
Milo’s eyes flattened. “I know a great many things, as a matter-of-fact.”
She leaned in like she was telling him a secret. “Then you know. You can call me Your Royal Highness.”
And it was the way she said it. As if she was extending an invitation—suggesting that he remember himself while also making fun of her exalted station. Nothing could possibly have fascinated and infuriated Milo more. It was masterful. And she wasn’t afraid, this marvel of a wife of his. She was completely assured.
She was Carliz of Las Sosegadas and she knew her own magnificence.
He did, too. Because he had seen her, recognized her. He had known her from that very same moment in Rome. Valentino stopped trying to pretend otherwise.
Even though they were here, where that kind of thing was used for sport. To hunt down any foolish enough to show it.
Carliz let out that laugh again, as if she was gracing Milo with a joke of her own. She even gave him a conspiratorial smile, showing him nothing but what she likely wanted him to see—the Princess Royal in all her glory. As unafraid as ever. Of Milo, but also of Valentino. Of this thing between them he would still rather deny. “It has a much better ring, don’t you think?”