NOTHING COULD HAVE PREPARED Annika for her honeymoon.
The days were warm, golden bright, and perfect. The nights were cool and called for fires in the grate and long walks in the vineyards, her head tipped back to take in the sky sloppy with stars. He had brought his trusted staff with him from New York and they managed to be both efficient and mostly invisible. It was at mealtimes that she was most grateful that they were here, heaping the bounty of this enchanted valley before them, so that there was no part of her day or night that was not a feast.
If this was the marriage her father had wanted for her, she was only astonished that he hadn’t hurried her into it sooner. Had he known all along? She hoped so.
Because this was magic.
Ranieri was magic.
Annika couldn’t get enough of him. No matter how many times he took her in the night, she woke up starving for more. No matter how he spread her before him, letting the golden light dance all over her naked body, she wanted to give him more.
There was nothing she wouldn’t give him, she thought after a week had passed, a soft, hot rush of sensation and delight. She only grew more voracious. She only wanted more. There was no sensual banquet she wasn’t prepared to share with him.
Their days took on an easy routine. They tended to wake at the first hint of light, turning to each other in that wide bed they’d claimed as theirs. It sat at the back of the house, so that sometimes Annika imagined that she could hear her own cries echo back to her from the hills beyond. And no matter how wild or adventurous they’d gotten the night before, their mornings were always about fire. Need.
As if, she sometimes thought, neither one of them could believe that this was real.
Ranieri usually left her to spend his morning in the cottage’s study, tending to his empire from afar. But Italian mornings were early in New York, so Annika allowed herself to be lazy. Sometimes she got up when Ranieri did, but more often she turned over and dozed.
She would have been the first to say that she’d led too privileged a life to have earned her idleness, and some mornings, the guilt of that had her charging out of bed. But as the days passed, she felt less and less guilty. She couldn’t remember losing her mother, yet the loss had marked her whole life. Losing her father had been two terrible days, with five years of a slower, more pervasive grief in between. The day of his accident and the day of his death had been unbearable in their own ways, especially because she’d had all that time in the middle to let herself imagine that things might be different. So much time that his death had been a shock, when perhaps she should have seen it as a blessing.
Because he was free now.
It was only here, across the ocean in Italy, on a honeymoon with the least likely man alive, that Annika found the space to let herself mourn.
Maybe it was because she wasn’t fighting it here. Maybe it was because she simply let whatever emotions came up wash over her in this place of golden ease. It was grief, but it was sweeter, somehow, than it might have been otherwise.
When she finally rose in the mornings, she took her time in the bath, or in the shower. Often, she would find herself staring out the windows until the beauty of the small, perfect valley overwhelmed her and she would feel drawn to take long walks through the fields.
And as she walked, she thought about...everything. Her lost mother she hoped she resembled in as many ways as possible. Her father, who had loved her so. His confounding will, which seemed to refute that. The past month and a half. And Ranieri, who was so tangled up in all of it.
Some days he would come and find her out in the fields when it was getting toward midday. He would grin at her, that dark, fierce face of his set in such bold lines. He would tumble her down into the sweet grass or the soft earth, and teach her new ways to cry out. To hold that beauty in her hands and chase the wildness that was only theirs.
Other times she wandered back to the house, and would take a light lunch with him on the patio outside his study, if the weather was fine. Or inside near the fire if it was cool. And they would talk. The way they never had in all the years they’d known each other, stretching back to when she’d been a teenager. Not necessarily of big, emotional things, but all the rest of it. Small stories. Observations. The connective tissue that held all the big things together, she liked to think.
Like they were just people. Not enemies making the best of things.
Over lunch one day, she made some comment about needing to find more ways to teach him a lesson or two. Ranieri gazed at her with laughter all over his face and his eyes bright. And no matter how many times she saw it these days, it never failed to make her breath catch.
“I’m happy to teach you jujitsu,” he said after a moment. “Though I cannot promise that I will teach you to be any good at it.”
“I’ve actually taken a jujitsu class before.” Annika wrinkled up her nose. “It seemed like a whole lot of very dramatic cuddling.”
He stared across the brightly tiled table at her, looking as outraged as he did astonished. “Cuddling,” he repeated.
“All that clenching together. And then writhing about everywhere. You know, it all seemed like a lot of thighs.” She shook her head. “And then quite a bit of heaving about. It was off-putting, I have to say.”
Ranieri continued to stare at her for a moment. Then he reached over, plucking her out of her chair and pulling her over his lap.
“Perhaps you need another lesson,” he murmured, nipping at her chin and making her shiver.
But what he taught her then, carrying her into the study and laying her down on the thick rug like an offering, was not jujitsu. Or any martial art Annika had ever heard of.
It was glorious all the same.
In the afternoons, she liked to check in with the museum back at home. Then she usually found a book and curled up with it, loving the afternoons when Ranieri ignored his own work, sought her out, and took her back to bed. But loving just as much the peaceful hours she got to spend in her favorite chair, sometimes dozing, sometimes unable to turn the pages fast enough.
And always, at some point, thinking back to when he’d brought up sex and she’d wondered what regular sex might even look like.
They dressed for dinner every night, and the dressing itself sometimes took longer than necessary. Because Ranieri’s “help” always ended the same way—with him surging deep inside her as they both took their pleasure, because the real magic was the way they fit together.
That friction. That heat.
His hardness so deep in her softness, his mouth ravaging her neck, her breasts. Her nails leaving marks on his shoulders, his back.
It only seemed to get worse, this need. This endless wanting.
Sometimes they had their dinner outside, taking advantage of the last of the mild nights. When it was colder—and it kept getting colder—they sat in the cottage’s pleasant dining room, or took trays before the fire of their choice. And always there was the sensual delight of the food they ate. Every night it was a feast of local fare, prepared to perfection. But for Annika, the real treat was the opportunity to get to know this man who had cast his shadow over her life for so long.
She knew better than to say out loud some of the conclusions she’d come to during her lazy mornings or out on her long walks. She knew better than to say that clearly, her father had known what he was doing here. That he’d been on to something. That he’d seen something in them that neither one of them would ever have come to on their own.
After all, Ranieri had only signed up for a year. Annika might already be hoping that they would last longer than that, but she wasn’t foolish enough to say that. She didn’t want to ruin the year he was willing to give her.
Because she wanted every greedy, glorious moment of it.
“Tell me about your grandmother,” she said one night, when one week had turned into two, and kept rolling on. “She’s the one you speak of most often.”
Tonight they were seated not in the cottage’s formal dining room, but one of the smaller sitting rooms. Like everything else in this lovely house, it was furnished in light, pleasing shades. The fire in the grate seemed to dance lovingly over the carefully placed objects that graced the tables, the precisely arranged stacks of books, and the quietly impressive art that was hung haphazardly over each wall.
Like every other room in this house, the elegance of the surroundings never took away from the room’s comfort. Even if the previous owner hadn’t been Ranieri’s grandmother, Annika would have been curious how anyone had managed to pull that off. She assured herself it was a professional interest, given she was the one responsible for staging the exhibits at the museum.
Ranieri sat back in his chair, the last of the night’s meal before them. They had eaten at a small round table that allowed them to sit closer to each other and he had fed her morsels throughout from his fingers, adding a glimmering undercurrent of fire to every bite she took.
And now that fire was banked, though still in his gaze as he held his wineglass and swirled it in his hand, taking a moment to glance around the room.
“Everyone told my grandmother that she was making a bad bet on one of those Furlans,” he said after a moment or two passed. “That it would all end in tears. But she defied them and did it anyway, to her sorrow.”
“Are you all so bad, then?” Annika smiled when his gaze moved back to hers, even though he looked remote again. “I thought it was only you.”
She was used to him smiling more these days. There was that crook in the corner of his mouth, but it went beyond that, too. Sometimes he grinned widely, the autumn sun pouring all over him as if the grin had summoned it. He laughed more and more as the days went by, usually a wicked, sensual sound, there against her skin.
The world might have been spinning them into another winter’s darkness, but between them, the light only grew.
Yet she was reminded that he was still Ranieri Furlan as he gazed back across the table now, his expression taking on that grave, grim coldness she knew so well. Even if she hadn’t seen it since they’d left New York.
And maybe it told her everything she needed to know about herself that seeing it now only made her shiver with delight. It made her want him, as if she had never had him at all.
It made her wonder why, exactly, she had told herself she hated him all these years. All these long years when he had always looked at her this way. When he had always been so inaccessible, so remote.
And all the while, there’d been this hunger deep inside her, just waiting for him to feed it.
But she had asked him a question and he was answering it. She tried to squirm in her chair unobtrusively.
“It is not that we are bad in the ways you might imagine,” he told her, his gaze dark. “On the contrary, we usually do quite well for ourselves. But sooner or later, we are presented with choices. And almost without exception, we choose our own pride over everything else.”
“You have to give me examples, Ranieri.” He had mentioned pride before, she was certain. But... “Pride can mean anything.”
She thought she saw his jaw tense. Or maybe she only wanted the excuse to reach over and touch him, to soothe him... But she kept herself from it, curling her fingers around the delicate stem of her own wineglass instead. Though she hardly needed intoxicants when she was in his presence.
“Take my grandfather,” Ranieri said, sounding distressingly cold and sober. “My grandmother was descended from Florentine nobility. She could have chosen anyone, yet she had eyes only for him. And this was a different time, you understand. So no matter their affection for each other, it was accepted practice that a man of my grandfather’s station would secure the family line, then seek his pleasures where he chose.”
“Mistresses,” Annika said, though the word tasted bitter on her tongue. “You can just say the word.”
Ranieri’s eyes gleamed in a way that sent a cold shiver down the length of her spine. “My grandfather had only one mistress then. By all accounts, she was magnificent. The toast of Italy. There was not a man alive who did not want her.”
Ranieri returned his attention to the room. More specifically, to the mantel above the fireplace. She followed his darkening gaze to a set of framed photographs and took the moment to study them. The dark-haired woman, laughing in one photo but too serious in the next.
Annika could see Ranieri in her face.
She felt a strange little tickle then, a kind of foreboding, and wanted almost desperately to stop this conversation. She knew how she would do it. She could launch herself across the table, then sink to her knees and take him in her mouth the way he’d taught her.
It would be a distraction, perhaps. But it would also make them both happy. She knew that as well as she knew her own name.
But she didn’t dare do it. She didn’t quite dare.
He was opening up to her, and no matter how being naked with him moved her, no matter what it showed her about the both of them, Annika understood that this was real vulnerability. That him telling her stories could never be dismissed as just sex.
A stray memory moved in her then, of her reaction when he’d told her that he had not initially intended to be faithful in this marriage. How outraged she’d been at the very idea, and that had been long before she’d developed this unhealthy, possessive fixation on his body.
On him.
She did not want to be married to any man who kept a mistress. And she specifically did not want to share Ranieri with anyone.
But she did not need to risk saying those things out loud, because she already knew she had no right to feel them. That was not what this was. That was not what they’d agreed. This one, miraculous year.
She cleared her throat. “I take it your grandmother was not pleased with this arrangement,” she said instead.
“My grandmother was raised to accept these things as all women of her class did,” Ranieri said, his voice seeming to grow darker and more forbidding by the word. “At first, it did not occur to her to object to what was common practice. But then she made the critical error of falling in love.”
“With your grandfather?” Annika asked, hesitantly.
“He was in love with her, too,” Ranieri said, but he sounded almost bitter. “She bore him a son, then two more. Both of them always said that those were happy years. Who knows how long that could have continued? But instead, my grandmother asked my grandfather to give up this mistress of his.”
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable.”
Ranieri let out a laugh, too dark to be anything like amusement, and she knew the difference now. “Perhaps not. But then, my grandfather was a Furlan. There was no question that he loved my grandmother. He said so at the time. He loved his sons as well. But he would not be told by his wife that he should give up anything. He would not permit my grandmother to dictate his behavior. So they lived apart until they died, as he would not divorce her. And he not only kept his mistress, he took others to prove he could. He wasted a fortune on each, leaving my grandmother to fend for herself. Leaving her to raise his sons with the money she had brought into the marriage. He felt he could do as he liked, and so he did. What is that if not egregious pride? And how many lives marred because of it?”
Annika’s heart was kicking at her, as if this was perilous, this conversation. She could not see how, seeing as they were speaking of people long dead. But she could feel the danger. She felt as if she was standing on the edge of a steep cliff and the wind was high.
“Still, my grandfather is not the best example of the Furlan pride,” Ranieri continued. “His sins were only ever of a personal nature. There are far too many others who made certain that their stumbles ruined more than their marriages and families.”
“With all these cautionary tales, you must have spent your life doing your best to rid yourself of this pride,” Annika said.
Perhaps too hopefully.
His dark brows rose. “Quite the opposite. I am so proud, Annika, that I refuse to accept that I will lose anything I wish to keep. My father has lost at least three fortunes by my reckoning. One of my uncles lost his life, too proud to admit he made a mistake and too proud to recognize that he was on the wrong side of the wrong kind of people. My other uncle considers himself too good to do what he ought to do to better his situation, an abominable display of misplaced pride if ever there was one. But as for me?” He did something with his glass of wine that seemed to take in the whole of the room, the cottage, perhaps the world. Certainly her. “I have made so many fortunes that it cannot matter if I lose three. Or even ten. Call it insurance if you will.”
But he did not sound pleased by this. He sounded wrecked, and she hated it.
“Ranieri,” she whispered. “Surely you must know—”
“I will show you what I know best,” he told her then, his voice dark and grave.
But when he moved, coming to pull her out of her chair, his kiss lit them both on fire.
And he made love to her like a man possessed that night. First there on the couch in that sitting room. Then he carried her upstairs, spent some time with her in the spacious bath, and then ripped her to shreds in their bed.
Again and again.
Annika thrilled to it all.
He was ruthless and demanding, and she felt as if she’d been made for this. Made for him, to meet his need, his hunger. To match his ruthlessness with her own.
To make certain that both of them burned bright and long, together.
And in the morning, she woke as he surged inside her once more, framing her face with his big, restless hands, his gaze pinning her to the mattress in the early morning light.
Usually their mornings were flash fires, bold and bright and fast-moving, but today was different.
He moved slow, setting them both to smoldering. So slow that every thrust took forever, and every retreat felt like a loss.
Still, he held her gaze. Still, he held her face in his hands.
With every deep, beautiful thrust, he broke her heart.
And when it was done, Annika lay in the bed and understood that she was already repeating the mistake his grandmother had made.
She was in love with him. Irrevocably, unpardonably, and not at all temporarily in love.
And looking back, she thought as she sat in the bath again—sinking down until her whole body was submerged by the warm water, save her face—it was possible she always had been.
More than possible. Likely.
This morning’s lovemaking had stripped away the last of her defenses, and she could see everything so clearly now. She had met him when she was barely sixteen and had hated the very sight of him—but what use could she possibly have had for silly boys after a sight of Ranieri? She’d gone on to college, where so many of her friends had experimented with passion and longing, crushes and relationships, but never Annika.
Some part of her must have known all along that she could settle for no substitutes. Even though she’d continued to despise him. Even though she’d considered him the bane of her existence.
Maybe there had been something in her that had sensed the kind of fire they would kindle together, all along.
“It’s all right,” she assured herself as she rose from the bath and got dressed in her walking clothes, an easy pair of soft overalls, a chambray shirt, a wide-brimmed hat. “It’s all going to be all right.”
Because it was clear to her that last night’s storytelling had indeed been a cautionary tale—but for her, not him.
She stopped by the portrait of his grandmother that hung in the hall outside their bedroom. “I will not make the same mistake you did,” she promised this woman long gone, who had been punished for her heart. “I won’t tell him.”
Though she understood why the other woman had made the choice she had. Annika could feel her heart beating too fast. She could feel her own heart. And she knew that there was nothing more she wanted to tell Ranieri than the truth.
Even though she knew he wouldn’t take it well.
She would hold it inside. She would keep it sacred, and hers. And as long as she didn’t say it, she didn’t see why she couldn’t have this year of theirs.
And maybe more than this year, a voice in her whispered, because in everything concerning this man, she was so greedy. So interminably greedy. If you play your cards right.
Annika almost laughed at that as she made her way down the stairs, heading toward Ranieri’s study on autopilot. Because when had she ever been even remotely good at cards?
Well, she would have to learn. And in the meantime, she would take all these new, unwieldy feelings and keep them where they belonged. Deep inside her. Hidden away, like treasures too precious to be taken out in the light.
She could do it, she was sure.
Or in any event, she would do it.
But when she pushed open the door to Ranieri’s study, she didn’t have to worry that he might see her love for him all over her face.
Because he wasn’t alone.
And she was certain she knew exactly who the two older people were who sat there on the couch of the study, neither one of them looking pleased. If she looked closely, she was certain she could see the man she loved in both of them.
Her gaze flew to Ranieri as he stood there at the mantel, looking...cold and cruel.
As distant as if none of these sweet honeymoon days had ever happened.
“Buongiorno, Annika,” he said, but not in the way he normally said her name. Not with that dark delight she’d come to depend on. “How kind of you to join us. May I present my parents. It appears they have invited themselves along on our honeymoon.”