Page 17 of Bound Enemies
Of her.
Her velvet, his steel. The way she clenched tight around him and drew him into her so that together, they could chase that fire that had burned from the start into a wild incandescence.
When she clutched him tight and sobbed out his name once more, her body beginning to clutch around him, he went with her.
And this was how Pau Calixto, who had made his reputation on the correctness of his behavior and his abiding moral rectitude—a deep contrast with many of the other individuals in his tax bracket—came back to himself on the floor of his office, still lodged deep inside Leontina Tavian.
An office that was made almost entirely of windows, into which any member of his staff could have looked at any point. If it had been any time in the last half hour, he wouldn’t have cared if they all gathered round and pulled up chairs.
Pau really couldn’t tell if he was horrified or something more like…proud.
He shoved that word away. It didn’t make sense, not here. Not when the entire point of his existence was to live up to his father’s exacting expectations. To do it even better than his father had done, and thereby somehow make good on this thing his father had loved. To preserve both the legacy his father had nearly lost and Pau’s own along with it.
A legacy that would then carry over to the child she carried, even now.
A chain that bound them all together, holding them tight, throughout generations—something far better, and far more real, than the emotional ties he knew some families spoke of. He believed the Calixto way was better.
Laudable even, he thought, but that didn’t change the fact that they were potentially on display.
He stood and put his clothing to rights, then wordlessly helped Leontina back into her dress. Then he put physical distance between them as quickly as he could.
“That can obviously not happen again,” he said, the chill in his voice frigid even to his own ears. “This is a business, not a brothel.”
Leontina only gazed back at him, her green eyes entirely too calm. “I hate to be that person, but a brothelisa business.”
“It is notmybusiness,” he returned. He found himself sliding a hand over his hair and stopped himself, because Pau Calixto did notfidget. “I see no need for us to dine together tonight. I will have the staff deliver a tray to your rooms. I appreciate that we were wed today and perhaps emotions were running high, but I thought I made this clear.”
Now she looked…interested. Maybe. As if this was a lecturer she’d caught at university, quite by accident, and she thought she might pull up a chair and listen in.
Then that was literally what she did. She moved over to his desk and settled herself in one of the chairs in front of it, and he despised the fact that she looked perfectly put together when he was contending with a heretofore unknownfidgetingproblem. Her dark hair didn’t look the slightest bit out of place and if he hadn’t known exactly where that glow she wore came from, he might have tried to convince himself that it was simply cosmetics at play. Her dress was wholly unwrinkled despite what they’d just done. The ring he’d slid on her finger with his own hands earlier caught the light.
Pau found himself wishing that she was still concealing herself in her baggy sackcloth missing only the attendant ashes, but he hadn’t seen the faintest hint of the dress she arrived in. Not in days.
“Please be clear again,” she encouraged him, with that damned smile of hers that he knew meant she washandlinghim. “I would hate to accidentally misinterpret anything that happened between us.”
Like, for instance, a disgraceful display of animalistic urges on the floor of his office. He could see that she was thinking that, though she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to say it.
Pau was fairly certain that there was only one way to interpret what had happened between them today, but he didn’t want any part of that. He wanted her pregnant. He wanted her married, and to him. He wanted to shove all of that at Umberto, make it hurt, and watch as the vile old man took it in.
He’d always thought that this would be best achieved with Leontina clearly married to him and a whole child that could not be ignored between them.
The perfect family despite Umberto’s vicious little games.
He’d been planning it all out for years. But in all of that planning, he had never considered that he might have his own, unpleasantly emotional reaction to all of those things. It had never occurred to him to solve for that in advance, because never in his life had his cock had a mind of its own.
Pau could not in good conscience allow it to drive his behavior now.
He frowned at Leontina, sitting there so prettily across the desk from him. Still looking as if this was an academic exercise when, as far as he knew, she had never seen the inside of a university classroom. Or possibly any classroom at all, now that he thought about it.
Umberto had not seemed to notice that she existed until she came of age, as her brother always told it.
But he shoved that ugliness aside. “That night at your brother’s wedding was a mistake, as I think we can both agree.”
He waited for her to murmur her agreement at that, on cue, the way everyone else did when he gave them such openings. But Leontina didn’t make a sound. She only gazed back at him, and waited.
Pau couldn’t say he cared for that, either. It made him wonder if she could tell that he was lying. That he did not view that night as a mistake at all. But how could she?
He pushed on. “We were both careless, though I blame myself.”
