Page 41 of Bound Enemies
But even if shewasbeing delusional, she also knew that she had already survived an entire lifetime in the presence of a man who didn’t love her at all. It was not ideal. It was not something she intended to subject her child to.
Though, with all her experience, it was certainly something she could survive until she made a new plan to escape.
And that notion was what almost made her cry.
She didn’twantto escape. She really did love Pau. Tonight it had seemed that she really had found her way home—to him—at last.
Leontina let her eyes go damp and let the pillowcase catch her tears as they fell. She did nothing to stop them.
She stayed where she was, curled in a damp ball, until morning.
“Both of you look a bit the worse for wear,” Giaco said, because of course he did, when he sauntered into breakfast some thirty minutes after the staff had ushered Leontina in, so that she and Pau could sit there in the chilly silence.
She had considered pretending to be chirpy and happy to see her husband and to pretend that nothing had had happened last night, but she didn’t. Because maybe it felt better to obey his unspoken demand—today, anyway—that she not attempt to talk to him.
Especially because the longer the silence drew out between them, the more tense that jaw of his became.
Giaco either didn’t notice, or did notice and didn’t care. He threw himself into his seat, helped himself to a generous pour of the blackest coffee, and beamed around the table. “I can only hope that you were up half the night, performing acts so salacious and degrading that you are hungover from them today. Yes, even you, Leontina. You are a pregnant, married woman who can have no claim to pearl clutching, surely.”
Pau looked as if he might possibly have died inside, though his expression did not change.
“Good morning, Giaco,” Leontina said, with a smile. “I understand that you take great pleasure—or did, certainly—in spreading your exploits hither and yon like some kind of sport But I do not.”
To her surprise, her brother actually blinked. “Of course you don’t,” he said, in a voice that was very nearlychastened. “My apologies. Sometimes I forget myself.”
“Sometimes we all do,” Leontina said, though she glanced over at Pau while she said it. It was a pointless enterprise, since Pau was apparently pretending to be made of stone today.
But she could remember too clearly how it had tasted when he’d lost himself in her mouth, no matter how much strongtorrefactocoffee she let herself sip.
After breakfast, she and Pau took Giaco on a tour of the vineyards. It was beautiful, as always, but for Leontina it was an opportunity to listen to Pau talk with great animation about this thing he did here. These ancient vines and the land they were a part of. All these things that made him who he was.
The things he actually loved.
She could almost convince herself that hewantedto melt.
That all she had to do was find a way to heat him up.
But when the tour was done, Pau went and locked himself up in the office with her brother for what she was pretty sure was a business conversation. Though for all she knew, they could have been planning new revenge schemes.
Afterward, Giaco took his leave—with another big hug that had her teary-eyed again—and then left Leontina and Pau alone again.
Or rather, as alone as anyone could be in the middle of a busy vineyard.
She didn’t see Pau again until the evening, when she was quite surprised to find herself summoned to dinner.
“I was certain I’d been relegated to a tray on my own,” she said to the maid, who looked horrified.
“No, madam,” she stammered. “The master was very clear that you are to join him.”
“I am honored,” Leontina replied, and had to fight not to sound acerbic.
She took her time dressing, more because it made her feel as if she was wearing armor than because she thought it would have any specific effect on him. The house was as sprawled out as ever and so she took her time finding yet another little corner of the place that Pau could make into a dining room for an evening.
When she found it, she swept in, and then paused when she found him waiting at the windows, his back to her.
They had been in this dining room before, she realized belatedly. Then she wondered if they would continue to cycle through dining areas forever—but that wasn’t how she greeted him. He wasn’t in a space to entertain her questions, always meandering and with a thousand tangents.
That was what happened when a person’s education involved wandering around a library at will and following rabbit holes wherever they might lead on the internet.
