Page 12 of Bound Enemies
They then ate in silence, until it clearly dawned on him that to remain polite, he would have to take a turn at saying something. “You will have to tell me why it is that you chose that particular car for your journey,” he said. She looked up at him and found a certain assessing look on his face. “A 1957 Ferrari 335 S Spider Scaglietti. A rare treasure.”
When she only gazed back at him in incomprehension, because the car was one of her father’s toys—a red convertible like any number of red convertibles her father had scattered around the globe, because apparently he liked a red convertible—Pau’s brow lifted.
“I believe only four were ever made.” He sounded as if he was displeased—or perhaps it wasdisappointed—that she didn’t know this.
“I would love to tell you that there’s a story about that car,” she told him with an involuntary laugh, because imagine havingstoriesaboutcars. “Something I could pretend was casual and yet you could somehow dive beneath the surface and see me for who I really am, perhaps? But alas, I grabbed the first pair of keys I could find and drove here in the car they went with. There was very little choice involved.”
“That appears to be a defining feature in your life,” Pau said. Mildly.
So very mildly that it took Leontina longer than it should have to understand that he’d struck a blow. She felt the impact of it before she fully comprehended it.
“Are you suggesting that I don’t make my own choices in life?” she asked when she understood why it was she felt hollow, suddenly. She blinked, then focused on him. “Do you think that you do?”
That was dangerous, evidently, because suddenly she could feel that danger right there in the room with them. Tonight’s dining experience was all about wide-open doors that led out to the patio and looked out over the vineyards. It was beautiful, but she couldn’t spare a glance at the reliably stunning landscape.
Not when Pau was eyeing her from across the table, that perfect face of his set into speculative lines and the tension in the room so intense now that she could feel all the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.
“Surely you’re joking,” he said after a moment, though if he thought so, he certainly didn’t indicate that he found her at all amusing. “I feel certain you know who I am, Leontina, and what I have accomplished in this life. No one has ever suggested that I somehow lack the ability to control my own destiny.”
That should have been the end of it. She could see that he wanted it to be, that the way his words landed—curt and certain—should have silenced her immediately. But she had been silent a very long time already, hadn’t she?
It suddenly seemed to her that if she ceded her voice here, in this new place that promised a new life, than she might as well have stayed behind at the castle and let Umberto do with her what he would.
An unacceptable end, so Leontina waved a hand to the view outside and then took in the old monastery that stood all around them.
“This land controls you as surely as my father controls me,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’s the Calixto family legacy and it controls your destiny no matter what choices you do or do not make. It is no different for me, though I do not get the opportunity to preen about in boardrooms talking in secret corporate code words that make other men think I’m a profound genius in all I do.”
Pau seemed to…expand, though she could see with her own eyes that he did not actually move. He stayed where he was, sitting in his seat across the table from her, those long, blunt-edged fingers of his tapping against the stem of his wineglass.
“That’s quite an indictment, Leontina. And I can only assume you’re speaking of your father when you speak of preening.” His expression shifted slightly. “Or perhaps your brother. What I know is that you cannot possibly think you are describingme.”
No one had offered her wine, which she knew was in deference to her pregnancy, but Leontina found it somehow emblematic of this entire experience. She was sitting on the grounds of one of the most famous and widely celebrated vineyards in the world. With a glass of sparkling water.
Those were the choices thatshemade.
“I was never given the opportunity to express myself or my feelings about my family legacy through universities or boardrooms,” she told him, and was proud of how even her voice sounded when she felt so ragged inside. “What’s expected of me is my obedience. But I’ll be honest with you. I don’t see a whole lot of difference between your situation and mine.”
He didn’t speak. She wasn’t sure he moved, and yet she was certain she could see his resistance to that notion as if it was written all over him.
In bold print.
She kept going. “Here we both are, about to marry a near-stranger almost entirely because our legacies demand it. No shirking of responsibilities for us. I might be running from less pleasant options, I grant you. But the only thing that’s changed in my life is that, three months ago, I did in fact make a choice.” She lifted her shoulder and then dropped it. “I suppose we could say that really, I’m the only one who made any choices here.”
And until she saw a flash of something that looked a good deal like temper move over his beautiful face, she didn’t realize that this was what she wanted from him. Shewantedto see behind his cool, closed-down exterior. Because she was starting to think that all those images she still had in her head of what had happened between them that night were a dream.
If she couldn’t feel the baby she carried inside her, Leontina would be certain she’d imagined the whole thing.
She held her breath, thinking that he would explode at her temerity, and wondering why she was dancing so close to telling him truths she knew full well she should keep to herself—
But instead, he merely inclined his head. He took a sip of his wine.
And it was as if nothing had happened. As if there had been no intensity, no flash of anything, no wild sensation all over that had made her skin prickle.
As if she’d imagined all that, too.
They carried on in exactly the samecarefulway until the day of their wedding one week after her arrival in Spain, where, if possible, everything became evenmorestiff and formal.
It was a swift and unemotional ceremony on one of the many terraces with sweeping views of the vine-covered land. The weather was bright and blue, but not too hot, as if the sun knew better than to get too carried away over such a matter-of-fact ceremony. The priest had clearly been briefed, because he kept his comments to a minimum. They exchanged their vows quietly and without fuss. Pau had produced rings before the ceremony and they both placed the appropriate one on each other’s appropriate hand.
