Page 18 of Bound Enemies
“It would be rather silly to blame the virgin, wouldn’t it?” she asked, and he thought her voice was just a littletoodry. But he didn’t pursue it.
“Now we have done the decent thing,” he continued, nodding as he spoke. “We have executed our duty in the time-honored fashion. We have married. The child will have a name.”
“In fairness, the child would have a name either way,” Leontina said. Musingly, he was almost sure, except he rather thought there was something a bitharderbehind the easy tone she used. “It’s not as if, were I to give birth on my own, I would somehow overlook the naming part and force the poor child to stumble about namelessly, is it?”
“That is not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” Again, that beatific smile that he was truly beginning to loathe. “It’s only that I find these agreements we make so fascinating, don’t you? A child has no name unless its father claims him. That claiming legitimizes the child’s birth, when surely, being alive is all the legitimacy a child needs. Do you ever wonder why it is we all agree to these things without ever actually discussing them?”
“Money,” Pau shot back curtly. “Property. Land and legacy. But I think you know that too, Leontina.”
“In any case,” she said smoothly, smile in place, “our fully legitimate child is on the way. Congratulations to you, Dad.”
He expected to feel horror at that, but horror was not at all the sensation that moved through him. Pau realized that, once again, he was somehow unprepared for this moment. He, who had never been unprepared for anything.
But it kept happening.
With her it seemed to happen with alarming regularity.
He had certainly not been ready for her to kiss him like that, on that first night or today. It was as if he had no defenses against her—and now this. Pau had thought of little else but her pregnancy and their marriage, and her belly beneath his hands had been a revelation, but her calling himDad—even though he knew she was doing it to be provocative—seemed to unlock something inside him.
Something he also hadn’t looked at yet, when he was the sort of man who looked at everything from every angle at least a thousand times by rote.
Yet not this astonishing truth: He was going to be a father.
And whatever revenge he could enact upon Umberto Tavian because of that, and would, the fact remained. Pau himself would be a father to a child. He would be responsible for shaping the child, just as his father had shaped him.
It felt…sacred. Overwhelming.Beautiful.
He had to look away and he could not account for the tightness in his throat. His chest. He was tempted to imagine he was ill when he never succumbed to the illnesses that plagued others.
“I would appreciate it if you joined me in pretending that this scene today did not happen,” he said stiffly. “We’ll get along quite well if we keep to our own places and the timelines we’ve already agreed upon. I have no idea what it is you do all day, but I do not wish to be disturbed when I am working.”
“Books,” she said.
Opaquely.
When he only stared at her, Leontina smiled—but it was a different smile this time. He felt it like a blow straight through his chest, because he recognized it. He’d seen it before, but only when they were both naked, tangled up together in his bed at the castle.
He could even remember what they had been talking about. She had been telling him the story of how she’d managed to foil her father’s plans for her this far into her twenties, when Umberto had made it clear that if it were up to him, he would have sold her off on her eighteenth birthday and been done with it.
Her invisibility powers, such as they were, had involved servants’ quarters and a certain blank expression that she’d pulled out to show him, somehow transforming her lovely face into something dull and easily ignored.
Then she’d smiled, just like this.
“I beg your pardon?” He said it stiffly because that damned smile, filled withjoyof all things, was having the same effect on him now that it had then.
A catastrophic effect, to his mind, because it tempted him to forget himself completely.
“I read books,” she told him, gently, as if she didn’t expect him to follow. “I realize that’s not a career, but that’s what I do. My father couldn’t be bothered to send me off to university and he’d long since grown bored of my tutors well before I turned sixteen. So I decided to educate myself. I feel it’s something of a lifelong pursuit.”
“Yes. Well.” He found himself clearing his throat. “We have no shortage of books here.”
He was sure he saw her gaze get more intent. “Are they all yours?”
“Mine, yes.” Now his chest felt even tighter. “Many were my father’s, though he preferred more nonfiction than I do, I believe. Even my grandfather was a reader, which is surprising because otherwise, he preferred life’s more active indulgences. Gambling. Pretty woman. A private island or two in warm climates where he could relax with said women who, it must be said, flocked to him. They mourned en masse at his funeral.”
The papers had talked of it for ages, all those beautiful women in black, mourning a man who had been faithful to none of them—and under the eye of his long-suffering widow, who had famously acted as if she didn’t see a single one of them. Bernat had always been deeply scathing about his father.Not much of a husband or father, he’d always said.It’s a wonder he didn’t burn the whole estate down, the way he carried on.
