Princes of Castaldini
He’d—he’d been…in love? All the way? Before or after her? And he was telling her all this…why? Warning her off while pulling her in? Was that what her tormentor was trying to do to her?
Suddenly he sat forward, thrust a hand into her hair. He let a thick lock sift through his fingers before he groaned, “Not that it doesn’t suit you, it does, even more than your natural hair color did, but what made you dye your hair black?”
Leandro groaned again. He’d swerved from the vulnerabilities he was exposing, groped for the diversion of something that gnawed at his curiosity. And she looked as if he’d slapped her.
“Don’t you mean why did I stop dyeing my hair blond?”
He gaped at her. “You’re a natural brunette?”
“You didn’t realize that? But then it stands to reason.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You knew nothing about me, apparently.”
“I knew plenty about you. I bet I know everything.”
“You’re talking in the biblical sense? How original of you.”
“I mean in every sense.”
“Yeah? Okay, let’s test this knowledge. Or are you going to plead memory holes due to the time lapse?”
“I have the memory of an entire herd of elephants.”
“And the comparative rampage damage potential.”
He harrumphed. “I never rampage.”
“Of course not. You’re too organized and premeditated for that. I should have said ‘incursion.’That is your MO, whether it’s on a personal or a global level.”
“By definition, an incursion is hated, resisted. I remember nothing but…approval, encouragement. On a personal level.”
“You have that effect on the people you take over—the super power of Stockholm syndrome. It took me a year and a half to realize what you did to me.”
He went totally still. “What did I do to you?”
She looked at him as if he’d once strangled her cat and didn’t remember it. She finally shook her head, let out a rough chuckle. “You didn’t even realize I dyed my hair.”
“And that made me…insensitive? Negligent? The hair on your head looked so natural with your tan. Thanks to your grooming habits, there was none anywhere else to give me a clue. What else did I allegedly do to you?”
She shook her head again. “You exist in a universe starring you, don’t you? Other people are the bit players who exist just so you can bounce your lines off them.”
“Why are you saying that when you know it wasn’t true…then?”
“Listen, I’m not criticizing you or laying blame…”
“No? You have a strange way of not doing that. The way you tell it, I was an egocentric, exploitative bastard. Come to think of it, I do remember a comment you hurled at me on your way out of my life. About my so-called self-absorption. Is that how you rationalize the way you ended things between us?”
“‘Things’ would have ended between us sooner rather than later, and you know it. I did us both a favor—”
“Why don’t you speak for yourself?”
“Fine, I did myself a favor by not sticking around to experience the deterioration of ‘things’ before their inevitably nasty end.”
He stared into the twin storms of her eyes.
Was this her admission that there’d never been more than self-interest behind her actions? Or was it self-preservation? Her words could be interpreted that way. Had his rage at the time made her fear he’d take his bitterness out on her?
What was he thinking? Why was he debating this yet again? He’d admitted there was no way to find out the truth for sure. And what did it even matter? That was then. This was now.
He was taking now. And when the end came this time, he wouldn’t spend eight more years agonizing over the reasons why. The whys would be of his own orchestration. And his own timing.
It was time to set things in motion.
Phoebe felt like a cat who’d just streaked across an antiques exhibit and sent everything crashing to the ground. Hurling those bombshells of self-pity sure felt as if it had caused comparative damage. So what now? Back to square subzero?
Her heart clanged as he unfurled to his full six-foot-five and gestured to someone in the distance. Music at once drowned out the cacophony of memories, the tumult of this confrontation.
Then he extended his hand to her in imperious invitation.
“Dance with me.”
He’d said the same thing the night they’d met. Before they’d even been introduced. She remembered only that he’d taken her in his embrace and that her feet hadn’t touched the ground until he’d first kissed her and changed the course of her life forever.
Now was the same. She didn’t know when she’d taken his hand, or how she’d reached the dance floor. All she knew was that he surrounded her like an extension of her own body, all her missing parts, moving with her, moving her, as if she shared his nervous pathways, as if he was in control of hers.
Suddenly her whole body shuddered on a shockwave. His whisper.Against her temple. “You learned to dance the guadara.”
The guadara. That unique dance born of the inextricable Moorish,Amazigh and Italian folklores that formed Castaldini. She’d seen it performed in rural areas on romantic occasions and at celebrations. She’d never danced it before. She’d never tried.
She was dancing it now, the sensuous rhythm turning her body into a malleable instrument that merged with the demands and vitality of the beat, flowed into the power and beauty of his body, rode the grace and fluency of his movements.
But soon the dance morphed into something else —syncopated footwork, a full-body embrace, entwining legs, a creation of his own invention, and she suspected from the intensity coming off of him in waves, his own improvisation. And that she managed to follow his spontaneous lead, move as one with him…magic.
Suddenly he spooled her away, whirled her back, gathered her, back to chest, in a off-the-ground hug that had emotion blossoming into pain behind her eyes, threatening to burst into an outpouring of pent-up longing and heartache.
Before she could bring herself to struggle, he swept her around and into an embrace that no longer pretended to be about dancing.
She began to shake. Recollections of his possession were brutal, accomplices to his passion, to his eyes as they bore down, burned down on her. She needed a reprieve. She needed…Needed. “Leandro, I—I…”
He wouldn’t let her find words. He lifted her, making her feel weightless, soaring. His arms fused her to his chest, where she’d once nestled for hours, under which she’d writhed in ecstasy, where she’d dreamed of being again every day of the past eight years.
She moaned her greed, her welcome. His eyes grew voracious. Volcanic. She wanted him to devour her, destroy her.
But he only watched her, singed her with the emotions fast-forwarding across his face. Why wouldn’t he give anything to her? His lips, his breath, his possession? Did he want more than surrender?
She succumbed, gave him more, clutched his hair and pulled with all she had. A growl revved inside his chest, driving her to her toes, reaching for his half-open lips. She sealed them, took his scalding “Phoebe” and breath inside her.
He still didn’t respond until she whimpered, “Please…”
The broken entreaty seemed to shatter whatever was holding him back. His lips crashed down on hers, wrenched hot, dark, desperate kisses from her depths. Yes…yes…Leandro…
Leandro. From the first moment, everything about him, everything with him, had been beyond reason, out of the bounds of right and wrong. He’d warranted one-off rules. Still did. And it had been so long without this…without him. No reason was good enough for that kind of deprivation. Had he suffered too? Tell me…
One of his hands answered in spasms of passion in her hair, the other pressing her where contact was a necessity. His legs continued the confession, rough, urgent, spreading hers for the relentlessness of his arousal. Her core wept, remembering, ready. His mouth told her the rest, every molten glide, every invasive thrust showing her how much, just how much…she’d lost.
Suddenly he tore away. She cried out as if he’d ripped her flesh off, surged up, needing his breath so she could breathe, his heartbeat so her heart wouldn’t stop. He let her drag him down, only to bury his face in her neck, her breasts, growling jolts of molten agony to the very depths of her. Then he groaned, “I will do it.”
She jerked as he pushed away, left her swaying without his support. “You—you mean you’re accepting the succession?”
“We will have to wait and see if I’ll accept it. But I will go back to Castaldini. On one condition.”
Tremors wracked her. “I…knew you’d make demands.”
“One demand. Do you also know what it is?”
She bit her lip, trepidation and temptation turning her body into their battleground. “Something concerning me.”
“And what would that be, do you think? From the man who ‘muddies the professional with the personal’? Come on, guess.”
“You want me to…to…” She couldn’t say it, damn him.
“What?” he prodded, a huge cat nudging its exhausted catch to entertain him some more. “Sacrifice your virtue for Castaldini?”
That turned her stone-cold steady. “How can I, when my virtue is something of the past? As you’re best equipped to testify.”
His face turned to stone, too. “Virginity is not virtue, Phoebe. Or have you been on Castaldini so long that you’ve subscribed to its dated, narrow-minded views of morality?”
Her temperature fluctuated from a furnace’s to a freezer’s. “So what do you want? Me, as your secret lover again?”
His smile had her heart thundering with arousal…and dread.
Then he whispered, soft and annihilating, “Nothing so simple. Until I decide to accept the succession or not, I’m staying in my ancestral home in El Jamida on the western shores of Castaldini. My condition is that you live with me there.”
Five
“Live with you?”
Phoebe was stunned to realize that squeak had issued from her. Her speech center was still functioning. Incredible.
Leandro was moving away. He stopped at a waist-high round quartz table sporting another buried-in-ice bottle.
He filled two flutes and flowed back to hand her one. “You object to the condition? Or is it only to the term ‘live’? If so, I wonder why. We’d both ‘live’ while we’re staying there. What would you rather call it? Exist with me? Survive with me? Occupy the same space-time continuum with me?”
“Okay. I’ll call on you when I’m brainstorming my stand-up comedy routine…” She stopped, exclaimed, “Live with you…openly?”
The mockery in his eyes leapt a few notches higher. “You’d rather be my secret lover?”
“That was a question, not an offer.”
He pressed the flute into her hand, engulfed the other in his and swept her to the table, where he hoisted her up on the gleaming metal and red-satin stool, had her feeling he’d perched her at the edge of a skyscraper. He dragged his own stool to touch hers, seared her left side with his body heat as he mounted it. She stared at him with the same fascination that people watched catastrophes in progress.
He gestured to someone, and lazy, sense-soaking music flowed over them. He took her hand, tilted his head at her. “How about being my guest and guide? I’m seeing no more than necessary of those who exiled me. You understand that I don’t harbor nostalgic feelings toward them. But I am out of touch with Castaldini, and I’ll need updates on its current situation. You know, the pulse of the street, the daily worries, the existing public opinions on everything from sports to politics. You are the perfect liaison to reconnect me with it all.”
This was what he meant? What he wanted from her?
She wouldn’t examine the jumble of relief and letdown.
Lobbing this ball back in his court was her only way out of dissecting her stupidity. “Why am I the perfect liaison? I can give you a list off the top of my head of a dozen people who’d be far better at it, born and bred Castaldinians who’d be only too eager to provide you with whatever you need.”
“I want you.”
She choked. On her heart. On his intensity. On longing for what had never and would never be. He’d always wanted her for the wrong reasons. She’d bet he still did.
Instead of arguing against the far deeper wrongness of his reasons now, all that came out was a stifled, “Why?”
“Because most people think nothing of embellishing or outright lying to steer me to the decision they want me to make. Your bluntness proves you’re the only one who’ll give me unbiased reports, that you’ll tell me only the truth. And I need that to come to a decision.”
That didn’t sound like a wrong reason. It sounded very good. Too good to be the truth? At least, the only truth?
Only one way to find out. Only one way to be with this man from now on. Head-on, full-blown confrontation.
“And besides needing my insights and whacks of candor upside your head, do you also want to pick up where we left off?”
“Yes.” The word disrupted her nerves wholesale with its force. Then he made it worse. “Si.” Then even worse. “Aiwa.”
She spilled half of her flute. “I…got it…in one language.”
He took the flute from her, took her wet fingers to his mouth, sucked them to a cinder. “It wasn’t enough to tell you how much I want you in one language. It never was. I doubt anything will ever be. And if I had any doubt that you want me as much, those…fireworks put it to rest. The desire between us is not only as explosive as before, it has intensified. We’re more complex people now, with far more extensive knowledge of ourselves and the world, and it has only deepened our attraction.”
He let go of her hand after he’d decimated whatever reason or resistance she had. As he dried the puddle she’d made, she wanted to tell him to get something bigger. For the puddle she’d become.
He went on, intensity now morphed into matter-of-factness. “But I’m only declaring my intent. This time I’m not sweeping you away to bed. It’s up to you when you decide to come to me.”
So über-businessman was back, huh? With the need for driving his bid home over and said bid certain to be soon begged for?
“When, not if, huh?” He gave her a serene look. Wanna contest that? it said. And oh, how she wished she could. She couldn’t. Not when the truth was I wanna come to you…right now.
She groped for something to say that wouldn’t be a lie or made her a self-destructive fool. “And what about the storm of speculation this will kick up? You don’t care what your possible future subjects think of your actions?”
“Of course not.” He made it sound as if he’d care about the opinion of the island’s population of monk seals first. “You will have an official job of the highest order. Whatever else we choose to be involved in is our business. We are both free agents and too grown-up to care what people think or say.”
“That wasn’t your position in the past, when you were obsessively secretive about our…liaison.”
Something harsh flared in his eyes. Or maybe she’d imagined it. Her powers of observation weren’t the epitome of reliability right now. “My reasons for secrecy no longer apply now.”
Yeah, tell her about it. Worrying that their liaison would threaten his chances of capturing the crown wasn’t a consideration now. They’d give it to him this time even if he kept a harem.
“And with the changes in circumstances and in ourselves, we owe it to what we have raging between us to explore it to the fullest, without the shackles our old situation imposed on it.”
“So this is all about ‘what we have raging between us’? It has nothing to do with having your way after all these years? Not that I know if your offer then was to ‘live’ with you, mind you.”
His eyes turned unfathomable. “It was something along those…lines. And you think this has an element of payback?”
“Why not? You’re a man who’s used to having all your whims bowed to. Both Castaldini and I thwarted you then. You’d be getting even with both in one fell swoop.”
“You still can’t believe revenge is not my style, eh? No, Phoebe, this has nothing to do with asserting my will, over you or Castaldini. This is purely what I want. What I’m burning for.”
She struggled to gulp down the heart that kept squeezing into her throat. “But if you’re making it a condition of coming back to Castaldini, then it’s an ultimatum that reeks of coercion.”
“It’s a statement of intent. And then, what reason do you have to say no? When it’s clear no one you’ve been with has measured up to me?”
He paused. Waiting for a corroboration?
He’d have to wait another lifetime.
When she made no answer, he again decimated all projections of what he’d say next. “I haven’t found anyone to hold a candle to you, either. And I felt that way when I held memories of your far less potent self. As you did of me. Now, I can hardly imagine what it will be like between us. But I intend to find out. I need to, to get this out of my system, as you said. I believe you need it, too. And we should wallow in every second of it.”
Okay. He had been lying through his teeth. He was out to exact revenge on her. The cruelest, most annihilating sort. She could feel months ticking off her life expectancy with each word.And whatever turmoil didn’t consume, temptation would.
But she had to kick to the surface for one last breath before she sank to the bottom under the weight of both.
“And that’s your position concerning me made crystal-clear. Great.” She inhaled. “About your position on Castaldini. I admit I let prejudices form my opinion of why you’d be the worst thing that could happen to Castaldini now. But I still believe you would be more hazard than help. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that, with the methods you used to build your financial empire, compounded with the views you gave me a glimpse of, you’d make a formidable ruler. But I don’t think you’re best suited to be Castaldini’s.”
And he laughed until she almost slumped off her stool.
He wiped his eyes, his laughter subsiding. “Ah, Phoebe, every word you say makes me more undecided. Are you being Castaldini’s top negotiator, so devious you’re saying exactly what will reel me in to the challenge, or are you being confrontational for the sake of it and as unprofessional as you accused me of being?”
“I’d love to lay claim to deviousness. But I can’t.” She shot him a sullen look. “Not with you around.”
“So you’re being confrontational and unprofessional?”
“Just appallingly, undiplomatically truthful. I think you’re unbelievably powerful and proficient. But you’re also driven and fixated on a certain mindset. You could make a magnificent king if you would consider other outlooks, if you would temper your views and methods. If you don’t, you could put an end to the monarchy.”
“And you wonder why only you will do?” He pulled her to him again and robbed her of inhibitions and self-preservation. All she wanted to do was nuzzle him, inhale him, open her mouth over his pulse, taste his vitality and forget that a time when he wasn’t filling her world had or would ever come. “So that’s your opinion concerning my eligibility for Castaldini’s crown. What of my eligibility to be your lover? Are you going to sacrifice your truthfulness and say I’m not the best man for that role?”
He wanted a verbal confession? Tough. He’d have to settle for her turning into estrogen goo in his arms.
“What I want to know is, is your condition a deal breake—?”
He didn’t let her finish. “Definitely.”
“And you say it isn’t a coercive ultimatum?”
He pulled her almost over his lap, cupped her face in his large hand with such gentleness. Everything inside her surged, tensed. “You need to get one thing straight, Phoebe. I spent my first thirty years with one goal on my mind: becoming the king of Castaldini. Then, suddenly, it was not an option anymore. I no longer believe it’s my destiny. I’m willing to give it a chance, but if you refuse my condition, I’ll be relieved, since that will put an end to your mission. They’ll be forced to go after Durante or Ferruccio and leave me out of it. And without the intrusion of duty, I’ll make you mine again that much sooner.”
“Then you’re not giving the crown serious consideration,” she gasped. “It’s just a pretext for what you really want.”
“I always give any undertaking my absolute best intentions and efforts to produce the best possible results, and that’s what I will give the succession proposition. But you’re right. You are what I really want. You once knew how much I can want. It’s nothing to how much I want you now. I put duty and the world’s expectations ahead of my desires before. But I’ve lived too hard and I know now what really matters to me. Having you, slaking my thirst for you, is my number one priority. It’s what I need. Anything else comes second. Or not at all. Your choice. But whatever you choose, I’m making you mine again. It’s up to you if I do it while giving Castaldini another chance.”
Too much. What he was. What he said. What he did to her. “Resistance is futile, huh?”
He brushed his lips below her ear, along her jaw, to the corner of her mouth before sprinkling her quivering lower lip with what felt like a hundred kisses and a thousand volts. “You want to resist? Because you think you should? Why? To what end?”
Indeed. To continue living her excitingly barren life?
He knew as well as she did that she couldn’t resist him. Didn’t want to. That didn’t mean she shouldn’t make terms of her own. Something to stop her from exchanging inertia for a plummet from a plane. Sans parachute.
She stopped his tormenting lips with hers. Satisfaction splashed through her when he jolted in surprise, then shuddered in response. Then he took over the kiss.
Seconds from begging him to finish her, now, here, she tore her mouth away, settled for the words that just minutes ago she’d thought he’d have to wait a lifetime to hear.
“I want you, Leandro.” She buried her face in his neck as she admitted this was far stronger than she was. That it scared her witless and it didn’t matter. She wanted it. Against all reason. For all reasons. “And yes…I want you more than ever. But no rush, right?” She raised her face to him, knew what he’d read there. Vulnerability, nervousness, capitulation, excitement…greed. “I’m taking you at your word about that.”
He groaned and crushed her to him for a moment before he loosened his embrace, let her slump back in its circle in a daze. “And I always keep my word, Phoebe. I won’t sweep you into my bed. You will come to me this time.”
She closed her eyes, let his spell claim the last corner of her sanity, and marveled at what a difference a few hours could make. She’d come here intending to deliver her arguments, stay the hell away from him, then run back to Castaldini to burrow out of sight until he’d made his decision—and bolt when he had.
Now—just look at her. Eager to go back to Castaldini with him, and the only burrowing she wanted to do was into his arms. As if he knew, as he’d always seemed to know, he stood up, lifted her from her stool and floated her back to the dance floor, taking her precisely where she wanted to be.
What felt like a few days of languorous, erotic torture later, she heard him rumble against her neck. “I have another promise, bella malaki.” She threw her head back over his arm, waited for it, at peace, in torment. “I won’t rush you, but there won’t be a minute when I won’t show you how much I want you in my arms and in my bed.”
Six
Was it possible for a man to get older, to amass world-spanning experience and world-shaping influence, and not add one ounce of judgment or restraint? Basically, to remain a fool?
Leandro let out a shuddering exhalation as he stared at the source of all loss of control. She was presenting him with the elegance of her profile, the sootiness of her lashes shading her silver gaze as it turned sideways to the clarity and endlessness of the horizon as they drove along the coast heading to the capital, Jawara, from the private airport where his jet had landed on Castaldini.