Princes of Castaldini

Eight

Leandro was used to winning. Maledizione, he’d come to demand nothing less than victory. In anything, over anyone. And he always started by triumphing over himself.

He was losing big-time right now.

His evil thoughts were in control, tossing his emotions wherever they pleased. He threw all his vaunted self-mastery at them, tried to loosen their grip. He didn’t want to infect Phoebe with his tension.

Too late. On the way to their destination, he caught glimpses of them in the massive mirrors placed in strategic spots. He looked like a man with serious damage on his mind. Phoebe looked like a woman walking to the guillotine.

And it was all about that next hurdle, the one that was left in the way before he could have Phoebe to himself. Her sister.

Phoebe had insisted she couldn’t move into his home and call Julia after the fact. She had to inform her sister of her plans, explain the situation and arrange this separation face-to-face.

It was the “arrange this separation” that made him want to haul that tyrant from the chair from which she ruled her sister’s life and shake some consideration for others into her. He would extract Phoebe from her clutches, even if he had to cut off her tentacles while he was at it. He owed that woman a lot of pain.

He believed that a big part of Phoebe’s rejection of him in the past had been caused by true panic at the idea of leaving her sister. He’d scoffed at Julia’s need then, but he’d long accepted that Phoebe believed that need to be real. And endless.

Oh, he might try to tell himself that Phoebe had gained a lot by sticking by her sister, but he only bought that when he was on one of his bitterness binges and needed to paint Phoebe as dark a shade of exploitative as possible. What he’d spent years needing to believe didn’t mesh with reality. Reality said Julia had it all, and Phoebe, the strong one, the capable, nurturing one, had ended up living in her shadow, everything in her life a reflection of what filled Julia’s.

He’d met Julia twice. On both occasions, he’d bristled with animosity. He hadn’t known why until he’d realized he’d been in the presence of tyranny of the weak in a wraithlike, female form.

And they were two corridors away from said monster’s lair.

Phoebe felt so taut she might snap. Maledizione, was she so deeply conditioned to put her sister’s so-called needs ahead of her own that she dreaded leaving Julia even for a short time…?

Short time. Did she think it would be that? Did she want it to be? Did he? How could he, when he’d never get enough…? Never?

Never. But…what about closure? Closure…

The word churned in his mind, sickened him. And he had to face it. He didn’t want closure. He never had. All he wanted was a continuation. And he was no longer putting a definition or form to that continuation. Something as elemental as what they shared abided by no rules but its own. But that was how he felt. What about her?

What if this tension wasn’t all about her mother complex over her sister? What if there was still an element of coercion here? What if being with him was what she wanted, but also what she’d rather not do? What if she felt cornered by both her need to help his kingdom, and her need for him? He couldn’t bear that he might be contributing to her turmoil.

He reached for her, pulled her through the nearest doorway.

The couple going about their business in their own quarters looked as if they’d been caught trespassing, started babbling apologies. He winced as he requested the kindness of the use of their quarters for a few minutes. They streaked out.

The moment the door closed behind them, he took Phoebe by the shoulders. She stared up at him, her eyes alarmed, confused.

He groaned. “I take back my condition. And my promise. I’ll stay in Castaldini and draw on your opinions and guidance in coming to a decision. We’ll work out a way to collaborate while we’re on opposite ends of the island.”

The deluge of emotion that flooded her eyes inundated him. She seemed to stop breathing. She seemed…hurt? More…stricken?

His lungs burned as he waited for her to put her reaction into words. They finally came from her lips, but felt like a trembling caress in his mind. “You don’t want me…to come with you anymore?”

The barked laugh gashed something on its way out. “If I wanted you more, we’d have a medical emergency on our hands.”

Her lower lip trembled. His whole body rioted. “Then why are you taking your invitation back?”

“Because I didn’t exactly make it an invitation.”

Her eyes—those eyes that dominated his fantasies—bombarded him with so much emotion, everything in him tensed. His thoughts and heart and guts and loins. Then she upped the ante. Comprehension, followed by delight, turned her face from the sum of his desires to the end of life as he knew it.

She slowly, so slowly, imprinted her body on his, slid up against him, her lips open on pleasure-laden breaths until she whispered into his mouth, “Then make it one.”

He was a super hero. He didn’t devour her. Or maybe he couldn’t. Because he was dying here. Not that rigor mortis would stop him from obeying her. He groaned.

“Will you come with me, Phoebe? Unconnected with anything but what we both want? Will you bestow on me the pleasure of you?”

“Yes.” The S lingered as she pressed all that reason-annihilating femininity against him. The world faded as the sound did, as she nestled her face into his open shirt. His heart did its best to tear open his ribs for a direct rub. “Now promise me again.”

Was this survivable? He frankly didn’t care. “I’ll let you come to me. But I’ll keep showing you how much I want you to, how mind-blowingly better than ever it will be when you do.”

Her giggle was a cocktail of distress, mirth and yearning. “This I have to experience to believe.”

He still kept his hands to himself. Somehow. “You will. Experience. And believe. When you make up your mind.”

She trembled as she leaned on him. He swayed. As they said in his hometown, sandadet ala haita mayla—she sought support from a collapsing wall.

“Oh, my mind’s made up. It took you a whopping twenty-four hours to make it up for me. I need longer than that to follow conviction with action.”

“Your pace this time. I might not have given you reason to believe that, but my stamina is legendary.” He paused, groaned. “And that sounded like so many famous last words.”

Her laugh shook him. It contained something he’d never heard, not from her. Carefree cheerfulness. Its power was total. “Oh, you gave me every reason, in that sense. As for the one you meant now, I hope my stamina lasts long enough to give yours a workout.”

“And I’m at once hoping it lasts as long as it takes for you to feel right about coming to me, and hoping it will crumble within the next three minutes so we can cut to just living this.”

“Forty-eight hours ago I wouldn’t have believed it. But I’ve been hearing it with my own ears nonstop, so I have to sanction the verdict. You talk good. Too good. As I’m sure you know.”

His lips twisted. “You’d be surprised what I don’t know.”

“I don’t know…” she ran a finger of fire down his sternum and marked him for life yet again “…about you, but I want to get goodbyes out of the way. I’m dying to…see your home.”

“And I’m dying—probably literally—to see you in it.”

She hooked her arm through his. “Then come on.”

Feeling like he could indeed sprout wings if he clucked hard enough, as she’d once said, or that he’d already sprouted them, he shared unfettered smiles with her as they hurried to her sister’s apartment. The sister he no longer felt like strangling.

Until he laid eyes on her.

The tinier—and in his eyes, off-putting—loosely-based-on-Phoebe variation was sitting in her wheelchair like a queen bee surrounded by her workers. Paolo, her doting idiot of a husband, the brood of children she’d shackled him with—and from the shape of her belly, she wasn’t done smothering him, not by a long shot—and an assortment of nannies and maids all flitted around her.

As soon as they entered the sunset-drenched family room of the apartment that occupied a hefty part of the palace’s left wing, the two girls and the two boys, all dark-haired and healthy-looking, hurtled toward their aunt, yelping at her like excited puppies. Paolo targeted him with a smile.

A tall, slender man with an eternally boyish face, Paolo looked younger than his thirty-one years. Until you looked into his eyes. There you could see the toll of being a father four times over, with the fifth—or only Julia knew how many more—on the way.

Paolo had kept in touch with Leandro over the years. Not that they’d been close before, but he’d become a better friend after the breach than before it. Leandro had appreciated that. Even if he didn’t appreciate Paolo’s choice of wife. When that choice had led to Leandro’s meeting Phoebe, he couldn’t have endorsed it enough. Not anymore.

“Leandro! So good to see you back in Castaldini.” Leandro let himself be pulled into Paolo’s hug and kissed on both cheeks. Paolo pulled back but kept both hands on his arms as he beamed at him. “I hope this time you’re here to stay.”

Leandro smiled as he extracted himself, trying to make it seem a natural move. He was bursting with impatience to get this visit over with.

He got right to the point. “That’s still up in the air. And it’s why we’re here.” He explained his plan and Phoebe’s role in it.

As he finished his explanations, a sense of oppression came over him. Her eyes were on him. Had she wanted to do the explaining? Had he made amends only to commit a worse offense?

He tried to gauge her reaction as she stood there, covered in kids, and the sense of oppression deepened. They looked as if they were extensions of her life force, made of her flesh. As they were. Partially. So many of the desires he’d repressed since she’d walked out on him besieged him, forced him to look, acknowledge. Things he thought he’d never have, because she’d left his life. Now, seeing her this way, the thought of her growing bigger with…

Paolo moved into his line of vision, interrupting his fevered musings. “I really hope you come to the right decision. You know what I think that is.You’ll make a helluva king, Leandro.”

“No need to kiss up to him yet, Paolo. We don’t know if he’s going to be crown prince this time or if he’ll blow it again.”

Silence fell like acid rain in the wake of Julia’s vindictive comment.

Then Paolo’s laugh boomed. “Mia moglie cara—my darling wife, the consummate diplomat. Guess Phoebe sucked that trait right out of your family’s gene pool and left you with none.”

“Yeah, and I don’t envy her the job it landed her with.”

Julia didn’t even try to disguise the glare she impaled Leandro with. To his delight. It gave him license to glare back.

But instead of teaching his nemesis that Phoebe wasn’t an extra in the play starring her, he just wanted to snatch Phoebe away. And never let her return.

“Say, caro, how about you and the kids show Leandro around?”

Leandro bared his teeth at Julia in a parody of a smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. We have to get going.”

Julia’s full lips thinned. “Okay, since you won’t take a hint. I want to talk to my sister. Alone. Do you mind?”

Phoebe couldn’t believe that Leandro had submitted to Paolo’s cajoling and left her and Julia alone. She’d thought there’d be an explosion. A belated one between the two most important people in her life who’d detested each other on sight. Probably more proof that she and Leandro weren’t meant to be.

Now accusation simmered in Julia’s eyes as she stopped her chair a couple of feet away. Then she stood up.

Phoebe winced. The effort it took Julia to stand always left her feeling traumatized. The two steps she took to come nose to nose with her were even harder. Julia really wanted to lay into her. And she could guess why.

“So that’s your secret,” Julia hissed, her voice rough with anger and hurt. “The reason you’ve been frozen ever since we came here, the reason you do anything you can to avoid having a personal life.”

“I have a personal life, Julia. I’m a person, and I’m alive—”

“Don’t. Just don’t, Phoebe.”

“Uh-oh. If I’m Phoebe now, things must be dire indeed.”

“Phoebe, shut up. I’m so angry I could kick your stubborn ass. You still think I’m just an invalid, don’t you? You still think you have to protect me from even a moment’s discomfort? What can I do to make you realize I’m not the clingy, needy mess I once was? That I can support the people I love? Support you? When will you stop giving and accept that I have something to give back?”

“Darling, of course you have…”

“Don’t you dare placate me, Phoebe. This isn’t about me, dammit. I’m not the center of the universe, so for God’s sake stop putting me in the center of yours. This is about you.”

“What about me, Jules? I have a wonderful, ever-growing family, you rabbit, an incredible job, a palace to call my home, and the fact that I haven’t yet found the man for me—”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You think you found him ten years ago, and that’s why you never gave anyone else a chance. Even Armando, that droolicious hunk of a human being. You blew it with him, big time. And it’s all over that ex-royal pain in the rear, isn’t it?”

Phoebe’s lips twitched with distress and amusement. “He’s royal again as of this afternoon, by the way.”

“You’re not glossing over this, do you hear me?”

“I think the whole capital can hear you, sweetie.”

“Don’t sweetie me or I swear…ooh.And all this time you kept me in the dark, you overprotective, suffering-in-silence…rat.”

“Who said anything about suffering—”

“I say. I felt it. And I should have known what it was about. At my wedding when that hunk of rock almost made love to you on the dance floor and then dragged you out to the terrace and you came back looking turned inside out, I was sure he’d kissed you senseless. And that you, Ms. No Man Ever Gets Past the Inspection Stage, let him, worried me sick. I spent half my wedding night interrogating Paolo about him. He said he respected Leandro as a prince and a businessman, but that as a man, he thought there was no colder fish in the known universe. I laid into you the moment I returned from my honeymoon, but you were all, ‘I haven’t seen him again and nothing happened that night.’ But you were seeing him all the time, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t exactly seeing him all the time, Jules. He didn’t live on Castaldini, remember?”

Julia staggered around, threw herself back into her chair with a furious screech. “You threw me off the scent so well, and I believed that not even that Roman god could fool you! I was in a bad way at the time, and I just dismissed the whole thing. Whenever your tranquil act cracked, I’d say, nah, not that, not Phoebes. Paolo did wonder how Leandro could afford to come to Castaldini so frequently during his campaign. But he was coming back for you, keeping you like a dirty little secret, forcing you to lie to me and to everyone, wasn’t he? And now he’s back and he wants to play some more, that…that…bastard.”

So she hadn’t been a good enough actress. Oh, well. Time to come clean. She sighed. “You’re talking as if I was a minor who was seduced by a dirty old man, Jules. He didn’t coerce me into anything.”

“But he’s coercing you now, isn’t he? Tell me he is. You can’t be that stupid twice in a lifetime with the same man.”

“He’s not as bad as you think, Jules. In fact, I’m discovering that he’s very, very good.”

“Oh, no, he’s messed with your mind again already.”

“Maybe. But as totally moronic as it may sound to you, I’m excited about this. I get to be his bridge back to Castaldini, and I believe I can do both him and the kingdom a serious service.”

“That’s not the kind of service he’s looking for from you!”

She laughed at Julia’s venom. “Oh, that, too. But one thing you don’t have to worry about is him forcing me into anything.”

“I get the feeling it would take force to pry you off him.”

Phoebe laughed again. Leave it to Julia to hit her over the head with the truth. Half the truth here, though. When it was time to let go, she’d walk away. She already had that routine down pat.

“What’s so wrong in being with the one man who ever got—and as it turns out, who’ll ever get—my motor running?”

“You want me to point out all the mistakes in this picture? One, you’re not on a level playing field. He wants entertainment, you want serious, and commitment, and forever—”

Phoebe snorted. “You make me sound like so much fun, Jules.”

“Okay, Phoebes.” Julia’s tone switched from exasperated to coaxing. “I understand, honest. I mean, I’m deliriously in love with Paolo and I still got the wind knocked out of me when Leandro walked in with you. Then he came closer, spoke…and whew. What I’m saying is, he has some serious brain-shutdown powers, even in completely committed women’s cases. So I totally sympathize. But you must resist the pull of the dark side!”

“So now I’m facing the return of the Jedi?” Phoebe hooted. “Oh, Jules, I’m sorry I didn’t confide in you. But this is my choice now as it was then. I want this. And when I’m gone, don’t you dare take your frustration out on Paolo, hear? Don’t go around being discontented, not over me this time. Or I’m sending Stella to scare you back to your best behavior.”

Julia’s gaze turned hot at the mention of the woman who’d once tried to wreck her marriage, the woman Phoebe had most minded seeing Leandro escort in public during his and Phoebe’s affair. “You’re a master at subterfuge, aren’t you? And to think I never suspected it.”

“I have many hidden talents.”

“So when are you going to stop hiding them?”

All temper evaporated from Julia’s eyes, all feigned lightness from Phoebe’s. This was it, then. Moment of truth.

And the truth was, she’d overstayed…maybe not her welcome, but her usefulness in Castaldini. One of the reasons she’d ended her ill-advised engagement to Armando had been that she’d recognized it as an attempt to revive the need for her to stay there. Julia had adapted to her condition, hadn’t needed Phoebe’s support for years now. It had been her who’d stuck around, avoided facing the facts that her purpose had dwindled to nonexistent and she was going nowhere staying in Castaldini. King Benedetto had created a job for her where she was needed. But she wasn’t indispensable. Not to Castaldini, not to Julia or the children. Not to…anyone.

The one thing that had been keeping her there was being at a loss as to what to do next, where to go. She’d always put everyone else first, let their needs dictate her course and choices. First her mother, then Julia, then Leandro, then Castaldini. And her use had expired for each, one way or the other. Now she had to get a life of her own.

And Julia was calling her on putting a time limit on getting one.

Phoebe looked her sister square in the eyes. “How about now? And I’ll start by going west with Leandro, taking every day as it comes.”

“You’re not fooling me.You did that once before with him.”

“Oh, it was different then.” She’d jumped in blind then, had had her eyes opened the hardest way. Now she saw exactly what she was getting into. “This time I’ll finally get the running start I need to launch into the life I should have started living years ago.”

Before Julia could volley and take the conversation deeper, Phoebe swooped her up in a bear hug, then made her escape through the door where Paolo and the kids had kidnapped Leandro.

And there he was, at the end of the immaculate gardens, the one thing she craved. If she didn’t already know it, the tension radiating from him even from that far, the way his gaze was pinned to the door he knew she’d exit from, would have told her she was on top of his list of must-haves, too…

She blinked, gasped.

Exiting from the massive columned promenade, his formidable frame etched in stark light and deep shadow in the setting sun, was Armando. Her ex-fiancé. Heading toward her on an interceptive course.