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Matchmaking again? This time not to save her from spinsterhood, but from depravity? But how could she have gotten him here this fast?
She sensed Leandro’s tension rising as his dash toward her was aborted by Paolo and the kids. Armando had already reached her, and Leandro stood there like a volcano about to erupt, letting the kids jump all over him with Paolo evidently talking his ear off.
Armando stopped before her, all male and beautiful with bronze hair, eyes and skin, radiating vitality and steady power. He bent, kissed her cheek, had her asking herself yet again why she couldn’t feel the tiniest twinge of desire for him. A question the answer to which was standing right there in the distance.
“You’re looking beautiful, as always.” The smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were serious, intent. “I asked Julia to let me know the moment you were back. She informed me only half an hour ago, and I’m thankful that I wrapped everything up and ran here, since I was just informed you’re flying out again immediately.”
And Julia hadn’t said where or with whom? Seems she hadn’t. Weird, but thanks anyway, Jules. “Yeah. How’ve you been, Armando?”
“I’ve been thinking about us…” Uh-oh “…regretting that I agreed to end our betrothal. I know you have to go, but just hear me out, think it over while you’re away. I might never love again as I once loved, and I don’t inspire your passion as you feel a husband should, but with your serene and steady temperament, our relationship could be powerful and enduring. Towering emotions—trust me—are distressing and addictive, and they bring little, if any, happiness.”
Yeah, tell her about it. This was heavy. And very untimely. But she respected Armando too much not to give him all due consideration. She exhaled. “You can have that kind of relationship, Armando…with anyone else. I’m not the one to build something powerful and enduring with you. I’m so much the opposite of steady and serene, it’s painfully funny hearing you call me that.”
“How can you underestimate yourself, when you’ve been such a stabilizing influence in so many lives since you first set foot on Castaldini? Without you, Castaldini would have gained many new enemies and wouldn’t have been able to prevent a few old ones from gaining ground. Without you, your sister’s and my cousin’s marriage wouldn’t have lasted one year, let alone ten.”
“Whoa. Don’t go overestimating me to counteract my alleged underestimation of myself. Paolo and Julia love each other.”
“And their love, like mine and Donatella’s, could have been total chaos, until one or both couldn’t bear it anymore.”
“You never told me it was like that with Donatella.”
“It was so intense, it sometimes left us gasping for breath. The good times were heaven, but the bad times were hell, and, regretfully, they lasted longer. Both of us were older and stronger than Paolo and Julia, and we weathered the hellish parts and would have done so forever had she lived. But I fully believe that without your support and counsel, the intensity of Paolo and Julia’s love, muddied by his impetuousness and her insecurity, would have pushed them apart in less than a year. They have a beautiful marriage, and Julia is that giving, nurturing wife and mother now because of you.”
“Oh, no, you’re not handing me all the credit here. Julia struggled long and hard, and Paolo did and still does everything in his power to do his part and more. Even though I may have helped, she would have done the same for me had the situation been reversed.”
“So you think your role isn’t to be admired or thanked?”
“I don’t care one way or another for admiration or thanks. But whatever my role, as you call it, was, it’s over.”
“Exactly. And you’re free now to start a new phase in your life. To live for yourself at last.”
Everyone must be fed up with her. They were all bringing it up. She huffed. “Yeah, now I’ve run out of excuses not to.”
“Causes, Phoebe. And you’ll never run out of those to champion. I ask only for the honor of sharing your life while you find more lives to enrich. You and I, we’re kindred spirits.”
“We may be, Armando, but I have nothing to offer you.”
Suddenly he winced, his eyes flashing gold. “Dio—how didn’t I see this before? It’s another man, isn’t it? A man you loved and lost, but not like I lost Donatella? This man hurt you, didn’t he? But you still can’t move on. You are still waiting for him.”
She gave denial a second’s consideration, especially since she wasn’t waiting for Leandro as he intimated. She just nodded.
The flare in his eyes and the step closer he took seethed with urgency. “Don’t let that man claim more of your life.”
She shook her head wryly. “I’m done letting people, or life, do things to me. I’m taking charge, as of now.”
“I’ll hold you to that. And Phoebe…” Her heart dropped a beat at the harshness that suddenly blazed on his face as he cast a look behind him. “It’s Leandro, isn’t it?”
This time she didn’t consider denying it. She even told him how things stood. She was done hiding things.
Armando digested this with a frown. “He might be the power Castaldini needs now, but he always was like a force of nature, unstoppable and indiscriminate on his quest for greatness. Now that he’s fulfilled his potential…” He suddenly caught her by the shoulders. “Stay away from him, Phoebe.”
Her eyes escaped his, clung to Leandro. “I can’t, Armando.”
“If he hurt you before, he will destroy you now.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not a silly twenty-year-old anymore.”
“It’s because you’re a mature and very sensible thirty-year-old that I am worried. What you felt when you were barely an adult will pale in comparison to what you’re capable of feeling now.”
She touched his hard cheek, loving him, but knowing she’d never be in love with him. She had terminal one-man-woman disease. “Here’s another possible outcome to all this. That I’ll put things in perspective, purge them and move on.”
He clearly wasn’t buying that. Then he gritted his teeth. “I may not be as powerful as he is—yet. But if he ever hurts you again, I’ll destroy him. Tell him.”
And with that he turned on his heel and strode away. She stared after him, stunned. Who knew Armando was capable of all that passion? Evidently it had taken his late wife—and Leandro—to rouse the sleeping tiger. Not her. Thank God.
Speaking of tigers, an even more impressive one, the one for her, had gotten rid of his human shackles and was stalking toward her with danger and desire blasting off him.
“That was quite a conversation,” he drawled.
She cocked her head at him. “Yes, it was.”
“Nothing more to say?”
She sighed. “You like to say that, don’t you?”
“I can’t think of anything I dislike saying more. You have a habit of forcing me to say it.”
“I’m making the poor mogul prince do things against his will?”
Emerald fire leapt in his eyes. “You could make an army of mogul princes jump in the air and stay there until you say ‘down.’”
She exaggerated a flutter. “Whoa, I must be super potent.”
“And how. And you are super exasperating, too.”
She gasped in mock innocence. “What have I done now? Besides ignore another of your infringing allusions?”
He snatched her hand to his lips for a compulsive kiss. “How many years will it take you to get enough of saying that to me?”
He was telling her she had…years? Figure of speech, girl. “What you’re saying is, find some fresh lines, huh? Drat. I loved that line. I was so proud of how pompous it sounded. I churned it up to give you the benefit of all those important-sounding words I learned in law school.”
He growled, bit into the flesh at the base of her thumb. “You talk too much, yet say nothing. The sure sign of a master lawyer.”
She gasped at the pleasure shooting from her thumb to her core. “Says the master mogul-cum-diplomat.”
“Phoebe, voi shaitana bella, you beautiful devil, tell me what Armando had to say that took so long and looked so serious.”
“Why don’t you ask him? You are related, after all.”
“Si, and I used to even like the man. Now you’re really putting il bastardo in harm’s way.”
She giggled. “What a coincidence. He thinks of you just as highly and feels as much goodwill toward you.”
“Infischio di lui—I don’t give a damn about him or what he thinks of me, or whether he’d like to have my head on a pike.”
“Ooh, such aggression. Has anyone told you how absolutely beautiful you are when you’re caught in a fit of hostility?”
“Porca l’oca—damn, Phoebe, you’d test Gandhi’s restraint.”
“I’m so glad you think so.” Before he could answer, she reached up and pressed her mouth to the throbbing pulse at his corded throat. “But with the way you’re prevaricating, I’m beginning to think you really don’t want to take me to your home.”
He rumbled something that zapped her nerveless, snatched her up, took her lips to within a hair’s breadth of sanity.
When breathing became an emergency, he let her go, left her clinging, panting. “Don’t stop…”
“Have to…I started this…again…and I promised…”
Yeah, and she’d made him do both. Start this. And promise.
This time, there’d be no one to blame but herself.
Ten
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you lived in paradise?”
Phoebe stretched up on her tiptoes, arched her back, opened her arms wider as if to encompass the beauty around her.
Layer upon layer of natural and man-made wonders stretched as far as she could see, drenched in the Mediterranean sunlight and swathed in the western sea breeze.
She’d read up on this place when she’d learned it was Leandro’s birthplace. No wonder Moorish poets described it as “pearls set in emeralds.” That was exactly what this place and the town and countryside it overlooked resembled. Pearly buildings set in emerald nature. They should have added the sapphire, aquamarine and gold of the sea, sky and sandy beaches to the setting.
The palace complex sprawled in multiple levels over the mountainous site, the park around it overgrown with wild-flowers and grass and teeming with roses, orange trees, myrtles and dense elms. Its resident nightingales had been filling the night with songs on their arrival, but now the silence was penetrated only by the sound of water surging in fountains and flowing in cascades.
Leandro came up behind her, stopped millimeters from touching her, creating a force field of screaming sensuality between them, his lips hovering in a path of destruction from her temple to the swell of her breasts. Then he took the same path up. This time he breathed, exhaled his hunger over her. “Would it have gotten you here sooner if I had?”
She collapsed back against him, knowing what a phoenix felt like, burning to ashes only to be recreated, over and over. “How much sooner than forty-eight hours could I have been here?”
“Forty-eight minutes.” His murmur thrummed inside her in a path that connected her heart and core, sending both gushing. “Forty-eight seconds. I should get my R & D department working on teleportation. All that commute time was pure torment…”
His voice plunged on the last word, lurching through her with enough power to whirl her away from him. “You should talk about torment. You invented it.”
He surveyed her, giving new meaning to lord-of-all-he-surveyed. “If I did, you must share dibs on the patent.”
“Okay, from one tormentor to another, how about we do something else for a change? Have a truce and explore your paradise?”
“The one I’ve been cast out of, you mean?”
His tone was unchanged, that teasing, tempting burr. But she felt it. Eight year’s worth of damage and disgrace. It wrung from her the now second nature urge to ease his hurt, to defend him against the pain of the past. She took a breathless step forward. “The one you can now live in again, if you only desire.”
“Oh, I desire.” He aborted her movement, hungry strides backing her up across the huge stone terrace until he had her against the three-foot-high balustrade. His gaze swept her, from piled-up hair to white wedge sandals, practically setting her on fire. “How I only desire.”
“Truce, remember?” She pushed past him to search for air.
“Va bene. I’ll honor it, even if it was a one-sided deal.” He leaned his hips against the balustrade, shoved his hands in his pockets as if they itched, stretching his pants over a sight that almost had her dropping to her knees in worship.
He beckoned to his house staff, who immediately got busy setting up an outdoor café for them. He watched them for a minute then swept a moody glance around. “This place is the one thing I regret about being who I am. My life has always contrived to keep me away from all this.”
And “all this” was something huge to be kept away from.
She walked back to him, the need to connect with him physically in a non-sexual way overwhelming her again. She took his hand in both of hers. “I’m sorry you had to sacrifice being where you wanted to be for what you wanted to be.”
“Funny, eh? To succeed to the point that I don’t get the things I really want.” Her heart no longer had distinct beats, buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Did he include her in what he wanted and couldn’t get? Before she asked, he sighed. “But being away from here was out of my hands at first. The funny part is, when it was in my reach, everything I did took it away again.”
She blinked back agitation. She treasured that he was exposing his inner self, letting her in, but she couldn’t stand to see him vulnerable or morose. “You can change all that now.”
He looked at her as if attempting to chart her brainwaves. She felt he must have succeeded by the time he looked back at the preparations. Then his expression changed back to scorching flirtation. “Let me feed you. A tour through my paradise is hard work.”
She scampered behind him to the table his people had conjured up, a dream in crisp white, luscious cream and deep emerald. Silver and crystal flashed and sparkled in the sunlight that hurtled through the canopy’s sighing folds. He dismissed everyone, then sat down in one of the fer forgé chairs. She moved to her own chair, only to be pulled down onto his lap.
She settled on the hardness she was molten for. She gasped, wriggled, wrenching a growl from him as one hand pressed her down harder to meet what felt like an involuntary thrust.
She gulped around the need to crash her lips to his, to straddle him and take him all the way in, to her heart. “So this is what they mean by the lap of plenty? Or is it luxury?”
“Don’t move, or it will be the lap of injury,” he groaned.
“Let me up and no one needs to get hurt.”
“Just don’t move, and I’ll still get to feed you and walk out of this with intact equipment.”
She wriggled more until he thrust back with a long rumble, his hands circling her waist, raising her as he once had during exhausting rides to extremes of ecstasy. She made use of the boost to stagger up to her feet and whirled around to flop down in her chair. “I’ve been feeding myself for some time now, thanks.”
He mock-scowled. “Who’ll lick my fingers for me?”
“So that’s what you wanted? No free rides, huh?”
He tossed his head back with a guffaw. “If I didn’t dread another lecture about criminal excess, I’d tell you what I’m willing to pay for one finger lick right now.”
She leaned over, picked up his hand. Then, holding his eyes, she sucked his middle finger into her mouth. She almost fainted with the spike of arousal. Was turnabout supposed to turn on its perpetrator? But at least she was causing him equal distress.
When he snatched his finger away with another string of language-blending curses, she murmured demurely, “Write the checks. I’ll give you a list of my favorite charities.”
He grunted a laugh. “You’d better stand over my shoulder when I’m writing the checks, or I’m liable to sign my fortune away.”
“For just one lick?”
“But what a lick. So that’s what ‘getting licked’ means, eh? We keep finding out the real meaning behind common expressions.”
He lifted a silver cover bearing a repoussé cartouche. The sight of dewy chicken and vivid vegetables and the scent of spices she couldn’t guess at knotted her stomach with hunger.
She exchanged unabashed smiles with him as he served her, feeling like an eagle that had just discovered she could fly.
Then she breathed, “Tell me.”
He didn’t ask what. He just raised his eyes to hers without raising his face, his expression almost…loving?
As she backpedaled from that interpretation as if she’d landed in shark-infested waters, he lowered his gaze, started to eat. He swallowed his first bite, then began.
“I’ve never stayed here, or on Castaldini, longer than a few months at a time since I was seven. After my mother died, my father was inconsolable. My maternal aunt, who lives in Venice, took me to live with her for two years. I came back for a few months when my father fell sick. Then he died. I was passed between my immediate family members—who happen to live all over the globe—with Ernesto in tow until I was seventeen. Then I struck out on my own. No wonder I’m not much of a Castaldinian.”
She’d been finding it harder to swallow as she imagined him, an only child, being orphaned at an even younger age than she’d been. That last remark had her almost coughing out her food.
“You’re the best sort,” she cried. “You have an uncanny ability to analyze problems and tailor solutions. All you need to do is fit your powers to Castaldini’s needs.”
“You really think so?”
“I’m providing uncensored thoughts, remember?”
“You’re providing a life-saving service. And your uncensored thoughts are a blessing to me and to Castaldini.”
“Which makes me a blessed angel, not a wicked devil, as you always claim,” she quipped, escaping his intensity. “Tell me about this place. It’s…amazing.”
He pushed away a clean plate. When had he finished it? “It is. Castello del Jamida—yes, an Italian/Moorish name—is what its name proclaims, an enduring castle. It was completed by King Antonio himself, but there is no record of when it was started. Its walls enclose an area reaching down from the Indara up there—” she followed his pointing finger “—the highest place in the El Juela mountains, down to the sea. A lot of the palace was rebuilt during the second Moorish period of occupation of Spain in the early fourteenth century, after its near destruction during a re-conquest of Gibraltar.”
She digested the sweeping historical details. “It’s mindboggling. I can’t begin to imagine how big the central castle is.”
“The castle rests on a plateau that measures about three thousand by one thousand feet.”
“That’s as big as the royal palace!”
“It was the royal palace for four centuries, before King Arturo moved the capital to Jawara in the seventeenth century.”
“So you’re the direct descendant of King Antonio?”
“I inherited this place. It’s an indication I am related.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re on shaky ground here, mister.”
“Not ‘mister.’ You may call me Your Royal Highness again now.”
“You may not live long enough to be called anything.”
“You’re right. Overexposure to toxic levels of beauty and sensuality is making my survival chances iffy.”
She turned up her nose at him. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere. Since there are no more places left for you to go.”
“I bet I can show you places you didn’t dream existed.” He stood up, came around, pulled her up. “And I’m starting now.”
She giggled and exchanged quips with him as he took her at a run to the ground floor of the castle and outside to begin the tour, all the time pointing out details with the thoroughness of someone who truly loved and cared about a place.
“This palace was built in the Mudéjar-Romanesque style, a symbiosis of architectural syles from cultures living side by side, which on this side of the island were Roman, Andalusian and Moorish with some North African influences. It’s characterized by geometric patterns in which accessorizing is everything, from elaborately worked tile to wood and plaster carving to ornamental metals.”
When they were far enough into the park to get an overall picture, he stopped. “The majority of the palace buildings are quadrangular, with all rooms opening onto central courts. The complex reached its present size by gradual additions of more quadrangles connected by smaller rooms and passages. And though the exterior was designed to be plain, even austere, the interior of each new section followed the theme of the core buildings.”
“What’s that?”
His grin burst like a flash in her eyes. “Paradise on earth.”
She whooped. “I knew it!”
“You’re a genius. Or maybe the columned arcades, fountains, indoor gardens, reflecting pools, sun and wind passing freely from ingeniously positioned and decorated openings, plus a feast of color touched by gold and bronze and silver gave you a clue?”
“You saying I was stating the obvious,Your Royal Wryness?”
He chuckled at her ribbing, pulled her into a run just as her breath evened from the last sprint. At the end of the park they ran down a steep descent leading to the biggest fountain yet. They slowed down as they passed through two gigantic gates.
“That’s where we access El Jamida town. The first gate is Cancello di Cielo, and it dates from the fourteenth century.”
“It’s an honest to goodness triumphal arch!” She gaped up as they passed beneath the dwarfing construction. “Hey, what’s that hand above the gate? I saw a key in the same place on the inside.”
“That’s the Hand of Elaya, with fingers outstretched as a talisman against the evil eye. That’s why it’s outside. The key is the symbol of authority, a reminder to those inside.” She laughed at his villainous tone as they passed beneath a massive horseshoe archway surrounded by a square tower. “And this is the Cancello di Giudizio, which was once used as an informal court of justice.”
“Gate of Heaven, Gate of Judgment. Divine delusions galore. But okay. You make a good guide. You may live.”
His laughter rang out again, and continued to do so as they walked.
They soon happened on a long queue of vegetable and fruit peddlers on their way to the palace complex to sell their fresh produce.
When they saw Leandro, they freaked out like a posse of hungry cats in a fresh fish market. Suddenly she couldn’t see Leandro in the maelstrom of human bodies and eager cries.
He finally managed to include her in their excitement, only for her to find herself and Leandro being dragged onto the leading cart and heading at a gallop into the streets of town.
All the way, people ran beside their cart, deluging Leandro with questions about the time since they’d last seen him.
Everybody in town knew Leandro, clearly loved and respected him. And missed him. The excitement of the situation soon turned to poignancy as she watched the reunion between the people and their estranged lord.
They were offered the use of every home, the food on every table. Leandro, unwilling to turn anybody’s generosity down, arranged for offerings to be taken back to the castle.
It was deep night by the time the townspeople let them go, and then only after Leandro promised they’d return in two weeks to celebrate the Merraba Feast.
By the time Leandro walked her to her room, all she wanted was to drag him inside and just end the torment. At the twelve-foot door that had survived eight centuries, he loomed over her for a heart-stopping moment. Then he lifted her in silence, plastered her against the door, opened her body around his bulk and took her lips, drank her, drained her, ground her between his unstoppable power and the immovable door until there was nothing left of her.