Rafe found her sitting on the side of the pool, her filmy floral skirt hiked up above her knees as she dipped her calves in the water. She looked beautiful like that, leaning back on her hands and making circles with her feet that spun with light through the water. Beautiful and yet, oh, so sad.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
Sienna glanced briefly in his direction and then away. ‘I thought you had work to do,’ she said, but not before he’d caught the flash of surprise. Surprise and something else that had skated across the surface of her eyes too quickly to pin down, but enough to encourage him. She was angry, but there was something else there as well. That was a start.
‘Work can wait. I needed some fresh air and thought, now that it’s approaching evening, a walk on the cliff path would be good. Have you done that yet?’
She shook her head, sitting straight up now and sweeping her hands clean.
‘Would you like to?’
She blinked once, suspiciously, and then again less so, and finally she gave the briefest of nods. ‘Thank you.’ She swung her legs out of the pool and reached for a towel, but he was already there with it. Their hands met as he passed it to her, and she jerked away, as quickly and gracefully as a startled gazelle.
‘Come,’ he said, once she’d slipped on her sandals. ‘This way.’
It was still warm, but the sun was dipping lower in the sky and the scent of a thousand wild herbs and flowers played on the fresh sea air as he led her, neither of them speaking, around the Castello wall and onto the narrow path that wended its way around the headland. Low scrubby bush hugged the sides of the path, tiny pink flowers jostling with each other in the light early-evening breeze.
In the distance the shard of rock that was Iseo’s Pyramid thrust savagely into the sky, with its ever-changing cloud of sea birds wheeling and circling its heights, and from this angle it looked even more dangerous, as if slicing through the water like an enormous black fin. They stopped to look at it at one point, where an enormous chair had been carved out of ancient rock.
‘Tell me about the legend,’ Sienna asked, standing in front of it, hugging her arms around herself as she looked across the sea to the rocky islet.
Rafe studied her face—the blandness of her expression, the tightness around her eyes. There was a vulnerability about her this evening that he hadn’t seen before, almost as if she’d lost her fight and had become resigned to her fate.
He didn’t like it. He liked her passive even less than he did when she argued with him. At least then she showed the passion for which he knew she was capable.
She turned her head then, her eyes questioning, and reluctantly he turned his eyes away and towards the chunk of rock she seemed to find so fascinating. ‘It was the making of Montvelatte,’ he told her. ‘The waters are treacherous around the Pyramid; many ships have come to grief in trying to negotiate a passage between the mainland and the island. Blown off course, the pyramid was almost a magnet. Many went down. Many men died.’
‘And the beast? How did that story come about?’
‘There were always stories, always a suggestion that there was more to the dangers of the Pyramid than an iceberg carved from rock. And then, on a night with no moon and a savage storm, legend has it that a vessel carrying riches from the east to Genoa was blown onto the rocks and sliced in two. One man miraculously survived, only to witness the breaking apart of his vessel and the deaths of all those he’d sailed with. It was he who first saw the beast when lightning lit up the sky. The beast was standing atop the Pyramid and howling into the storm, the bloodied remains of one of his fellow sailors in its maw. That man was Iseo.’
Alongside him she shivered, and he would have reached out an arm to bring her close, but he knew she wasn’t shivering with the cold, and he sensed his arm around her shoulders would not be welcome. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He clung to some debris and made it here. Eventually he went mad, if he weren’t already. But not before everyone had heard the story. And believed it.’
‘What a horrible story.’
‘Though fortunate for Montvelatte.’
She looked up at him. ‘How so?’
He shrugged. ‘Some enterprising pirate decided it was easier to make a living by exacting a toll from passing ships to guarantee them safe passage past the Beast, rather than bother with attacking them. It was only the ones who refused to pay that he was forced to attack.’
‘Oh, my,’ she said, with what sounded suspiciously like a laugh. ‘Very entrepreneurial.’
And he laughed at her unexpected response, suddenly glad he’d swapped a mountain of work on his desk for a walk in the fresh air with a woman who continued to surprise him at every turn.
A woman already pregnant with his seed.
A woman who would soon be his wife.
And once again the beast inside him swelled like it had been fed. This would work, he knew in his gut that this marriage would work. One way or another. He just had to make her see it.
A noise interrupted them, and Rafe cursed himself for not turning off his cell phone. No doubt Sebastiano was checking up on him, his schedule thrown by Rafe’s spur-of-the-moment change of plans. The caller ID confirmed his suspicions before Sebastiano’s gently chiding voice reminded him of a meeting he hadn’t forgotten at all. Simply wished he could.
Rafe pretended to listen while he watched Sienna turn her focus on the ancient stone seat, running her hands over the weathered contours of the rock. He followed their progress, watching her fingers trailing across the surface, hit with the sudden memory of how those same fingers had felt dancing across his skin, her nails biting into his flesh when he’d turned his attentions to a place that had made her gasp and curl her fingers deeper.
And suddenly his body ached to feel the curl and bite of them in his flesh again.
He watched her move, absorbing the gentle sway of her hips and the sweet curve of her neck into his being as one absorbed sunshine.
How long would he have to wait? Until their marriage night? The doctor had told him there was no reason they should not resume a normal sex life, but he’d been assuming they’d had a normal sex life, when all they’d shared had been just one night. Definitely not normal. And definitely not enough.
And while he intended to remedy that the first chance he got, right now was hardly the best time.
One step at a time. He wouldn’t rush her or she’d consider it just another ploy. As much as he preferred her passion to the passive sadness he’d witnessed in her most recently, the last thing he needed to give her was another reason to fight him before the wedding. That wasn’t the kind of passion he wanted. Once she was legally his, there would be plenty of opportunity for passion.
But the best part of two more weeks? It would be agony.
Sebastiano’s voice had long died away when she looked up and caught his gaze on her, her hands halting their exploration as her eyes widened in surprise. She swept her hands away from the rock, as if embarrassed. ‘The stone is so beautiful.’
‘It’s called Vincenzo’s throne,’ he said, drawing up so close behind her that the breeze, so usually filled with the perfume of wild flowers and aromatic leaves, was laced with the warm scent of her. ‘After the first Prince of Montvelatte. Nobody knows who carved the seat or when, but it was right here that Montvelatte first became a Principality.’
She flicked a nervous glance over her shoulder, as if surprised by how close he was, before spinning away and turning her attention back to the seat, running a hand along its surface. ‘I was intending to read about that today,’ she said. ‘How did it come about?’
He allowed himself a