The Unwanted Conti Bride (The Legendary Conti Brothers) (12 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
OPHIA
WOKE
UP
with a start, something sinuously haunting seemed to have lodged in her veins, and peered at the unfamiliar surroundings. This was not the high, luxurious bed that she had taken to falling into in exhaustion the past month. The walls were not the pale cream, the drapes not the sunny yellow that Luca pulled away a couple of times, calling her a lazy cat. No great Conti wealth peered down from paintings on walls.

This was not the bedroom in Villa de Conti where Luca had joined her at all hours of the night in the past month—once it had been 3:00 a.m. and she wasn’t sure who was more shocked, she, to see him emerge buck naked and dripping wet from the shower, or he, to see her sneak into the bedroom with her laptop and a sliver of red velvet cake from his niece Izzie’s birthday party.

What had followed had been a crazy night of cake, champagne, a wet Luca and the bed.

Here, the walls were bare and the general impression of the room was utter chaos. The bed on which she lay was the only surface not covered in books and loose paper. Realization came slowly to her sore, sated body—this was Luca’s studio. The only familiar thing here was the unmistakable scent that their bodies created together—the scent of sex and sweat and raw intimacy.

When she hadn’t seen Luca in a week, nor heard a word, she’d invaded Leandro’s office, demanding to know where Luca was. With each passing day that she hadn’t seen him, a frenzy of fear and worry had built inside her.

Kairos had been defeated in his pursuit to be CEO of CLG, leaving the position empty, and wouldn’t even talk to her. Rossi’s financial future looked better than it had in a decade. And Luca had thoroughly ravished her, his eagerness and passion chasing away her own inhibitions, not that she’d need much persuading once she’d seen past his facade.

Now that all his goals had been achieved, was he done with their marriage?
The memory of how easily he’d walked away last time—whatever the reason—wouldn’t leave her alone.

This time, she wanted him to say to it to her face.

She wanted closure if he was ending this. But more than that, she had enough of the game he played with the world. She wanted to face the real Luca. She wanted the truth of him, a part of him that no one else knew before she let him finish this.

Grudgingly, and with warnings, Leandro had driven her to the high-rise building that was only a few miles from the Conti offices. He’d accompanied her to the door.

If Luca had been shocked to see her standing on the threshold of his apparently inviolate space, he’d hidden it quite thoroughly. Naked torso and blue jeans molded to hard thighs, he’d sent her heart thudding. Dark hair all kinds of rumpled and a gaunt, introspective set to his features that she’d come to recognize as a need for solitude, he looked utterly delectable.

Arms folded, Leandro waited and watched them, a faint tension emanating from him. He didn’t know what Luca was going to do. With her, she’d realized with a sliver of alarm running up her spine.

But even the thought that Luca could harm her was ludicrous. Strip her armor and distill her to the core of her, yes. Hurt her with reckless or cruel intent, no. She was as sure as the wild beat of her heart in her chest, like the flutter of a trapped bird.

“Hello, Bluebeard,” she’d tossed at Luca then with a manufactured sauciness, and ducked under his arm, refusing to give him a chance to turn her away.

She didn’t care that he hadn’t even sent her one of his teasing, quirky texts in a week. That he didn’t want her infiltrating whatever it was that he guarded so fiercely. She didn’t care that in a matter of weeks he wouldn’t want her in his life.

Already, there were warning signs. At least once every day, he reminded her the days were counting down, a calculating look in his eyes. Afraid that that one question would start a conversation she was in no way prepared for, she’d evaded him. She didn’t care that slowly her heart, her emotions, her very soul, were slipping away from her. That she had lost all rationality about this thing between them. That for the first time in her life, it wasn’t her career or her family’s future keeping her up at night.

That had been at seven in the evening. He’d closed the door and turned to look at her, a devouring light in his eyes. Slowly relief gave way to other uncomfortable emotions—awkwardness and anxiety. They stood there staring at each other, both aware that a line had been crossed.

She didn’t say,
you didn’t call in six days
.

He didn’t say
, you’re acting like a clingy wife
.

When he reached her and cupped her jaw, she’d almost wept with relief. “You look exhausted.”

She’d leaned into his touch, too far gone to even think of hiding her need for him. “Didn’t sleep much the last few days. I don’t know how you do this all the time.”

His fingers covered her nape; his nose rubbed against her jaw. “How did your proposal go?”

She smiled against his shoulder, the familiar scent of sweat and soap and skin anchoring her. “It went very well.” Nuzzling into his skin, feeling the thud of his heart under her hands, only then did the clamor in her blood calm. “With you on my side, I can even achieve world domination.”

“Bene.”

He’d picked her up then, as if she weighed nothing, and declared they’d go to bed. For sleep, first, and then other things that they both were in desperate need of, he’d declared throatily against her hair.

The scrape of her skin against the soft cotton told her she was still utterly naked. Instinctively, she pulled the duvet up toward her chin and turned to her side.

The pillow didn’t even bear an indentation—he hadn’t slept at all. Whereas she’d been thoroughly wiped out. Like a possessed man, he’d driven her to the edge again and again. He’d always been playful before, even when he’d made her do the wickedest things.

Laughter colored everything they did. Even when they were hungrily going at each other like rabbits. He said the funniest things and found her no-nonsense outlook humorous. Except tonight.

A price, he’d said, scratching his stubble against the tender skin of her inner thigh, when she’d begged him to stop. She had to pay a price for coming to Bluebeard’s lair. And even with his wicked mouth at the core of her, and her throat raw from screaming his name, Sophia realized she’d already paid a price.

A crisp breeze flew in and she shivered, the last remnants of sleep chased away. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness punctured by the moonlight through the floor-to-ceiling glass doors. Wrapping the sheet around her, she walked to them and peered through.

It was pitch-black, the darkest time of the night, just before dawn.

She went into the bathroom, washed her face. Sneaking into his closet, she found a dress shirt and pulled it on over her underwear.

That was when she heard it.

The strains of music. That same tune he’d played haltingly, almost lazily, that night of the party.
It
had woken her.

Heart beating a thousand times faster, she went, her entire being tugged as if by a rope. Just as she reached the door and pushed it open, the music stopped.

No, no, no.

Like a wisp of smoke she’d been chasing for hours in some deep, dark forest but forever lost now. Only an echo of it lingered, in the very stillness of the air, in the loud thud of her heart.

“Play it again,” she demanded, leaning against the wall, her voice loud and uneven.

Skin stretched taut to stiffness over muscle, his bare back was a map to his mood. His hands still on the keys, he didn’t turn around. “I didn’t realize you were awake.”

Sophia walked a couple more steps into the room and halted. An urgency was building in her, as if she was at a crossroads that would change her life. “You gave it your best shot to wear me out, I know. What did you think to do once I fell asleep? Smuggle me out of here? Drug me and take me back?” For the life of her she couldn’t keep the accusation out of her tone. “Even you, with your unending energy and libido, can’t keep me in that room forever.”

He turned and leveled a look at her over his shoulder. “You’re developing a sense for drama.”

“Dramas and masks are your forte.”

He raised a brow then. Masculine arrogance dripped from the lazy gesture. Her breath held, Sophia waited, for he could rip her apart in that moment. It was the same look he’d worn when she’d said he thrived on control. He would have decimated her then, too, but Sophia had backed off. Stalled him by offering herself up.

Only a few steps between them but it could have been an oceans-wide chasm. A stranger looked back at her. Not the one who laughed with her. Not the one who’d moved inside her like he was an extension of her own body.

She stayed at the door, afraid of breaking whatever tenuous thing had built between them. Afraid that if she walked out the door tonight, it was all over.

“Please... Only once. I...would give anything you ask of me to hear it once.”

Something akin to shock flashed in his eyes.

She forced herself to smile, to act as if her heart wasn’t rearing to leap out of her chest. As if she weren’t standing over some abyss, ready to fall in. Fear and hope twisted into a rope in her belly.

“I...have never played for anyone. Not even Leandro and Tina.”

“I don’t give a damn. I want to hear it.”

He didn’t blink at her outburst. He didn’t reply. He just turned back to the piano. Silence reigned for so long that Sophia was sure she had lost.

But then long fingers moved on the keys. The tension melted from his shoulders and back. He became fluid, an extension of the instrument. He forgot her, Sophia realized. There was no one but him and the tune that flew from his fingers.

Slow, haunting, full of a soul-deep pain. It continued like that, sneaking insidiously into every pore, every cell, until Sophia felt the haunting desperation as her own. It was gut-wrenching, visceral, with a swirling motif turning back on itself again and again, as if it couldn’t free itself of its tethers. As if it was choking but still couldn’t escape.

Until a different note emerged and almost disappeared. She tensed, wondering if she was imagining it. If it was her own audacious hope that she was hearing in the music.

But that note emerged again, like the crest of a wave, like the brilliance of light in a darkened corner. Again and again, until the haunting pain was slowly being washed away by the tremulous hope. The tempo picked up, now the notes of pain and fear being lost among the high notes. It rose and rose until nothing but hope remained. Even that hope was tentative, fragile, a jaggedly painful life but still it glittered.

The high note held and held until it soared like a bird in the sky, stretching every nerve in her tight.

Sophia sank to the floor, her body shuddering at an avalanche of emotions she couldn’t even name. Her knees and hands shook, tears running a blistering path over her cheeks.

She felt transformed, like she herself had risen from the ashes, painfully new but full of hope. The beauty of the composition was an ache in her throat. For several minutes—or was it aeons?—she stayed there on the floor, her heart too full to feel anything.

Slowly, her heartbeat returned to normal and the contrast of the silence that descended was deafening. Like the silence a storm left after its destruction.

Luca stayed at the piano. She’d never seen him so remote, so distant, almost as if he stood at the edge of civilization instead of being the charming lover pursued in droves by women.

She pushed herself to her feet. Today she would heed his unspoken warning for she felt like a leaf that could be blown away by the wind. She couldn’t laugh if he told some slick joke. She couldn’t bear it if he became that...that travesty of an indulgent playboy when that astonishing beauty, that incredible music, resided in him.

For once, she didn’t feel victorious for being right. She felt nauseous and furious and frayed at the edges.

“What did you think of it, Sophia?”

His question stilled her hand on the door. She looked at the dark oak, unwilling to face him. How could he contain so much inside himself? How had he bared a part of him but ripped away something of her?

“It was...interesting,” she replied. There was no word that could do justice to that piece of music. All she knew was that she needed to get away from him before she did something stupid like bawl over him...or rage at him with her fists. Was this what came out of those periods of restlessness, those times that he disappeared?

It was like that piece of music had broken open the cupboard in her head and all she could see, feel, were messy emotions roiling in and out of her. She was spoiling for a fight, a down and dirty match. She felt a huge wave of emotion building inside her, battering at her to burst out.

“Interesting?” he said, and she heard a sliver of laughter in that single word. “I think that’s the first diplomatic thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

She turned and faced him.

He looked like the same Luca who’d mocked her three hours ago. The same one who had fed her strawberries and cream while she’d worked on her laptop, the same one who’d brought her pots of tea and pastries when she’d worked into dawn. The same man who had licked and stroked her to ecstasy as if it were the one and only reason he was put on the planet.

But he wasn’t the same.

She didn’t know him at all.

Slowly, she realized what he was telling her. What his slick smile was about—an invitation to join him in the parody he carried out every day. Nausea welled up inside her.

“Whose composition is it?” she asked, giving him a chance, giving him a warning of her own. “It sounds...classical.”

He smiled then. And instead of charm, she saw condescension. Instead of genuine amusement, she saw smugly bored arrogance. Instead of miles of charm and insouciant wit and reckless antics, she saw pain and utter anguish and a thin flicker of hope. Instead of a man who went through life in pursuit of reckless pleasure, she saw a brooding, dark stranger.