Manhattan's Most Scandalous Reunion by Dani Collins, Caitlin Crews

CHAPTER THREE

JOSSELYNFELTAS if Cenzo had driven the two of them over the side of a towering mountain. Some part of her, in a sudden rush of madness, almost wished that he had.

Because she’d spent her wedding night alone, and she had chosen to view that as consideration on his part. As a sign of respect. He’s giving you space, she’d told herself. He might have been overwhelming and intense in every regard, but this marriage of theirs would be fine if it started that way. On such rational, reasonable footing. She’d assured herself of that, again and again.

She had curled up in a ball on the bed in her stateroom and had chanted that to herself as she tried to sleep. Over and over as the jet flew through the dark.

This marriage will be fine.

Finding herself confronted with the news that this marriage was not only not going to be fine, but that he had been plotting revenge all the while, was jarring.

More than jarring. Josselyn felt winded.

“I don’t understand,” she managed to say after a few moments. She was doing her best to present a calm, impenetrable surface, the way she’d learned long ago. It was the best way to handle excitable men who believed deeply that they were anything but. Normally her own serene facade made her feel better, but not today. It did nothing to keep her heart from catapulting itself against her ribs. Still, she refused to give in to the panic that rose inside her. “You worked out the details with my father yourself. Why would you do that if you thought that he was involved with what happened?”

Cenzo laughed, but it was a terrible sound. Mocking. Dark. It curled inside of her and made her bones feel cold. “Archibald Christie was not involved in what happened to my father. He is what happened to my father.”

Josselyn wanted to leap to her feet. She wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and this conversation. She wanted to escape...whatever this was.

But she was on a private jet. There was nowhere to go. And even the small protection of her stateroom wouldn’t help her now, because they were landing. Even bouncing a little on the tarmac as if in tune with his laughter.

It took everything she had to stay put. To keep her panic from her face. She wasn’t sure she succeeded.

“There were any number of ways I could have made your father pay,” Cenzo told her as the plane taxied on a dark runway, with only a few lights in the distance to make it clear they weren’t still in the air. He sounded as if he was confiding in her. And as if the act brought him great pleasure. “I chose the one calculated to hurt him the most.”

“How lovely,” Josselyn managed to say, through lips that felt frozen. She kept her gaze on him, though the cabin lights had gone dark. That did nothing to dim those ancient eyes of his, blazing straight at her. “Here I thought that despite the archaic nature of our situation, we might be able to work together to come up with the kind of union that benefited us both. Since we both agreed to do this.”

“There will be a great benefit, I assure you.” Cenzo laughed again. He looked entirely at his ease. “But the benefit will be mine.”

It took her a breath, maybe two, to realize through the tumult inside her that the plane itself had stopped. Cenzo did not move. He continued to lounge there across from her as if he was an ancient emperor preparing to order an execution. And it was as if everything inside Josselyn shivered to a humming sort of halt, waiting for that gesture that would decide her fate. Desperate for any hint of compassion in his gaze when there was none.

But the jet door was thrown open then, and Josselyn told herself it felt like a gift. Even if, somewhere beneath the relief, there was a part of her that almost resented the interruption. Because she wanted to do something. Make a stand. Refuse to exit the plane when Cenzo stood, then beckoned for her to precede him down the stairs with exaggerated courtesy. But she didn’t see the point in a protest. Not now, when she didn’t even know where they were.

Or perhaps you worry that he would simply bodily remove you himself, a voice inside her countered. And what do you think you would do with his hands upon you?

She repressed the shiver that notion caused. She repressed it so hard it almost hurt.

And either way, Josselyn walked down the stairs herself, stepping out into a thick night. Once she made it down to the tarmac she paused, trying to figure out where they were. Her location seemed far more critical in that moment than...the peril shaped like a man who prowled down the stairs after her. The air was more sultry here. Back in Pennsylvania it had still been warm, but there were hints of the coming fall in the September mornings. Whispers in the wind at night. Here she could smell nothing of fall. There were flowers on the breeze, and a rich salt that told her she was near the sea. The very dark around her seemed secretive, whispering things she couldn’t quite understand.

Josselyn accepted that she was being fanciful. And fanciful wasn’t going to help her. Nothing was.

You married him,her trusty voice within condemned her.

As if she might have forgotten that part, with what passed for the Crown Jewels on her hand.

Not to mention the terrifying man who had given it to her.

Cenzo appeared beside her and gripped her elbow with a possessiveness that would have stolen her breath even if she wasn’t already so...undone. And there was a moment, a breath, where he looked down upon her from his great height and Josselyn wondered if she might do as everything screamed in her to do, tear her elbow from his grasp, and run for it.

But that would be giving him what he wanted. She understood that implicitly. He wanted her reaction. He wanted some acknowledgment that whatever game he was playing here, it was working.

Josselyn decided she would rather die where she stood than give it to him. So all she did was smile coolly, remaining as outwardly serene as she could.

Something she would continue to do unless and until it killed her.

Cenzo handed her into the front passenger seat of a rugged sort of SUV, then rounded the hood and swung into the driver’s seat. Josselyn was surprised. She would have assumed his tastes ran to sports cars like crotch rockets, not hardy vehicles with four-wheel drive. He did not spare her a glance—another gift, she told herself stoutly—as he drove into the dark as if he knew it well.

Josselyn clutched at the handle beside her, not exactly shocked to discover that Cenzo Falcone drove too fast. As if his expectation was that the narrow road would arrange itself before him to best suit him. It irritated her that, as far as she could tell, it did.

She focused out the window, where his headlights picked up groves of almond trees, tangles of bougainvillea, and a rocky coastline that flirted with the sea.

“You’ve brought me home to Sicily,” Josselyn said into the dark tension between them. “You could have just said so.”

In the distance, the sky began to lighten. The first sign yet that the sun was soon to rise.

Maybe it was foolish that she clung to that notion as if it meant that there was hope.

“To Sicily, yes,” Cenzo replied. Though he took his time with it. “But not home. I have something else in mind for you, mia moglie.”

My wife. It was truly something how he made that sound like an insult.

“How wonderful,” Josselyn said smoothly. “I can’t wait.”

And that same mocking laughter of his seemed to draw tight around her, like a noose.

He drove her down to a rocky cove, where a boat waited. He ushered her on board, and Josselyn supposed she ought to have been grateful that it wasn’t a tiny little outboard motor, barely more than a skiff. It was a much larger, sturdier sort of fishing boat, with a cabin below and a deck to shield passengers from wind and waves. She stood as near to the bow as she could get without stepping back out into the early morning breeze. And she gripped her hands tight together to keep herself from screaming while Cenzo and his crew had what was clearly a riotously amusing conversation in Italian. All of them speaking far too quickly for her to pick up much more than a few words in the Italian she’d last used during her semester abroad in Rome.

Another set of headlights came down to the cove, and Josselyn watched as luggage was loaded onto the boat. Her luggage as well as a set of cases that she had last seen in Pennsylvania, and so knew belonged to Cenzo.

Another sign that boded ill, she had to think.

Once again, it was almost a relief when the boat set off, moving slowly from the cove and then picking up speed as it left the land behind.

“When will you tell me what it is you plan to do with me?” Josselyn asked when Cenzo came to stand beside her, though she kept her gaze trained on the dark waves and the ever-brightening sky. It was pinkening to the east, water and sky alike. “Or is the mystery part of your fun?”

She felt that impossible stare of his on the side of her face, but she did not look at him. Because she was certain that was what he wanted her to do. And hers might be a soft and pointless rebellion. Josselyn accepted that. But it was all she had at the moment, so she leaned into it.

“I’m not going to toss you overboard, if that is your fear.” Cenzo, by contrast, continued to sound more and more amused.

“I’m delighted to hear it,” Josselyn said crisply. “But there’s a lot of room between being forced to walk the proverbial plank and the civil, polite marriage I thought we’d agreed to. You can see how a reasonable person might doubt your motives.”

“When did we make such an agreement? You appear to have all manner of notions about this agreement you say we made when I cannot recall ever discussing the particulars of our marriage.” He laughed. “Not with you, cara.”

She wanted, very badly, to tell him not to call her that. But suspected that whatever else he might choose to call her was worse than any ubiquitous endearment.

“I think you know that my father would never have agreed to anything that might hurt me. Like, for example, a revenge plot.” She squeezed her fingers more tightly together as the boat bounced across the waves, and she liked that it wasn’t comfortable to do that any longer. Not with that enormous ring cutting into her flesh. Because the discomfort grounded her, somehow. It made it matter less that she was on a boat somewhere in the Mediterranean with her brand-new husband and his plots. “I must assume that you misrepresented yourself.”

“I did what was necessary.”

She looked at him then, the precarious dawn seeming to call attention to the stark lines of his face. Cruel and yet still beautiful, even now that she knew better. “We are agreed, then. You’re a liar.”

A corner of his hard, sensual mouth kicked up. “You may call me whatever you wish, Josselyn. It will not change a thing.”

“So what is it to be?” she demanded, with a grand sort of sweeping bravado she in no way felt. “Will you lock me away in some tower? Will I be put in jail for the supposed sins of my father? Or do you intend to abuse me yourself?”

Cenzo studied her face while around them, the world got brighter. His gaze did not.

He lifted a hand and Josselyn braced herself, everything in her spinning wildly. Did he truly plan to strike her? What would she do?

Was this really happening?

But he did not land any blow. He reached over and traced her cheekbone with a careless finger, moving it down after a lazy sort of sketch to find her beauty mark.

Just that odd little touch, then he dropped his hand.

And Josselyn felt the same great tumult she always did where he was concerned. Panic and longing, and that terrible heat.

Too much heat.

She was glad it was still dark enough that, if she was lucky, he would not see all the ways her body reacted to him. Josselyn wasn’t sure she could bear the shame.

What had seemed hopeful yesterday—that attraction, that fire, between a bride and groom who hardly knew each other—seemed like nothing but a betrayal now.

“I will not have to abuse you,” he told her softly. Much too softly, when the look on his face was enigmatic. And made the blood in her veins seem to run hot and soft, like syrup. “For one thing, I have no taste for such things. I’m not a monster.”

“Are you not?” she bit out, though her cheek still felt as if he had lit her on fire.

Again, a tug of his lips. “You might wish that I was a monster. That might bring you clarity, I suppose. But what I intend to be to you is far worse.”

Deep inside her, Josselyn felt a kind of trembling. It wasn’t fear. It was where the fear went, what it turned into. It was years of tamping down her feelings and putting herself last. Always so understanding of her father’s needs, and his losses—far greater than hers. For it was true that she had lost her brother and her mother, but there was nothing worse than losing a child. And the love of one’s life, all at once.

He had never made that argument. Josselyn had made it on his behalf.

She could hear her friends’ voices in her ears, begging her to reconsider this marriage. Just as they had begged her over the years to gain some measure of independence from her father. To think of herself for a change. To build a life of her own.

But Josselyn had always taken comfort in the fact that her father cared for her. Truly he did. He was not vicious or cruel or even dismissive. He truly believed that what he was doing was the best for her, because he loved her. Just as she loved him. So she had held her tongue. She had let things go. She had never, ever showed him her true feelings about things unless her feelings aligned with his. What would be the point?

All of those choices bubbled up inside her now.

It was temper. And it was volcanic.

And she couldn’t think of a better recipient than this man beside her. Her husband, whether she liked it or not.

“So far,” she said, her voice harder than it had been in years—or possibly ever—“all you are to me is a duty to my father. And now, having acquitted that duty to the best of my abilities, this sounds like nothing but empty threats. Am I meant to be afraid that a man I care nothing about might harbor conspiracy theories? Why on earth would I care?”

Cenzo, apparently, did not realize that even so civilized a volcanic eruption from Josselyn was nothing less than a sea change. All he did was laugh again. “It seems you do have some fire within. I doubted it.”

Temper kicked its way through her, making her think she might actually combust where she stood. “You do know that whatever it is you’re planning, it cannot last, don’t you? Whether you leave me on a raft in the middle of the sea, beat me black and blue, or merely lock me up somewhere, it will all end the same way. Sooner or later, my father will demand to see me. And then what will you do? Do you imagine that I will not tell him each and every indignity you make me suffer in the interim?”

“But that is the point,” Cenzo said silkily. “I want you to tell him.”

Josselyn felt her heart stutter a bit at that. The waves grew choppy, so she had to reach out and hold on to keep from being rocked off her feet. She noticed that Cenzo did not hold on to anything, and she instantly felt as if she’d lost any higher ground she might have gained by proving herself weaker.

But she ignored all that and focused on him instead. “Or we could fast-forward to the part where I tell him you’re a terrible person, then file for divorce. Why all the theatrics?”

“I had a great many conversations with your father,” Cenzo told her, and if she wasn’t mistaken he sounded something like...satisfied. Her belly twisted into a knot. “Once I understood that you would obey him, there was no need to repeat those conversations with you. And I feel confident that your father does not believe in divorce. I should warn you, Josselyn, that neither do I.”

It was a bit late for warnings, she thought. “Maybe not. But he also doesn’t believe that I should be harmed. I think you’ll find that his number one object in life is to make certain that I am never, ever, hurt in any way.”

“I will not be ‘beating you black and blue,’ as you put it,” Cenzo replied, as if she was the one who had said something distasteful. “I do not have to resort to brute force. I will not have to take you apart, cara. You will do it for me.”

The boat, having picked up speed on the choppy water, began to slow. And Josselyn was more grateful than she wanted to admit that there was an excuse to look away from him. So quickly that it took her a moment or two to take in the island before her.

Though island seemed an exaggeration. It was a small bit of land, really more of a barren rock, and the only thing upon it was an ancient castle that rose up from the sea. More than half of it in ruins.

“You can’t be serious,” she said, hardly realizing she spoke out loud.

“Welcome to the Castello dei Sospiri,” Cenzo said from beside her, sounding triumphant. And something far darker than that. “You would call it the Castle of Sighs. It was built as a fortress many centuries ago to keep invaders at bay. But not long after the Normans came it was converted to its current purpose, which is to serve as a kind of retreat for members of my family.”

“A retreat,” Josselyn repeated, scowling up at the unwelcoming old rocks before her. “Really.”

There were stairs hewn into stone, leading up from the water. A great many stairs marching up toward the ruins. At the waterline there was nothing like a beach. There were rocks and a kind of jetty, a forlorn-looking dinghy hauled above the high tide mark, and what looked like a very rudimentary sailboat.

Dawn was breaking, painting the sky with gold and pink, and even that failed to make the castle before her look anything but lonely. Isolated.

Dangerous,something in her whispered. As if she needed the reminder.

Cenzo gazed up at it as if it was Buckingham Palace. “It is many a Falcone over the centuries who has been sent to this castle to rethink. Redirect. Relearn some things, even.”

Her heart kicked at her wildly. “What you’re saying is that this is a prison.”

“Precisely.” He smiled down at her then, those arresting eyes of his all the more breathtaking with the sunrise in them. “The world as you know it does not exist here. There are no servants, no staff. No mobile phone service. No internet. All such things are back on the mainland. When this boat leaves us here, it will not return for a month.”

“A month?” Josselyn repeated, her voice beginning to sound thready. She cleared her throat. “That doesn’t sound safe. What if, to pick a possibility at random, you woke up one morning to find you’d been justly stabbed in your sleep?”

“How delightfully bloodthirsty, Josselyn,” he murmured, and she got the sense that he approved. “This obviously will not occur, if only because I do not intend to give you access to any sharp blades. But there is, naturally, a radio for emergencies.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the most powerful and important man alive,” she said, desperately trying to make sense of her predicament. Why was he doing...whatever he was doing? And exactly how prison-like was this going to be? “How will you continue to convince the world that’s the case if they can’t access you for a month? I thought men like you couldn’t go without business calls for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Surely you’ll crumble to ash if you’re not buying or selling something.”

“For you, Josselyn, I have cleared my schedule.” When she only stared back at him, nonplussed, he laughed again. “It is our honeymoon, is it not? And you are a beautiful woman. Surely it cannot surprise you that I have set aside the whole world that I might enjoy the spoils I have gone to such lengths to claim.”

“Wait. Is this... Is this a sex thing?” She shook her head, but she couldn’t make sense of any of this. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

His laugh changed, then. It sounded like less of a weapon, and more like something real. And that wasn’t any better.

Josselyn told herself that what slid down her spine, like a lick of naked flame, was fear. Or fury. Or both, fused together into a molten hot reaction that made her nipples tighten.

Because she refused to let it be anything else.

“I do not kid,” he told her, almost gently. “Nothing will happen on this island unless you beg for it. Know that now. I told you I am not a monster, and I am not. I do not intend to take what will be so freely given.”

Arrogant, she thought then, was really not a strong enough word to describe this man. It didn’t come close to the reality that was Cenzo Falcone.

“If you really wanted me to give you anything,” she managed to grit out from between her clenched teeth, as the boat docked on the small outthrust bit of jetty that looked like it was only available at low tide, “anything at all, you’ve played your hand all wrong.”

“I can assure you that I only play to win.” He moved then, and she found herself turning her body as if to follow him. As if her body simply wanted to follow him. As if he was a magnet and she was helpless before the pull of him. “I want you to know, at every moment, exactly what is happening to you.”

“But I don’t—”

And then his hand was on her face, his hard fingers gripping her chin.

Cenzo tilted her face to his and kissed her.

It was a bruising, punishing kiss that she was shocked to find packed that same punch. That same delirious heat flooded through her, and it was not fear. It was nothing at all like fear, and it pooled between her legs like a new pulse.

When he lifted his head, Cenzo did not release her chin. And she could see from the expression on his hard face he knew.

He knew.

“In a month’s time, we will leave here,” he told her, his voice a rasp that seemed to do the same things in her that his kiss had. “And you will be my slave. Not because I make it so in some show of strength, Josselyn. But because you will beg me for the role. In my bed, of course. But everywhere else, too, because that is how much you will want me.”

“You’re delusional,” she gasped, as something in her roared.

Again, not in fear.

That was more alarming than anything he’d done or said. Josselyn shoved herself back from him, jerking her chin out of his grasp. And found herself chastened at once, because even though she managed to put space between them, she was far too aware that he’d let her go.

“I knew from the moment we met how this would go,” Cenzo said, his gaze so intense it hurt. It actually hurt. “It is inevitable. You should have lost your innocence while you had the chance, Josselyn. For I will shatter it, hoard it, and make it my own. And you will thank me for the privilege.”

“And this is...” It seemed as if her heart was literally in her throat, trying to pound its way out of her body. “Do you truly believe that somehow, breaking me down in this fashion is revenge?”

“Josselyn. Cara. What is it your father wants for you most of all?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer. His ancient eyes were aglow. His cruel face was too beautiful to bear. “He wants you safe and comforted, and so I promise you this. You will never know a moment’s peace. Your life with me will be an agony. I will make you an addict for my touch, my gaze, the barest possibility of my approval. You will live for it. And you will never be happy. You will never feel safe. You will be nothing more than a junkie. Strung out on a man who will never love you back. Ever.”

Then he took her hand in his, a parody of the kind of touch a bride might expect on the first day of her marriage. And he led her from the boat, onto that hateful rock, where the brooding old castle rose into the sky.

But Josselyn knew that her doom was not in those weathered rocks, rich with history and pain. It walked beside her, made of flesh and spite.

Because her tragedy was that despite everything he had said and done since he’d found her waiting for him on the plane, she already wanted him.

Meaning he had already won.