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

CHAPTER SEVEN

TRYASHEWOULD, Cenzo could not seem to access the great and abiding joy his employer told him he had once possessed in his job. In his life, which apparently demanded total immersion in that job.

“I have never met a happier servant,” the signora had told him merrily while his head had still been pounding in that doctor’s office. “You have often told me that you could not think of a single thing you would prefer to do. And, sure enough, your joy infused every moment of your day, every task you completed, everything you said and did.”

A week later, Cenzo could not imagine how that could ever have been so. He felt a great many things as he sank back into his role, but none of them were joy.

Or even adjacent to joy, by his reckoning.

They had not gone to the hospital in Taormina. His employer had waved a breezy hand and told him that she would be happy to monitor him herself, unless, of course, he had a driving need to seek hospital attention, in which case she would have him transported down the coast at once. And Cenzo did not have to dig particularly deeply to feel that he did not have any such need.

His head had hurt that first day. There’d been a ringing in his ears, that pounding, and a headache every time he so much as drew breath, it seemed. When they’d left the doctor’s office, she’d encouraged him to get into the back seat of the SUV that waited for her and had left him there a moment while she conferred with the driver. No doubt he should have listened to the conversation. He should have tried to glean any information he could about the bewildering state he found himself in.

But instead, he’d simply...sat there. And had the distinct sensation that allowing another to cater to him while he remained in the dark was new to him, in some way.

Which would make sense as a servant, he supposed.

They’d driven down to the water, where the signora had a boat waiting. A boat she piloted, only waving him off when he suggested that perhaps he ought to do the honors. For surely that was his role.

“Who knows if you remember how to operate a boat?” she’d asked in her merry way. “I’d rather not discover that you don’t remember a thing while we’re in the open water, if you don’t mind.”

He had felt as if he ought to argue about that, but hadn’t.

And then she’d taken him across the water to a desolate slab of rock topped with ruins, where, she claimed, they would remain for a month.

He had helped as best he could—happy that the painkillers the doctor had given him had kicked in—while she brought the boat into the rocky, unwelcoming shore, then moved it back out again while towing the waiting rowboat. She’d thrown down an anchor and then had made as if to row them to shore.

Cenzo had drawn the line at that. He might have been wounded. And a joyful servant. But he was still a man.

He had done the rowing.

But it was when she started to lead him up the stairs that seemed to march on into forever, and rather steeply, that he was so dubious he’d had no choice but to share it. As perhaps servants did not usually do.

“This is a place you choose to come?” he had asked. “Deliberately?”

The signora had gazed at him serenely from two narrow steps above, putting her just below his eye level. “Oh, indeed. It has been in my husband’s family for many generations. It’s an excellent place to...” She had smiled widely. “Rediscover oneself.”

Perhaps that made this the perfect place, Cenzo had thought, for a man as adrift as he was then. Though he could not pretend that anything about it felt perfect. Particularly not when the place was nothing but the remains of something better.

But his was not to reason why, he had tried to remind himself as they had climbed. His was to...serve, apparently.

He had tried to allow the notion of service to sink into him like the sun. To warm inside him and become...well, palatable, anyway.

When they made it up flight after flight of winding old stairs that wound around and around the isolated rock, he had found he liked the newer part of the castle much better. The ruins made him uneasy. It was as if they whispered secrets of other forgotten lives, drawing comparisons he did not wish to entertain. Cenzo vastly preferred the sleek lines of the renovated part. He would not have said that it felt like a homecoming, exactly, but for the first time since he’d woken up in that exam room, he had breathed easier.

That had made him feel as if he was moving in the right direction, no matter what else might have been happening. It had felt like progress.

“You must have a splitting headache,” the signora had said as they stood in the grand foyer, all clean lines interrupted with a bold wall here, a commanding piece of art there. “Why don’t you head to the kitchen and get something to drink? I’m sure I have some headache tablets that I can give you.”

She had pointed in the correct direction, and Cenzo had obediently taken himself off to a kitchen he was pleased to find was as sleek and welcoming as the rest. He had still found it difficult to imagine himself serving in any capacity, but he took it as a good sign that the kitchen felt like his. The whole renovated part of the castle did, come to that. But then, he was sure he had read once—back behind that wall in his head that he couldn’t penetrate—that good servants felt that kind of ownership over the places where they served. He had the dim impression of a film featuring stately British homes and some kind of saturnine-faced butler.

He had found all the glasses in precisely the place he imagined they ought to be, for his convenience, and that, too, seemed to indicate that he had indeed spent time in this place.

It seemed to take the signora a great long while to locate her medicine. When she’d come back, she had seemed faintly flushed. As if she’d exerted herself in the search for paracetamol. He had opened his mouth to inquire, but had closed it again.

Surely servants did not last long in their positions if they asked such personal questions of their employers. Maybe he’d picked that up in the film, too.

She had slid the bottle over to him, smiling again. And he had admitted, then, that despite the racket in his head, he liked the way she smiled. Too much, perhaps.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the night off?” she had asked. “And tomorrow as well. If you like, we can set you up in the master bedroom, because I really don’t like to think of you sleeping as you usually do when you’re trying to recover from something as traumatic as this has been.”

He had tossed back a couple of tablets and swallowed them down without water. “How is it that I usually sleep?”

Again, she had smiled. Angelically, he had thought.

“You prefer a pallet on the floor. That seems austere to me, but you’ve always claimed that you feel better that way. You don’t like to coddle yourself. Strength of body and strength of mind breeds strength of character, you always say.”

Cenzo had thought he sounded like a bit of an ass, but kept that to himself.

“I will remain in my usual place, I think,” he had said, more forbiddingly than he should have, given that she was his employer. He had tried to look...servile. “And hope it encourages my memory to return more quickly.”

And he had thought she looked almost guilty then, but he’d supposed that was his headache, obscuring everything.

When she had led him upstairs, the room that was designated as his looked like it might once have been a sitting room of some kind, though it featured only chairs and a table. No sofa. Not even a settee. There were suitcases stacked neatly in one corner and on the floor beneath the windows, a single pillow and a pile of nicely folded blankets.

Austere, indeed.

“Don’t hesitate to call for me if you need something,” she had said.

“I will, signora,” he had replied.

Though he had privately thought that he would rather die than do any such thing.

He had lain down and pulled the blankets over him, then had waited for his body to relax into what it surely knew, no matter what he remembered. And instead had seemed able to think only of how hard the stones were beneath him.

But as the days passed, he became used to them. And to his little pallet beneath the window.

What he did not get used to in any hurry was his job. Or, as the signora told it, his calling. More than a career. More than simply something he did for money—assuming he had money out there somewhere.

But no matter how he searched within himself, Cenzo couldn’t seem to find anything that resonated with that.

Still, he performed the duties expected of him. He found that he enjoyed cooking in that kitchen where he felt most like himself, whoever that was. He appreciated the excellent ingredients available to him and the greatest pleasure, he found as he compiled ingredients, was serving what he made to the signora.

Cleaning, on the other hand, he found distasteful in the extreme. And worse than that, simply tedious. Cenzo could not reconcile the joy he’d been told he’d once felt in performing these tasks with the boredom he felt while doing them now.

Sometimes it felt more like rage than boredom, but he did it all the same.

“Why don’t you join me?” the signora asked one evening after he’d brought her the small feast he’d prepared. She nodded when he looked at her in surprise. “It seems silly for you to sit in the kitchen, eating by yourself when it is only the two of us here. You might as well enjoy this view too, especially since we are both eating at the same time.”

Something in him had turned over at that, though he could not have said what it was.

But when he retrieved a place setting and his own meal, then sat down with her, it felt as if something in him...settled.

Had they eaten in this manner before? Was it a habit? Or was it more of an employer’s whim, that she could carry out or not as she saw fit?

He thought he probably had his answer with that last one.

“Your ring is very beautiful,” he said, because she was holding her wineglass before her and the ring caught the setting sun, sending it dancing all around them in shards of light. She looked startled, looking down at the enormous ring as if she didn’t know how it had gotten on her finger. “Your husband is very generous.”

“I suppose he is,” she agreed. “But he is...complicated.”

“All men are complicated,” Cenzo replied. “Men like to claim they are simple, but it is a mask. Where it counts, they are always layered.”

She seemed to take a long time to look up at him again. “Are you remembering?”

He laughed at that, then wondered if servants weren’t meant to laugh when she seemed to react to the sound. Cenzo cleared his throat. “I remember nothing. But I feel certain, nonetheless.”

The signora looked back at her ring, giant and blue, like a pool she wore on her hand. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it that first night in the doctor’s office, because he’d certainly noticed it every day since.

“I think it is people who are complicated,” she was saying. “And never more complicated than in the ways they interact with each other.”

He thought it ought to have made him feel any number of things that he could not remember his own relationships. He felt certain, yet again, that he’d had them—even if he couldn’t remember any details. In the next moment he knew that was true, because he remembered having sex. Not specifically. Not attached to any particular woman’s face, but he knew. He remembered that much.

As did his sex, he discovered the next moment, when the signora lifted her face to look at him again and the setting sun made her gleam like honey.

Josselyn. The name bloomed inside him as if he had always known it. Her given name is Josselyn.

He grew harder, and understood exactly what the ache in him was, then. “Perhaps complication is a compliment,” he said when he could speak without all that wanting in his voice. Or he hoped he could. “If relationships were simple, they would be boring, would they not?”

Josselyn seemed to have shadows on her face, or maybe it was the night drawing close at last, after another stunning blue Mediterranean day. “We wouldn’t want that. Anything but boredom.”

In his pallet, later, after she’d gone up to her room at the top of the tower, Cenzo found himself thinking far too much about this woman he lived with. And served. And had broken bread with tonight.

And wanted terribly, like a fever in his blood.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He laughed as he thought that, because he couldn’t remember any others, but even so, he was sure that if he could personally remember the faces of every woman he’d ever encountered she would still blow them all away.

The sun moved all over her the way he wanted to do. Cenzo found himself jealous of the sun.

Josselyn,he thought, her name like a song in him.

As the days passed, he found he focused on her more and more. Some days he thought he could almost taste her. Some nights he dreamed of kissing her, and there was something about those dreams that made him wake, panting. Hard as a spike. Desperate, which he sensed was not his typical state.

He often toyed with the heavy ring on his finger in the dark, finding it hard to believe that he had ever made the vow of celibacy Josselyn had told him he had.

“I find that doubtful,” he had said when she shared this amazing revelation with him. When it had finally occurred to him that if it were a wedding ring, there must have been a wedding. And must therefore be a wife...out there somewhere. A notion that had not sat well with him. “Extremely doubtful, signora.”

“You truly are a Renaissance man, Cenzo,” she had replied, sitting in the little library room in the tower with a book open before her. And surely something was wrong with him that he’d begun to associate that particularly serene smile of hers with information about himself he was not going to like. “You wear that ring as a celebration of yourself. The commitment you made to you.”

Josselyn looked as if she thought that was beautiful. Cenzo thought he’d like to punch himself in the face. That was a commitment that he could make to himself. It rather sounded like he needed it.

“How extraordinary,” he had said. “I do not feel at all like a monk.”

“Do any monks actually feel like monks?” she’d asked airily. “It seems to me that’s the whole point of becoming one. If the vow was easy to make, would it be worth making?”

Cenzo had not shared his personal opinion, which was that some vows were deeply stupid.

Still other nights he lay awake and lectured himself. He told himself that he ought to be grateful. Because it wasn’t as if he remembered any part of the job he’d done here before. Josselyn was constantly reminding him. She was unfailingly nice about it, always kind and patient as she told him he usually did things like gather fresh flowers and festoon them about, or scrub the floors with his own hands as he felt that made them gleam brighter. He knew he should have been far more thankful for her willingness to not simply...have him replaced.

But it turned out he was the sort of monk who struggled mightily with anything like gratitude.

And no matter what, no matter how he tried to trick himself into remembering something that might make sense of these choices he’d made, he always came up against that same wall.

His bruises faded quickly, and that almost made it worse. Because then he simply looked like a normal man, but one who’d been born at the beginning of the month. Fully formed, completely useless, and doomed to be a mystery to himself.

Cenzo felt, strongly, that he was not accustomed to finding himself a cipher.

It was better when he focused on Josselyn rather than himself. And the bonus was, he liked doing exactly that.

Perhaps it was the only thing he enjoyed. And perhaps that was the answer to the puzzle of his identity right there.

“What does your husband do when you take month-long trips to a place like this?” he asked one evening as they sat together in one of the rooms off the kitchen, because the wind had picked up too much to eat outside. She usually came to sit with him in the kitchen as he prepared their dinner each night, and, in turn, he had taken to eating with her all of the time now. It seemed simpler.

And though she hadn’t reissued her invitation, she hadn’t rescinded it, either.

Once again, Cenzo questioned how it was he had ever taken joy in servitude when he took far too much pleasure in pushing boundaries he shouldn’t have.

Perhaps it is precisely the pushing of these boundaries, with her, that you took pleasure in,a voice in him countered.

Cenzo had no trouble believing that.

“I believe my husband has an endless capacity for entertaining himself with his own bank balance,” Josselyn replied in a darker tone than usual. “Some men are like that. It is about what can be bought and sold, always. That’s the pleasure they take in things, if they take any pleasure in anything. And it isn’t about money, because believe me, they already have enough.”

“Men are hunters.” Cenzo shrugged. “What they cannot stalk for their dinner, they must hunt in other ways.”

She looked at him curiously. “What do you hunt? Can you remember?”

“I cannot,” he said. Yet for once it did not bother him. “But I feel certain that whatever it was, I was very good at it.”

He liked the way she laughed then, as if delighted, even though he was baffled by it. For he had come to realize that no matter what, no matter that there was that wall preventing him from remembering the details about his life, he felt very sure about who he was.

Supremely certain.

And as he sat there, thinking about that certainty while Josselyn’s laughter made music between them, Cenzo could suddenly triangulate a life that made sense.

Finally.

There was that ring on his finger that Josselyn told him was a vow he had made. There was what she claimed was his commitment to his role here—his service to and for her. And the third point of that triangle, the most important point, was Josselyn herself. His signora. The beautiful woman whose laugh was brighter than the sun, and who sometimes smiled at him and made his chest feel too tight.

He could see the purpose in that life. And the beauty in it, too.

And perhaps that was the recipe for joy—maybe even that joy she had told him he had always felt in his work.

Maybe the work was incidental and the point was her.

He felt something in him roar at that, like a dragon, and knew it was the truth.

“It’s a good thing that even getting knocked on the head hasn’t taken away your sense of yourself,” Josselyn said, though she did not sound as if she thought it was all that good.

“Surely losing one’s memory should be clarifying.” He found himself lounging back in his chair, his gaze on her. “Surely I should become more of who I am, not less.”

Her dark eyes seemed particularly mysterious to him then. “That’s the internal debate, isn’t it? Some think a person is made of certain immutable characteristics, set in stone at birth. Others are sure it’s our experiences that make us who we are. It’s the nature versus nurture debate, and I’m not sure either side has ever won it.”

“I cannot speak to your philosophy,” he replied. “But while I may not recall the details about my life, I find that knowing myself does not appear to pose a challenge.”

“You are a man with a singular sense of himself, Cenzo.” Her voice was quiet, and she seemed to cling tighter to her wineglass than she usually did. “You always have been.”

“And your husband?” he asked. Because it was difficult to recall that she had one, he could admit. He didn’t like that she was married. And there seemed no point in pretending that his acceptance of that unworthy thought wasn’t also the acceptance of another, even darker truth. He wanted her regardless of her marital status. That was the beginning and the end of it, because she already felt like his. Cenzo could only hope that the things he wanted weren’t stamped all over him as he gazed at her. “Surely you must have married him for his own collection of...singular characteristics.”

She blinked then, an expression he couldn’t read flashing over her face. He thought she looked almost...uneasy. Even upset. But she lowered her lashes and when she lifted them again, the expression was gone as if he’d made it up.

“My husband and I are separated,” she told him, her voice sounding odd to his ears. “He is...focused on other things at this time.”

“Is that why you are spending a month here?” With him instead of the man she’d married. The one who had a greater claim to her than he did, a notion he did not care for at all. “To find your own focus?”

But she stood then, and he knew that meant she was cutting off this conversation. And right when it had gotten interesting. Sure enough, she smiled in that way he already knew meant she did not intend to continue. Ever.

“I don’t know why I mentioned that. It’s irrelevant.” She cleared her throat, but that smile of hers seemed far less serene than usual. “Good night, Cenzo.”

“Good night, signora,” he replied, because that was the appropriate thing to call her.

Her name was a treasure he hoarded and kept to himself.

Josselyn headed up into the tower, but he lingered in the kitchen long after he’d cleaned away the remnants of their dinner.

It was as he had told her. He couldn’t remember the details of his life, but the things he did know were bedrock certainties.

Like this one: Her husband was a fool, but he was not.

And if her husband was not man enough to claim the wife he had, Cenzo saw no reason why he should respect such foolishness.

Because he was the one who was here, making Josselyn laugh.

He was the one who tended to her, feeding her and caring for her, day in and day out.

As far as Cenzo was concerned, he was the only husband she needed.