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

CHAPTER EIGHT

JOSSELYNCOULDNOlonger pretend that she was anything but a terrible person.

Some days that weighed heavily on her. Other days, she rationalized that having made the choices she already had, there was no going back without causing even more trouble.

She had felt guilty immediately. The very moment the words were out of her mouth and Cenzo had blinked, clearly trying to imagine himself a servant. Josselyn hadn’t been able to imagine it herself, really, but she’d said it. There was no taking it back. Surely that would confuse him even more.

That first night, she hadn’t slept, because... Had she really told the man to go sleep on the floor with a head injury? Yes, she’d offered him the master bedroom, but she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t known full well he would refuse. That was why she’d rushed into the tower and moved his things. And surely that level of manipulativeness made her evil. Rotten to the bone, just as he’d believed her father was.

The way she’d told him his mother was, little though he’d wanted to believe her in those last moments he was still himself.

Josselyn thought about that all the time—the poison his mother had fed him that had led him to think his only reasonable course was revenge.

What do you imagine his reaction will be to this act? her conscience liked to ask her daily. He might well prefer a dose of poison to scrubbing floors.

She’d tried to assuage her conscience by surreptitiously checking on him every hour on the hour throughout that first night, and the next few nights as well, just to make sure that her questionable desire to get her own back with him didn’t result in any actual health issues on his part.

But he seemed in perfect health save for his lack of memory.

A few days into it, after she’d waved a hand and told him that he liked to clean the castle’s many windows every Tuesday, she’d taken the hired boat out again. The helpful driver of the SUV that night in the village had arranged the whole thing for her, only too happy to do what he could after she’d demonstrated that she had unlimited funds at her disposal.

It was even a nice boat, she’d thought that first night, and then again when she took it out once more. Fast enough that she could make it back across the water to Sicily in less than half the time it had taken her to sail. That was good to know. It made her feel much better about choosing not to take Cenzo to the hospital. Once she’d determined that she could get to Taormina fairly quickly if she had to, she’d taken the opportunity to call her father. Just to check in. And to assure all her friends that she was alive and well in her archaic arranged marriage, despite all their proclamations of doom.

When she’d calmed all the nerves she could, she’d spent some time downloading articles on head injuries from the internet so she could make sure that she wasn’t irreparably harming the man. And could spot any signs that his health was taking a dive.

As the days passed, Cenzo not only exhibited no signs of decline, he seemed to thrive. More and more by the day. And Josselyn was fascinated that even though he couldn’t remember a thing, he was in no way less himself.

Arrogant. Commanding. Steeped in the whole of his glorious history. And quite obviously mystified by the notion that anyone would ever choose to be a servant, which she couldn’t help but find entertaining.

Because you’re an awful person, she would tell herself again and again.

But then she remembered what his plan had been for their time in this place. The revenge he planned to take on her, thanks to the lies his mother had told him. She knew they were lies. She’d read the woman’s letters. And surely even this terrible charade she was inflicting on him was better than that. Because she wasn’t trying to make him a slavering addict, so that she would somehow break her own father’s heart for more of a taste.

She wasn’t trying to break him. That was the difference, she assured herself.

Though her conscience wasn’t so sure.

“You look distressed,” Cenzo said one evening as they sat out on the balcony, though the air was cool. Even here summer waned, however mildly. He indicated the first course that he’d only just brought out, a rich stew of eggplant, pine nuts, and plump, sweet raisins. “I hope it is not the caponata.”

“Of course not,” she replied. “How could it be? Your cooking is marvelous and you know it.”

He inclined his head, regally. And despite herself, Josselyn wanted to laugh. Because for all they might have talked about nature versus nurture in their time here, it seemed that Cenzo’s sense of himself was truly innate. He simply was that arrogant.

Even as a servant, he behaved like a king.

“And yet you do not look happy, signora.”

“Is that important to you?”

And then, instantly, she hated herself for asking. Why was she torturing herself? Asking questions that had no answer, because this intent man who cared for her in his own imposing way was not her husband. She was all too keenly aware of that. This was a version of him, but she knew perfectly well that one day Cenzo would remember his true self—or they would leave here and someone would tell him the truth—and he would hate her. The way he had already hated her when he’d married her.

It made her stomach hurt to contemplate.

“It is quite clear that you are the focus of my existence,” he said dryly. “How can you doubt it? You are all I remember.”

“We’ll see how you are in a few weeks.” Josselyn tried to sound severe, because she wanted to laugh again and that felt perilous. It felt intimate. She wanted to bask in this version of Cenzo, who looked at her so intensely but clearly without any desire to harm her.

It made her imagine she could see things in those old coin eyes that she knew were never there.

Or wouldn’t be there if he was himself again.

She was a terrible person for this. Josselyn knew she was. But the longer it went on, the less she seemed able to help herself. She would lie awake at night in that wide bed, high in the tower, and decide that tomorrow she would pack him up in the boat, take him to a real hospital where they would recognize him at once, and face the truth about what she’d done.

The truth and what would follow it. His condemnation. Possibly his loathing.

But every morning she would wake up and find herself in the alternate reality she’d created. Where beautiful, impossible Cenzo smiled when he saw her. Where he saw to her comfort, inquired about her needs, and more than that, talked to her as if she was a person instead of a tool to wield.

And in that alternate reality, it was far too easy to get caught up in how astonishingly attractive he was, especially when he wasn’t seething with buried rage and revenge. How egregiously gorgeous. Especially because this Cenzo seemed to have no notion of how to dress like the richest man in the world. She supposed it was her fault, because she’d never corrected him when he’d appeared in little more than casual trousers and a T-shirt on the first day. She hadn’t insisted that he dress like a butler because she’d been far too busy excoriating herself for her lies.

As the days wore on, she almost wished she’d insisted on the formality. Because maybe if she had, she would be able to think of him differently. Instead of catching her breath every time she looked up and saw him studying her. All that intensity and focus of his, and all of it sharply focused on...tending to her happiness.

Ruthlessly.

So implacably that it made her burn and burn.

Josselyn could not say that she was actually happy in this situation. She was far too aware of the game she was playing. And how temporary it all was, whether she was burned alive or not.

Their time here was running out. Their days were numbered.

And because it was temporary—or so she told herself—she permitted herself to enjoy it.

Because this version of her husband was a delight.

He talked to her. He listened to her. He seemed genuinely interested in what she thought, what she said, what she felt about anything and everything.

She knew better, but he made her heart beat funnily when he smiled at her. He plied her with food. He insisted on running her baths. His eyes followed her everywhere. The heat in him found the fire in her, and they both grew hotter by the day.

And even though she knew that he was just a version of Cenzo that she’d created, Josselyn found that she was susceptible all the same.

Because it turned out that the Cenzo who existed without a thirst for revenge was, more or less, pretty much the perfect man.

A man who asked after her family and when she told him of the tragedy that had taken her mother and brother so long ago, had reached over and placed his hand on her arm. A simple expression of solidarity in grief. In loss.

Even though she knew he could not recall his own loss, his own grieving.

It had moved her far more than any words might have.

This version of Cenzo was the man she’d dreamed he might be when she’d allowed herself to hope that she might have what her parents had.

Knowing he would hate that he had fallen so far was like an ache in her, because she knew that if she could, she would keep him this way forever. No matter what that made her. She couldn’t unknow such a thing about herself.

“I have been considering the matter closely,” he said one day, as they explored the ruins down near the waterline. It had been Josselyn’s idea. Because she thought she needed to actually do something with all the strange nervous energy inside of her. Before it burst out of her in inappropriate ways. “But I cannot decide if I am a good man or not.”

She looked out through a hole in what had once been an outer wall. She saw the sea before her, that impossible blue. And yet more knowable than the man behind her.

“Surely if you question such things, that already makes you better than some.”

“Can a man be good if his thoughts are...unworthy?” he asked.

Josselyn wanted to ask him why he paused over that last word. She glanced back at him, but as usual, his intense focus made her uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable is not the right word and you know it, she scolded herself internally. Because what she felt was too hot. Too interested. Too aware that there was no one on this hunk of rock but the two of them, that he was her husband, and that if she wasn’t mistaken, the way he looked at her during these lost days of too many lies was lit up with all the same heat and need she felt herself.

Hotter than the Sicilian sun.

“Thoughts are just thoughts,” she managed to say, trying to sound philosophical. “It’s what you do that matters.”

Indeed it is,she thought, and didn’t quite manage to keep from wincing.

“It’s what you do that is judged,” Cenzo countered. “But it must begin within, is that not so?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking me if you already have an answer.”

Her trouble was that all of this felt far too cozy. Too revealing. The searching conversations they kept having, too deeply personal even if he couldn’t remember why he would never have had them with her before, felt like intimacy.

It felt like she was getting to know him. The real him.

She was all too aware how dangerous that line of thinking was.

Because the real Cenzo would loathe this. He would hate her for allowing him to expose himself. Josselyn knew that.

Yet she also knew that the real Cenzo would have taken great pleasure in doing the same thing to her.

So who was she to lecture him on how to be good?

“Maybe you can’t remember the details of who you are,” she said after a moment, turning her back to the watchful sea. “But maybe you don’t need them. Do you have a sense of right and wrong? Do you know how you feel about things? I think the clues to who we are must be wrapped up in that.”

“I believe I am a good man,” Cenzo said with his typical conviction. But then he paused, studying her, the sun pouring over him like it wanted to hurt her. “Or I would like to be one. But I do not know if every man thinks these things. Perhaps it is no more than a convenient and flattering way to think of oneself.”

“I believe that if you want to be a good man, then you can make sure that you are one.” Josselyn’s chest ached. “No matter what the provocation. No matter your past. No matter what lies have been told.”

His copper and gold gaze seemed brighter, then. “Tell me what that entails.”

And somehow, without her noticing, he had drawn close. She found her back against that half wall and then there was Cenzo above her, blocking out the sky.

She felt her breath change. She felt everything inside her pull tight, then seem to shimmer.

“It’s not a recipe that you can follow,” she whispered. “It’s life. It’s each and every choice you make over time.”

Like the choices she was making now. Or not making.

“Maybe it is not that I truly desire to be a good man.” His voice was low. His gaze moved over her face, seeming to catch on her lips. On that mark just beside them. “Maybe it is that I wish only to be good for you.”

“Cenzo...” she began.

“Let me in, signora,” he urged her, his voice a dark thread that seemed to wrap all around her, then tug.

Again and again, pulling her to him. Making her want things she shouldn’t.

Why shouldn’t you?something in her asked. This version of Cenzo would not hurt you. This version would hurt himself first.

“Let me in,” he said again, and his hands were on the wall beside her head. His face was lowered, hovering there just above hers. It would take so very little to surge onto her toes, lift herself up, place her lips on his.

Again. At last.

Some part of her thought she’d earned it. That she deserved a little pleasure here, before reality ruined them all over again.

“Josselyn,” he said, and it made a new sort of heat prickle at the back of her eyes, because oh, how she loved to hear her name in his mouth. His perfect mouth. “You must know that all I wish to do is serve you.”

And that almost broke her, but it was a gift.

Because it reminded her who they were.

The real Cenzo Falcone had no wish to serve anyone, least of all her.

Even so much as kissing him now would make her no better than he was. The way he’d claimed a kiss on the boat that first morning, the way he’d branded her with it, had told her in no uncertain terms who he was. But that didn’t mean she needed to be like him.

She ducked away, out from beneath his arm, her heart pounding so loudly that it echoed back off the ruins. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they could hear it all the way across the water in Taormina.

“Is that a bad thing?” he asked, turning so his eyes could follow her, though he stayed where he was. “I would have thought rather the opposite. Who does not wish to be served? In any and all capacities?”

Josselyn wished she could breathe regularly. She wished she couldn’t feel that wildfire slickness between her legs. She wished it didn’t seem like he was in control of her body even though he was no longer this close to touching her. And hadn’t touched her.

And, because he believed himself her servant, might not touch her at all unless she granted him permission.

She couldn’t tell anymore which part of that made her shudder, sending all those goose bumps prickling up and down her spine.

“The trouble is that you don’t know what you really want,” she managed to say. She even sounded vaguely in control of herself. “How could you? You don’t know who you really are.”

“You have told me who I am.” He shrugged, and he looked dangerous and beautiful. Ancient and untouchable, standing here in these ruins where his ancestors had fought and died, lived and loved. She was sure she could feel their ghosts all around them, judging her as harshly as he would. “And I might not know any number of things, signora, but I do know that the things I want are not a mystery to me.”

“I told you I was married,” she said, expecting that to be a dose of cold water on this situation.

But Cenzo only shrugged, the corner of his mouth crooking up. “So you say. You have run away from this husband of yours and isolated yourself here, where no one can reach you. And you took me with you. I cannot say I see this husband of yours as a barrier.”

She laughed at that, helplessly, because what else was there to do?

“You may not consider him a barrier,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “But believe me, he is a force. When you feel that force, you will think quite differently about all of this.”

His smile widened. “I like my chances.”

The absurdity was almost too much for her. “Cenzo. This is not something that’s going to happen. It wouldn’t be right.” She rubbed her hands over her face, not the least bit surprised to discover she was shaking. “Weren’t you the one who was worried about how to be a good man?”

“I am not so concerned, it turns out.” And though the day was blue and clear, Josselyn was sure she could hear thunderstorms brewing in the distance. “Whether you want to admit it or not, la mia bella signora, there is a fire between us.”

“There may be,” she said, because she thought denying it would make him more resolute. And because it might also actually, physically wound her to deny it. “But that doesn’t mean we have to let it burn us alive.”

“Maybe, Josselyn, I wish to burn.”

“I don’t.”

It was not the first or even the worst of the lies she had told him, but this one stung. Horribly. Wounding her, just as she’d feared.

And because she was holding on to the faintest shred of virtue here in the middle of this mess she’d made, she made herself turn and walk away.

Before she found she couldn’t.