Olivia Gates Bestseller Collection 2012 (35 page)

How
could
they? Her mother, and King Benedetto? All these years, lying to her, to everyone?

Now
everything made sense. Why her mother had always had that look of apology, why she’d sent her to a boarding school in Napoli when she was old enough to suspect what was going on.

Betrayal ate at her. But it was nothing compared to the dread that tore at the tethers of her mind. If she felt this way, what would Durante feel when he found out?

The king had said he should never find out. But this couldn’t be hidden. Not anymore. And she had to be the one to tell Durante the terrible truth.

She had to do it now. Before their meeting with the king. Come what may. Even if it was something she might not survive.

The icy feeling had reduced the telltale signs of weeping, but she still looked like she had on the day she’d lost her mother. She felt as if she had lost her all over again. She might lose her life now. She would, if she lost Durante.

No.
No, she wouldn’t. Durante believed in her now. He’d know she had nothing to do with any of it. He trusted her.

She staggered out of her suite…and was almost knocked off her feet by the wall that materialized in her doorway.

Durante! God…here…no, she needed a few more minutes…

Stop it.
This had gone on long enough. It ended now.

“Durante…I need to tell you something.”

“What a coincidence. I have something to tell you, too.”

His voice. She’d never heard his voice like that. Emotionless. Lifeless. He looked as if he’d been crying, too, his eyes shards of brilliant blue simmering in angry redness.

She clutched at him, her heart bucking its tethers. “Durante, what is it? God…are you okay?”

“I will be.”

Then he turned and walked away. She rushed in his wake, a fireball of fear and confusion exploding in her mind.

The king was waiting for them at his reading table, the first time she’d seen him out of bed. His face started to tug into that skewed smile. It fell back into bleakness at the sight of Durante.

Silence settled over the scene. Something terrible radiated from Durante. She stumbled sideways as if out of the path of a lethal ray.

He couldn’t already know. She had to be the one to tell him.

But he looked…rabid. He…he
did
know. Was incensed. But not at her. It couldn’t be at her.

“You wish me to become your crown prince.” The hiss that emanated from him sounded inhuman. Shudders started to creep over her. “What do they say about being careful what you wish for? You manipulated me to get me back here only for me to find out your secrets, crimes that I will expose. I’ll tell the world what a sadistic, adulterous husband you were. And I will take the crown now, not after you die.”

Gabrielle’s heart had stopped with the first salvo out of Durante’s lips. Now it beat like the wings of a hummingbird, yet pushed no blood to her brain. The world constricted into a pinpoint of darkness.

Something wrenched her from the edge of oblivion. Durante was dragging her away.

He was so angry at his father. She had to defuse his shock and agony. Had to mend this horrific breach.

“Durante…don’t do this to yourself…it’s not like you think…” His abrupt stop had her crashing into him. She leaned on him, for support, for both of them, her lips trembling into his heaving back, with love, with desperation to explain before one more minute passed. “Your father’s only crime was loving my mother, hiding their affair, from everyone, starting with me, but he did it so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone…he loves you…but was so afraid you hated him, made me promise…”

He wrenched away, turned on her. “You were congratulating yourself, weren’t you? As each phase of your seduction worked on me like a spell?”

Seduction? Spell? What did he…?

“Now you’ve reached the point where you believe your hold on me is unbreakable, that I’d sooner let go of all my pride and fortune, of my very life, than let you go, don’t you?”

He-he believed…the worst?
Again?
He didn’t trust her? Didn’t think she deserved a chance to defend herself?

“And you were right.”

Wha…? She’d misunderstood? He wasn’t saying that he doubted her?

“I would give my life for you, the woman, the treasure who shares my soul and mind, the owner of my body and heart.”

He wasn’t! He didn’t doubt her. Her churning world stilled, quaked with relief. “Oh, God, Durante, oh, my love…”

“But that’s not you.” His hiss froze her jubilation. “That woman was a role you played to seduce me, reading the lines my father taught you. That woman doesn’t exist. So now, my bride-to-be—you’re no longer my bride-to-be. I cancelled the wedding. I’ll tell the whole world why. I’ll show anyone who had any doubt about you how the worst so-called rumors were only the
tip of the iceberg. I’m cancelling the book deal, too, and if you try to play any of the penalty clauses, I’ll crush you and your precious company under my foot.” He gave a hideous laugh. “Oh, wait, I’ll crush you and everything you hold dear, anyway.”

A stranger. She was looking at a vicious stranger. One who’d played an elaborate game of make-believe, of knowing her down to her last thought, caring for her with his every breath, respecting and trusting her with his every fiber. It had all been empty. All the proclamations, the promises of forever.

The world started spinning again, swinging her away with it. He receded as everything drowned in a sea of distorted images.

“Gabrielle.”

That growl, a predator enraged to find his prey about to escape his talons. She turned back, no survival instinct left.

And he delivered the killing blow. “If you have any shred of self-preservation left, you will make sure I never see you again.”

She stared into his cruel eyes, and everything came to an end.

L
eandro had been right.

He’d warned him. Durante hadn’t listened. He’d been deaf. Blind. And totally out of his mind.

Madmen didn’t realize the depth of their insanity. Didn’t see it at all. Saw it as justified action, inescapable reaction.

He’d foamed and fermented in the delusion, thrashed and plummeted down a spiral of intensifying agony. Then he’d hit bottom. And he’d remembered them. Gabrielle’s eyes. In the blood-red haze of his fevered memories. The shock of letdown there, the horror of loss. The realization that the one who’d pledged to protect her from all harm, the only one she’d trusted with her true self, was the one dealing the deathblow. And he’d known.

She had nothing to do with any of this. Hadn’t known most of it. What she’d hidden had been the burden, the pain he’d seen in her eyes. That she couldn’t tell him what wasn’t hers to tell. She’d tried to tell him that.

He believed her. Without question. Now. When it was too late.

No.
He couldn’t let it be. He wouldn’t. He would do anything to turn back the clock. Erase the hurt he’d inflicted on her.

But he’d resurfaced from his madness to find her gone. Two days ago. He’d learned that she’d left within an hour of his throwing her out of his life with a threat he wouldn’t have hurled at his worst enemy. But he’d thought her far worse than that then. He’d thought her his murderer. When he’d been the one who’d stuck a knife in her heart. And twisted.

He didn’t deserve her forgiveness.

But he would. Whatever and however long it took, he would.

Gabrielle counted her steps, her breaths. The seconds.

It was the one way she could go on from one to the next. She had this conviction that if she stopped counting, she’d stop moving, stop breathing. Stop moving forward in time. Be trapped forever in a second of pure agony.

She wished she would. But couldn’t. Not before she made sure her employees were safe from Durante’s wrath.

She cared nothing for what he would do to her.

She opened her office door, stepped inside, the plush wall-to-wall carpeting absorbing the sound of her steps, amplifying the feeling that she’d ceased to exist.

But it wasn’t insubstantiality that engulfed her now. It was something else. Something overwhelming and all-encompassing.

Him. Durante.
Here.

She dropped the count. She’d been right. Her breath stopped. Time. The second held her in its grasp—and crushed her.

“Gabrielle. Perdonami.”

Forgive him?

The second fractured. Breath tore into her lungs. She spun around. And there he stood.

A god come down to earth, in an immaculate suit the color of the night of his hair, he made the crisp blues and grays of her space—made
existence
—pale into colorless nothingness.

His scent, his eyes on her. They made her forget everything. Every muscle in her body quivered like a bound bird’s, the blinding urge to fly to him tearing her apart.

Weak, self-destructive moron.
She might never truly live again, but it was his doing. He’d crushed her.

What more did he want?

Anguish almost ripped her chest open. “You didn’t cut me into small enough pieces to satisfy your self-righteous rage? You want to see me a bloody mass on the ground before you’re satisfied?”

“Gabrielle,
no.
”

His urgency exploded into strides that obliterated what remained of the flimsy safety of distance, brought him against her, around her, hard and hungry. Then he was taking of her, taking her into him again, spreading her against him, pressing her between the persistence of his passion and something as un-yielding, drinking in her moans, absorbing her shudders, draining her of will and memory and pain.

He was the air that would make her breathe again. But he was also the poison that would asphyxiate her if she did.

She tore herself away, stumbled against the wall at her back, pressed against its coolness. “So is this it? You…invested too much time and effort in…training me, and even though you despise and abhor me, you want your sex-marathon-on-demand nympho back?”

“No, Gabrielle, don’t…Don’t say anything like that.”

“You mean you
don’t
want to have sex with me? That wasn’t why you almost took me against the wall just now?”

“No, Gabrielle—yes, I desire you, now and always, but that isn’t why I’m here. I now know the truth, and…”

She cut him off. “So you deigned to talk to your father? Oh, wait, you think his word is as worthless as mine. So you must have done more investigations. And they…what? Cleared me? No, thanks. I’m not doing this again. I’m guilty of not telling you how it all started, when it wasn’t my secret. But you
accused me of
crimes.
You found such comfort in believing the worst without even trying to hear me out.”

He neared her as if approaching a wounded, terrified animal, his voice a hypnotic croon. “I was in shock, in agony, over finding out you’re the daughter of the woman I spent years hating without knowing if she even existed. I went mad thinking you knew all along and had been leading me on. But I didn’t need you to slap sense into me this time, Gabrielle. What we shared, what I feel for you, what I
know
you feel for me, made me overcome the pain and madness. I did no investigations. And I didn’t talk to my father.” Hesitation entered his beseeching eyes. “What would he have told me?”

His words swirled inside her brain, making no sense. She refused to let them. They’d be lethal if they did. She’d succumb to their influence. Sink. All the way this time. And next time he gutted her and tossed her out to drown, she wouldn’t resurface.

But among all the things she couldn’t hear, there was one thing she could. A question. About his father.

She owed him no answers. Not after he’d judged and executed her. But he wasn’t just the man she’d loved beyond self-preservation, would love against all reason, for the rest of her days. He wasn’t just the one being who held the power of destruction over her, who’d used it again and, she swore, for the last time. He was also the man who held the fate of a kingdom—and that of his father—in his hands. She knew her mother would have wanted her to do anything she could to defend the one man Clarisse LeFevre had lived and died loving. Gabrielle’s answer might exonerate King Benedetto in his all-powerful son’s eyes. Or at least ameliorate his guilt. Durante might not exact his revenge on his father to the full.

She told him everything she knew.

Durante listened to Gabrielle, his heart twisting in his chest. She seemed sentient but not alive, aware but unfeeling, held
together with the glue of automations and obligations, which was bound to come undone at any point. Even if it didn’t, and it stuck her together, fractures traversed her psyche and soul, fault lines that would splinter her again at the least pressure.

He’d done that to her. And he had to restore her, at any price. Starting with his own life.

He’d hoped that begging her forgiveness would garner him a hearing. Why had he hoped she’d grant him what he’d denied her?

He knew why. He’d counted on her being more forgiving than he was. But even her mercy had limits. He’d pushed her beyond them.

One hope remained. That something in what she’d said would give him insight into how to repair the devastation he’d wreaked.

He replayed every word, looking for clues. He got only blows, every one battering him with more shame at how he’d lashed out at the two people who’d put their pride and hearts on the line to save him from his bitter loneliness, to help him find contentment and joy, to learn what living truly meant at last. The one thing to redeem him was that his heart had already believed in her without proof, against all damning evidence.

It
had
all been his father’s orchestration, as he’d thought when he’d been in the throes of suspicion and pain-induced insanity. But not at all as he’d expected. His father did know him far better than he knew himself. He knew Gabrielle as deeply. He’d known it would take Gabrielle to save him, bring back his humanity, that it would take
him
to heal, cherish and worship her. So his father had sent her to him.

And though it had started out as a mission for her, their magic had taken over from their first glance, fulfilling his father’s prophecy.

But it had been the king’s fault again that she’d kept secrets. He’d made her pledge secrecy, fearing the violence of his son’s unreasonableness, the depth of his bitterness, things that would have made him blind himself to her true worth, costing him the
one woman who shared his soul. Even when it had seemed that nothing could tear them apart, his father had still withheld the truth, fearing exactly what Durante had done upon finding it out.

Another verdict was as glaring. He might never know the true causes of his mother’s decline and death, but whatever those diaries contained, something else must have caused her to write them. His father was no cold-blooded abuser. Thinking otherwise had poisoned him for five long years. But the heart that had led him to loving Gabrielle would never lie to him. His father, while guilty of many things, had never been guilty of hurting his mother.

He not only owed Gabrielle a lifetime of apologies, he owed his father, too.

“…but instead of exonerating your father,” Gabrielle was going on, “I must have only added manipulating us to his offenses, in your opinion. Or rather, manipulating you, because I’ve been in on it, with the worst possible agenda, of course. So why not get on with your revenge? End your father’s reign in humiliation, take the crown from him, take my company from me, throw me out on the street and leave me the hell alone.”

“That was my rage talking,” he insisted, urgency writhing in his chest. “I would never have carried out my threats.”

“Really? So cancelling the wedding, telling the world why—”

“I told no one anything. And far from taking your company away, I’m here to give you these.” He flicked open his briefcase, handed her a dossier. When she didn’t take it, he explained. “These papers ensure that neither I nor anyone else can take your company away, that it will always be stable no matter what happens to any market in the world. And that’s just the beginning. Make any demands. I’ll do anything for you.
Anything,
Gabrielle. My father knew me, and you, too well—he knew we were made for each other. He did what he had to do, to bring us together, a debt I can never repay.”

“So you won’t dethrone him?”

“I was raving mad with shock when I said that. The moment I came to my senses, there was no question in my mind about your innocence.”

“Sure. Until the next time something rouses your suspicions, and you turn on me and maul me to death.”

“That is never going to happen again.”

“I’ve heard that before, Durante. From Ed. Every time he abused me, he’d say it would never happen again.”

“I’m
nothing
like him. Don’t,
Dio,
please don’t…don’t put me in the same thought as him,
amore.
”

“You’re worse than him.” Her sob sliced into his brain, its agony, its import, insupportable. “I cared nothing for him. His abuse cut nowhere beyond the surface. Yours carved me to the marrow.”

Her agony flooded his chest, became molten lead coursing through his left arm like the onset of a heart attack. He wished it would truly damage him. But self-abuse was self-indulgent. He needed to be at his fittest to undo what he’d done.

He wrestled with paralysis, surged forward to embrace her. She struggled like a cornered animal. He was distressing her more.

He staggered back, rasped, “I followed in my father’s footsteps—this genetic compulsion we once spoke about—to the point that I suspected the worst of you, the keeper of my soul, and cast you away, as he’d done with your mother. But he let her stay away, compounded his mistake by marrying for the crown, and made a mess of so many lives. But I’m done being my father’s son. I’m walking my own path from now on and I’m repeating no one’s mistakes, starting with my own. Give me one last chance, Gabrielle. I’ll never ask for anything more. I’ll make amends, until the end of my days.”

Tears no longer flowed from her eyes. She was no longer shaking as if she’d unravel, no longer breathing as if her throat were swelling closed.

Dared he hope…?

“Words are cheap, Durante.” Her voice was steady, lifeless. “To you, everything is cheap. You can throw companies and fortunes at me, but the one thing I want is what you’ve failed twice to give me. The benefit of the doubt. Fair treatment. I once said, when you were as generous with superlatives, that ‘never’ has forever scope. I
should
have waited and seen.

“I thought at the beginning that I could handle it, if you were offering something simple and superficial, like no-strings sex. But you weren’t, and even though I told you I wasn’t in your league, I let you sweep me away, into all those powerful emotions and bottomless passions, let you seduce me into wanting—and expecting—too much, way too soon. I was right to be wary of your rash proposal, and again too weak to heed my wariness. I own my mistakes—whether it was falling into your arms then believing we could have forever, or abiding by a promise of secrecy, not only because I couldn’t break my word, but because I feared for the fool’s gold perfection of what I thought I had with you.