The Accidental Accardi Heir, page 10
“My grandfather was not a clown. He was not merry. He was a great man, revered by all who knew him. And he is responsible for taking Accardi Industries out of the bucolic hills of Tuscany and into the global market.”
“She suspected that he was desperately in love with her,” Victoria continued, as if sharing secrets with a close friend. “But he promised her that wouldn’t matter. The problem is that such promises are made to be broken, aren’t they? He resented that she could not love him. She suspected that he built up the business not only to impress her, but to prove to her that she was a hundred times a fool to have given her heart to some low-class carpenter who could never provide for her as he did.” She smiled at her husband. “Then they were trapped, both of them desperately and hopelessly in love with someone they could not have. As far as I can tell from the diaries they both left behind, neither one of them was ever untrue. But your grandmother turned to drink. Your grandfather became embittered. They were held up as great paragons of virtue to all who knew them, but the truth is that they were excruciatingly unhappy.”
Ago looked as if he wanted to bolt up from his seat, though he did not. She watched, telling herself she felt nothing as that muscle in his jaw worked. Telling herself she was happy that she had brought these things to his attention, dropping them like bombs over dinner.
She had intended to tell him all this earlier today, after all. Though she would not have presented the facts quite so baldly, she could admit.
Still, she was glad she had. He needed to know. She assured herself that was not her bravado talking, despite the flush she could feel in her cheeks that suggested otherwise.
“Do you take some pleasure in digging up these graves?” Ago looked at her as if she had done something to him. As if the facts she had recited here were an assault. Victoria wanted to explain herself. She felt the urge race through her—but she bit her tongue. “And have done so, with such obvious relish, do you truly imagine that I would wish to hear such unsavory details? I remember my grandparents, Victoria. They might not have loved each other, but then, that was not the purpose of their marriage. The purpose was doing their duty, and they did their jobs. They did them well.”
“What I’m trying to suggest to you, husband, is that you can choose how you do this duty of yours, to which you have dedicated the whole of your life. Your great-grandparents were of a like mind. And happy for it. Your grandparents were miserable. Nothing you have ever told me, or I have heard, about your parents suggests that they were anything but—”
“Devoted,” Ago bit out, his dark eyes a blaze of warning.
And the truth was, she was just as happy not to touch on the issue of his parents.
“This is what it suggests to me,” she said instead, telling herself that she disliked him as she set her gaze to his, though the lick of flame that worked through her whispered that she was a liar. “That even you, such a lifelong devoted servant to the Accardi legacy, can choose the path that suits you. If you wish. That’s all.” Victoria shrugged, but perhaps a bit too elaborately, because his eyes narrowed. “Because they were all just people. Not giants or celestial beings who you feel so compelled to live up to. Just regular people. Nothing more, nothing less. Some of them were virtuous, others not. I suspect the real truth is that they were all bits of both. As are we all.”
He did not move. He did not seem to so much as breathe, but then, Victoria found she could not draw in any air herself. It was as if he caged her with his arms, locking her down into her seat. When in reality he was still seated at the head of the table, his eyes blazing, not a finger on her. No cage at all.
Save that of her own making.
“Is this something you would like to confess?” he asked, his voice cold. “Have these pleasures we have discovered together so enchanted you that you have decided you must experiment with them? To traipse about the continent, taking lovers? Because I must warn you, Victoria. It doesn’t matter what you’ve read. I am not a man who shares what is his. Ever.”
And deep inside her, something seemed to sing to her at that. Even though there was a wild, reckless part of her that wanted to rush to her feet and announce that she intended to follow in his great-grandparents’ footsteps and cut a swathe through the male population. Don’t worry, she could tell him, with great sophistication and a hint of boredom, as she imagined the sort of women who wanted such lives always spoke. I’ll be certain to keep you informed of my each and every move. In detail.
But she knew she only wished to say such things to him to see if she could poke him into displaying that emotion that she knew—she hoped—lurked just beneath his skin. Locked away long ago by this idea of his that every breath he took had to be dutiful, or he didn’t deserve to take it.
This isn’t supposed to be about him at all, something in her argued. This is supposed to be about you, claiming some measure of revenge here. Making him regret his manipulations however you can.
Either way, Victoria wanted to push him. She wanted to make him fall apart, the way she had, by any means necessary. But instead, she only smiled, and shook her head.
“Of course not,” she said, though she hadn’t given a great deal of thought to indiscriminate sex. Maybe it was because she’d fallen pregnant after having sex exactly once. It seemed to have put a damper on any notion that she ought to go freewheeling about, notching up bedposts. “I only thought that as we will soon have our own son to raise, we might concentrate less on duty, as it can be interpreted in so many ways. And more on being a good man. A decent human. A person who would never lie or deceive another. Just a thought.”
But he did not seem to follow her where she was going, straight back to himself and their marriage.
“You say duty like this a bad thing,” Ago replied in a low, taut voice, his gaze so dark it hurt to look at him directly. Though Victoria did it anyway. “While I have always considered it a guiding light. And if there is any gift I could give my son, it would be that. Because it would always lead him home.”
And later, in their bed, she could feel the intensity come off of Ago in waves. She could feel the emotion in him—
But he never broke.
He gave in to his passion, eventually, but no matter how she tried to do to him what he did to her, to make him beg her as he fell apart in her hands, he never let her.
And so she curled up on her side and pretended to be asleep, his heavy arm slung over her body, his hand on the bump where their son slept. While all the while, inside, she told herself that she could deal with her feelings much better than he could, and so she would.
She could start by remembering that he had set out to control her by this deception, this pretense that he was as besotted with her as she was with him.
He had led her to believe that what burned between them meant something.
But the only fire in him was for his bloody name.
Victoria needed to remember that. She needed to know it in her bones. So she could work on leaving him, once and for all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AGO DID NOT have particularly fond recollections of Christmas. Like most things in his family, there were usually command performance appearances, duties to acquit and responsibilities to meet.
The traditional meatless dinner on Christmas Eve, a pageant of seafood that his family had always made longer and more trying by filling the table with local dignitaries and the odd overawed peasant—the better to extol the virtues of the restrained and elegant Tuscan character while feasting. Christmas Day had meant the local church, endless masses, and then stilted formal meals that had been tedious and awkward until he’d come of age and could retreat into the good whiskey like everyone else.
But that wasn’t the end of it, for the 26th was il giorno di Santo Stefano, when his family would ostentatiously parade from one nativity scene in a local church to the next, giving donations to all, then hitting up the hospitals for more opportunities to display their benevolence. Only to return to the villa for yet another too-long meal, which usually devolved into recriminations and histrionics that everyone pretended not to remember for the rest of the Christmas season, which in Italy stretched on until the Epiphany in January. There would be visits from La Befana, the strega from folklore who delivered stockings filled with sweets in the night, and yet another family meal during the day—a national holiday—during which his mother and grandmother would murmur things like L’Epifania, tutte le feste porta via to each other and into their wine, as if the Epiphany not only took the holidays away for the year but all of their hope and happiness too.
Buon Natale, one and all.
But despite his aversion to the spectacle, Ago had made an effort this year. He had told himself it was all part and parcel of giving Victoria what she wanted, and thus to continue lulling her into a false sense of security. Because it was clear to him that Victoria, having lost her mother at a young age, was certain to throw herself full tilt into the mothering of their child.
He knew this by the way she crooned to her bump when she thought she was alone. The way she talked to their child on their walks, pointing out items of interest as if the baby inside her could see what she saw.
No matter how much help she might have on hand, as befit the mother of his heir, he was certain that she would insist on being as hands-on as possible. Unlike his grandmother, who been far more concerned with appearances and what she thought was owed to the community as the reigning Accardi matriarch. Or his mother, who had been distant and medicated and under constant supervision on the few occasions per year she actually interacted with her sons.
Your mother had a responsibility to produce the two of you, his father had said whenever Ago or Tiziano dared complain. Whatever you may think of her, she did her duty. You can do her the simple courtesy of appreciating what she did without forever expecting more. Can you not?
Ago had done exactly that. He had expected nothing from his mother after the age of nine or so, up until her death when he was fourteen. And by the time his father had died when he was twenty-one, he’d stopped expecting anything from that quarter too. And in the meantime, he’d learned a great many valuable lessons about the ways it was possible to arrange events to suit himself without seeming to do so.
It was only one of the ways he was good at his job.
With Victoria, it had seemed the easiest thing imaginable to play the besotted newlywed. It had not been difficult to do his best to keep her lost in a haze of sensual bliss until the child arrived. After all, there were only a few months left. Why not make sure this marriage he hadn’t wanted ran as smoothly as possible, so that his son and heir could have a lovely and joyful start?
He wasn’t sure that he’d enjoyed anything like that upon his arrival into this family, if he parsed the stories he’d been told about his childhood.
Not that Ago liked to do much parsing.
Besides, it was easy enough to run his office from the villa. His grandfather had built this wing for precisely that purpose. His father had used it more often than not, particularly during the years Ago’s mother was the most unwell. Ago’s own staff were well used to him going mobile, since he routinely traveled to the various Accardi Industries offices around the world. He’d even taken Victoria with him on some of those more recent jaunts, though he had not paraded her about as his wife.
He had seen to it that the fact that they had married was mentioned nowhere. He couldn’t control whispers, but he could do his best to sink stories before whispers became questions he might need to answer for his stockholders.
Because what he was doing—what all of this was, as he reminded himself daily—was sticking to his plan.
Even if the trappings were a bit different than he might have originally intended.
The idea of using the Christmas season to help keep her docile had occurred to him late. He had walked with her one morning here, through the cold mists that snaked over the hills and gathered in the valleys. And he had become so accomplished at playing his part that he found himself taking her hand without even thinking that he ought to do it. Rubbing his thumb over the back of hers, he’d swung their arms slightly as they moved together at a pace that seemed to come to them both naturally.
If it was real, he might have thought they were uniquely suited to each other.
It is so beautiful here, Victoria had said, her clear blue eyes fixed off into the distance. It will be lovely to have our first Christmas here.
What do you normally do for Christmas? he had asked in some astonishment, for it had not occurred to him until that moment that Christmas was something she would expect to celebrate. Or even what it might mean to her, if it meant anything at all.
When, really, he should have done. As far as he had ever been able to tell, the moment it began to get dark in the afternoons in England the whole country went Christmas mad. By early December, it was nearly impossible to find an Englishman who was capable of conducting a serious business meeting, too busy were they all with their holiday merrymaking and their ugly sweaters and their fancy dress parties.
The Italian preference for a Christmas season that ran for roughly a month, from the 8th of December through to the Epiphany, seemed very nearly rushed in comparison.
My father was not one to celebrate the holiday, Victoria had told him. By his reckoning, the gifts he gives all year round, for which I ought to be more grateful, are more than enough. Still, I take pleasure in all the decorations. I like all those lights, sparkling so happily even though the nights are long.
Ago had smiled down at her she gazed up at him. How am I to know how to give you the Christmas you desire if you don’t tell me?
She had laughed at that, and though he’d only said that because it seemed like the right thing to say, he had suddenly been determined that he would, by God, deliver her the perfect Christmas.
He’d told himself it was simply another way to sweeten the pot.
I don’t actually want anything particularly special, she’d said, still laughing, the sound somehow making the mist all around them feel bright. Evergreens and candles. Christmas carols. Something festive and happy and with no talk of gratitude owed, that’s all.
Ago had set his staff to the task of researching the quintessential British Christmas and then making it happen, right here in the villa. Both the things she already knew of and the things he’d kept in reserve.
He had thought that they’d nailed it. Victoria had seemed delighted at first. Her lovely face had gone soft when she’d caught sight of the Christmas trees that shed their needles in every room. Her eyes had glowed when she’d seen the fairy lights strewn on the branches of everything that stood through the winter outside, from trellises to trees.
But over the past few days he had the sense that he was missing something, somehow. And he was not used to missing things. He was Ago Accardi. He made millions without even thinking about it, all thanks to his discernment.
Yet Victoria grew more opaque by the day.
He’d tried to put his finger on what could have happened, but it had proved impossible. There had been that night when she’d laid out all those things he did not wish to know about his great-grandparents and his grandparents, but he hadn’t argued about it any further. Mostly because what she’d said made a great many parts of his childhood suddenly make a lot more sense. Perhaps more sense than he might have wished.
And he didn’t think she’d intended to wound him with her discoveries, because she’d come to him with all of her typical generosity and greed in bed that night. And every night thereafter.
Ago knew all kinds of women who could hold hatred in their hearts and still enjoy the marital bed. Apparently, some of his forebears were among them. But he could not believe that Victoria was that jaded.
Not yet.
And still, he found her more difficult to read by the day. Maybe because of that, he found himself returning to the things she’d said over and over. He’d even found those diaries himself, when he’d never had the slightest inclination to delve into what his family members, all long dead, had got up to behind closed doors.
But if what Victoria had said was true—and he discovered, sadly, that it was not only true, but that his great-grandmother had a flair for the descriptive—it meant that everything his grandfather and father had beaten into him since he was small was...
Not quite right. Not right and more, not even a fair representation of their own lives.
Particularly when he considered his own parents and what he’d observed of their relationship—yet had decided was none of his concern.
It was possible his father had encouraged him to think it none of his concern, now he considered it.
But he did not wish to dwell on any of that. No matter how many times it seemed to appear in his head despite his wishes.
Ago woke Christmas morning feeling...unlike himself.
He reached out for Victoria, but found her side of the bed cold. He sat up, adrenaline spiking inside him, but saw that she had only taken herself over to the seating area before the fireplace. She sat in the chair she favored with her legs drawn up, wrapped in several throws, with an expression on her face that he could not recognize as she gazed into the dancing flames.
And he could not have said why it was that he found himself rubbing his hand over his chest, as if he could rub away the sense of disquiet that moved in him.
“Is this the Christmas spirit of which I’ve heard so much?” he asked into the quiet hush of the room.
Victoria turned her head to look at him, smiling widely. Guilelessly, he thought. Ago told himself he must have been imagining that wistful look. It must have been something else he didn’t quite recognize, that only reminded him of despair.
