freely?
Pia certainly felt at liberty to stare more openly. From behind the screen of her mask, she watched a couple debate a bid for a certain item. The woman protested it was too extravagant while the man insisted he loved her and wanted her to have it.
Pia was fascinated by interactions like that. They reminded her of the tenderness and indulgence that existed between her older brothers and their wives. They had both started their marriages in scandal, but had turned them into something meaningful, making her yearn for something like it for herself—as she repaired the family name by way of a low-drama, civilized marriage that was more a contracted merger with a dynasty of equal rank and prestige.
She bit back a sigh. Taking up the mantle of duty wasn’t a sacrifice, she assured herself. It was a sensible course of action that benefited everyone, including herself. Her few attempts at dating had been failures, something the perfectionist in her loathed. Love and passion were foreign concepts. She wouldn’t recognize either if she tripped over them.
She turned from spying on the couple and ran straight into a man setting down a pencil.
Physically the impact was light. With wistfulness blanketing her, however, the collision felt monumental. Life altering.
His opera cloak opened like dark wings that threatened to engulf her as his hands came up to grasp her upper arms and steady her.
Their masks had caused this, her confused mind quickly deduced. They interfered with peripheral vision. She wasn’t clumsy or blind and doubted he was, either. He was too vital and controlled.
She recognized those traits in him instinctively, even though she wasn’t usually sensitive to such things. Or sensual either, but she found herself taking in nonvisual elements even more swiftly than the sight of him. The heat of his body radiated around her. The strength in his hands was both gentle and firm. The scent of fresh air and orange blossoms clung to his clothing as though he’d arrived from a long walk through the grove, not from the stale air of a car.
Who was he?
His black tricorn hat had simple white trim. She glanced down to his black-on-black brocade vest over a black shirt, his snug black pants tucked into tall black boots.
A pirate, she thought, and looked back to his porcelain mask, white, blank and angular. It cast a shadow onto his stubbled jaw, his beard as black as the short hair beneath his hat.
She couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, but as he looked straight into hers, her pulse shot up with the race of a prey animal. She held that inscrutable stare, arms in his talon-like grip, skin too tight to contain the soar of emotion that rose in her.
Most people skipped past her in favor of more interesting folk, which she preferred. Sustained eye contact was never comfortable, but her mask gave her the confidence to stare back. To stare and stare while her whole body tingled in the most startling and intriguing way.
Sexual attraction? He possessed the attributes that typically drew female interest—height and broad shoulders, a firm physique and a strong jaw. She was stunned to learn she was human enough to react to those signals. In fact, as the seconds ticked by, the fluttering within her grew unbearable.
“Excuse me.” Someone spoke behind her, jolting her from her spell.
A woman wanted to place a bid on Poppy’s framed, black-and-white photo.
The black satin lining of the man’s cloak disappeared as he dropped his hands from her arms. The noise around them rushed back, breaking her ears.
Pia moved out of the way. When she looked back, the man was leaving the tent.
Still trying to catch her breath, she moved to the bidding sheet where he’d left his pencil. She knew all the names on the list and none of those men had ever provoked a reaction like that in her.
At the bottom, in a bold scratch, was a promise to quadruple the final bid. It was signed Anonymous.
“How does this work?” Pia pointed to it as her mother finished speaking to someone and caught up to her. Pia’s hand was trembling and she quickly tucked it into the folds of her skirt.
“It happens occasionally,” her mother dismissed. “When a man wants to purchase something to surprise his wife.”
Or didn’t want his wife to know at all, Pia surmised. She wasn’t a cynic by nature, but nor was she naive about the unsavory side of arranged marriages.
“He’ll leave his details with the auctioneer,” her mother continued. “It’s a risky move that becomes expensive. Other guests will drive up the bid to punish him for securing the item for himself.”
“The price one pays, I suppose.” Pia’s witticism was lost on La Reina.
“This is one of the paintings from the attic,” La Reina said. “A modest artist. Deceased, which always helps with value, but not the sort of investment I would expect to inspire such a tactic.”
Pia studied the portrait. The young woman’s expression was somber. Light fell on the side of her round features, highlighting her youth and vulnerability.
“Do you know who she is?” Pia picked up the card.
“Hanging pictures of family is sentimental.” Her mother plucked the card from her hand and set it back on its small easel. “Displaying strangers in your home is gauche.”
“The final bid is sewn up,” Pia pointed out. “I was merely curious.”
“We have other priorities.”
A husband. Right. Pia bit back a whimper.
Angelo Navarro nursed a drink as he clocked the rounds of the security detail, picking his moment for the second half of his mission.
He could have sent an agent to bid on the portrait, but along with not trusting anyone else with the task—loose lips and all that—the opportunity to slip onto the estate undetected had been far too tempting.
He hadn’t expected such a bombardment of emotions as a result of visiting his birthplace, though. Anger and contempt gripped him; fury and injustice and a thirst for vengeance that burned arid and unquenchable in the pit of his belly.
These people prancing like circus clowns, making grand gestures with extravagant bids to benefit victims of violence, were the same ones who had ignored a young woman’s agonizing situation. They hadn’t interfered when her child had been taken from her and had continued to revere her persecutors.
Angelo felt no compunction whatsoever at infiltrating this private fund-raiser with the intention of retrieving what his mother had stolen. Or been given. He’d never been clear on how she had obtained the jewelry or exactly which pieces had gone missing. That part didn’t matter. He would happily have gone to his grave with the knowledge that she’d fought back in her own way.
However, when this chance to add a fresh blow had arisen, he hadn’t been able to resist it.
Did it make him as soulless as his father that he was willing to commit a criminal act to continue her retaliation? So he could
