The Marriage He Must Keep

Both she and Sorcha slumped in relief and Octavia finally returned to her room—where a bouquet the size of Sicily had been delivered with a card that read, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, A.”

And yet he was still with Primo.

That bitter reality kept her awake despite her exhaustion. We have a baby, she mentally shouted. Don’t you care? She had texted the blood test results, had seen the notification that her message had been read, but all she heard back was radio silence.

She might as well be Sorcha, raising her baby alone.

The thought sliced a kind of agony through her, but she couldn’t keep doing this, either: waiting for Prince Sandro to arrive on his steed to make her feel worthy.

What she needed was to work on her self-esteem. It had never been particularly strong. Her childhood had been one of strict rules and sighs of tested tolerance, impelling her to press herself hard into the mold her parents wanted just to earn a shred of approval.

She might have kicked up at boarding school, but that had been as much about trying to fit in as proving to her parents she wasn’t under their thumb. By nature she was the bookish sort, so hanging with the party crowd, pretending she was into boys and fashion and drinking hadn’t felt right in the first place, but she’d loved the sense of freedom and independence in making risky decisions: sneaking out of her room at night, voicing strong opinions without caring what anyone thought of them.

Then someone had slipped her something and she would have been one more assault statistic, no doubt, if the party she was at hadn’t been discovered by the faculty as she was passing out. Having her stomach pumped and being suspended for a few weeks had almost been a relief at that point, becoming an excuse to eschew the rowdy crowd and their superficial pursuits if she wanted to return to school.

She had toed the line after that, scared of that spark of insurgence inside her, learning to get by with her own company and buckling to her father’s dictates because it felt safer than trusting her wild side. Eventually she’d attached loosely to a group of girls from Naples because they had geography in common, but she didn’t have a history of fancy vacations or brushes with celebrity to turn into engaging stories. She definitely didn’t have shocking sexual exploits to share.

The identity of her husband had been the first thing to cause ripples of reaction—mostly admiration—among her shallow social pool. To this day, Octavia didn’t understand why Alessandro had chosen her. She was supposed to have married Primo.

She thought back to that gala when she’d met the two men, searching for clues to what he’d seen in her when she’d been such a generic example of an heiress.

“That’s the man your father invited,” her mother had said, pointing out Primo. “The one he thinks might accept you. He would love a connection like the Ferrante family.”

“The one on the right?” Octavia had asked, intimidated and alarmed as she glanced toward the two men, both thirtyish. Primo’s boyish good looks hadn’t even registered beside the compelling Alessandro’s carved features and arrogant sweep of his stern gaze around the room.

“The left,” her mother had said. “The taller one is his cousin, the head of the family. He controls Ferrante Imprese Internazionali. He doesn’t look very approving, does he? I wonder if that’s why he’s here, to decide if we measure up.”

He didn’t look approving at all, Octavia had silently agreed, intimidated by his air of censure. She told herself she was relieved her father wasn’t aiming so high as to think Alessandro Ferrante would be interested. The second-in-command, Primo, would be enough of a coup. He looked arrogant in a different way. Smug almost.

“Make a good impression,” her mother had ordered.

Blowing out a surreptitious breath, Octavia had tried to imagine how one made a positive impression on a potential husband. It was the first time she was being forced to try, but she’d said she would marry the man they chose, so try she would.

Her father had introduced her to the men a few minutes later. Primo had looked her up and down like a buyer at an auction considering a broodmare. Alessandro waited for her gaze to come up to his and locked the contact into something unbreakable.

His air of dissatisfaction was stronger up close. The way he dourly took in every detail from her upswept hair, to the shade of her lipstick, to the scoop of her neckline across her breasts, suggested he was searching for flaws.

Her insides quivered under his inspection while she found herself holding her breath, waiting for his verdict.

“We should dance,” Primo had said in a hard voice, his words coming from off to the right. His hand had come out in her periphery, but she’d been unable to drag her gaze from the frosted moss of Alessandro’s irises.