Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret / Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she was saying with more than a little ferocity. “There’s more joy in it than ought to be possible, or the species would have died out. But what I’m talking about is keeping a tiny human alive. What you’re talking about is your own hurt feelings because you chose to disappear into the ether and it turns out, there are consequences for that. One of them is the child you helped make.”

He felt pale with that anguish, mixed liberally with fury. “You dare to speak to me of consequences?”

“I’ve lived your consequences, Pascal,” Cecilia retorted. “An absolutely marvelous little boy has grown into a five-year-old as a consequence of your carelessness. And after trying more than enough times, I didn’t keep banging my head against brick walls trying to find a man who didn’t leave behind so much as a telephone number. I decided that I was going to focus my attention on raising my son, instead. And did.”

“Cecilia—”

“I never expected you to show your face here again,” she told him. “I don’t expect you to stay now. You’re acting as if knowing I was pregnant would have changed something, but I’ll let you in on a secret, Pascal. I know full well it wouldn’t have. Why don’t you spare us both the dramatics and just…go away again?”

Pascal really did stagger then. He had to reach out to keep himself upright, gripping the back of the nearest pew.

As if her certainty that he would abandon his own child no matter the circumstances was almost as grave a betrayal as the fact she’d kept this secret so long.

“I told you,” he said, too many memories flooding his brain then. Of the hours she’d spent at his bedside, talking as well as tending to him. All the things he’d told her in return, because his bed in that clinic had felt disconnected to the world. Why not tell a kind stranger every feeling that had ever moved in him? Why not share every story he had inside him? He’d done that and more. How could she imagine that the man who had done so would turn around and leave now? “I told you how I was raised. What it meant to me to be a bastard son to a cruel, unfeeling man… Have you forgotten?”

Her eyes seemed nearly purple then, with what he only hoped was distress. “I didn’t forget. But people say all kinds of things when they think their lives might end, then turn around and live very differently, when given the chance.”

“I told you,” Pascal growled. “And you decided to do this to me anyway. To my child. When you had to know it was the last thing I would ever have allowed.”

Whatever distress might have been lurking in her, it disappeared in a flush of temper as her chin tipped up again.

“I stopped caring about what you might or might not allow,” she said with a distinct calm that felt like yet another slap when he could barely keep himself together. “Right about the time it became clear to me that you weren’t coming back, and that I was really, truly going to have to have our baby all on my own. And then carry on raising him. I considered adoption, you know. Because my plan was to be a nun, not a mother.” Her tone was bitter then. “Never a mother.”

Something tickled at the back of his mind, about Cecilia’s stories about her own childhood, but he thrust it aside. Because she’d actually wanted to…

“You wanted to give up your child—my child?”

Once again Pascal couldn’t force his mind to process that. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. It was bad enough that he’d come here on a whim to discover that all this time, the woman who’d haunted him through his life in Rome had kept his child a secret from him. But that he could have come back here today, just like this, and never know? Never have the slightest notion what he’d lost?

That fissure inside him widened. And grew teeth.

“Yes, Pascal,” she said. Because she had teeth, too. And they seemed to sharpen by the second. “It was never my intention to have a child on my own. Why wouldn’t I consider adoption?”

Again Pascal ran a hand over his jaw, his scars. Reminding himself that he had survived the impossible before. Surely he would again.

One way or another.

“I suppose you would like me to thank you for choosing motherhood,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “I find I cannot quite get there. I want to see him.”

He wasn’t looking at her as he said that, and it took him a moment to realize she hadn’t responded. When he slid his gaze back to hers, she had a considering sort of look on her face. As if she was mulling over a decision as she looked at him.

For the first time it occurred to Pascal that she might very well bar him from seeing the child. His child.

How could he be outraged at being denied something he hadn’t known he had when he’d driven into this valley? How could he know himself so little?

“I’ll show you a photograph,” Cecilia replied, her violet eyes glittering with more of that same consideration. “I’m certainly not introducing you to him. He’s five. As far as he’s aware, he doesn’t have a father.”

Pascal blinked, but once more couldn’t really take that in. He felt drunk again, as reckless and out of control as he’d been when he’d driven that car over the side of a mountain. This was like living through that crash again and again. And more, he felt broken into a thousand pieces, the way he had then.

He reminded himself that he was the president and CEO of an international corporation that had made him a billionaire. He laughed off deals that would make other men sweat. He could surely handle one parochial woman and the rest of this…situation.

All he needed to do was stop letting his damned feelings dictate his reactions.

Something he’d thought he’d stamped out years ago. Six years ago, in fact, when he’d received the ultimate wake-up call, had remembered himself and had left.

Cut his own feelings about his father out of this and it was a fairly simple thing. She hadn’t been able to track him down. He hadn’t looked back. It wasn’t even a saga—it was depressingly common.

He cleared his throat. “So you…live here. With him. At the abbey?”

“We have our own cottage,” she said. Grudgingly, he thought.

And Pascal felt better now that he’d allowed a bit of reason back into the mix. More like himself and less like the broken man she’d known.

He looked at the bucket beside her. “If you do not live in the abbey, and you are not a nun or even a novitiate any longer, why on earth are you cleaning this church?”

“I clean,” she said. And when he stared back at her without comprehension, she lifted her pugilistic little chin again. The expression on her face was challenging, which he should probably stop finding so surprising. “That’s what I do. For a living.”

“You…clean. For a living. This is how you support yourself?”

“That’s what I said.”

This time he understood her completely. The words did not bloom into that same dull roar in his head. He felt like himself again, and that allowed him the comfort of the sort of temper he recognized. Not the volcanic, tectonic shift of before—but the sort of laser focus he usually saved for creatures like his father.

Fewer feelings. More fury.

He liked this version of himself much better.

“Are you truly this vindictive?” he asked her, his voice soft with menace and the power he’d fought for—and had no intention of ceding to a fallen nun, thank you. He shifted his position to shove his hands into his pockets and kept his gaze trained on her. “You say you read about me. You knew about the company and claim you called. So there can be no debate about the fact that you know perfectly well that I’m not a poor man. That no matter what else happened, I would never willingly consign my child to be raised in poverty.”

Color bloomed in her cheeks, and he had the sense it was the first honest response he’d seen from her. Maybe that was why he reveled in it, like a thirsty man faced with a mountain spring.

Surely there could be no other reason.

“Your child is not being raised in poverty,” she snapped. “He doesn’t take a private jet to get his shopping done, I grant you, but his life is full. He wants for nothing. And I’m sorry that you think cleaning is beneath you, but luckily, I don’t. I make a good living. I take care of myself and my son. Not everybody needs to be rich.”

“Not everyone can be rich, it is true. But you happen to be raising the son and heir of a man who is. Several times over.”

“Money only buys things, Pascal,” she said with the dismissiveness of someone who had never lived more or less by their wits in the worst parts of a major city. “It certainly doesn’t make a person happy. As anyone who looks at you can tell quite clearly.”

“How would you know?” he asked, his tone deadly.

She flushed again. “I make Dante perfectly happy. That’s what matters.”

“You live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but cows and nuns. What kind of life is this for a boy?”

“There was a time when you thought this valley was paradise,” she threw at him. “It hasn’t changed any. But if you have, there is no need for you to suffer the cows and the nuns a moment more. You can turn around and leave right now.”

“I don’t think you’re understanding me.” He sounded almost gentle, he noted, which was at odds with that cold fury inside him. He leaned into it, because it was better than that terrible fissure. “I am Pascal Furlani and we are discussing the sole heir to everything I have built. No son and heir of mine can grow up like this, so far away from everything that matters.”

She scowled. “Then it’s a lucky thing your name isn’t on his birth certificate, isn’t it? You don’t have to worry yourself about how he’s raised.”

Pascal couldn’t seem to do anything but stay frozen solid where he stood, staring at her as if, were he to focus, he could make this go away. He could turn her into the ghost she should have been, not…this. Not mother to another bastard child, but this one his. His.

The scandal when it was discovered—because these things were always discovered, as Pascal knew all too well himself—would brand him the worst kind of hypocrite, given he’d never made any secret of his feelings on his own father’s behavior. He’d made himself the asterisk forever attached to his father’s name. Now he would have his own, and he knew full well the tabloids would have a field day with him.

But the thought of scandal made a different sort of apprehension grip him.

“Did you tell the members of my board about this child?” he demanded.

“I didn’t want to tell you about this child,” she replied furiously, her scowl deepening. “So no, I didn’t share the news with two complete strangers marching around the village officiously, asking rude questions.”

“But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have seen you. Or have asked someone else. Or otherwise figured it out.”

“I didn’t much care what they did.” And now she sounded impatient, which was just one more insult to add to the pile. “Just so long as they left. Which I would also like you to do. Now.”

Pascal couldn’t let himself think directly about the child. His child. His son. It was too much. It was so heavy he was convinced it would flatten him—but thinking about his spiteful, grasping board members in possession of this secret he hadn’t known he was keeping was different. It was easier to think about what they would do with the information than it was to think about the information itself.

Or that the information was a little boy who didn’t know he had a father who would never, ever have abandoned him if he’d had the choice.

“This is a disaster,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.

But she heard him. Maybe he’d wanted her to hear him.

“Funnily enough, that’s what I thought you would say.” Her scowl smoothed out and her chin went up as if she was wrapping herself in armor. “As a matter of fact, all of this is happening precisely the way I imagined it would. So why don’t we fast-forward to the inevitable end without all of this carrying on that won’t get us anywhere?” Her violet eyes flashed as they held his gaze. “Just go. Leave here and return to your money and your life in Rome. No one has to know that you ever came here. Dante and I will muddle along as we always have and you can spend your time however it is you like. No harm, no foul.”

And she even waved her hand through the air with a languid indifference that made something in Pascal simply…snap.

One moment he was standing frozen and still in his fury, and the next he had moved toward her. He wrapped his hands around her soft, narrow shoulders, then held her there before him.

Cecilia made a slight startled sound. Her hands came up and she braced her fingers against his abdomen, though she didn’t push him away or try to pull back from him. It was as if she was holding her breath, waiting to see what he would do.

But all he did was lower his face so it was directly in hers.

“This is not going to go away,” he promised her, a thundering thing in his voice, though he kept it low. Even. “I am not going to go away. I have a son. A son. You have made me a father and taken it away from me, and I will never forgive you for either one of those things. But I know now. And nothing will be the same. Do you understand me?”

He expected her to order him to let go of her, which he would do, of course, because he wasn’t the animal she seemed to think he was. Even if it wasn’t exactly lost on him that even now, even with what he knew, his body was having a far more enthusiastic reaction to the close proximity with the woman who had haunted him all these years. Her shoulders fit perfectly in his palms, as ever.

And the last time he’d been this close to her, it had been a prelude to his mouth on hers. Then the hardest part of him deep inside her melting, clenching heat, making them both ache. Then shatter. Then do it all over again.

“That,” she said very distinctly, her violet eyes wide and fixed to his, “is absolutely never happening again.”

For the first time since he’d walked into this church, he saw the woman he’d left here six years ago. The one who had always known what he was thinking. The one who had so often been thinking the very same thing.

She certainly was now.

And she had kept this secret from him. She had made him into his worst nightmare. Pascal wanted to crush her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to tear apart this church and rip this whole valley apart with his hands. He wanted to rage hard enough to turn back time, so that he could prevent this tragedy from happening in the first place.

Or, something far more insidious whispered inside him, so you could stay this time. The way you wanted to back then.

And that thought was the biggest betrayal of them all.

Because staying here had never been an option, no matter how much he’d wanted it once. And no matter what price it turned out he’d have to pay for going.

Pascal stopped fighting that roar inside him. He surrendered to the yawning thing, rage and grief, fury and need.

He had never forgotten Cecilia Reginald. He had come back here to exorcise her, but now it seemed he would be twined with her forever in the son they’d made.

It was too much.

It was all too much.

So he hauled her up onto her toes and brought her even closer to him, then crushed his mouth to hers.

CHAPTER FOUR

HIS KISS WAS MUCH, much worse than she remembered.

It was hotter. Wilder.

Better, something in her cried.

But this time she knew how to kiss him back.

He had taught her. Six years ago he had taught her how to light the world on fire. How to burn so hot and so bright that she hadn’t much cared if he was turning her to ash in his wake—she’d wanted only to keep getting too close to the flames.

Cecilia would have sworn that she couldn’t remember any of it. A moment ago she’d have been certain that all those memories had been swept away in the trials and joys of motherhood. That it was all dim recollections of warmth and nothing more.

But it turned out, she remembered everything.

She remembered his taste, and the way he cupped the back of her head with one big, hard palm, guiding her where and how he liked. She remembered the wildfire that scared her and excited her in turn, roaring through her and lighting her up. Everywhere.

She remembered how to angle her head. How to move closer. How to press her body against his until she was all fire again. Fire and need, passion and desire.

Kissing him was like traveling back in time.

She remembered her own innocence. How she’d given it to him, and how carefully, how gently, he had taken it and made her sob with joy and wonder.

She remembered the first time he had kissed her, there in that whitewashed room where he’d spent his convalescence. How he’d pressed his lips to hers, smiling as he’d coaxed her. Taught her. Then tempted her beyond endurance.

She had always imagined, before then, that a kiss would take something from her. And over the past six years she’d told herself rather darkly that she’d been all too right about that. But the truth she’d forgotten—or she’d made herself forget—was that his kiss had made her feel…bigger. Better. Brighter and more powerful than she had ever been before. Like some kind of shooting star.

Here, now, was no different.

She could feel herself shooting wild across a dark night sky, lighting up the world with the force of her longing.

He kissed her, and she kissed him back as if she’d been waiting all this time for him to come back. As if she’d wanted this. And with every scrape of his tongue against hers, she felt that same light. That heat.

Cecilia did the only thing she could. She poured all her lost hope, all her misery and worry, anxiety and loneliness, into the way she kissed him back. She kissed him with all the pride she’d stored up inside her for the little boy he’d never known. The love and the odd moments of gratitude that Pascal had come into her life and left her the greatest gift, no matter the cost.

Everything he’d missed. Everything she’d wished for. She kissed him and she kissed him; she poured it all into him, and got passion in return.

Passion and intensity. Greed and delight.

His hands moved, tracing their way down her back as if he was reacquainting himself with her shape. Her strength.

She shifted, her palms moving down the front of his shirt to find him harder. More solid. And even hotter than she’d let herself recall. It wasn’t until she found her way to his belt buckle that she remembered where they were.

Not just in this valley, not far from the abbey that had been her childhood home and where she would never, now, be the nun she’d always imagined she would.

More than that, they were standing in the church where she’d learned how to pray.

She was defiling herself all over again.

Cecilia wrenched herself back, tearing her mouth from his and pushing against his wall of a chest with her hands. But he was so much bigger and tougher than he had been six years ago, and she only managed to create about a centimeter of space between them.

Still, it was enough for reality to charge in and horrify her.

“That will never happen again,” she managed to say.

She thought he would laugh, or say something arrogant and cutting. But all Pascal did was gaze down at her, an odd expression on his starkly beautiful face.

“I’m not so certain,” he said after a moment.

She pushed against him again, and this time he let her go. And she didn’t have it in her to explore the reasons why that made her heart clench. She felt the end of the pew behind her and gripped it. As if anchoring herself here could save her. As if she hadn’t blasphemed in every possible way.

Again.

When she knew better.

“Thank you for reminding me that the chemistry between us is dangerous and upsetting,” she said, and she made herself meet his gaze when it was the last thing she wanted to do. “It leads nowhere I want to go.”

“I had convinced myself I’d imagined it,” he said. And she might have taken offense at that if he hadn’t sounded so…disgruntled. “I told myself I was weak. Out of my head with pain and recovery and healing. That was the only explanation that made sense.”

He lifted his hand to his face, but this time, instead of running his fingers over his scars, he ran them over his mouth. Which reminded Cecilia that she could taste him on her tongue.

Damn him. And damn her for surrendering so easily once more.

Pascal was still studying her as if she’d turned into a creature he couldn’t name, right there before his eyes. “But it turns out you’re more potent than I gave you credit for.”

“I do not wish to be potent,” Cecilia managed to get out. “And I do not want any credit. What I want is for you to forget me. The way you already have, for years, before you came back here.”

That mouth of his twisted. “But that’s the trouble, cara. I did not forget.”

Cecilia hated this. Him. And most of all, herself.

Because she should have been better prepared for something like this. She’d been on edge when those other men had come and sniffed around the abbey asking questions about Pascal Furlani’s famous car accident, but she hadn’t really believed that Pascal himself would follow. She’d assumed that if he sent anyone else, it would be more emissaries of the officious variety. Attorneys, she’d supposed, to make her sign documents that would renounce any claim to him she might have had. She’d been ready for that. She prepared stinging speeches that she could deliver to his men, making it clear that she wanted nothing from him and never had and never would.

She hadn’t expected him.

And she certainly hadn’t expected that he would kiss her again.

Because it cut the knees straight out of her argument, not to mention all her prepared rebukes. It reminded her too well of the reasons she’d given up everything she knew for him.

The truth was, it had been years since she could even imagine how it was that she’d allowed a torn-up soldier to turn her from her chosen path so easily. Sometimes she would sit up at night, when Dante was sound asleep and looked angelic, instead of the whirl of holy terror and inexhaustible energy he could be when he was awake. She would gaze at him, allowing herself to feel that flood of maternal love—but still completely unable to understand how it all happened.

How had a person as quiet and contained as she was…do what she did?

Her life had been divided into before Pascal and after him, and the further she got away from those stolen months, the less he seemed real in her memories. There were a thousand stories about the fecklessness of youth, after all. Everyone knew that young girls were easy pickings, and as embarrassing as it might have been for Cecilia to think of herself in that way, that was the story she’d accepted about herself. That was the story she told, when it was necessary to tell it at all, here in a small valley filled with people who had known her since the day she’d arrived here and could tell her story for her. And often did.

It was a hard shock to discover that all she’d done was mute the man.

Because the reality of Pascal was in full, living color. And his kiss was electrifying.

And Cecilia understood that she’d been lying to herself for a long, long time.

She found she didn’t know quite how to process any of that.

“This is all irrelevant,” she said now. She moved away from him, aware that her body no longer felt like her own. That irritated her almost more than the rest, because it had taken her so long to get it back. There had been Pascal, then Dante, and years before she’d become simply Cecilia again. “Feel free to send your lawyers. Do your worst. I can’t say I care.”