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

“Lawyers?” He sounded mystified, though she didn’t look back at him to see. “What do my lawyers have to do with anything?”

“Rich men are renowned for going to great lengths to make sure they don’t have to give away any of their money, for any reason. Call it what you like. I’m not going to fight you.”

“I’m not following you.” And his voice changed as he said that. Less the man as surprised as she was at the way that kiss had exploded between them and more…dangerous. It sent a shiver down her spine. Because suddenly, she had no trouble imagining him as a leader of men. A captain of his industry in every regard. “Was I planning to give away my money in some capacity?”

“I’m sure you’ll have a battalion of documents for me to sign. So you don’t have to claim Dante. And so I will never make any kind of claim on you. Whatever. What I’m trying to say is that I expect it.”

“Cecilia.” Her name was like an oath. “There is no circumstance under which I would knowingly renounce my claim to my own child. Understand this now.”

She couldn’t help but look back at him then, though she instantly wished she hadn’t. There was an intensity in Pascal’s black-gold gaze that made her clench her teeth tight to hold back the shudder that threatened to take her over.

But all that did was send all that sensation spiraling down through her body until it lodged low in her belly.

“You say that now.” She told herself he couldn’t see her reaction to him. That all she had to do was pretend she wasn’t having one. “I think it’s likely the shock. Once it wears off you’ll change your tune. You’ll want nothing more than to get back to your preferred life.”

“This is what you think of me?” His voice was quiet, but she didn’t mistake it for weakness. Not when it seemed to fill the small church, swelling up from the stones at her feet. “You concealed my own child from me for all these years. Now you imagine that having learned of him at last, I will abandon him all over again. This from a woman who spent months sitting at my bedside. Talking to me. Getting to know me in some small way, I would have thought.”

That pricked at her. “The man I thought I knew would never have left the way you did, in the dark of night. With no word.”

Pascal didn’t move toward her, so there was no reason she should have felt as if he loomed over her, trapping her, when she’d put several pews between them.

“Remind me, whose hurt feelings are at play here?” he asked in that same quiet way that hummed in her, intense and demanding. “Mine, because of the consequences of my actions? Or yours, because you feel slighted by a choice that might have had to do with you, but you must have known full well had nothing to do with the child.”

“It doesn’t matter whose feelings are hurt,” she fired back, stung. And something like terrified that he’d hit on something she hadn’t even known was inside her. Was she truly so petty? It made her stomach hurt that she couldn’t immediately answer in the negative. “What matters is that I don’t intend to allow my child to play victim to your periodic sentimentality.”

He let out a harsh sound. “I have no idea what that means.”

“You can’t possibly want him,” Cecilia said, exasperated.

She had the sense of him growing bigger again. Sharper, this time. Like a loaded weapon, pointed straight at her.

“You do not have the slightest idea what it is I want,” he said in that same deadly tone. “How can you, when I hardly know myself? You have known about this child’s existence for the past six years. I have known about it for thirty minutes. Pray, do not tell me what it is I want when I am still reacting to the news that this child exists.”

“I don’t want Dante to have to pay for it while you sort through your emotions.”

“Cecilia. You do not get to decide what and how I feel about any of this. And you certainly will not dictate what I do.”

She didn’t mistake that for anything but the threat it was.

“This isn’t one of your boardrooms, Pascal,” she threw at him. “He’s my child. You don’t get to rip open his life unless I say you can, and I say you absolutely can’t.”

Pascal laughed. But it was not a sound of amusement.

Cecilia felt it like a kick to the gut.

“You should never have kept my son from me all this time, but you did,” he told her, his voice as dark as his gaze, and that thunderous expression he wore. “We all get to do what we can get away with, don’t we? And now that I know about him, there is nothing that will keep me from him. And you should know that there is very little I can’t get away with, cara.”

“Stop threatening me!” she snapped at him.

He laughed again, and it was not exactly soothing. “I have yet to begin threatening you.”

She panicked. There was no other way to put it. She wasn’t sure she could feel the top of her head; her lips still throbbed, she could taste him and he showed no sign whatsoever of slowing down.

“Who’s to say he even is your child?” she heard herself ask as if the stained-glass saints could answer for her. Or help her out of this situation. “Your name is nowhere on his birth certificate. He might as well have been delivered by fairies for all you have to do with it.”

Pascal looked wholly unperturbed. “Then you really will meet my lawyers, when they arrive here en masse to demand and perform a DNA test. Do you really want to force me to force this issue? Because I will. Happily.”

What Cecilia wanted to do was scream at him. Rail against him until she satisfied all those hurt feelings inside her that he’d pointed out and that she couldn’t pretend weren’t there any longer. Until she made him pay, somehow, for all these years and all her loneliness and all she’d lost—

But that was about her. And this needed to be about Dante.

“Listen to me,” she said, and she didn’t care if he could hear all that emotion in her voice. She wanted him to hear it. She wanted him to understand this, if nothing else. “Dante is a happy, healthy little boy. But this is his whole life. This valley. Me, his mother and only parent. He has yet to so much as question me about whether or not he has a father.”

“Do you truly expect that to last? You cannot be so naive.”

The fact that she had, on some level, expected it to be a non-issue because she wanted it that way struck her as unbearably foolish then. Something more sinister than simply naive. It was one more ugly part of herself she would have to pull out and look at closely—but not now. Not where he could witness all the ways he’d knocked her off her foundations today.

“You barreling into his life and claiming him as your child when that is meaningless to him can only hurt him,” she made herself say in as steady a voice as she could manage, under the circumstances. “It will confuse him terribly and I don’t want that. And if you’re serious about wanting to take your place as some kind of father to him, you shouldn’t want it, either.”

And for a moment the church was quiet. Pascal kept his dark gaze on her, stern and accusatory, but he didn’t speak. Cecilia watched a muscle in his lean cheek flex as if he was biting back his own strong emotions.

The light changed outside, sending the colors from the windows dancing over him, and something shuddered through her, too much like foreboding. She knew, like some kind of terrible premonition, that he meant what he said. That he wanted to be a part of his son’s life after all. That she had kept a child from a father who would have wanted him, not the careless, reckless liar she’d thought he was.

And that was a possibility she had never prepared herself for.

It made her feel sick.

“Whatever you do,” she said, though it felt like a kind of surrender, “I beg you, do not toy with my son’s emotions for the sake of your own ego. Please, Pascal.”

But when the tension between them roared into a higher gear, she understood that somehow, her plea had made it all worse.

“I can understand that you’re not expecting me,” he bit out with a furious, exacting note in his voice that sounded to her like pure condemnation. “And I can even understand that you perhaps require some time to prepare him for this. But my patience is finite, Cecilia. And I am not leaving this valley until I not only meet my son, but also claim him—formally—as my own. I’m prepared to stay as long as necessary to make that happen.”

Too many things whirled around in her head at once then. Too many questions—and too much fear. What would happen if he claimed Dante, formally or otherwise? Would they turn into one more modern version of unconnected parents, forever shipping him off from one place to the other? Would Dante grow up without a sense of his own real home—which had always been one of the great comforts of Cecilia’s own life? How would she survive a life that included huge swathes of time without her own son?

She wanted no part of any of that. But she gulped down the questions that threatened to bubble over from inside her, because she was terribly afraid they would come out as tears. And that was the final, ultimate humiliation. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—allow it. It would break her.

And Cecilia refused to let him break her. Not this time. Not again.

“I hope you enjoy camping alfresco, then,” she said instead, heading toward the door. “The pensione is closed this time of year. And you’re certainly not welcome to stay with me.”

She shot a look over her shoulder at him when she reached the door, because she was so damnably weak, and something caught at her. Pascal stood where she’d left him, so solitary, and yet so sure. As if he were a pillar that held up the world, or at least this church, and could stand like that forever.

He will, something in her whispered, making goose bumps break out all over her skin. You will never be rid of him again.

“Alternatively, you can always throw yourself on the mercy of the nuns,” she threw at him, hoping her desperation didn’t show on her face. Yet somehow sure that it did. “I’m sure they remember you all too well. But no worries. They took vows. If you ask them for sanctuary, I believe they’re duty bound to take you in.”

With that, Cecilia threw open the door to the vestry and escaped from her past. But she knew, even as she slammed the heavy door behind her and collapsed against it, that it was only temporary.

And there was no one to help her or save her now as it tightened around her throat and pulled tight, like a noose.

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