About the Authors

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

Canadian DANI COLLINS knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Mills & Boon novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.

Also by Caitlin Crews

Bride by Royal Decree

Undone by the Billionaire Duke

A Baby to Bind His Bride

Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring

My Bought Virgin Wife

Bound to the Desert King collection

Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child

Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries

The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

Stolen Brides collection

The Bride’s Baby of Shame

The Combe Family Scandals miniseries

The Italian’s Twin Consequences

Untamed Billionaire’s Innocent Bride

His Two Royal Secrets

Also by Dani Collins

The Secret Beneath the Veil

Xenakis’s Convenient Bride

Consequence of His Revenge

Claiming His Christmas Wife

Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband

The Maid’s Spanish Secret

Bound to the Desert King collection

Sheikh’s Princess of Convenience

Innocents for Billionaires miniseries

A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire

Innocent’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Sauveterre Siblings miniseries

Pursued by the Desert Prince

His Mistress with Two Secrets

Bound by the Millionaire’s Ring

Prince’s Son of Scandal

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret & Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

Caitlin Crews and Dani Collins

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90003-8

UNWRAPPING THE INNOCENT’S SECRET & BOUND BY THEIR NINE-MONTH SCANDAL

Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret © 2019 Caitlin Crews Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal © 2019 Dani Collins

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

Note to Readers

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

 Change of font size and line height

 Change of background and font colours

 Change of font

 Change justification

 Text to speech

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

About the Publisher

Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret

Caitlin Crews

Their desire haunts him…

Will her revelation reunite them?

Billionaire Pascal prides himself on his rigid control. So it infuriates him beyond belief that he can’t forget Cecilia, the sweet and innocent woman who saved his life…or the forbidden passion they shared. This Christmas, he’s determined to forget her—until they suddenly come face-to-face!

Seeing Pascal again blindsides Cecilia. She gave him more than her innocence during their explosive encounter—she gave him a piece of her heart. Their still-searing chemistry is startling! As is Cecilia’s stunning baby secret…

To all our wonderful Modern readers—

this one is for you!

CHAPTER ONE

“I BEG YOUR PARDON, sir,” his secretary said in the pointedly diffident way that always managed to convey the full range of his feelings.

Pascal Furlani shared them.

And he was not a man who ordinarilyf accepted the existence of feelings, unless they suited him. Or benefited him in some way.

“I have taken the liberty of compiling yet another slate of candidates,” Guglielmo continued in that same tone, because he was not the sort of secretary who was afraid to share his opinions, feelings, or thoughts, however he might dress them up. “As the last several met with disfavor.”

There was a dig in that, Pascal knew. He stood, not at the window that looked out over one of Rome’s wealthiest neighborhoods, but at the glass partition that separated him from the rest of his sleek, modern office. It was the perfect antidote to the fussiness and great weight of Roman history everywhere else in the city.

Pascal knew too well what the three-thousand-year-old city looked like, from its forgotten streets to its most renowned piazzas. He knew how it felt to grow up rough and ignored in the shadow of the ruins of former great glories. And what life in this city had made him, the cast-off bastard son of a man who acknowledged only his legitimate issue and turned his back entirely on his mistakes.

He had earned every inch of the sweeping views his office commanded, but he was far prouder of what he’d done inside the walls of The Furlani Company.

Pascal had considered it a decent start when his personal wealth exceeded not only that of his father, but of all his father’s legitimate children, too. Combined. He’d achieved that milestone in the first year after the accident.

The accident.

Pascal’s lips thinned in inevitable displeasure as his mind tugged him back to the period of his life he most wanted to forget. The one stretch of his life where he’d lost focus. Where he’d come this close to forgetting himself completely.

He would never forget that his father had thrown him away like so much trash. He refused to forgive it. He did not hunger for revenge, necessarily—he wanted his life to be its own reckoning. Pascal chose to dominate from afar and show his father precisely as much interest as had been shown to him. And he had not wavered in this purpose since he’d been a small boy—save for that one regrettable winter.

It was not every man who could say that his rise from the ashes was not metaphoric, but entirely literal. The way they always did, Pascal’s fingers found the grooves on his jaw that told the tale of the car crash that had left him scarred forever.

He quite liked them. The scars reminded him who he was and where he’d been, and how close he’d come to walking away from his purpose and ambition for what was, in the end, such a small temptation.

Not that his memories of that time were…small, exactly.

Nonetheless, the office reminded him where he was going. What he’d built with his own hands and force of will. It reinforced his goals. All of them sleek, moneyed, and each a pointed jab at the father who had never claimed him and the memory of a lost mother who had left him to his fate with no more than a shrug.

He had no intention of forgetting every last moment of how he’d come to be here.

“If you’ll turn your attention to your tablet, sir,” came his secretary’s voice, excessively placid. Its own pointed jab, as usual. “I have arranged a selection of heiresses for your viewing pleasure, ordered in terms of their social standing.”

Pascal turned away from his offices, all that granite and steel that he found so comforting here in the middle of ancient Rome. The building was filled to bursting with his vision. His money. His people acting to bring his dreams to fruition.

It was time for him to take the next step and find a wife.

Whether Pascal wanted to be married had little to do with it. A wife would make him look more stable, more settled, which some of the more conservative accounts preferred. A wife would conceivably keep him out of the tabloids, which his board would certainly prefer. And a wife would give Pascal legitimate heirs to his fortune and power.

Pascal would die before he consigned a child of his to the things he’d suffered, first and foremost being the lack of his father’s name.

In addition, getting married would put an end to the mutterings of his board. That Pascal, as a single man with healthy appetites, was an embarrassment to his own company. That Pascal was somehow less trustworthy than other CEOs, imbued as they all were with wives and children, all legitimate and legal.

No one ever mentioned the mistresses and unclaimed bastards on the side, of course. No one ever did.

Pascal dropped his hand from his jaw. Something about his scars—which he knew were faded now to white instead of the angry red they’d been at first—was making him maudlin today.

Welcome to December, a voice inside him said. Snidely.

He knew what time of year it was. And why his thoughts kept returning to the crash and the flames that had very nearly been the end of him. But he had no intention of celebrating that anniversary. He never did.

He eyed his secretary, waiting with obvious impatience, instead.

“What makes you think that this collection of desperate, grasping socialites will be more appealing than the last?” he asked.

“Are we looking for appealing, sir? I’m not sure I had that on my list. I was looking more for suitable.”

Pascal was sure he saw the hint of a smirk on his secretary’s face, though the other man knew better than to succumb in full.

“Careful, Guglielmo,” he murmured. “Or I may begin to suspect that you do not take this enterprise as seriously as you should.”

He walked back to his desk, a massive slab of granite that looked like what it was. A throne and a monument to Pascal’s hard-won power and influence. Guglielmo gestured toward the tablet computer that lay in the center, and Pascal checked a sigh as he picked it up and scrolled through the offerings.

Lady this, daughter of Somebody Pedigreed, the toast of this or that finishing school. The daughter of a Chinese philanthropist. Two French girls from separate families that were connected—somewhere back in the deep, dark, tangled roots of their family trees—to ancient kings and queens. An Argentinian heiress, raised on cattle money halfway across the world.

They were all beautiful, in their way. If not classically so, then polished to shine. They were all accomplished, in one way or another. One ran her own charity. One performed the flute with a world-renowned orchestra. Another spent the bulk of her time on humanitarian missions. And not one of them had ever been mentioned in a tabloid newspaper.

Pascal refused to consider anyone with a whiff of paparazzi interest about them or near them, like the California wine heiress who was herself marvelously spotless, but had been best friends since boarding school with a celebrity whose life played out in headlines across the globe. No, thank you. He wanted no scandals. No dark secrets, poised to emerge at the worst possible time. No secrets at all, come to that.

Pascal was a scandal. His whole life had been first a secret, then a shock, trumpeted in headlines of its own. His tawdry, illegitimate birth and his shipping magnate father’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his existence throughout his life might as well have been another set of scars on the other side of his face. He had always felt marked by the circumstances of his birth, his parents’ poor choices.

He would always be marked by these things.

His wife, accordingly, had to be without stain.

“You do not look pleased, sir,” Guglielmo said drily. “Yet again. I fear I must remind you that an unblemished heiress of reasonable social standing is, in fact, a finite resource. One we may have exhausted.” He inclined his head slightly when Pascal glared at him. “Sir.”

“I’m meeting with the last of the previous selection of possibilities tonight,” Pascal reminded him.

“I made the reservation myself, sir. Moments after you informed me that the meeting you’d had with another woman on that list was, in your words, appalling beyond reason.”

“She did not resemble her photograph,” Pascal said darkly.

“Sadly, that is part and parcel of the digital dating culture we all now—”

“Guglielmo. She was a sweet-looking, conservatively dressed blonde in the pictures you showed me. She showed up with a blue and pink Mohawk and a sleeve of tattoos. I liked her more that way, if I am honest, but I can hardly parade a punk rock princess in front of my board. If I could, I would.”

“The woman you’re meeting tonight has a robust social media presence and absolutely no hint of punk rock about her,” Guglielmo replied blandly. “I checked myself.”

Pascal found his fingers on his scars again. “Perhaps I will be swept away tonight and all of this will prove unnecessary.”

“Hope springs eternal,” Guglielmo murmured.

After Pascal dismissed him, he didn’t launch himself into one of the numerous tasks awaiting his attention. He could see his emails piling up. His message light was blinking. But instead of handling them he found himself sitting at his desk, scowling out at the physical evidence of the empire he’d built. Brick by bloody brick.

Because once again, the only thing in his head was her.

His angel of mercy. His greatest temptation.

The woman who had nearly wrecked him before he’d begun.

It is December, he reminded himself. This is always how it feels in December. Come the New Year she will fade again, the way she always does.

His phone rang, snapping him back to reality and far away from that godforsaken northern village in a forgotten valley in the Dolomites. Where he had crashed and burned—literally.

And she had nursed him back to life.

Then had haunted him ever since, for his sins.

Tonight, he vowed as he turned his attention to the tasks awaiting him, he would leave the past where it belonged, and concentrate on the next bright part of his glorious future.

“I think it’s important to set very clear boundaries from the start,” his date informed him much later that evening. She had arrived late, clearly full of herself in her role as a minor member of the Danish nobility. She had swept into one of the most exclusive restaurants in Rome with her nose in the air, as if Pascal had suggested she meet him at one of those sticky, plastic American fast food restaurants. Her expression had not improved over the course of their initial drinks. “Obviously, the point of any merger is to secure the line.”

“The line?”

“I am prepared to commit to an heir and a spare,” she told him loftily. “To be commenced and completed within a four-year period. And I think it’s best to agree, up front and in writing, that the production of any progeny should be conducted under controlled circumstances.”

Pascal was sure he’d had more romantic conversations on industrial sites.

“Is it a production line?” he asked, his voice dry. “A factory of some kind?”

“I already have an excellent fertility specialist, discreet and capable, who can ensure to everyone’s satisfaction and all legalities that the correct DNA carries on into the next generation.”

Pascal blinked at that. He had had simpering dinners. Overtly sexual ones. Direct, frank approaches. But this was new. It all seemed so…mechanical.

“You are staring at me as if I’ve said something astonishing,” his date said.

“I beg your pardon.” Pascal attempted to smile, though he wasn’t sure when or if he’d ever felt less charming. “Are you suggesting that we concoct offspring in a laboratory? Rather than go about making them in the more time-honored fashion, favored as it has been for a great many eons already?”

“This is a business arrangement,” his chilly date replied, looking, if possible, more severe than before. “I expect you will find your release elsewhere, as will I. Discreetly, of course. I do not hold with scandal.”

“Nothing is less scandalous than a sexless marriage, naturally.”

A faint suggestion of a line appeared between her perfectly shaped brows. “There’s no need to muddy a perfectly functional marriage with that sort of thing, surely.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” he replied.

And later, after he had left his date with a curt nod and an insincere promise to have his people contact her, Pascal waved off his driver and walked instead.

Because Rome was its own reward. The city of his birth and his poverty-stricken childhood. The city where he had become a man, by his own estimation, then joined the military to give himself what his mother couldn’t and his father would never. Discipline. A life. Even a career. It had seemed such an elegant solution.

Until that night six years ago when he’d followed a reckless whim, on a moody December night very much like this one. It had been raining in Rome. He’d hoped that meant it was snowing in the Dolomites, on the edge of the Alps, and had decided he might as well drive himself up north and learn how to ski.

He laughed a bit at that as he moved through Piazza Navona and its annual Christmas Market that made the crowded square even more filled and frenetic. He dodged the usual stream of tourists and his own countrymen, taking in the night air and already surrendering to the pollution of Christmas that would invade everything until the Epiphany, then thankfully disappear into the clarity of the New Year.

The night was cold and leaning toward dampness. It was the perfect sort of weather to ask himself how he’d ended up with the coldest, most clinical woman imaginable tonight. Was that really what he was reduced to? A laboratory experiment masquerading as a marriage?

He knew he needed to marry, but somehow, he had imagined it would be…less cold-blooded. Warmer. Or cordial, at the very least.

And he wanted to make his babies his own damned self. More than that, he had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps in any regard. Once he married, Pascal had no intention of cheating. He was not planning to have “arrangements” on the side. He wasn’t planning on having an on the side, for that matter.

He had no intention of creating another woman like his mother, so fragile and so lost she couldn’t take care of her own son. And he would never, ever risk the possibility that he might create an illegitimate child of his own.

The very idea made him sick.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he knew it was Guglielmo, checking in the way he always did after these excruciating “dates” that were little more than vetting sessions. Because Pascal persisted in imagining that he could cut through all the nonsense, ask for exactly what he wanted and then get it. It had worked in business, why not in marriage?

Pascal didn’t answer the call.

There were a million more things that required his attention, but he couldn’t face them just yet. Instead, he lost himself in the chaotic embrace of the Eternal City. Rome was a monument, yet Rome was ever-changing. Rome was a contradiction. Rome was where Pascal felt alive. It was the place where he had grown to understand that his very existence was an affront to some, and it was where he finally figured out how to claim that existence and make sense of it.

Walking through Rome had always soothed him. And kept him alive, some dark years. Long nights with his feet, his thoughts and the grand Roman sprawl had made him whole, time and time again.

So there was no reason at all that he should be caught up in memories of a tiny, sleepy village with steep mountains all around and very few people, where he had never been anything but broken.

He stopped by a fountain in a forgotten courtyard, steps from the roar of a busy road. The water tumbled from the pursed lips of an old god made stone, and in the dark, he almost believed he could see her reflection there in the water the way he always did in his head.

Sweet Cecilia, half nurse and half angel. A woman so lovely and so innocent that he had nearly betrayed every vow he’d ever made to himself and stayed up there in all that towering silence.

The very notion was absurd. He was Pascal Furlani. Not for him the pastoral delights, such as they were, of a remote mountain village of interest to absolutely no one unless they happened to either have been there for centuries or were a part of the quiet abbey that had also been there, in one form or another, since right about the dawn of time. Not for him a life forgotten and tucked away like that, out of sight.

She would have taken her vows by now, Pascal assumed, and become a full nun like the others in the order. Or perhaps his last, half-dreamt night there had been her fall from grace. Would she have stayed? Taken her place outside the abbey walls? Perhaps she lived in the village proper now, or off in the fields that dotted the hillsides with some or other farmer. She would be settled now, one way or the other. Committed to her Lord or married to some man, and unrecognizable.

Just as he was.

Pascal was not haunted by the specter of his childhood. He had lived through it, transcended it and moved on. He had mourned his mother’s death, then buried her with greater reverence than she had ever shown him. He rarely thought of his father these days, preferring to decimate the old man and his penny-tante shipping concern from afar.

Pascal did not look back. Ever.

Unless it was to her. Cecilia.

His personal ghost.

“Enough,” he muttered. He pulled a coin from his pocket, then flipped it to the air, watching as it tumbled into the water before him. He had made his last reckless decision the night he’d chosen to drive like a maniac up into those mountains in search of one of Italy’s many ski resorts. He had been on leave from the army and the idea—or some demon—had seized him, which in those days was all Pascal needed. That and a bottle of something strong.

He had never made it to a ski resort. He’d spun out on a mountain pass after making a wrong turn. The clunker of a car he’d been driving—good for absolutely nothing save ejecting him through the windshield with great force—was the only reason he’d lived.

The car had burst into flames, and Pascal would have burned, too, had he not been tossed off into the unforgiving wilderness.

But even the fire was a blessing in disguise. It had alerted the villagers. They’d trooped out in the middle of the dark December night, collected his broken body and had settled him into what passed for the local hospital. The clinic connected to the abbey, where slowly, carefully, the nuns had nursed him back to health.

Pascal had been torn open, broken and out of his mind for weeks. It had taken him longer than that to heal. Then painfully learn how to move again when the casts came off.

And the greatest danger of it all was not the infections he risked or the bones that healed differently than they’d been. It was not his discharge from the military, or the entirely new life he was forced to face—and figure out while lying flat on his back—thanks to the wreckage of the old.

It was the fact that life in that forgotten village felt sweet. Easy. Good.

It had been the greatest temptation of his life to simply…remain.

And his favorite nun had been a part of that.

Not quite a nun, he corrected himself now, his hands deep in his pockets as he brooded at the fountain before him. She had been a novice of the order, young and sweet and uncorrupted—until she’d met him.

But when he thought of what happened between them, her cool smiles and soft hands, blooming into that one night of almost unbearable passion that still made his body stir after all these years—he couldn’t help but think that she had been the one to do the corrupting.

He was a master of the universe by any reckoning, and yet…here he stood. In a dark, forgotten corner of the greatest city on earth, the world literally at his feet, her face in his memories making the city dim.

It was an outrage. It was unacceptable.

Pascal headed toward his home, three stories of the top of a building that he had refurbished to suit his particular taste. Distinctively modern inside and an appropriately battered, ancient-looking facade.

It was not lost on him that for all intents and purposes, that description could have been about him.

When he reached his building, he didn’t go inside. He headed to his garage instead and somehow or another, almost without conscious thought, he found himself in one of his cars. Then heading north. This time he was neither as drunk nor as reckless as he’d been six years ago, but still. A man did not possess a car as fast as his if he did not plan to use it.

He drove for six hours, through what remained of the night and into the dawn. He stopped for breakfast and strong coffee when he reached Verona. When the espresso had revived him sufficiently, he called Guglielmo to tell him where he was.

“And may I ask, sir, why you are a great many kilometers away from the office? May I assume that your meeting last night did not go as well as you hoped?”

“You may assume what you like,” Pascal replied.

And as he lingered over another espresso, Pascal had ample time to ask himself what exactly he thought he was doing. The answer came to him after he’d gotten back on the road.

The months he’d spent in the care of that abbey was the only time in his life that he could recall straying so far from who he was, and he’d resented it ever since. Bitterly. Cecilia had been a kind of enchantment. A witch in a nun’s habit.

He’d told himself he was well rid of her when he’d come back down the mountain and remembered himself at last. He’d meant it. He’d gone about creating his company and doing every last thing he’d ever dreamed.

And yet…he couldn’t seem to move on. No matter how many empires he built, no matter how much richer he made himself, he was still haunted by her face.

It was high time for an exorcism.

Two hours later he found himself on the same mountain where he’d nearly died six years ago. It was a cold, crisp morning in another December, and he treated the winding mountain road with a great deal more respect than he had back then.

And this time he pulled off to the side of the road when he reached the top, because he could see the village before him.

It looked like a storybook, which only made him more determined to scrape it off whatever passed for his battered soul. It was like a dream in the morning light. Snowcapped mountains all around, and down in the small valley, fields cut by a tumbling river. What passed for the center of town was a clump of old buildings that dated from centuries past. The church stood at one end of the village with the abbey behind it and off to one side, the hospital where he had survived his recovery. He stared at it a long while, aware that his fingers were on his scars again.

Something in him turned over, with a low hum.

He told himself it was sheer horror that a man like him, raised in the middle of one of the most frenetic and sophisticated cities in the world, not to mention the luxurious lifestyle he now enjoyed, should ever have imagined that he could stay here.

Here.

It beggared belief.

He started up the car again, following the road down and around and around, until it reached the valley floor.

Where everything was exactly as he’d left it.

There was no reason that his heart should be clattering about in his chest as he drove the familiar road to the church. He would find the old priest and ask after Cecilia. He would almost surely find such a reunion faintly horrifying, and once he did, he would leave. The truth was, he’d come a very great distance for what he expected to take all of a few moments. He could have—and should have—sent Guglielmo. Or some other underling, who could have reported back on whether Cecilia was still here. For that matter, there had been no earthly reason for him to drive through the night like a man possessed. He could have taken his helicopter and landed it in the field behind the church, the same field he’d stared at week after week after week from his hospital bed.

No wonder he’d become fixated on the novice nun who’d cared for him. There had been nothing else to do. Except, Mother Superior had told him serenely, pray.

Pascal had not prayed then. He considered a prayer for deliverance now instead. Because he had surrendered to this fantasy for absolutely no good reason. This appalling tour through his own nostalgia.

“You might as well get it over with,” he growled at himself.

He unfolded himself from the low-slung sports car and stood beside it a moment. It was midmorning now, and though it was a clear day, the wind rushed down from the mountain peaks and sliced straight through him. He was dressed for a sophisticated dinner in Rome, not a trip to the hinterland.

He adjusted the jacket of his bespoke suit with two impatient tugs of his hands, and didn’t bother looking around. The village felt deserted. If memory served, what few villagers there were rarely congregated before the afternoon, if then. The nuns had chosen this valley well. It was the perfect spot for silent contemplation.

Pascal walked up the steps to the front door of the church. The weathered door stood open a crack, and he pushed his way inside, and then paused for a moment in the vestibule as he was walloped with memories.

It smelled the same. It looked the same. And it made his head spin as if he’d overindulged again.

What year is this? he asked himself.

The church might not have changed in the past century. But Pascal had changed tremendously since he’d left here. That was what he needed to remember.

He moved into the church proper, his gaze moving from the quiet, empty pews to the candles flickering in the alcoves. He saw no hint of the old, garrulous priest who he recalled so vividly from six years ago. The place was deserted—

But then he heard a noise. He took a few more steps and saw a washer woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the floor before the altar with her back to him.

She did not look around as he started down the aisle, and that gave Pascal ample opportunity to remember all the other times he’d done this exact same walk. All the times the priest had encouraged him to look within for a change, rather than continuing to look outside himself.

What is the point of all this power you seek if your heart is empty? the old man had asked him.

What do you know of either power or a heart? Pascal had replied. And he’d laughed.

But Pascal did not think the old man had been kidding. And those sneaky words were one more ghost that he couldn’t quite get to leave him alone.

He dropped his gaze from the stained glass in the small nave, and stood there, several feet away from the woman on the floor. He expected her to stop what she was doing, for she must have heard him, but she didn’t. Not even when he cleared his throat.

“If I might have a moment of your attention, signorina,” he said, his voice echoing back at him from all around.

She moved then. She sat back on her knees, and tugged the headphones out of her ears in one smooth motion. And Pascal was caught, somehow, in the smoothness of it.

But then she shifted around to face him, still down there on the stone floor. And everything…stopped.

That face.

Her face.

He’d been seeing it for years.

He knew every millimeter of her heart-shaped face, and the rich brown hair touched with gold that surrounded it. He knew that wide, generous mouth, and the delicate nose.

Most of all, he knew those eyes. Startling violet set above cheekbones made for poetry.

He knew her, his angel of mercy and the ghost that had haunted him for years.

It was Cecilia. His Cecilia.

“My God,” he whispered. “It’s you.”

“It’s me,” she replied, her voice flat. Hard. And that was when he noticed that those violet eyes of hers were bright on his. And murderous. “And you can’t have him.”

CHAPTER TWO

CECILIA REGINALD WAS no stranger to fear or disappointment.

It was right there in the name she’d been left with all those years ago when the English lady—her mother, presumably—had stayed in the only pensione in the village for the weekend, given a fake name, and then had left her three-year-old behind when she’d run off. Never to return.

Cecilia had always known that she was disposable, though she happily remembered very little of that first, lost life. Just as she’d always known that Pascal Furlani, who had discarded her when she was fully grown and able to recall every painful second of it, would be back.

At first, she had dreamed of his return. Wished for it, fervently, as if he’d disappeared from the village by mistake somehow. Because assuming he did the right thing—and she’d assumed he would then—would have solved her problems in a neat, orderly and time-honored fashion. Because his coming back would have made sense of the wreckage that her neat, orderly life had become in the chaotic wake he’d left behind him.

And because she had imagined herself in love with him.

But of course, that was not when he had deigned to tear himself away from his meteoric rise to wealth and prominence and return at long last. Not when she would have greeted his return with nothing short of delight. Instead, he came back now, when she wanted it least. And not only because she no longer believed in such childish notions as being in love.

“Who is him?” he asked. “And why do you imagine I would wish to have him, whatever that means?”

She didn’t miss the affront in that deep, rich voice of his she’d done her best to forget. Or try to forget.

Just as she didn’t miss the crack of power in it, either. It seared through her like a lightning strike and she added the unpleasant intensity of the sensation to the list of things she blamed him for.

Cecilia knelt there on the floor, her weight back on her heels, and her hands wet from scrubbing the stones. She had to crane her neck back to look up at him. Up and up and up, for he seemed much taller than she remembered him. While she imagined she looked shriveled and ruined and infinitely hardened by the years—because that was how she felt, certainly.

Back then she’d had faith. She’d believed that people were mostly good and life was certain to work out well, one way or another, even for abandoned girls like her.

She’d learned. Oh, how she’d learned.

Cecilia was fairly certain she wore every last lesson right there on her face.

Meanwhile Pascal looked like he’d stepped straight out of the pages of one of those glossy magazines she pretended she didn’t know existed and had certainly never scoured, just to see his face. He looked like the lofty, arrogant man he’d gone off to become, leaving her here to handle the mess he’d made. And the man in those magazines bore no resemblance whatsoever to the broken, half-wild creature she’d taken far too much pleasure in nursing back to health.

If there had ever been anything broken in Pascal Furlani, she couldn’t see it now. Were it not for the scars on the left side of his jaw that she knew continued down across his chest—though in her memory, they were far more raw and angry than the silver lines she could see today—she would have been hard-pressed to imagine that anything could ever have touched this man at all.

Much less her.

A thought that made her want to throw her bucket of dirty water at him. Preferably so it could damage that overtly resplendent suit he wore with entirely too much unconscious, masculine ease.

God, how she hated him.

The trouble was, it had been easy to scoff at those pictures of him. To tell herself that she was better off without a man who would go to such places, with such people, and dress the way he did when he was photographed. So breathlessly, deliberately fancy, which even she knew cost the kind of money she would never, ever have. Or even be near. The kind of money that was so dizzying she wouldn’t want to have it. It was corrosive. Cecilia didn’t have to live the high life in Rome to understand that.

Her life here had always been simple. Things were more complicated than she’d planned six years ago, but still. Overall, life was simple.

And nothing about Pascal Furlani was simple.

Neither was her reaction to him.

Cecilia had forgotten the way he filled a room. That antiseptic chamber in the clinic. This whole church. Just by standing there in all his state, his black eyes glittering.

The problem was he was so…arresting.

He had changed since he’d left the hospital, where he’d been so rangy and wiry. He’d filled in. He looked solid. Big. Strong, everywhere, with the kind of smooth, powerful muscles that quietly boasted of the worship he paid to his own body and the kind of power he could wield.

But Cecilia did not want to think too much about his body.

His dark hair was as she remembered it, cropped close to his head. It only made those glittering black-gold eyes of his all the more mesmerizing. Electric, even, like another lightning strike she had no choice but to endure while it lit her on fire.

He looked like a Roman centurion. His aquiline nose. His sensual lips. Something impassive and stern in the stark lines of him.

And she hated the fact that she knew how he tasted.

“You’re not welcome here,” she told him as evenly as she could from where she knelt there before him. “I already made that clear to your little spies. You didn’t have to come all the way up into the mountains yourself.”

He blinked, and made a small pageant out of it.

“I do not have spies, Cecilia.”

Her name in that familiar, charged voice of his rolled through her, igniting fires she would have sworn only moments before had been doused forever.

“You can call them whatever you like.” She had the urge to get to her feet, but ignored it, because scrambling up from her knees made it far more obvious that she was discomfited by their power differential. And she did not wish to be discomfited by Pascal Furlani. Not any more than she already had been. So she stayed put, meeting his gaze with defiance as if he was the one on the ground. “They said they were on the board of your company. You will forgive me if I assumed that meant they had something to do with you. Or do you really expect me to believe that two visits from you and your minions over the course of three weeks is a random coincidence?”

He didn’t appear to move and yet it was like a storm gathered around him. Cecilia was sure that if she looked down, she would see the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.

“Members of my board were here?” His voice was…darker. Midnight thunder.

It took her a moment to process the way he’d said here. As if this village where he’d nearly died and had come back to life again was so far beneath him that the very idea that anyone he knew from his fancy boardrooms might visit it appalled him.

Cecilia tried not to grit her teeth. “I will tell you what I told them. You have nothing to do with this place. Or with me. You left. And you don’t get to swan back in here now, no matter the reason. I won’t allow it.”

His dark eyes flashed. “Will you not?”

Something about that question, too silky by half and far more dangerous than it should have been, had Cecilia tossing her sponge into her bucket. With perhaps too much force, she reflected, when water sloshed over the sides.

“What do you want, Pascal?” she demanded.

Through her gritted teeth.

He looked down at her from his irritatingly great height. “I thought I came here to expel old ghosts.”

“I don’t believe you’d know a ghost if one appeared at the foot of your bed, wreathed in chains and moaning your name.”

Again he blinked as if he expected the movement of his eyelids to bring underlings running to serve him. Something that likely occurred with depressing regularity down in Rome.

“You do not believe that you have haunted me these past years, cara?” And she couldn’t say she cared for the way he used the endearment, either. Like a sharp-edged blade, and he wasn’t afraid to cut her. “I cannot say I believe it, either. And yet here I am, when I vowed I would never return.”

“I suggest you turn around, return to wherever you came from and uphold your vow.”

He did not take her suggestion. Instead, he stayed where he was and studied her for a moment.

“I do not understand why my board would be at all interested in you,” he said after what felt like an eternity. Or three. “I’ve never kept this part of my life a secret. Everyone knows I nearly died in the mountains and it changed me profoundly. I discuss it often enough. Why would they come here now? What could they hope to find here besides an old lover?”

Cecilia could hardly breathe. She couldn’t imagine what expression she wore on her face. An old lover. Was that what she was to him? Was that all she was?

But she kept her cool, no matter what it cost her, because she had to. She had to. She would not react to the tightness in her chest. The shortness in her breath.

Or that wild, betraying tumult in her pulse.

All that she could chalk up to fear, she told herself as Pascal gazed down at her, arrogant and impatient. It was nothing but panic, surely. The strange feeling, too much like some kind of anticipation, she felt that her worst fear was being realized in the extraordinary flesh whether she liked it or not.

She could understand that. It was her other reactions that concerned her more. Most especially that melting low in her belly that told her terrible truths about her true feelings about Pascal’s return that she wanted desperately to deny.

She got to her feet then, taking her time. And as she did, she was fiercely glad that she looked like who and what she was: a woman who washed floors for a living. She was nothing like the sorts of pampered women Pascal always had on his arm in the magazine pictures that were burned into her head. Cecilia knew she bore no resemblance to them and never would. She was not elegant. Her jeans were too big, decidedly ripped and horribly stained. She wore a ratty T-shirt beneath the long-sleeve buttoned-up shirt she’d tied off at her waist. Her hair was a disaster, no matter that she’d tied it back with an old scarf.

She expected she looked more or less tragic to a man like him. He was no doubt asking himself how he’d ever lowered himself to touch one such as her. She wondered it herself.

But this was a good thing, she told herself sternly. Because he needed to go away and never come back. And if she disgusted him now, well, she was only what she’d had to become. To survive him. If that got him to leave, great. Whatever worked.

She ignored the small pang that notion gave her.

“I expected you to be wearing a nun’s habit,” he said, and she opted not to hear the wicked undertone in his voice. Much less…remember the way she’d thrilled to it, once.

“I chose not to become a nun.” She did not say, because of you.

But his eyes narrowed anyway. “I thought that was your life’s ambition. Was it not?”

“People change.”

“You seem markedly changed, in fact. One might even say, distinctly hardened.”

“I’m no longer a foolish girl easily taken advantage of by traveling soldiers, if that’s what you mean.”

His head canted to one side, and his black eyes gleamed. “Did I take advantage of you, Cecilia? That’s not how I recall it.”

She eyed him. “Whether you recall it that way or not, that’s how it was.”

“Tell me, then, how precisely did I take advantage of you? Was it when you crawled into my hospital bed, threw your leg over me and then rode us both to a mad finish?”

She remembered it as he said it. She remembered everything. The wonder of taking him inside her. The madness, the dizzy whirl. His big hands wrapped around her hips and his intent, ferociously greedy gaze.

No one had ever explained to her that the trouble with temptation was that it felt like coming home, wreathed in light and glory.

That melting sensation grew worse, but she refused to let herself squirm the way she wanted to do.

Because this wasn’t about her.

“I always wondered what it would be like to have a conversation like this with you,” Cecilia said when she was sure she could manage to sound calm. Faintly bored. And it was not untrue, though as the years passed, the content of the conversation had changed in her head. She’d asked fewer questions. At some point she’d even become magnanimous. She’d practiced it enough in mirrors. “I find it’s less productive than I might have imagined. I don’t understand why you’re here. I am not haunted.”

Only furious, still and always, but she didn’t tell him that. He didn’t deserve to know.

“Can it be as simple as catching up with an old friend?” he asked as if he was…reasonable in any way. Palatable.

She made a scoffing sound. “Please. We were never friends.”

To her surprise, his mouth curved. “Cecilia. Of course we were.”

Something in her chest seemed to stutter to a halt then. Something different from the panic, the heat.

Because she remembered other things, too. Long afternoons when she would sit by his bedside, holding his hand or mopping his brow with a cool cloth. In those early days, when no one had known if he would make it, she’d sung to him. Songs of praise and joy interspersed with silly nursery rhymes and the like, all calculated to soothe.

When he grew stronger, he would tell her stories. He couldn’t believe that she had never been to Rome. That she had never been more than a couple of hours out of this valley, for that matter. Or not that she could recall. He painted pictures for her with his words, of ancient ruins interspersed with traffic charging this way and that, sidewalk cafés, beautiful fountains. Later, when she was no longer a novitiate and often found herself up in the middle of the night—either because she was worried about her future, or because sleep was a rarity for a woman in her position—she’d looked up pictures online and found the city he described. In bright detail.

He’d made her feel as if she knew it personally. Sometimes she thought she hated him for that.

“Either way,” she said resolutely, “we’re not friends now. Do you wish to know how I know we’re not? Because friends do not disappear like smoke in the middle of the night, without a word.”

She regretted that the moment she said it. This was not about her, not anymore, and if she wanted to tell herself a harsh truth or two, it was possible it never had been. She could have been the field outside his window. The mountains looming about in every direction. She was simply here. He was the one who crashed the car, tore himself to pieces and got the luxury of telling dramatic stories about what the experience had taught him in televised interviews.

Not that she planned to admit she’d ever watched them.

Meanwhile, Cecilia was the one who could remember nothing but this valley. This village. The comfort of the abbey walls and the counsel of the women she’d believed would be her sisters one day.

It was true that he had taken all of that away from her. But another truth was that she’d given it to him. And she knew she shouldn’t have mentioned that night.

Something she was in no doubt about when his expression changed. His eyes were too hot suddenly. His mouth was too stern and yet remained entirely too sensual.

Now that she was standing up, she could better appreciate what the years had done for his form. He had always been beautiful, like something carved from soft stone and twisted into that flesh that had healed so slowly. Now he seemed made of granite. His shoulders were so wide. And the excellent tailoring of the suit he wore did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that his torso was thick with hard, solid muscle.

And somehow she’d expected that because he’d filled out he would be less tall. But he wasn’t. She still had to look up at him. And for some reason, even though she was no longer on her knees, it made her feel a little too close to powerless for comfort.

“By all means,” he said in that dark, silken way of his. “Let us discuss that night.”

And she’d already started down this road. She might as well say all the things she’d been carrying around inside her all these years, or at least the highlights, because she had no intention of having this discussion again.

“What is there to discuss?” she asked. “I fell asleep in your arms. It was the first time I had done something like that, as every other moment we’d had together had been so furtive. Stolen. But not that night. You asked me to stay and I stayed. And when I woke up in the morning, you had left the valley for good.” She made a noise that no one could mistake for a laugh. “In case you’re wondering, I woke up the way you left me. Naked. With the sun beaming in the windows and Mother Superior standing at the foot of the bed.”

Back then she could have read every expression that moved over his face. Every glint in his eye. But though she could see something shift there today, she couldn’t twist it into any kind of sense. And it was stunning, the things that could wallop a person. The ways that grief could sneak into the most surprising crevices and well up there, like tears.

“Is that why you’re not a nun?” he asked.

She wondered if he knew what a loaded question that was.

It is not for me to tell you what to do, child, Mother Superior had said when Cecilia’s condition became clear. That is between you and God. But I will tell you this. I have known you since you were delivered to our door. I watched you grow up. And I greeted, with joy, the notion that you might join the sisters here. But the truth is, the order is the only family you’ve known. I have to ask myself if you truly wish to dedicate yourself to this life, or if what you want most of all is family. And now you will have your own. Do you truly wish to give that up?

“In the end,” Cecilia said now to the man who was a catalyst for both her greatest shame and deepest joy in life, damn him, “I was not a good fit for the order.”

“Not a good fit? You’d already been living in that abbey for most of your life. How could you not be perfect for them? Why would they let you walk away?”

She glared at him. “These are all interesting questions. But not from someone who ran off in the middle of the night. If you had questions to ask me, Pascal, you could have asked them then.”

“I did not run off,” he bit out. And if she wasn’t mistaken, there was something like temper in his voice then. Sparking in that black gaze of his. “You must always have known, cara, that my destiny was never here.”

Her palms stung and she realized she’d curled her hands into fists. She forced herself to unclench her fingers, one by one.

“That became clear once you left. And then failed to return for six years.”

“I’m here now.”

“And I’m sure that any moment, the heavens will open up and hosannas will rain down upon us all,” Cecilia retorted. Archly. “But until that moment, you will forgive me if I am somewhat less enthused.”

“The Cecilia I remember would never have spoken to me this way.” One of his brows rose. Imperiously. “I remember soft, cool hands. A pretty singing voice. And cheeks that were forever pinkening.”

“That girl was an idiot.” Cecilia sniffed. “And she died six years ago, when she woke to find herself not at all the person she’d imagined herself to be.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t you? I thought that I was a moral, upstanding, pure and wholesome individual. A woman who truly wished to dedicate herself to a life of service. But it turned out that I was wicked straight through, shameless enough to flaunt it in the very abbey that raised me, and so foolish that I actually believed that the man who had engineered my fall might stick around to help with a rough landing. Alas. He did not.”

His stern mouth looked starker somehow. “I was told that all sins would be forgiven if I were to do what was inevitable, what I would do anyway, and leave.”

Cecilia opened her mouth to argue that, but something about the way he said it tugged at her. “What do you mean, you were told?”

But he didn’t answer the question. He studied her for a moment, then another, his hand on his jaw.

“You have yet to explain to me what my board members were doing here. Let me guess who it was. An older gentleman, perhaps? Silver hair and beard, a theatrical cane and a penchant for dressing like an uptight Victorian? And his trusty sidekick, the younger man, round and possessed of an overly glossy mustache?”

He had described the two men exactly.

She shrugged. “They didn’t leave their names.”

“But I can see from your expression that they were the ones who came here. Why?”

“Your story of narrowly escaping death in the Dolomites, and the recovery that allowed you ample time to shore up your scheme to take over the world, is practically a fairy tale told to small children at this point. Everyone has heard it.”

“I’m delighted that you have paid such close attention.”

“But that’s my point,” Cecilia said coolly. “No attention was required. The story was everywhere. You’re fairly ubiquitous these days, aren’t you?”

“If by ubiquitous you mean wealthy and powerful, I accept the description proudly.”

“Because that’s what matters to you.” She couldn’t seem to help herself. Because she had to keep poking and poking to make sure that he really was this stranger he’d turned into. That the man she’d thought he was had never been anything but a figment of her own imagination. She had to be certain. “Money at all costs. No matter who it hurts.”

“Who does it hurt?” His gaze was far too bright. Particularly with his mouth set in that harsh line. “There will always be rich men, Cecilia. Why shouldn’t I be one of them?”

“I think the real question is why you’re here,” she said past the lump in her throat for the man she’d nursed all those weeks. The man she’d believed was different. The man who had never existed, not really. “Because I want to be clear about something, Pascal. We like this valley quiet. Remote. The sisters spend their lives here engaged in quiet contemplation. If they want the bustle of the city, they know how to drive themselves down to Verona. What none of us need or want, villager and nun alike, is whatever scheming Roman nonsense you or your minions brought with you.”

“I told you.” And his voice was harsher then. “I came here to face a ghost, nothing more.”

“I know that ghost is not me. Perhaps the ghost is the man you were, when you were here before. Because if we’re being honest, you left him that night, too.”

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t reel away from her as if she’d hit him. And yet, somehow, Cecilia had the distinct impression that she’d landed a blow. Possibly with a very sharp knife.

And she would have to spend some time questioning herself later. She would have to try to figure out why, when she’d dreamed of landing blow after blow, each harder than the last, the doing of it made her feel shaken.

“But that is something you can sort out on your own,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as off balance as she felt. “It doesn’t involve me.”

Because if she stood here any longer, she would forget herself. And she already knew what happened when she allowed herself to forget, particularly when she was around Pascal. More to the point, her life was different now. She had no desire to change it completely. Not anymore. Not again.

She stepped around him, yanking her bucket off the floor as she went. She headed for the door at the side of the altar that led into the vestry, thinking she could bar herself in the church if necessary. There were hours yet before she was due to pick up Dante and she very much doubted that a man like Pascal would lounge around, waiting. Whatever whim had brought him here would have him bored silly and heading for home before long.

“Cecilia.”

And she hated herself, because his voice, her name, stopped her. He still had that power over her. She had the despairing notion he always would.

“I’m going now,” she said, glaring at the window up above her. “Whatever you wanted out of this sudden return is your business. But I don’t want it. I don’t want any part of it.”

“You said I couldn’t have him,” he said. “Tell me who he is.”

She was staring up at the stained glass before her. And this was the moment of truth, wasn’t it? She had tried to call, of course. Once he had started appearing on the news, and in the magazines. She tried to do her duty by him. But she’d never made it past the main switchboard of his company. No matter who she spoke to, and no matter how they promised that someone would get back to her if her claim was found to be worthy, no one ever did.

Three years in, she’d stopped trying.

Since then she’d been certain that given the chance, she would, of course, come clean at the first opportunity.

But she hadn’t.

She’d excused the fact she hadn’t made the situation clear to his board members. She’d told herself that they didn’t deserve to know something Pascal didn’t already know himself. But deep down she’d believed that she would never see him again. That this moment would never come.

Now he was here. She had foolishly thrown Dante in his face straight off. Now he’d asked directly.

It was another opportunity to discover who she was, and once more Cecilia was faced with the lowering notion that it was not who she’d thought. Not at all. Because she wanted—more than anything—to lie. To say whatever was necessary to make him let her go. Forget about her. And never, ever, get anywhere near Dante.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She was too aware of her own pulse, pounding in places it normally didn’t. She swallowed, not surprised to find her throat was dry.

And then she made herself turn, because she had done harder things than this. Like sit up in a bed in the clinic, without a stitch of clothing on her body, and face Mother Superior directly. Then explain what on earth she was doing there. Or like when she’d started to show, and had been forced to leave the abbey—the only home she’d ever known—and find her own cottage to live in, just her and her growing belly and her eternal shame.

And neither of those things was all that difficult stood next to childbirth.

So she faced him. The man she had loved, hated and lost either way.

And she had no optimism whatsoever that what she was about to tell him would change that.

In fact, she suspected she was about to make it all much worse.

“He is your son,” she said, her voice echoing in the otherwise empty church. “His name is Dante. He doesn’t know you exist. And no, before you ask, I have absolutely no intention of changing that.”

CHAPTER THREE

HER WORDS WERE IMPOSSIBLE.

They made no sense, no matter how loudly they echoed in his head.

Pascal thought perhaps he staggered back beneath the weight of all that impossibility, possibly even crumpled to the floor—but of course, he did no such thing. He was frozen into place as surely as if the stones beneath him had made him a statue, staring back at her.

In horror. In confusion.

There must be some mistake, a sliver of rationality deep inside him insisted.

“What did you say?” he managed to ask through a mouth that no longer felt like his own.

Because while he was certain he had heard her perfectly well, no matter how he tried to rearrange those words in his head, they still didn’t make sense. They couldn’t make sense.

“This isn’t something I want to tell you,” Cecilia said, tilting her chin up in a belligerent sort of way that was one more thing that didn’t make sense.

Because the sweet almost-nun he’d known hadn’t had the faintest hint of belligerence in her entire body. Though her body was obviously the last thing in the world he needed to be thinking about just now.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she was saying. “So. Now you know.”

And then, astonishingly, nodded in punctuation. As if the subject was now closed.

“I cannot be understanding you.” His voice sounded as little like his own as the words felt in his mouth, and he still couldn’t seem to move the way he wanted to. Or at all.

Cecilia sighed as if he was testing her patience, another affront to add to the list. “You have a son, Pascal. And you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that. If memory serves, you never spared the slightest thought for any kind of birth control. What did you think would happen?”

It was the sheer insult of that—and the unfairness—that seared through him, hot enough to loosen his paralysis.

“I was recovering from a car accident in a hospital,” he gritted out. “When do you imagine I might have nipped out to the shops and found appropriate protection? I assumed you had taken care of it.”

“Taken care of it?” She actually laughed, which nearly let Pascal’s temper get the better of him. But she didn’t seem to notice. Or care if she did. “I was raised in a convent. With real-life, actual nuns. It might surprise you to learn that the finer details of condom use during premarital sex didn’t come up much during morning prayers.”

Pascal dragged his hands through his hair, though it was cut almost too short to allow it. Unless he was very much mistaken, his hands were actually shaking, something that might have horrified him unto his soul at any other moment. But right now he could hardly do more than note it and move on. It was that or succumb to the high tide swamping him, drowning him, tugging him violently out to sea.

“I cannot have a son,” he snapped out, not caring that his words were far too angry for a place like this. Holy and quiet, with the watchful eyes of too many saints upon him—and none of them as sharp as Cecilia’s gaze. “I cannot.”

Cecilia sniffed. And her remarkable eyes sparked with what he thought was temper, however little that made sense to him.

“And yet you do. But don’t worry. He’s perfect, and he doesn’t need you.” The gleam in her eyes intensified, and he felt it like a blow to the center of his chest. “Feel free to run back to your glossy magazines. Your lingerie models. Whatever makes you happy, Pascal. You can pretend we don’t exist. The way you’ve been doing for six years.”

“How dare you take that tone with me.” His voice was soft, because his fury was so intense he thought it might have singed his vocal cords. The rage and grief in him so hot and blistering he wasn’t sure he’d ever speak in a normal voice again. “You never told me you were pregnant.”

“How would I have done that?” She fired the question at him, plunking her bucket back down on the stone floor with a loud crash. She even took a step toward him as if she wanted this confrontation to get physical. “The first time I saw you mentioned in the papers, two years had gone by. Before that? You’d just disappeared overnight. The army had discharged you, and even if they hadn’t, they weren’t about to hand out a forwarding address. What was I supposed to have done?”

“You knew I was from Rome. You knew—”

If he hadn’t been close enough to see the pulse in her neck go wild, he might have believed the cold smile she aimed at him meant she wasn’t affected by this interaction. But Pascal wasn’t sure that knowledge was helpful.

“Right. So you think I should have…what? Wandered up and down the Spanish Steps while heavily pregnant?” she demanded. “Calling out your name? Or better still, climbed atop the Trevi Fountain with a newborn in my arms, demanding that someone in the crowd take me to you? How do think that would have worked?”

That she had a point only made his anguish worse.

How could this have happened? He couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to tear down this godforsaken church with his hands as if that would change the way she was looking at him. As if it could turn back time.

As if that could save him from the nasty reality that he’d become exactly what he most loathed without knowing it.

“You keep mentioning magazines, which means you clearly saw me in one,” he found himself saying as if he could argue the conviction from her face. As if he could make this her fault and make it better, or different, by shrugging off the blame. “You must have known the company existed. That must mean you could have contacted me. You obviously chose not to do so.”

Her laugh sliced into him. “I called your company repeatedly. Oddly enough, no one took me seriously. Or I assume they didn’t, because it took you all this time to turn up here.”

“Whoever else might have turned you away will be dealt with.” Though even as he said that, he already knew what had likely happened. Any reports of pregnancies would have been dismissed by Guglielmo as opportunists attempting to cash in on Pascal’s success. He would never have dreamed of wasting Pascal’s time with empty claims. “But if you had actually turned up on my doorstep, Cecilia, I would not have denied you entry.”

She actually dared roll her eyes. At him. “That’s good to know. Should you impregnate me and leave me behind like so much trash again, I’ll be sure to take that tack. I’ll gather up whatever children you’ve abandoned, camp out in your lobby and hope for the best. What could possibly go wrong?”

“What kind of person has a man’s child and fails to tell him?” Something cracked wide open inside him, and it was harder and harder to pretend he was angry when it went far deeper than that. When it felt like a catastrophic fissure, deep within. “It has been six years. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I know exactly what I’ve done, because I’ve been here the whole time, doing it,” she fired back at him, and he had the uneasy notion that she could see that yawning expanse inside him and was aiming straight for it. For him. “You knew where I was. You knew that I was unpardonably naive. You weren’t without experience as you made a point of mentioning more than once. Surely you must have known that anytime people have sex, especially without any protection, there’s the possibility of exactly this occurring. You never inquired.”

“How dare you put this responsibility on me.”

“I will not stand here and listen to lectures from the likes of you on responsibility, thank you,” she bit out. She moved even closer then, and went so far as to jab a finger toward him—very much as if she’d have liked to put out his eye. “You try being a single parent. All the feedings and diaper changes, the crying for no reason and sudden, scary illnesses. Where were you? Not here, handling them.”

“I could hardly handle something I didn’t know was happening.”

She jabbed that finger again, and it occurred to Pascal that she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d encountered such a thing. And certainly not from a woman he’d thought was a ghost a few hours ago—and who he remembered as nothing but sweet.

“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.”

“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.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.