Secrets 0f His Forbidden Cinderella (One Night With Consequences)

by Caitlin Crews

  “I do not think it is the temporary aspect that you like,” he continued, in that same dangerous way. “I think it is quite the contrary. You imagine yourself in a place like this. It is a small cabin, but sturdy, and has stood right here in one form or another for centuries. You are thirsty for that kind of connection, are you not?”

  Her throat hurt, it was so dry. “I’m not thirsty for anything.”

  “I am not the only one who grieves,” Teo said, as inevitable as thunder. As terrible as the storm outside. And in here, too. “But you lost something rather different, did you not? The whole of your childhood.”

  She had wanted to be seen. By him, specifically. And now she wanted to hide.

  But there was ash on her hands and that aching thing where her heart should have been. And she was the one who had hidden herself last fall. She was the one who had made all of this happen. She owed him the penance she’d been paying.

  And that likely meant it wasn’t up to her to dictate the terms of that penance. Even if this was the price she had to pay.

  “I had a marvelous childhood,” Amelia retorted, a knee-jerk response that seemed to roll up and out of her whether she liked it or not. Because it was one thing to think about penance and scrub a not very dirty floor. It was something else entirely to pry herself open and expose herself to him. To anyone, but especially to him. “My mother took me everywhere with her.”

  “Like a pet.”

  “Like a friend.”

  “Parents are not meant to be friends,” Teo said with soft menace. “One cannot parent one’s friend. And children are by definition in want of a parent. I think you will find that it is all right there in the titles. Parent. Child. Friend. Not the same, is it?”

  Amelia made herself laugh, trying for airy and bright—but what came out made his dark brow lift.

  “Not everyone was raised up into a glorious bloodline, filled with tedious history and mausoleums with their names chiseled into the stone at birth,” she said. “Some people prefer a more carefree existence.”

  Her childhood had been many things, none of them carefree. And Amelia couldn’t understand why she felt one thing and then opened her mouth to find something else entirely coming out. As if her tongue was more afraid of vulnerability than she was.

  And meanwhile, Teo lounged in that bed half-naked, like some kind of god. Or satyr. And whatever he was, he made her dizzy. She wanted to fall down all over him, and burn herself on all that smooth, hard male perfection.

  The way she had last fall, but with all of her, this time. All of him.

  But she couldn’t seem to make her body move. Her legs were planted into the floor, as if her feet had taken root.

  Because if she went to him like this, without the mask or the dress, the lipstick or the red hair, she would be wide open. Exposed.

  He would know how much she wanted him.

  How much she always had.

  “You might convince me that your mother loved my father, in time,” Teo said darkly, that gaze of his too hot. “You might even convince me that your mother is not the gold digger she seems, but a woman who cannot help but fall in love. Repeatedly. And only upward on the social ladder. But you will never convince me that Marie French loves anything so much as she loves herself. Not even you, Amelia.”

  It wasn’t as if Amelia hadn’t heard such things before. Or some variation thereof. But she had never heard it quite like this.

  Quietly.

  With that devastating certainty that rolled through her like truth.

  The truth she had never wanted to look at face-on.

  Something walloped her, and she wanted to tip back her head and let it out. Sob through it. Scream about it. Just get it out—

  But almost before she could process the hit of it, something else smacked her down.

  Because she didn’t think that Teo was being cruel for the sake of it.

  He was lying there, naked to the waist—and for all she knew, naked beneath that sheet—and he was looking at her as if he could see deep inside her. To the place where that great sob remained trapped. To the place where she’d hidden from everything and everyone for as long as she could remember.

  Even him, last fall.

  But here, in this cabin on top of a remote mountain in the Pyrenees, he saw her.

  Just as she’d wanted. Just as she’d feared.

  He saw her.

  Amelia had a brief thought for that sixteen-year-old version of herself, who would have done anything to gain his notice. Anything at all. No matter what it took, no matter the cost. And now she understood things she couldn’t have, then. That some prices hurt to pay almost beyond bearing, because the way he looked at her was ruthless. Pitiless. Merciless, even.

  It wasn’t in any way the kind of longing looks she’d imagined in her youth.

  But it was perfect.

  Scathing, serious, beautiful and perfect.

  And Amelia still couldn’t look away.

  “Much as I enjoy watching you squirm in my doorway, with soot on your face and ash prints on my walls,” Teo said, “this is not what I would consider an ideal way to end a trying evening.”

  He lifted that brow of his, an arrogant query that on a face like his was more properly a demand. And some part of her was amazed that he could seem just as untouchable, just as remote and powerful, lying down half-naked in a bed as he did when he was standing—likely surrounded by portraiture and statuary, all of them bearing features that looked like his and taken together, told the story of Spain.

  “What is it you want?” he asked, holding her gaze hostage.

  For once in her life, Amelia didn’t dare look away. She didn’t dare hide.

  She felt torn asunder, though she knew she stood in one piece. She had spent the whole of her life trying her best to pretend a great number of things. That her mother loved her the way a mother should. That her life was a madcap adventure.

  That this man did not matter to her. Because he shouldn’t have.

  Amelia had tried to forget him. And when that didn’t work, she’d tried a spot of immersion therapy.

  And here she was again, and it was worse this time. She carried his child. His son. The heir to that absurd monster of a house.

  Amelia knew that he would never allow her to take their son away from him. That he would not have allowed it if the only thing he planned to leave his heir was debt. Perhaps she’d known that before she’d gotten on that plane in San Francisco. Perhaps she’d always known it.

  She could pretend all she liked that if she was stubborn enough, dedicated enough to this penitent game she was playing, he would give in—but she knew better, didn’t she?

  The Duke did not give. He did not bend. There was not one part of his life that required compromise or quarter, and accordingly, he offered neither. He never would.

  And suddenly Amelia felt as exhausted as if she’d crawled up that winding mountain road on her own hands and knees. She felt as if he’d clawed away a crucial veil she kept between her and the reality of her life, of her, of what she’d done to both of them, and it hurt.

  It all hurt.

  Maybe it had always hurt, and she was only now admitting it.

  Her hands crept over her belly, and she thought about longevity. About centuries upon centuries of one family, one house, one enduring vision that united them all.

  And how, in comparison, the ragtag itinerant lifestyle she’d lived with her mother seemed so shoddy.

  If she could choose a life for her baby—and she could, by God, and would—she would not choose hers.

  All she had to do was surrender.

  And risk that he would see the real truth about her stamped all over her face, her body. That without her various masks, he would know the real her.

  And scarier still, her heart.

  �
��I will ask again,” he said, his voice more stern, if such a thing was possible. All ice and disapproval, and she was a twisted creature, wasn’t she, that she craved that from him. It made her restless, hot. “What do you want? Why did you come in here?”

  “I’m ready,” she said, and had the sense that she’d run to the edge of one of the mountain cliffs all around and instead of stopping, had catapulted herself out into the great abyss.

  Now came the fall.

  And if she was very, very lucky, a little bit of something like flight on the way down.

  “Are you indeed.” He considered her while her heart hurt and between her legs, she was bright and needy. “Ready for what, cariña?”

  “I’m ready...”

  And she couldn’t bring herself to say it all. He wanted a wife. A duchess. It didn’t mean he wanted her. Though at the same time, she knew the ways he did want her. She could feel them all, a molten thing inside her.

  She wanted those things, too.

  She wanted everything.

  And she had to imagine that if she gave him what he wanted, someday—some way, as she marched along this road that had been carved out for her by Marinceli brides for hundreds and hundreds of years, because love was not a prerequisite for a duke of his magnificence—she would convince him to give her what she wanted, too.

  All the things she wanted.

  She cleared her throat, because it was still so dry she was surprised it didn’t catch flame. But the rest of her was taking care of that. She was surprised she wasn’t burnt straight down to a cinder.

  “I’m ready,” she said. And found herself smiling, almost despite herself, because a Pyrrhic victory was still better than a total loss. It had to be. “Are you going to share that bed?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  TEO TRIED TO tell himself that passion was not the point here, that this had been an exercise in obedience only, but his body was paying him no mind. He was hard and ready, on the verge of desperate—the way he’d been since she’d strolled back into his life.

  Amelia stayed in the doorway for another moment, as if she was hesitating. Waiting, he realized. For him to answer her question.

  It was hard for him to imagine she couldn’t see his answer, stamped all over him.

  The past ten days had been torture. Sheer and utter torture, that he’d had to pretend didn’t affect him at all. Amelia had bustled about playing house, which hadn’t been why he’d brought her here. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’d assumed that a woman like her—a woman like her mother, more properly—would be unable to last twenty-four hours pretending to be a servant. He been certain they’d be back home and planning their wedding, and their future, within two days’ time at the most.

  Amelia was nothing like he’d expected.

  He had actually spoken to her about his father’s besottedness with Marie, something he had never really discussed with anyone—because it was too easy, from there, to delve into his own sense of loss over his mother. And how his father’s obvious obsession with another woman had seemed to Teo like he was making a mockery of not only Teo’s grief, but of his first marriage altogether.

  How had he even started down this road with Amelia?

  He didn’t understand how he could have been so wrong about her. Assuming he was actually wrong, that was. Assuming this wasn’t simply some game she was playing.

  But he thought not. Not when her remarkable eyes were so big and bright. Not when her lips parted as if her breath was its own kind of torture—a sensation he knew too well just then. And not when she’d left a perfect handprint of ash on his door.

  “By all means,” he said, fighting to sound appropriately unaffected when really, he wanted to leap from the bed and charge her like an untried boy. “Join me.”

  He waited.

  And still, she hesitated, there on the threshold with something too raw to be hope in her gaze and soot on her cheek.

  “Let us be clear about what it means if you climb into this bed with me,” he found himself saying, every muscle in his body clenched tight in anticipation. Need. And a driving force he wanted to call rage. Though he knew better. “What it means if you take this step.”

  He was afraid he knew exactly what it was, and it wasn’t rage.

  “I know,” Amelia said softly. “Believe me, Teo. I know.”

  For a moment that he was certain lasted a thousand years or more, their gazes clashed. Held. And he could see something in the violet depths that made him shake.

  It threw him. It humbled him. It made him feel as if he was soaring.

  All at once.

  But before he could catalog it, process it, compartmentalize it and move to counter it, somehow, she began to move.

  She wore her usual uniform, which would never have passed muster if she was an actual servant in a grand house. She liked stretchy pants that clung lovingly to her thighs, her calves, and layered-on distractingly soft T-shirts and that finely woven sweater that she’d worn the first day. And since.

  There wasn’t a single part of her that was appropriate. From the ash on her face to her bare feet, where her toenail polish was bright red and chipped.

  Teo had been used to the best of everything, all of his life. He had never understood until these past ten days how limiting that was. And all the glorious, mesmerizing things it left out of the equation.

  Like the way Amelia frowned so fiercely as she slept, and how flushed her cheeks were when she first woke in the mornings. The soft little noises she made, of delight or frustration, as she found her way through the various chores he’d set for her. How her blond hair looked when she knotted it carelessly on the top of her head, and the little curls that sprang up at her nape when she worked over the fire.

  Ten days ago he would have sworn up and down that his baser urges aside, he could only ever view a woman like this is as a convenience, or temporary fix. His tastes were too refined, too deeply aristocratic, to seek permanence with so little effort toward outward perfection.

  But that was before he’d spent ten days battling his own intense urges when it came to this woman.

  There was nothing perfect about her. And yet somehow, every imperfection he found made him want her more.

  Her face without makeup. That crooked smile she wore when he lapsed off into some history lesson she hadn’t requested. The look of wonder and hope on her face when he caught her with her hands on her belly.

  More and more and more. Teo was full up on more, but it didn’t stop. It only got worse.

  Amelia came to the side of the bed, then lifted one knee to slide it onto the mattress, slowly. As if she still wasn’t certain about what she was doing.

  Meanwhile, Teo was so greedy for her he thought he might burst into flame. Or perhaps he already had.

  “There’s no going back,” he warned her, his voice gruff. “If you choose this, it is done. We will marry. And soon. The legitimacy of the Marinceli heir can never be in question.”

  “Must you threaten me even now?” she asked, and though her violet gaze was intense, he thought her smile was real. And that shook him, too. “Is this a duke thing? Or just a you thing?”

  “I want to make sure this is an informed decision on your part,” he said, dark and low because it was all he could manage. “Because once the decision is made it is permanent.”

  “Why are you acting as if I have a choice now?”

  She pulled her other leg onto the bed with her, so she was kneeling there at his side. And her bougainvillea eyes were alive with heat and laughter. And he, who had been surrounded by interchangeably lovely things for the whole of his life, had never glimpsed anything as beautiful as this.

  Amelia beside him, her eyes bright and laughter like a new flush on her face.

  Like hope, he thought, and that made something in him lurch.

  “I am prepared
to wait here as long as it takes,” he said, even darker and more gruff, to cover that lurch inside him where he should have felt nothing at all. “Once it is done, it is done.”

  “Your Excellency,” she said, and he could hear the laughter then, too, “do you ever shut up?”

  And there was no time to take umbrage at that impertinence, because she simply...toppled forward, flinging herself across his chest with a thud.

  Teo had never thought of himself as a man of extremes, because there weren’t any in his life. Marincelis endured. The centuries passed. Extremes came and went, like little pops of color and moments of theater, but there was always the dukedom. Unchangeable and eternal.

  But Amelia was a tangle of too much color to wave away. A snarled, hopeless knot. There was something profoundly silly in the way she flung herself against him, and he was not a silly man. She made him wish he was.

  Amelia was touching him, then. He could feel the sweet weight of her breasts and felt it as her nipples turned to hard points against his chest.

  And Teo had never felt this strange mixture of heat and laughter, silliness and that punch of sensuality that was all Amelia. Only Amelia. He felt almost breathless. Altered.

  She lifted her head and grinned. When he frowned, she grinned more. So he frowned all the harder.

  Only after he did so did he realize he wanted to see her grin as she did then. Big. Bright. Fearless and beautiful.

  “A good duchess does not tell her Duke to shut up, cariña,” he said frostily. Though he couldn’t maintain the tone. Not with her soft weight in his arms.

  “You didn’t say I had to be a good duchess,” she said, laughing at him in that way only she dared. “Only that I had to become one. If you’re expecting me to excel in the position, you should resign yourself to disappointment here and now.”

  But all Teo could think about then, like a flash of heat, was that he could no longer imagine anyone else in the role. Only her. Only Amelia, with soot on her face like an urchin, too loud and too inappropriate, and as of this moment, his.

  Entirely his.