He could hear the danger in his own voice. He thought she heard it too, because she did that thing with her chin. That defiant tilt, as if, left to her own devices, she might fight him.
“It’s the baby that needs your attention, Cristiano.”
And he had to grit his teeth against that word. Baby. Against all the things that happened in him when he thought of it.
Because he knew better. He knew what he was.
“Neither you nor the child will want for anything.” His lips thinned. “What more can you require of me than that?”
“Explain to me how this is going to go,” she said, in the brisk manner he recognized too well from her days as one of his vice presidents. His favorite vice president, he could admit, now she’d vacated her post. “I will have the baby here, presumably? And I do not doubt that you will see to it that the finest medical team in Europe is on hand. After he is born, I’m sure you will produce nannies. Tutors. Do you anticipate that he will simply live here forever? That he and I will shuffle around the Tuscan hills until we are interred beneath the soil ourselves?”
His teeth ached. Again. “There’s no need to be dramatic.”
“My mistake. Because there is no inherent drama whatsoever in imprisoning the mother of your child against her will.”
“Neither you nor the child will want for anything,” he gritted out again, repeating himself.
“The child will want a father,” she threw back at him. “And I—”
But she stopped herself. And he found himself roaming closer, not sure what it was that compelled him. That glow of hers, maybe, now mixed with the heat of her temper.
Cristiano had never seen anything so bright.
And he could not tell if he wanted to lock her away or put his hands on her instead. He could not tell which one hurt, which tempted him or how on earth he could possibly handle this. Her.
The baby.
“Finish your sentence,” he dared her. “What is it you want, Julienne?”
“I have known you for a long time, Cristiano. A very long time. I have seen the best of you firsthand. I have also seen you on one of your cold rampages, striking terror into whole divisions with a single stare.”
“And yet you do not know me at all,” he retorted.
“I know enough. You have your rules, don’t you? You like to be alone. No friends, no family, only work. You like a woman, but only for a night.”
“In this, I think you’ll find, I am no different than any other man.”
“But you’re not a playboy, forever in search of flesh and sin,” she said, and there was a different kind of light in her dark eyes. He could feel the echo of it inside him. “You’re afraid.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF SHE’D THROWN a lit match at him, she doubted Cristiano would look more thunderstruck.
But that was good, she assured herself as that thunderstruck expression tipped over into something significantly more forbidding. He might not want to know how she felt, but she was compelled to tell him anyway, for her sins.
There had to be something deeply wrong with her that this man—her captor, lest she forgot—could stride in here with a look on his face that suggested she was already trying his patience, and she should want nothing more than to go to him. To put her hands on him. To press her mouth to his and feel the kick of that race through her all over again.
“Call the police,” Fleurette had snapped at her, the first day. And every day since. “Or I will.”
“I can’t call the police,” Julienne replied every time. Today she’d added, “think of the baby, please, Fleurette. Does he need to come into the world to find his father in jail?”
But her sister knew her too well, and had responded to that pious tone with a snort.
“Maybe you should think of the baby,” she’d shot right back. “With your head, Julienne. Instead of whatever it is you’re thinking with these days.”
Julienne did not wish to examine what part of her person she might have been using lately, thank you. What mattered was that there would be no police. Paparazzi, perhaps, thanks to the wealth of personal letters Cristiano’s grandfather had kept in this library. Passionate letters, both the ones he’d received and copies of those he’d sent, which meant Julienne had the full picture of his extramarital affair—a relationship filled with longing and complaint, years of yearning and plans for more. Always more.
And privately, she might have felt somewhat ashamed about sharing those sentiments with the world by calling some of the contacts she’d made in her time at Cassara Chocolates, then letting them run with what she’d dug up. Then again, who wasn’t fascinated with stories of marital infidelity, long-term mistresses paraded around in plain view, and the truth about great men who had been very nearly canonized after their deaths?
Besides, she told herself now as Cristiano scowled at her, what else was she supposed to do? She was a kidnap victim. A kidnap victim held in glorious luxury, it was true, but all the lovely trappings in the world couldn’t change the fact she couldn’t leave.
Oh, said a voice inside her that sounded far too much like her sister, do you want to leave? Because that certainly isn’t clear.
That landed like a punch. Because Julienne knew, now, that anything she might have told herself about her motivations was a lie. She’d known that the moment she’d looked up and seen him there, smoldering and furious and still with that darkness all over his face.
As if she had not simply surprised him with this baby. As if she’d broken him instead. A notion that made her want to reach out and make it better, somehow, with her hands.
Fleurette would be appalled, she knew. But then, Fleurette was often and easily appalled. It was part of her charm.
“I must have misheard you, Julienne,” Cristiano said after what felt like a long, long while, in a conversational tone she in no way believed. Not when she could see that simmering fury in his dark gaze. “It sounded as if you called me a coward.”
“It’s a choice you have to make,” she threw back at him, head high, as if he didn’t get to her at all. Because he shouldn’t have gotten to her. “You can be a father or you can be afraid. So far, it appears you’ve chosen the latter.”
Because surely they could both figure out how to be better parents than the ones they’d had. She had to believe that was possible.
Cristiano’s glower took on a new weight, but she refused to be cowed. And as he prowled toward her, she reminded herself that he hadn’t exactly become less dangerous in the week he’d left her here.
What was wrong with her that something in her thrilled to that?
And worse, there was that melting between her legs. As if her body had already made its choices and would happily, exultantly, make them all over again.
“You are not the only person I met in that bar ten years ago,” he told her when he reached the table.
She felt a jolt at that, an awful kick. Was he trying to say...? But she couldn’t even complete that question in her own head.
“I was there in the first place because I knew my father was there that night,” he continued, sounding even darker than before. “He loved Monte Carlo. The excess soothed him. And when I found him, he was blind drunk, as ever. But in his blindness he retained a certain, vicious clarity. Particularly when it came to me.”
“In vino veritas is a lie,” Julienne said quietly, something she knew all too well. And she refused to acknowledge the sense of deep relief she felt that he was not telling her a story of how he’d had some other woman in that place she now thought of as theirs—the good and bad of it alike. “You must have learned the truth of this years ago.”
Cristiano’s mouth did something stark and bitter. “My father was not pleased to see me, which was the typical state of affairs between us.”
That bitter curve to his mouth only deepened, leavi
ng brackets in his hard face. And Julienne wished, suddenly, that he had not started to tell her this tale. She had a terrible feeling about where he was going with it.
But she couldn’t seem to speak when she needed to most.
Cristiano kept going, one hand on the table between them. “We had a fundamental disagreement, my father and I. He believed that it was his right to behave as he wished, without a single thought for any other living human being. In particular, my mother, who he took great pleasure in bullying. And I believed that if he wanted to careen about from one bottle to the next, then communicate with his fists, he should remove himself entirely from the rest of polite society. These were incompatible positions, obviously.”
And there was something about the way he was looking at her, that bittersweet gaze of his direct. Intense. Daring her to...argue? Deny him the opportunity to tell this story? She couldn’t tell. But whatever he was daring her to do, it made her pulse pick up. Her heart began to kick through her, slow and hard and insistent.
“I had long ago outgrown any need to rail at my father in the hope that he would become a different man before my eyes. Those are trials of adolescence and I had long ago become inured to his opinions of me. They mattered less and less in the course of my actual life and work. Left to my own devices, I rarely saw him.”
“Except that night,” Julienne managed to croak out, though her throat felt almost too tight to bear.
“That night it was necessary for me to seek him out,” Cristiano agreed, the banked fury in that dark gaze of his making her neck prickle. “It was not a task I relished, though if I am honest, there was a part of me that wanted it, too. My grandfather was concerned about the future of the company he had spent his life building. He was as disgusted with my father as I was was—more, probably. And after many years spent waiting and hoping that my father might straighten himself out and rejoin the family and the company as a contributing member, my grandfather had made a final decision. He’d gone ahead and cut my father off entirely. And had written him out of his will to boot.”
Julienne wanted to reach for him, but knew that Cristiano would never allow it. He stood too stiffly. His eyes were too dark. She braced her hands on the swell of her belly, and tried to focus on the story he was telling. And not how she longed to soothe a man who didn’t want to feel better. Who would actively avoid it if possible, in fact.
“Why were you the messenger?” she asked quietly instead, a sense of injustice welling up in her on his behalf. “Shouldn’t this have been something your grandfather told your father himself? It was his will.”
“My father and I did not see each other much, but my father and my grandfather had not spoken in years,” Cristiano said with a certain briskness that told Julienne a great many things about his family without him having to elaborate. And it occurred to her to wonder why she had always assumed that someone with his money must necessarily have no problems. Why she’d imagined that the money itself would protect him, when, of course, complicated people kept right on complicating things no matter their tax bracket. “It fell to me to deliver the news to him, if I chose.”
“If you chose?”
“I didn’t have to tell him that night. I could have waited for the inevitable explosion when he discovered his funding had disappeared, and for good. I might have, were it not for my mother.”
Julienne blinked. “She wasn’t still with him. Was she?”
“My mother believed deeply in the sanctity of marriage,” Cristiano replied, his voice as hard as it was cold. As if he was turning to ice before her eyes. “Or perhaps it was more that she felt she had made her bed and was required to lie in it ever after. I can’t say. I understood her very little, if I’m honest.”
Julienne shook her head. “But surely she wasn’t required to stay if your father was cruel to her.”
“There is no ‘get out of jail’ card for a bad marriage,” Cristiano said, a hard amusement in his voice that in no way made it to his eyes. “Not for my mother. She was raised to endure. This story you have dug up about my grandfather and Sofia Tomasi—I used to tell my mother that she should use it as her example. That it was possible to have something better. Different, anyway, even if she did choose to remain married. But she was horrified at the very idea.”
“So she stayed.”
“She endured.” Cristiano blew out a breath. “I admired my grandfather deeply. In many ways, he is the only hero I have ever known. But when he cut off my father, I knew that he was condemning my mother to more abuse. It was the only time we fought.”
Julienne searched his face, but there was only granite. “Did you think that if you spoke to your father he’d be nicer to your mother? I would have been afraid that it would make him go in the opposite direction.”
“I did not beg a man like Giacomo Cassara to treat his wife better.” Cristiano’s eyes gleamed with that cold near amusement that made Julienne shiver. “I wanted him to know first that despite his best efforts, his inheritance was mine. And second, that I didn’t care what he did with himself, but I would be watching over my mother. And prepared to take matters into my own hands if any harm befell her.”
Julienne’s mind spun. She tried to remember the bits and pieces of Cassara family history that had trickled down to her over the years. This rumor, that rumor. She knew his mother was no longer alive, of course. But did that mean...?
“My father proceeded to tell me that he thought about drowning me when I was a child. Repeatedly. Among other, less savory parental notions.” Cristiano paused, his mouth in a flat, hard line. “And then he staggered out of the bar. He collected my mother where, unbeknownst to me, she was waiting for him in a rented flat, and told the valet that he was driving them back to Milan. Meanwhile, I looked up from a dark contemplation of the only example of fatherhood I knew personally...to find you there. Determined to sell yourself.”
“Whatever your father said to you is a reflection of him, not you. You must know that.”
“Spare me the pop psychology, please.” His dark eyes glittered, remote and icily furious at once. “You and I can sit here and discuss at length the ways in which my father was a pathetic example of a man. But that does not change the fact there is something wrong with me. With this blood in my veins.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but a frigid glare stopped her.
“I always think of my grandfather as a good man, but as you have uncovered, there are reasons to think otherwise. If you traipsed across the length of this property and found my grandmother, she would tell you that the Cassaras are nothing but monsters. Devils sent to this earth to plague the decent.”
“In fairness, it seems your grandfather was fairly unrepentant about the fact he was cheating on her.” Julienne gestured at the table and the collection of letters. “He even brags about it.”
“There was only one good Cassara, and he died a long time ago,” Cristiano said. Firmly. “I never had any plans for there to be another.”
“Cristiano...”
“But there is more to the story.” And she was too well trained to obey that commanding voice of his. She’d been doing it for years. She fell silent without even meaning to do so while he kept telling her this same story that bookended hers. “While I was busy making arrangements for you and your sister and having you transported out of the country, my father was driving to Milan. But he never made it.”
The memory, foggy before, snapped back into place. There had been a car accident. She remembered the whispers she’d heard in the office about his past. And even more vaguely, the research she’d done on his family when he’d first installed them in the house in Milan.
But she didn’t want him to say it. Not here. She wanted to leap across the sun-drenched library table and throw her hands over his mouth to keep his words in.
As if that could make it any better for him.
The baby kicked
then. Hard. Sharing her distress, maybe, And for a moment she didn’t have to wonder why she couldn’t breathe.
“They say he lost control of the car in the Montferrat hills. But I know better. He was already drunk, and I had agitated him. And I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that the loss of a man like my father keeps me up at night. It doesn’t. It’s my mother I can’t let go.” Cristiano’s hard gaze bored into her. “He killed my mother, and it was my fault, and I have to live with that.”
“Cristiano—”
“And then I have to ask myself, what kind of man does not care that he sent his own father to his death?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Julienne said fiercely. She stepped out from behind the table and moved toward him, even though it was foolish. She couldn’t seem to help herself. “You weren’t the one who’d had too much to drink. You weren’t driving the car.”
“I knew what he was and I knew what might happen if he went off half-cocked. This is what I’m talking about, Julienne.” And she could see something besides that glacial cold in his dark eyes as she came closer. The torture. The pain. Her stomach twisted—for him. “I killed my mother as surely as if I was behind the wheel. And I let my father kill the both of them, because some part of me cared that little about where he would go and what he would do once he left that bar. Because the truth is, there is nothing good in me. I play a good game, but scratch the surface, and I’m nothing but another Cassara monster. A breaker of vows. A bully. A son who took great pleasure in taunting his father into staggering off and getting behind the wheel. One way or another, that makes me a killer.”
Julienne felt like crying. Or possibly already was. Her eyes were glassy and the library was becoming blurred at the edges.
But in the center of everything was Cristiano.
“None of that is true,” she managed to say.
And then she closed the last bit of distance between them and slid her hands on his chest.
He jolted as if she’d shocked him. His hands moved to capture hers, and she thought he would push her away, but he didn’t.
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