The Italian's Pregnant Cinderella (Mills & Boon Modern)

by Caitlin Crews

  And for a very long moment, they stood there, frozen.

  “You are nothing like your father,” she told him with all the ferocity she could muster. “I knew your grandfather too, don’t forget, and the difference between you and him is that you don’t make vows unless you know you can keep them. Forever. There are a thousand things that can make an innocent child grow into a man like your father, but none of them are in your blood, Cristiano. Not one of them.”

  And before he could argue any further, she thrust herself up on her tiptoes, somehow balancing the weight of her belly, and pressed a kiss to his mouth.

  She hadn’t meant to do that.

  Or maybe she had, because Lord knew, every night she tried to sleep in this villa—this gorgeous prison—and her head was full of nothing but him. Images of the things they’d done. Of the things they might yet do. She woke up in the dark, her body one great throbbing pulse of need, and he was never there.

  But Cristiano was here now. And he was hurting.

  And somehow a kiss seemed to be the answer to everything. A give and a take. A soothing and a sharing, for both of them.

  So she angled her head and took it deeper.

  Just the way he’d taught her.

  She felt him shake. It was as if he was melting, there while she touched him, and she knew that if he was in control of himself the way he normally was, he would never have allowed it. He would certainly never have let her see it.

  She had the sense of glaciers melting, ice floes cracking.

  Until slowly, almost reluctantly, he kissed her back.

  And she forgot, for a moment, that he had spirited her off to this place. She forgot the baby. The great belly that was now pressed between them.

  Cristiano kissed her and she forgot her own name.

  She heard a faint noise, low and greedy, and only belatedly realized that it was her. That it was coming from her own throat.

  And when he tore his mouth from hers, he looked hunted. Haunted, something in her supplied.

  With perhaps more satisfaction than necessary.

  “It is already too much,” he said, dark and low. “It is already gone too far.”

  “I don’t know what that means.” But she understood well enough when he stepped away, backing away from her as if she’d done something to him. “Are you disgusted by my pregnancy?” Her voice was much too brittle, but she did nothing to stop it. She couldn’t. “Is that what this is?”

  “You glow,” he bit out, as if the words erupted from within. “If it is possible, you’re more beautiful now than you were before, damn you. And I think you know it.”

  That was meant to be an indictment, clearly. He threw it at her, then wheeled around, and stalked away.

  And Julienne should no doubt have taken herself off for another good cry.

  But instead, she found herself standing there where Cristiano had left her, her mouth still tingling from the taste of him, and a smile she couldn’t quite control on her face.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE WOMAN WAS a demon.

  There was no other explanation for that kiss. The way he’d responded and worse, what he’d said to her as he walked away. This was precisely what he’d wanted to avoid. It was why he’d stashed her away in Tuscany in the first place.

  Did you really think she wouldn’t cause problems for you? a harsh voice inside him asked. If you wanted to keep her out of trouble, you should have made sure she couldn’t contact the outside world. A prison isn’t much of a prison when a person has full access to her media contacts, is it?

  Cristiano meant to return to Milan. He needed to keep away from this woman who had unaccountably haunted him long before she’d turned up pregnant. But halfway to the helicopter, he thought better of it. Leaving Julienne to her own devices helped no one, least of all him. Especially not when he was stalked by the reporters she’d sent after the family secrets.

  Unapologetically.

  That was what he told himself, in any case, as he sent for his things and then set up his usual remote office in the villa.

  His intention—had anyone asked, which no one would dare—was simply to monitor the situation here. To repress any further attempts to stir up trouble.

  Even if he still didn’t know why he’d shared the details of that night in Monaco with her, when he’d never talked about that night with anyone. Much less the guilt and shame he carried with him even now.

  And once in the villa, he expected her to show that relentless streak he’d so admired when she’d worked for him. He expected interrogations over his morning cappuccino, demands for further discussions at the end of his work day, or appearances in the middle of conference calls that would cause him difficulties with his colleagues when so many of them knew her.

  But Julienne did none of these things.

  She appeared at dinner that first night looking fresh and easy, seeming to shine even brighter than before. The smile she aimed his way was sunny, which had the direct result of making him glower.

  “The staff tell me that you have insisted on a solitary dinner service every night,” he said, sitting in his usual spot at the head of the grand table, the centerpiece of the formal dining room. “Right here at this table.”

  She beamed at him, sitting directly to his right. “There have to be some perks to finding oneself marooned in Tuscany. I decided I might as well make use of your fine staff and your truly excellent cook.”

  And when Cristiano could seem to do nothing at all but stare darkly at her, she smiled again, even more sunnily. Then she turned her attention to her antipasti.

  He resolved to use this experience—sharing the villa with her, against his will—as an opportunity for some immersion therapy. He did not wish to be haunted, thank you. He wanted her out of his head, his unfortunate dreams, his life. Cristiano felt certain that familiarity must breed its usual contempt, and that in short order this thing that ate away at him would disappear completely.

  Once it did, he could approach the rest of this rationally. Carefully.

  But everywhere he went, she seemed to be there. Even if she was not physically in the room, there was some reminder of her. Her scent on the breeze, or the sound of her laughter from across the atrium.

  More than that, the woman he associated so strongly with a particular corporate sleekness and style of dress preferred to go about...naked.

  Well. Not precisely naked.

  But as the weather got warmer, Julienne could often be found out at the swimming pool, set slightly down the hill from the house, sunning herself.

  Wearing absolutely nothing but a bikini.

  And he had not lied to her that day in the library. He found her new, impossibly lush body astonishingly beautiful. Almost too beautiful to bear.

  He might not want to think of his impending fatherhood. He actively avoided it, in fact. But it was impossible not to look at Julienne and think of fertility. Of spring and sunshine, colorful new flowers and the fresh green of new growth.

  She was bright and round and ripe, and every moment he did not have his hands on her was a torment.

  Cristiano found himself in his own hell. Here at the villa, where he had always come for sanity. For an escape from the tumultuous life his parents led. One week led into the next, a riot of longing and fury, Julienne’s knowing smiles, and those dinners that required more self-control than they should have.

  Familiarity with Julienne bred nothing like contempt. On the contrary, it ignited nothing short of an obsession.

  But he knew addicts too well. And he knew that succumbing to the itch was always worse, in the long run. Always. Far better to white knuckle his way through this without sampling her again.

  Sooner or later, this vice grip she had on him would fade. He was sure of it.

  One night at dinner, she looked up from the gazpacho that had
been served as their first course and announced that the doctor would be coming the following morning.

  “It was so thoughtful of you to set up an obstetrician’s office of sorts in one of the studies,” she said, in that tone of hers he spent far too much time analyzing. Was she mocking him? Was that a hint of a sardonic slap? Or had he gone utterly mad and was now parsing her tone? “If you come to the appointment tomorrow, you’ll be able to see—”

  “‘Come’?” Cristiano stared at her from across the table, the icy distance he preferred to keep between them crumbling into so much ash. “Why would I attend your doctor’s appointment?”

  And for the first time since he’d come here, that sunny, breezy demeanor of hers cracked.

  First, that smile tumbled from her face. Her gaze darkened. She put her fork down and took a breath, as if he was trying her patience. And more—messing with her head the way she was doing with his.

  Funny how that seemed a hollow victory.

  “What game are you playing, Cristiano?” she demanded, an undercurrent in her voice that made his chest tight. “Why would you be here, however reluctantly, if you didn’t want some part in your son’s life?”

  Cristiano stared back at her as if he was made entirely from stone. It would be easier if he was, he knew. “I’m here to encourage you not to continue to seed the voracious Italian press with scandalous stories about my grandfather,” he told her, crisply, as if he couldn’t see the dark thing between them. Not even now it was all over her lovely face. “And if I cannot encourage you to stop, to prevent you from doing it all the same.”

  Julienne sat back in her seat, her belly taking up most of the room between them. Or so it seemed to him, because that gloriously round belly was all he could see.

  She studied him for far too long. With a considering sort of look in her clever eyes that made him feel far too exposed. “Let me guess. This is your fear talking. Again.”

  He didn’t like that. “I am who I am. Who I have always been in all the years you have known me. It is hardly my fault if you cannot accept this now that you are with child.” He shrugged. “Perhaps this is an example of the pregnancy hormones I have heard so much about.”

  There was hot color on her cheeks, then, and something perilously close to disappointment in her eyes. When, if he was honest with himself, it had been his intention to prick her temper.

  Not disappoint her.

  He had already disappointed the first woman who had ever meant something to him. He couldn’t bear the idea that he was doing it again.

  “People choose who they are,” Julienne told him, her voice much too quiet. Not shrill, not furious. Just that quiet directness that scraped at him, leaving deep grooves inside her. “Every day, you choose. It’s not destiny that makes a man, or his bloodline. It’s how he behaves.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You forget how you met me,” she shot back.

  Cristiano had not forgotten. And now, because of what had happened ten years later, all his memories of her were infused with an eroticism the reality had not possessed. Like all those years in offices around the world when he somehow hadn’t fully looked at her. He remembered them like torture now. And when he thought of Monte Carlo now, she was this version of Julienne both times—not the terrified sixteen-year-old she’d been then.

  You are sick, he accused himself. Do you need any further proof?

  But then, he had despaired of himself for the whole of the last decade.

  “You never asked either one of us too much about where we came from,” Julienne said now, still sitting back in her chair and frowning at him. “Which was a mercy, as neither Fleurette nor I ever wanted to speak of it. You told me that first night that you assumed that if selling my body was my only option, my other options must be wretched indeed.”

  “You have mentioned your mother before,” he said darkly. He didn’t wish to have this conversation. Or any conversation. He wanted to remain in merry ignorance forever, if that would keep this woman at arm’s length. If that was what he wanted. Which, he assured himself forcefully then, he did. Of course he did. “I understand that your childhood was unpleasant.”

  If she heard his repressive tones, she ignored it.

  “In my village, they called my mother a ‘party girl,’” Julienne told him. “A lovely euphemism, is it not? When what she was, always, was an addict. She had me when she was seventeen. Sometimes she liked to claim that I ruined her life, but even as a child, I knew that wasn’t true. She was the one who ruined her life, over and over again.”

  “I don’t see what the story has to do with our situation,” Cristiano said gruffly.

  Because the last thing he needed was to have more reasons to feel things where this woman was concerned.

  “It’s hard for me to look back and figure out what I knew then and what I know now, thanks to the passing of so many years.” Julienne sighed. “But my mother would do anything for a good time. At a certain point they began to tease me about it in school. Everyone knew who the easiest woman in the village was, and how they could get their hands on her. So you see, when I decided to sell myself, I knew what to do. I thought I would try to differentiate myself from my poor mother by charging more than a pack of cigarettes or a ride home.”

  His jaw was so tight he worried it might shatter. “I do not see the purpose of wandering off down memory lane, Julienne.”

  But she didn’t relent. “Men began to look at me early. Too early. There were leers, suggestive comments. One of my mother’s friends told me that the Boucher women had a certain look. That anyone could tell they were made to be whores. And yes, he said women. He wanted to be sure to include Fleurette, who could not have been more than eight at the time. It was as if we had price tags around our necks, and a clock counting down. All the men in that village were waiting for was the opportunity.”

  That chin of hers rose, defiant and something more.

  And there was a howl in him that Cristiano doubted would ever fade.

  Julienne’s smile was brittle. “On the day I decided to leave that town forever, I had been propositioned no less than three times. It was just an ordinary day. And I knew, you see, that it was only a matter of time before I surrendered to my fate. There was nowhere to go on that cursed hill. No one would hire one of the Boucher women to do an honest job. Who would have a whore like that behind the counter? Or even sweeping a floor where decent people might go?”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Cristiano demanded, convinced there was ground glass in his mouth as he spoke. “Is it your intention that I find this village and burn it to the ground?”

  He would do it personally. And with pleasure.

  “You are a Cassara,” she threw at him, her voice fierce, then. “The blood you are so ashamed to have in your veins makes you a billionaire twice over. You can buy anything you wish. You were never trapped in a forgotten hill town, doomed to be a whore. And yes, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a benefactor at the least likely moment. But I didn’t lounge about, bemoaning my good luck. I claimed it. Don’t you see? I worked night and day to be worthy of my rescue.”

  Cristiano didn’t know when he had stopped pretending to pick at his dinner. Or when they’d faced off, there at the corner of the great table in the dining room, staring each other down as if at any moment one of them might throw a punch.

  What was wrong with him that he almost thought it would be a relief?

  “I know you cannot be suggesting that I am...lazy, is it?”

  “Not lazy, perhaps. But you certainly do work at your self-pity the way others work for a paycheck.”

  He growled. “Be very, very careful, cara.”

  “Or what?” Julienne asked wildly, and laughed in a way he could not say he enjoyed at all. “Let me guess. You will imprison me on a remote property and leave me to live
out my days in forced solitude. That will show me.”

  “Here is one thing you apparently did not learn in your vicious little hill town.” He leaned closer to her, which was a mistake. “Things can always get worse. They often do.”

  Julienne sighed, a great heaving sound, as if plagued. By him, presumably.

  “When our son is old enough, will you sit right here this table and tell him these things?” she demanded. When he was used to making the demands in all situations. “Will you make certain to let him know that he’s cursed already? As doomed as I was? How will you make sure that he’s aware of the Cassara corrosion that already pollutes him?”

  Cristiano found he couldn’t answer that. He only stared back at her, something dark and edgy gripping him. Crushing him.

  “When he seeks his father for comfort, will you push him down to the ground? Slap him until he cries—or stops crying? That’s what your father did to you, didn’t he?”

  “Stop it,” he ordered her, with a stranger’s voice.

  But her eyes were too bright with an emotion he couldn’t identify.

  “I know. You’ll wait until he really needs you. When he’s a man grown but still needs a father figure. You’ll get drunk. You’ll say appalling things, calculated to slice him into pieces. Then you’ll totter out of the bar, hurt yourself, and blame him for it.”

  She might as well have thrown a bomb at him. Cristiano wished she had.

  “That is more than enough,” he growled at her. “I believe you’ve made your point.”

  But he could see that wild thing was still on her, in her. She stared straight at him, challenge stamped on every inch of her, opened her mouth—

  And Cristiano did not want to hear whatever came next.

  He pushed back from his chair, hardly aware that he was moving, and then he was looming over her. But that was good, because she sucked in a breath. And did not say whatever shattering thing was next on her list.

  A win, as far as he was concerned.

  He pulled out her chair so he could lean down over her and brace himself on the arms, holding her there.