Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  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 w
hether 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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WE ARE NOT in the habit of turning away petitioners in need,” said Mother Superior, her face as smooth and ageless as it had been six years ago. She could have been fifty or eighty, for all Pascal could tell. There was a canny wisdom in her gaze and a certain scratchy archness in her voice. And the smile she aimed at him made him want to drop to his knees and rededicate himself to a faith he had never felt deeply enough to pronounce in the first place. “Not even those who took advantage of our hospitality once before.”

  “You are too good,” Pascal murmured in reply.

  He would sooner rip off his own arms than admit how strange it had seemed to him to walk up to the front door of the abbey. Then wait to be admitted into Mother Superior’s presence as if he was any visitor. Not one who had lived here for months and not of his own accord.

  Pascal had never intended to return.

  Moreover, he had gone to great lengths to deny that he had ever been as helpless or weak as he had been when he’d been stuck here. He liked to touch his scars to remind him that he could overcome any obstacle, but he had stopped permitting himself to remember the details of this particular obstacle. This valley and the stone abbey were a story he told to illustrate both his strength of will and his ability to climb out of any pit.

  He’d managed to convince himself that none of it was real.

  But the stone building that housed the abbey had stood in this same spot for centuries. It had been a fortress, a castle and a monastery, and it was built to last ten more centuries in much the same forbidding condition. He followed Mother Superior as she glided along the smooth, spotless halls, made somewhat less dim by the lights set into sconces every few meters. He had to double-check that the lights were electric, and not torches. Because otherwise, it could have been any one of the past five centuries.

  It was a relief to exit the old part of the abbey and cross into the modern clinic building. And somehow he was not the least bit surprised when the nun led him to the very same chamber where he’d stayed years before. He stopped in the doorway, not sure he was in complete control of himself as he looked around. But nothing had changed. The same whitewashed walls, free of everything save two items that were surely not considered decoration. The crucifix on the wall across from the narrow bed. And above the bed, a Bible verse in a frame.

  No wonder he had spent his time staring out the window at the cold fields instead.

  “As you can see, we have kept everything just as you left it,” Mother Superior said genially, but her gaze was sharp.

  “How thoughtful,” Pascal managed to say, even as a revolt took place inside him. As if he was doomed to months of confinement if he stepped across the threshold—

  But he was not a superstitious man.

  And he would not let this absurd attack of malicious nostalgia affect him.

  He stepped into the room, reclaiming it. Because the last time he’d been here, he’d been carried inside. In pieces.

  It took him a long time to look at the nun. And to get the distinct impression she’d known exactly how hard it was for him to be here.

  “Perhaps this time you can concentrate more on the cultivation of inner peace, and less on external stimulation,” she said when she had his full attention, her tone dry enough to make a desert weep.

  Pascal would not have taken that tone from anyone else, but this was Mother Superior. And Pascal might not consider himself one of the faithful, but he was an Italian man, and therefore entirely too Catholic by definition to fight with a nun. No matter what she did.

  Something he was certain Mother Superior knew well.

  Once
she left him to his uneasy memories, Pascal found himself with nothing to do but sit on the edge of the narrow bed where he’d wasted far too much time already. Most of it fighting pain and wondering if he would ever stand and walk out of this place of his own volition and on his own two feet.

  And, he could admit, with a few very brief moments of joy.

  All involving Cecilia.

  He didn’t know what impulse it had been that got him in his car and brought him here. He’d been haunted by her across the years, it was true. But he’d wanted to put that ghost to rest. He never imagined for a moment that she’d been keeping this kind of secret from him.

  And it was easier to bluster on about what he wanted and what he planned to do when she was standing there in front of him.

  The simple truth was that he had a son. He, Pascal Furlani, had a son.

  He couldn’t quite grasp the wonder of that. And the devastation, so quick on its heels. One chased the other, and he found himself thinking not of the little boy in the center of it, but of himself as a little boy. He had been in the center of a similar storm. And he’d found himself battered about, used as a pawn by his mother, then neglected when her machinations to force his father’s hand didn’t work.

  He would never do that to his own child.

  He vowed that to himself, here and now. Whatever happened, he would keep his feelings about what Cecilia had done in a separate compartment entirely. He would make sure that whatever the storms that raged between the two of them, the child would feel none of it. Cecilia claimed he was healthy and happy—well, now, he was healthy, happy and the sole heir to all Pascal had.

  He lowered himself to prone position, and lay there, his hands folded on his chest and his eyes on the ceiling. A position he’d assumed in this very bed a thousand times before. He knew that ceiling better than he knew his own face. Every centimeter. Every faint crack or hint of discoloration. He knew how the light crept across the room on sunny days, and how the cold wind made the door rattle.