Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  He would wait for his introduction. Then he would do exactly as he pleased.

  Cecilia waited as if she expected him to keep talking, then let out a sound that he couldn’t quite define when he didn’t. “That doesn’t explain why you would want to marry me.”

  He remembered that moment at the side of the field when it had all gotten to him. When he had found himself swamped with a kind of longing he had since dismissed. Because he was Pascal Furlani, not some soft, emotional creature. He had been reacting to the shock, that was all.

  It had been a long, long time since anyone had managed to surprise him.

  But he had been given a great many days to accustom himself to this new development in his life. He had a son. That was what mattered. And a son deserved a family. So Pascal could marry his son’s mother or he could marry someone else—he didn’t much care which, but he was going to make Dante a family.

  One way or another, he was going to spend his son’s first Christmas with a father like the family man his board of directors did not believe he could be.

  “I am a deeply unromantic man,” he told Cecilia. He waited as she turned slightly so she could look at him again. “My mother spent a great deal of time carrying on about her great love affair. It shadowed the whole of our lives. And as the result of that affair, I can assure you, love had nothing to do with it.”

  He could see her take that in and consider it.

  “So the marriage you’re proposing is in name only.”

  Pascal saw the faint flare of something like hope in her gaze, too.

  Maybe that was why he laughed.

  Or maybe he was a bastard in more than simple, biological fact.

  “I don’t need you to be in love with me, if that’s what you mean,” he said, again enjoying himself more than he should. “And I’m not capable of love myself. I require a wife in any case. I’ve been searching for one for some time. The trouble was, I did not wish there to be a hint of scandal attached to her.”

  “I’m the most scandalous woman in this village,” Cecilia said. Clearly hoping that would disqualify her from consideration. “I’m obviously not the right choice for a man of your...stature.”

  That stature was not the word she’d meant to use was obvious enough that Pascal almost thought her intended word glimmered in the air between them, like the heat from the fire.

  “Your only scandal is me.” And when he saw her gaze take on a calculating gleam, he laughed again. “Do not bother to tell me otherwise. According to all sources in and out of the abbey, I was your only mistake. Which makes you perfect for my purposes.”

  “I feel certain that I want nothing to do with what you call perfection.”

  “You have a choice, cara,” he said, drawling a little as he said it. “Never let it be said I am not magnanimous.”

  She looked like she wanted to strangle him, which should probably not have made him hard in instant, enthusiastic response.

  “Yes,” she seethed at him. “Magnanimous is precisely the word I would have chosen to describe you.”

  “Should you choose to marry me, you will be doing me a favor,” Pascal continued, almost happily. “You will help me to create a charming picture of domesticity to undercut my board of directors’ machinations. You’ve already met a pair of them. They are always scheming against me, and the fact that I’m a single, seemingly unfettered man does not endear me to them. I can’t say that I will ever forgive what you have done here, but my gratitude will be no small thing, I trust.”

  He could have told her that he also wanted Dante to have the family he’d never had. But he didn’t.

  “Your gratitude,” she repeated, her voice flat. “Or, excuse me, your potential gratitude is what I am to look forward to.”

  “Or you can look forward to a weekend a month. Supervised, of course. Noncustodial parents do have a reputation for disappearing with their children, don’t they?”

  “And what if I don’t believe you?” she asked after another long moment. He could see she was fighting to keep her composure. “What if I think you’re just trying to intimidate me?”

  “Five-year-olds are resilient,” he said with the soft ruthlessness that made even the normally cheeky Guglielmo pause and rethink. “It would be nice to have you there when I meet him. It would be nice to have you set the stage. But it is not necessary, Cecilia. If I were you, I would not forget that.”

  “Or what?” she demanded, wildly. “You’ll just...steal him away to Rome?”

  “Yes.” His voice was a hard crack in the quiet room. “Without a second thought.”

  She stared back at him, stricken. And she was his ghost, once upon a time his angel. But he didn’t let that soften him. If anything, that he had believed he cared for her all those years ago made the betrayal worse. He stared back at her, relentless.

  “Mama?” The small voice came from one of the doors behind Pascal. “I heard voices.”

  Pascal tensed. He watched Cecilia’s face closely. And he was sure he could see her fight back the urge to shoo the child away. To have him hide himself just a little longer, however futile the gesture.

  He thought he saw something like despair in her otherworldly eyes, just a flash of it. Just enough to lodge itself inside Pascal like shame.

  But then she smiled. Wide and bright as if there had never been anything in her eyes but sweetness and light.

  “Come here, baby,” she said, and held out her hand. “You have a very special visitor tonight.”

  Pascal held himself still enough to crack in half as he heard Dante’s surprisingly heavy footsteps move across the floor. And then he watched as the small, sturdy boy with rosy cheeks and black hair standing on end came around the side of the couch. He walked toward the fire and took his mother’s hand. Then he gazed at Pascal with sleepy eyes.

  Sleepy eyes that were black like Pascal’s, with a dark rim around the irises that Pascal suspected, were he any closer, would be the precise violet shade of his mother’s.

  It was like a heart attack, but it didn’t hurt. It simply...seized Pascal where he sat.

  He knew this child. He could see the shape of his own face in the smaller face before him. He could see his own mother’s nose. And he could see Cecilia, too. And it had never occurred to Pascal before that children were the real ghosts, patchworks of the past made new—yet unlike the haunts of fiction, wholly uninterested in what had gone before them.

  Pascal felt struck down, though he knew he still sat in the same position. He felt everything he’d felt on that field and more, because this time, his son was right in front of him. Looking at him.

  And Pascal had never understood his father or his choices. But here, now, in this huge moment that was happening so quietly and calmly despite the cacophony inside him, he understood the man even less.

  Because he knew that he would fight, kill, or die for this little boy with his sleepy eyes and sulky mouth. He would not think twice.

  That his father had walked away from his son made even less sense to Pascal now.

  “Dante,” Cecilia said, her voice soft but perfectly cheerful as if this had been her plan all along, and Pascal stopped thinking about that useless, spineless man who shared nothing with him but biology. “This is your father.”

  The little boy stared. He regarded Pascal solemnly. One beat, another.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Then he yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw, didn’t spare his mother or brand-new father a second glance, and shuffled his way back to his bed.

  * * *

  They married the following week by special license.

  Pascal stood at the very altar where he had first discovered the existence of the child who had changed everything. Dante—his son, he reminded himself with that same fierce pride that beat in him now like a new heartbeat—stood beside him, looking proud and
overtly solemn in his best clothes.

  Dante looked up at him, his little face grave. Pascal didn’t think it through. He reached down and put his hand on his child’s head, something sweet and unexpected blooming in him at the sensation. At the way the curve of his palm fit the crown of Dante’s head.

  As if they had been crafted to fit together like this, interlocking pieces. Father and son.

  He told himself that was why he felt very nearly emotional when the nuns who filled the pews began to sing, a hauntingly lovely song that he realized belatedly was their version of a wedding march.

  Then Cecilia appeared at the head of the small church’s aisle, and Pascal...stared.

  She was unhappy with him. She had made no secret of it in the days between that night when she had finally accepted reality, and now.

  “What concerns me is how Dante will handle this,” she had said that night, still stiff and unfriendly at the fireplace after the child had gone back to bed. “You’ve only just sprung the fact that you’re his father on him. I’m not sure how a wedding between me and a stranger is going to strike him.”

  “Children are resilient,” Pascal said with great unconcern.

  “You know that, do you?” she blazed at him. “With all your experience handling children? Raising them?”

  “If I lack experience raising children, Cecilia,” he’d replied silken and dangerous, “whose fault is that?”

  And she had paled, but she hadn’t backed down. “He’s more fragile than he looks.”

  “If children were not resilient, neither you nor I would be here today. And yet here we are.”

  She had let out a shaky sort of breath. “I don’t know that I think we should base anything on your childhood or mine. In fact, I imagine that the wisest course of action is to think about our childhoods and do the precise opposite.”

  Cecilia had decided that they should tell Dante that they were marrying together. As the united front she insisted they would have to become if any of this was to work. Pascal did not remind her that she was no longer in control of the terms—or anything else. He assumed that must have been obvious to her already.

  “And by work,” she snapped at him when he arrived the following morning at the appointed time, “I do not mean to your satisfaction. I mean, we have to find a way to make sure this is about Dante. Because it can only be about Dante.”

  “Whatever else could it be about, Cecilia?” he had asked. Silkily enough that she’d flushed.

  But when Dante was told of their plan, he’d grinned. “Do we get to be a family? Everyone else gets to be a family.”

  “Yes,” Cecilia had said, her voice suspiciously rough and her eyes too bright. “We would get to be a family. We would all live under one roof. But it wouldn’t be here. We would have to move down to Rome, where your father lives.”

  The little boy had seemed far more concerned with the toy truck he was slamming repeatedly into the leg of the sofa then the conversation.

  “Paolo’s mother told me about Rome,” he said matter-of-factly. “She’s from there. You can get gelato anytime you want. Not only when the abbey cook makes it.”

  “And there you have it,” Pascal murmured. “Easy.”

  The look Cecilia had given him then was murderous.

  And he was twisted enough to enjoy that, too.

  She hadn’t objected when Pascal had spent the rest of the intervening days as much with Dante as possible. He walked the boy to his care. And didn’t bother to discuss his feelings on the topic of the soon-to-be Signora Furlani spending her days cleaning, because she only had so many days left here. If she wanted to spend them on her hands and knees on unforgiving stone floors, it was nothing to him.

  It was on one of those days that she found him in his little cell, tending to the work that was always piling up on his laptop. He heard a faint noise, looked up—and there she was, standing in his doorway with a mop clenched in one hand.

  And for a moment it was as if they’d been tossed back in time. He had the oddest notion that if he looked down at himself, he would find all the bandages and wounds he’d had when he’d first come here. As if the accident had only just happened.

  As if maybe they could do this over—though he shoved that thought away almost as soon as it formed.

  And he knew she was thinking much the same thing from that stricken, electric look in her beautiful violet eyes.

  It was those eyes he’d seen first when he’d surfaced after the surgery that had saved his life. Those eyes that had insinuated themselves somehow into the confusion of his brain in those fuzzy days, and had tempted him to make his way back to the land of the living.

  And it was those eyes that slammed into him again now, making a mockery of his assertion that he was only here—and only doing this—for the boy.

  But he chose not to analyze that.

  “Dante is putting on a good show,” she told him after a moment, her hand tight around the mop handle. “But sooner or later this is all going to come crashing down on him. I hope you’re prepared for it. He’s a headstrong, often maddening, perfect little boy. I doubt very much that your life is set up to accommodate an active five-year-old.”

  “The beauty of my life, cara, is that it is set up to accommodate me. Therefore, whatever it is I wish it to be, it becomes.”

  “Spoken like a man who has no idea what I’m talking about,” she retorted. “And yes,” she continued before he could remind her yet again why it was he had no experience in this area, “I know. It’s my fault. But you’re the one issuing ultimatums, Pascal. Not me.”

  He knew what she meant was, he was the one who insisted on marrying her, and was holding her child over her head to make sure she did it. Something he supposed he ought to have felt some guilt about. Oddly enough, his conscience was clear.

  “The other thing I have, in abundance, is money,” Pascal said. And smiled faintly when she rolled her eyes. “I’m not bragging, Cecilia. Do you know what that money buys? Nannies. Tutors. An army of trained staff to make sure his is the best nursery in Italy. Anything and everything that can make this transition as painless as possible for Dante. And for me.”

  “But not me, of course.” She eyed him as he lounged there on the narrow bed, his laptop open before him. Not in a particularly friendly manner. “Are you not concerned with my transition?”

  “Not especially.”

  She ran her tongue over her teeth. “What is it you expect me to do?”

  Pascal studied her a moment. “I suppose you could clean my floors if you desired, but my housekeeper would not be best pleased.”

  Her eyes flashed. “There’s no shame in cleaning a floor.”

  “In general, no,” he’d replied. “But we are talking about the wife of Pascal Furlani, not a nameless single mother in a remote mountain village.”

  And he didn’t have the slightest intention of telling her that the way she glared at him made him want to poke at her more, not less.

  “There will be certain expectations upon you,” he said.

  “You mean your expectations.”

  “Mine, yes, but sadly for you, not only mine.” Or he would keep her naked and tied to his bed. He didn’t know quite why he didn’t say that out loud. But he had to shift to keep that image from making him reveal too much to her. “You have to be outfitted with an appropriate wardrobe, first and foremost. Then I will have to consider the best way to instruct you in how best to move in the society I keep. Appearances, you understand.”

  “You must be joking.” When he only gazed back at her, she scoffed. “It’s not as if you’re royalty, is it? You’re a businessman.”

  “There are many things I learned the hard way,” Pascal said quietly. “If you do not wish to profit from my example, that is all the same to me. You can flail around, making a spectacle of yourself if that is what you wish.
I will allow it.”

  Not that he could actually imagine this woman flailing in any capacity.

  “Will it embarrass you?” she asked coolly. “Because if so, it holds a certain appeal.”

  “I can handle the embarrassment,” Pascal replied easily. “But can Dante? Children can be so cruel.”

  And he had allowed himself a smile when she simply stalked off down the hallway, slamming her cleaning tools about with entirely too much force.

  Their wedding day could not come soon enough to suit him.

  “I thought you would lecture me,” he had said to Mother Superior earlier today when he’d seen her after he’d dressed.

  “Would that work, do you imagine?” the old woman asked him, that canny gaze of hers on him. “Would you listen?”

  “I listened to you last time,” he reminded her as they made their way to the church. “Why not again?”

  “You listened to your fear, child,” she said when they made it to the door. “I was nothing but a catalyst. And I’ll thank you to remember, when fear starts whispering in your ear again, that all it made you was alone.”

  “And very rich,” he’d said drily.

  “The abbey looks forward to your significant donation,” she’d replied tartly.

  And Pascal didn’t know why he was thinking about an old, interfering nun’s pointed remarks at a time like this. When he was standing here in this church and Cecilia was floating toward him like one of those dreams that had chased him through all the years they’d been apart.

  She wore a cream-colored gown and a demure veil, but he could still see her.

  Once upon a time she had saved him. Then she had betrayed him. Now she would marry him, and he couldn’t help thinking that he’d find the balance in it there. In their marriage.

  And better still, in the marriage bed.

  He had already kissed her far too thoroughly and long in this very same church, and lightning had failed to strike him down. Thoughts of marital congress were hardly likely to bring the walls down around them.