Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  She arrived beside him and he took her hand, and then it was happening.

  The priest was quick. The nuns made approving noises.

  Pascal said, “I do” loud enough to be heard in that stark white clinic room he never planned to enter again.

  Cecilia’s vows were more measured, but she said them. She didn’t stumble. She didn’t pause for effect.

  And then it was time for Pascal to lift her veil and smooth it back from her face.

  He felt something like rage pound through him, thick and nearly mad, and it took him a moment to realize it wasn’t rage at all. It was triumph.

  As if this was about her, not the boy.

  But he refused to let himself consider that.

  He kissed her instead, with all the pent-up passion of the years she had kept his child from him and the days she’d forced him to sit in that clinic as penance. He kissed her deep, and thorough, and he didn’t care if he made the watching nuns uncomfortable.

  He kissed her until there was no doubt whatsoever that he was claiming what was his.

  And when he lifted his head, she looked stunned. Thrown.

  That, too, felt like a victory.

  Dante ran before them down the aisle toward the door. Pascal took Cecilia’s hand and led her after their son, something primitive working its way through him as they moved. His son. His woman.

  His family, at last.

  “I want you to be very clear about something,” his brand-new wife said when they stepped outside into the December morning. It was clear, but very cold.

  Cecilia didn’t shiver. She kept her gaze on his while Dante ran in a big, looping circle around Pascal’s waiting car.

  “I am not certain things have ever been more clear, cara,” he told her. Truthfully.

  Her violet eyes met his, then held. She tipped up her chin.

  “You forced me to do this,” she said, “and I did it. For Dante. But you should know right now that it doesn’t matter if you kiss me like that. This marriage will never, ever be consummated.”

  Pascal laughed.

  Then he slid his hand along her pretty face and held her cheek in the palm of his hand. He met that outraged violet glare and he smiled at her, because he knew this part. He knew how to get what he wanted, and he would. It was what he did.

  “My darling wife,” he said, enjoying the words as much as the way she trembled—in fury, he was sure, and he liked that, too. He couldn’t wait to taste it. “You will beg me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ROME WAS A SPARKLING, sprawling mess of a too-big city, Cecilia was a wife when she had never planned to marry—much less in such haste and upon command—and there wasn’t a single part of this sudden new life she was going to have to find her way through, one way or another, that made any sense to her.

  Pascal had driven them down from the mountains, stopping only for the odd meal or the chance to stretch his legs. Or better still, to let Dante wear himself out enough to resume the trip. For her part, Cecilia had changed into a traveling outfit after the ceremony, too aware that it was an outfit her brand-new husband—her husband—had picked out for her. She hadn’t wanted to wear anything he’d given her, but she also didn’t want any of the nuns to know how fraught and strained her brand-new marriage was. Already.

  “I don’t want you to dress me,” she’d told him, scowling over the clothes he’d delivered to her the night before the ceremony. A wedding dress, traveling clothes and a sharp order to leave all her packing to the staff he planned to unleash on the cottage after they left. His staff would take all the personal items and leave behind the furniture. Maybe she’d been mad about that, too. Maybe she was mad about everything. “Like some horrid little doll.”

  “Thus far I have only provided you with the wardrobe I would prefer you to wear,” he’d replied in that dark, stirring way of his. His black-gold eyes had glittered. “Would you like me to dress you, as well? Because that is a different proposition altogether.”

  She didn’t want to think about that.

  Or to be more precise, it was all she thought about the last long night she was still herself. She’d tossed and turned and scowled at her ceiling, and none of it had changed a thing. She’d woken up, put on the wedding dress he’d chosen for her and walked down the aisle as ordered.

  And now she was Pascal’s wife.

  The truth was, she didn’t want to think too hard or too closely about any part of it. Not the wedding ceremony. Not the fact that she’d left behind the only home she had ever known for a future she could only describe as unknown. And unsettled.

  And she certainly did not want to think about that taunt of his after the ceremony.

  She would not beg him. For anything. Ever.

  But even as she thought such things, and meant them, a quick glance toward her new husband—and the way he navigated the roads with confidence and ease—made something deep inside her...quiver.

  She busied herself with Dante, who was overexcited and could hardly contain himself over the course of the long drive. There were tears. Tantrums. Too much sugar, not enough videos, and by the time they finally made it all the way into Rome, Pascal was tightlipped and Cecilia was thoroughly frazzled.

  But not too frazzled to be a little smug about it.

  “Just remember,” she told Pascal as they finally got out of the car, there in a garage that was itself almost too fancy for her to take in, “you asked for this.”

  Pascal only gave her a dark look. Then he picked Dante up—because the boy had finally gone to sleep—and led the way inside. Up a stair and into three full floors of what Pascal called home.

  Cecilia’s first impression had been...overwhelming.

  She’d chalked it up to fatigue. All that glittering, all those views, the soaring entry hall that went all the way up to a chandelier the size of her cottage, and all that stuff that shrieked its dizzying cost at decibels she didn’t think she could truly understand.

  The next morning it was even worse.

  Because it had been one thing to see magazine spreads of a powerful man in a rich person’s clothes. The magazines were filled with such men after all. It was something else again to be steeped in all that power rather than simply reading about it at a remove. To have it wrapped around her, choking her and making her think that she had been very foolish indeed to come here.

  All Cecilia had been thinking about when she’d agreed to this was staying close to her child. And that was all that mattered, she told herself sternly that morning as she crept around the huge, hushed apartment that was the largest single residence she’d ever been in. But she should probably also have spared a thought or two for the fact she was a simple woman.

  Cecilia’s version of a complicated life had included the boundaries of the same small village that was the only home she’d ever known, and the good or bad opinions of the people who lived there with her. And whether she’d lived inside the abbey walls or in a cottage outside the grounds, the abbey that had always been the center of that village had also been her whole world.

  You didn’t have a choice, she reminded herself tartly. You had to come here.

  But that didn’t make things any better.

  She was...dizzy. Whatever the opposite of altitude sickness was. And that feeling didn’t go away as the days passed, the darkness of the waning year enlivened only by the signs of Christmas everywhere she looked in her adopted new city.

  Pascal had been good to his word. As far as Cecilia could tell, he had employed a literal army of staff to care for Dante’s every possible need. Each and every one of whom Dante found fascinating, so as much as Cecilia might have wanted to reclaim her only child’s attention, he didn’t want to go with her when she sought him out and found him playing, or doing crafts, or practicing scales on the piano that had its own room. He wanted to continue doing what he was d
oing, in the company of all the new people who he, of course, found far more entertaining and fascinating than his own mother.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do with myself now that you’ve forced me to come here,” she had seethed at Pascal one morning several days after they’d arrived, feeling brittle enough that she might break in two. “I am not used to all this idleness.”

  Pascal had been in the office he used when he was home, starting his day with a stack of financial papers from around the world and a cup of the strong espresso he preferred.

  The look he’d given her had seared through her.

  “You are in Rome,” he’d said, sounding faintly astonished that such a thing needed to be said. Or perhaps that was his innate arrogance. “If you cannot entertain yourself here, Cecilia, you cannot be entertained.”

  There was no response she could give to that he wouldn’t have seen as a challenge she had no intention of meeting, so she’d swallowed it all down. She’d accepted that for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was well and truly left to her own devices.

  She’d gone out and lost herself in the ancient streets of the eternal city.

  And it was out in the chaotic splendor of three thousand years of human habitation, losing herself on one street only to find her way back on another, that she realized she’d completely forgotten that Christmas was coming.

  When normally this was her favorite time of year. The pressing dark, and the bright lights making joy against the night.

  She found herself in a café in a bustling piazza one late afternoon, with a latte steaming gently at her elbow. It had been a wet day, cloudy and moody, and much too cold. She had left Dante in the capable hands of his caregivers. Who, if she was honest, she quite liked herself. And how could she argue with Pascal’s desire that he receive that kind of attentive care when she herself had left him with the neighbor while she worked?

  She couldn’t. Or she would have, to be more precise, but she didn’t quite dare.

  There was something about Pascal here, prowling around his natural element, that made Cecilia feel as if she’d lost the ability to keep her feet on the ground. And not because it was cracking or rolling beneath her the way it felt sometimes, but because he’d taken it.

  She blew out a breath as she looked at the bustling piazza, and all the Christmas lights and decorations that made it gleam no matter how dark or thick the incoming night. She could see the gleaming trees, done up proud and bright. She could hear the zampognari playing the mournful bagpipes, just as the Sicilian family had always claimed was tradition down south.

  For a moment she felt very nearly at peace.

  The abbey had always felt magical to her this time of year. The sisters had sung carols every morning, and the village itself had done itself up with trees draped in lights, wreaths on the doors and candles flickering in every window.

  And suddenly, the fact she wasn’t there to see it this year took her breath away.

  Cecilia hadn’t expected to miss home this much. It felt like a physical pain, wrenching and terrible, that she couldn’t simply go outside, walk for five minutes no matter the weather and find herself in the cool, serene embrace of the abbey. That Mother Superior was not on hand for a dry comment, a bit of wisdom, or both.

  She was well and truly on her own for the first time in her life, and Cecilia couldn’t say she liked it.

  Later, when she’d drained her coffee and left the café, she found her way home again through the tangle of streets, packed full of eras and people and cars that roared this way and that and parked in all directions. She only got lost twice, which she thought showed improvement, and found her way into Pascal’s rambling three-story showcase of a home, resplendent in its usual state of modern, moneyed serenity. She was informed that her child was currently being fed and would soon after be bathed, before settling down into his evening routine.

  They no longer pretended to ask her what she thought about this routine; they simply performed it.

  Cecilia felt a surge of temper—or maybe it was fear—wash over her then. This was all part of Pascal’s plan; she knew that. He was going out of his way to show her how easily he could keep her son from her, in retaliation. And she was letting it happen. Just standing here, letting him do his worst. She should storm into the middle of Dante’s dinnertime, kick out all the staff members and reclaim her own son—

  But even though she started across the polished marble of the foyer toward Dante’s set of rooms, she stopped.

  Because like it or not, Dante was having the time of his life. What right did she have to take something away from him because her feelings were hurt? Or because she felt lonely? Whether she liked it or not, he was the only son and heir of a very, very wealthy man. If this was how wealthy children were raised—and she certainly wouldn’t know—who was she to deny him that?

  She turned away from the hall that led to her son and headed for the nearest sitting room instead, so she could stare out the window at all the light and madness and people that made up the city she still couldn’t believe she lived in now. The glass of the window was cold beneath her fingers, but she didn’t lift her hand.

  It wasn’t as if she didn’t see her own child. Dante always knew where she was and any of his new aides knew how to contact her if he needed her. She should congratulate herself on having raised such a confident child that he was happy to race around, immersing himself in his new life without giving her a second thought.

  She would get there, she told herself. Maybe a little grimly. Somehow, she would find a way to be happy about all of this. For him.

  “You look so glum, cara,” came Pascal’s low, insinuating voice from behind her.

  As if the prospect amused him.

  Cecilia took her time turning. It was early for him to be home, and she hated that she knew anything about his schedule. His routines. Because the real tragedy was that she’d started to anticipate his return every night. She could tell herself that it was because she grew ever more wary of him, and needed to buttress herself against him however possible...

  But that wasn’t quite true.

  She faced him, entirely too aware that she didn’t feel any one thing when she looked at him. It was all mixed up together. Guilt and temper, her long-held anger, and beneath it all, that heat he could generate without even seeming to try.

  She could still feel that kiss he’d given her on their wedding day. The way he’d claimed her mouth with his and taught her things she didn’t want to know about herself, right there in front of the entirety of the church.

  “I’m not glum at all,” she told him now. “I was merely contemplating, as ever, the fact that you insisted on this marriage. And yet apparently have nothing for me to do here but wander the streets of Rome like a permanent tourist.”

  He stood in the doorway, still dressed in the sort of exquisitely cut suit he wore to work. And she really would have preferred the remove of a tabloid magazine, because the pages could only show him in two digestible dimensions. There was no way to sense the brooding power he wore. Or how impossible it was to look away from him. Or how she could feel him, like a switch flipped deep inside her.

  Magazines made it clear he was beautiful. But the truth was, he was dangerous.

  Because somehow it had been easier to hate him in the mountains. Here, where she was the one out of place, she found it a far more difficult prospect.

  “You are my wife,” he told her with that arrogance of his that should have repelled her. That it didn’t was her secret shame. “That is your role. And do not kid yourself, it is a job. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Is this where you lecture me on what to wear and which fork to use?” she asked him, her voice like acid to her own ears. “You understand, it’s not the comportment classes I object to. It’s the teacher.”

  She didn’t know who sh
e had become here, over the course of these strange, confusing days in a city so large she couldn’t make sense of it. And she was so completely within the power of this man, she couldn’t make sense of herself.

  Yet, she had the distinct impression he understood her all too well.

  A small curve disturbed the stark line of his proud mouth. “I spent a significant amount of my time looking for the perfect wife. My requirements were simple. Poise, grace and aspirational elegance.”

  Cecilia hated the fact that sounded like a list of her failings.

  “I’m a foundling who wanted to become a nun,” she told him, the cold glass at her back. And far too much defensiveness in her voice. “A fallen woman who cleaned floors to care for her illegitimate child. There’s no poise in that. And very little grace. And if you wanted elegance—well. You were the one who demanded this marriage.”

  “And here we are,” Pascal murmured, moving farther into the room. “Just as I demanded.”

  The sitting room was one of several such pointless areas in this jaw-droppingly immense place. As far as Cecilia could tell, the point of so many rooms in a home like this was to stock them all full of unnecessary things—antiques, art, that piano and whatever else shouted its status simply by existing. Because otherwise, what would be the point of having them? When she started thinking of this apartment like a museum, it made more sense.

  But did that make her one more piece in his collection?

  “We’re well and truly married, Cecilia, in the eyes of God and man,” he told her now. “There’s no pretending otherwise.”

  “I wasn’t pretending.”

  “Are you ready to take on your duties in that regard?” He was still smiling. She knew it was a warning. “I warn you, it may require that you spend less time idle and more time welded to my side, more or less.”

  “That is not appealing,” she said crisply.

  Pascal’s smile widened. “You like it well enough in bed.”