And really, she should have seen that coming.
But Cecilia had been going out of her way not to think about the nights here.
Pascal had insisted that she share his bed.
That first night she’d put Dante to bed, claiming he didn’t like to sleep in new places. Only to curl up next to him because actually, she was the one who didn’t want to sleep in this new place. She’d woken up to find herself being carried through this too-large place in her brand-new husband’s arms, and had panicked.
“Calm yourself,” he had told her briskly. “I am only carrying you to the marital bed, cara. I am not requiring you perform in it.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” she’d thrown at him, perhaps desperately. And when they’d reached the palatial suite of rooms that Pascal had said were his, it did not exactly relax her to discover that they were now hers, as well. “Put me down.”
And she almost said please, but that would be begging.
Pascal had laughed, but he’d done what she asked. And she had been bleary-eyed and panicky, and still dressed in the clothes he’d set out for her to wear to travel that day. Clothes she had wanted to hate on principle, but couldn’t. Because she had never in her life worn a sweater so soft, so warm. Or trousers that were not only comfortable to sit in for hours on end, but also seemed supernaturally incapable of wrinkling, even all these hours later. Even the shoes he’d provided had somehow managed to be both fashionable and comfortable.
Cecilia had looked at herself in too many mirrors today, whether in rest stops or in all the gleaming rooms of Pascal’s absurd home, and she hadn’t recognized herself at all. She didn’t look like a simple woman who wanted to become a nun any longer. And she certainly didn’t look like a country woman who cleaned to make her rent.
And the fact that all it took was a change of clothes to make her look like the sort of woman who really might belong in a place like this made her...uneasy.
“I have no intention of begging,” she threw at him, because she couldn’t say she liked the intent look in his eyes just then.
While she’d been curled around her son as if the child was her security blanket—instead of the other way around—Pascal had clearly showered, if his damp hair was anything to go by. And worse, was standing there before her wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of low-slung trousers.
Absolutely nothing.
“Did I ask you to beg?” he asked mildly. “Tonight?”
And Cecilia felt as if he’d lit her on fire. He was a perfectly formed, mouthwatering specimen of a man. She had thought so years ago—but it was even worse now. His scars tracked down his left side, where he’d sustained the most damage. But now they seemed like so much decoration. Not angry and livid, but simply scars. Markers on the map of his male beauty.
And the truth was, Cecilia wasn’t sure she was equipped to handle this.
“Then why did you bring me in here?” she demanded.
“You will sleep in my bed,” he told her as pitiless as ever, his black gaze unreadable. “And no, you will not come to my bed fully dressed. I will consider it an insult.”
“But Dante—”
“The child will be monitored, naturally. By staff members paid for the purpose. Should he need you, they will rouse us both at once.”
“But—”
“Cecilia.” And she truly hated that soft tone of his, because it was Pascal at his most dangerous. And his most implacable. “I did not marry so that I could live apart from my wife.”
“You married as a form of blackmail.”
“I did not marry you to blackmail you.” And she almost believed he meant that, until he shrugged. And that muscled wonder of his chest moved, making her mouth go dry. “But you would do well to remember that this marriage is for my convenience, not yours.”
Cecilia was entirely too aware of that. “I have already given you far too much for one lifetime. I’m not giving you anything else.”
And he had stood there, that faint smile on his sensual mouth, and something far too knowing in his dark gaze.
“I have already told you what will happen, but let me elaborate.”
“Not on my account,” she said, but he ignored her.
“You will beg me for my touch, and you will do so sooner rather than later. Believe this, if nothing else.”
Then, just when she thought he would put his hands on her and carry her off against her will... Pascal did the exact opposite. He headed away from her instead, toward the vast platform bed that dominated the room they stood in, which she had been doing her level best not to look at.
Cecilia watched, surprised and a little bit put out, as he climbed into the bed and sprawled there, like Roman emperors of old.
“Do you need a nap before you finish threatening me?” she asked. With perhaps a bit too much emotion in her voice.
“I want you in this bed,” Pascal told her in a dark tone that made her melt, then burn. “But I’m not going to wrestle you into it. If you go and sleep somewhere else, I will simply come find you, bring you back and set you on your own two feet. Right there. Until you come to your senses and get into bed beside me. The question you should ask yourself, Cecilia, is how tired are you tonight? How many times do you wish to do this?”
“I’m exhausted,” she had managed to say. “I don’t want to do this at all.”
“Then if I were you, I would come to bed. Now. Instead of performing a grand charade that will end the same way no matter what you do.”
And Cecilia had believed him. She had walked stiffly from the room, but not to escape him. Only to tend to herself after such a long trip—and the far longer walk down that aisle that she still couldn’t believe had happened. She’d washed her face, then changed into the only thing she’d brought with her that bore any resemblance to appropriate sleepwear. It was the slip she’d worn beneath her dress, and it seemed silly to put it on to sleep in.
But the alternative to that was to crawl into Pascal’s bed naked.
And that was clearly impossible.
She stalked back out into the bedroom to find Pascal typing something into his phone, looking wholly at ease. She glared at him, but he didn’t look up. Still, she was sure she could feel his eyes on her as she skirted the foot of the bed, then stood there for a moment on the opposite side.
Cecilia understood what he was playing at, suddenly. This was the first surrender. He could easily have picked her up and tossed her on the bed. He could have kissed her and made her forget her own name.
But he was making her do this. He was making her do this to herself.
She should have turned and run into one of the many other rooms. One of them was bound to have a lock—
But she didn’t. She climbed into bed and lay as close to the edge as she could get without toppling off. Rigid and resentful, like a martyr at the pyre.
He turned off the lights not long after, and settled in. Cecilia waited. Every muscle inside her body was tense, prepared for him to reach over, take liberties, go back on his word...
But instead, and in an indecently short span of time that suggested his mind was not similarly preoccupied, she heard his breath go even.
He had fallen asleep.
Leaving her there with her fingers gripping the edge of the bed as if she’d expected to be dragged off somewhere at any moment. Long into the night.
The next morning she’d woken up because she was so deliciously warm she’d thought she might find herself curled up on the surface of the sun.
But it was much worse than that.
She was sprawled out all over Pascal, her legs tangled with his. Her hair all over his chest. Her mouth there against his hard muscles.
Cecilia had sucked in a breath of pure horror, then threw herself to the side, hoping against hope that he was still—
“You still feel lik
e silk and longing,” he told her, his voice rich with sleep, amusement and something far darker that pulsed inside her. “When you beg me, cara, I will make you sob. Over and over and over again.”
“In your dreams,” she’d hissed at him, already scrambling out of the bed and heading for the bathroom suite.
“Please, cara.” And his gaze was so hungry she nearly tripped. It made her heart pound even as she felt herself melt, then ache low in her belly and between her legs. “My dreams are far more demanding.”
Every night since had been the same thing.
If Pascal was home when Cecilia went to bed, he stayed far off on his side. He made no move toward her. And they still ended up in that breathless tangle each morning. If he was out when she went to bed, she would always wake up with a start when he climbed in, sure that this time he would trespass over that invisible line that ran down the center of the bed...but he never did.
And it made no difference. They still woke up in a knot.
Cecilia was beginning to understand that her body simply wanted him. And didn’t much care how she got him.
Standing there in one of his many salons tricked out in priceless objects, nothing but glass at her back and her uncertain future before her, the last thing Cecilia wanted to feel was breathless. She glared at him.
“No clever response to that?” Pascal asked almost idly. “I’m disappointed.”
“Is that part of my punishment? It’s not enough that you force me to sleep in the same bed with you, you must also taunt me about it?”
“I’m not punishing you, cara. You would know.”
“I can’t imagine how an actual punishment would differ from this,” she threw back at him.
“For one thing,” he replied, too easily, “it will be public as well as private.”
But she had been a nun who turned up pregnant. What could he possibly do to her that she hadn’t already lived through, more or less happily?
“Public humiliation is hardly good for Dante. Who is supposed to be the point of all this, isn’t he? How quickly you forget.”
“I forget nothing,” he said, and there was a note in his voice that made her neck prickle in warning.
She didn’t pretend to understand this man she’d married. There was something about the way he watched her, hungry and angry at once, that unsettled her too deeply. She hurried from the room, determined to reclaim at least some part of Dante’s evening routine after all.
Because she needed a touchstone. She needed something.
She dismissed his staff, then read him a story, and kissed him as he drifted off to sleep. As if nothing had changed but the size of his bedroom.
And it was then, in the darkness while her little boy dreamed, that she had to accept the truth she’d been wrestling with. Her heart was not the least bit worried about Dante. Not only would he thrive here, and was—there was no doubt in her mind that Pascal loved him.
With the same reckless, heedless and instantaneous devotion that she herself had felt when he’d been tucked there inside her.
Seeing them together...did things to her. Watching the man who so overwhelmed her squat down to talk seriously, yet kindly, with her child—with their child—made her feel something like giddy.
And she might have told herself that she had come to Rome to save Dante from him, but she knew tonight that wasn’t true. She wasn’t afraid, on any level, that Pascal would harm her son.
She was far more concerned that Pascal would harm her instead.
And the following morning she woke up to find him gone. It felt like a premonition come true—a notion she tried to shake off.
“I’m afraid you cannot go out today,” the housekeeper told her sorrowfully when she made to leave after her breakfast. “There are paparazzi camped out around the building, and Signor Furlani would prefer you not give them any more ammunition.”
“Ammunition?” she queried. Then blinked. “Paparazzi?”
The housekeeper delivered her the stack of morning papers. And there it was. A picture of the two of them together. Their wedding. Pascal leaning into her, his mouth hovering above hers.
And Cecilia hardly recognized herself. She looked...flushed and starry-eyed. Like the silly girl she’d been when she’d first met him.
She hated that the picture existed. Much less that it was now...out there, for the entire world to dissect. It felt like a kind of death. Something far worse than a shaming.
But far worse than being exposed like that herself was the fact that Dante was splashed across all those papers, too.
His sweet face was there in bright color.
Furlani claims his son! one headline screamed.
And then, just beneath it, thumbs his nose at father once again.
Just like that, it all became clear.
Cecilia felt as if a truck hit her. She sat in the breakfast room, her ears ringing, feeling sick to her stomach. She read every single article she could find, then pulled out her mobile to look for even more.
And every word she read was like a nail into her heart.
“How did Signor Furlani leave the building this morning?” she asked the housekeeper when she could speak. When the betrayal was an agony inside her instead of wholly incapacitating her.
“Well, signora, he took a car. But—”
“Then get me a car,” Cecilia demanded.
And that was how she found herself sitting in the backseat of a luxury vehicle she couldn’t have named if her life depended on it, hiding behind tinted windows while men with twisted faces pounded their fists and open palms against the sides. This was the pit her husband had thrown their son into. All to score points with his own father.
None of this had been about Dante.
Or about you.
Pascal’s offices were done up in low-slung furniture and steel accents. It made her think of the man she’d married. So beautiful and austere on the outside, and nothing but steel and lies within. There was no comfort to be found here. Or in him.
His secretary met her after a short, undignified squabble with his front desk, and led her back through the gleaming maze of offices separated by nothing but panes of glass. He took her directly to the center, where a group of men stood around a long table in yet another glass enclosure.
Cecilia was starting to rethink her urge to come here and tell her husband exactly what she thought of his little games, but it was too late. Because Pascal’s secretary knocked twice on the great glass door, then swept it open. And every stuffy, officious man in that room turned to stare at her.
But it was only Pascal’s gaze that she felt.
And her husband did not leap from the leather chair where he lounged as if he was at a café, whiling away the day. He did not look the least bit surprised to see her, and in fact, when his gaze met hers and held he looked even more lazy than he had a moment before.
She had the strangest notion that he was the one who felt out of place, always. Even here.
“May I present the woman in question, gentlemen,” he drawled as if he’d invited her here. “Cecilia Furlani, in the flesh. Not a publicity stunt as you have accused me. But my wife.”
CHAPTER NINE
PASCAL KNEW THAT Cecilia could ruin him, here and now.
All she would have to do was contradict him and the gauzy, romantic story he’d delivered to the papers, filled with smoke and mirrors about the two of them and their son. She could simply open up her mouth and tell the assembled men any story she liked about their marriage—and the real timeline of events. She could tell them who he had been six years ago and how he had left her to have and raise his child on her own. That truth would do the trick with this particular group of hypocrites quite nicely. It would give them all the ammunition they needed to start making noises about moral questions.
Even if she didn’t wish to tell the
truth—even if she decided to editorialize at will—it didn’t matter. It would do the same damage. Worse, in this room with too many eyes on them, he couldn’t stop her.
They wanted a reason to call him unfit. All she had to do was give them one.
And Pascal couldn’t think of any particular reason why she wouldn’t go ahead and do just that.
He stared at the face of the woman who had haunted him when she was not in his life, and was something far worse than a ghost now that she was. Ghosts only came out at night. But Cecilia haunted him always. Bright light of day through winter dark, then back again.
How had he imagined it would be different once he’d put his ring on her finger?
He knew why she was here, barging into his office with that furious look on her face. Oh, yes, he knew. He had told her she would beg, and he’d been arrogantly certain that all it would take was one night in his bed. Maybe two.
But he should have known better. He should have understood who Cecilia was. Not the soft, fragile girl he’d met all those years ago and had made into a monument of sweet innocence in his head, but the far tougher and more self-possessed woman who’d stared him down in a church and thrown his fatherhood in his face.
Perhaps the truth was she was both. But either way, Cecilia did not bend.
Meanwhile, Pascal felt as if he might break.
He had told himself it was time to make announcements about his marriage because it was high time he take charge of his unruly board and cut off their favorite line of dissent. It made business sense, he’d assured himself. And it was only a few days to Christmas, which meant the interest in the story would dissipate quickly as everyone turned their attention to their holidays. He’d had the distinct sensation that planting those newspaper stories had been an act of reclaiming himself somehow. Returning to form.
Or maybe, something sly suggested inside him, you knew exactly what reaction she would have.
Because despite his best efforts, Pascal was the one who was falling apart, little as he wished to admit that.
He was the one who woke again and again in the night, every time she shifted to get closer to him. She did it in her sleep. He was the one who held her, staring into the dark and wondering what the hell had happened to him. Where was the man who had built his entire life as a shrine to revenge? Where was the Pascal Furlani who would do anything at all—and had, happily—to live his life at the father who had always ignored him and pretended he didn’t exist?
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