The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  Which was fair enough. Sophie wasn’t too fond of herself at the moment, now she knew the truth about the headaches she’d been having the past week or so, and that oddly thick sensation that wasn’t quite nausea—

  But Sophie wasn’t sure she could bear it. Not from him.

  Her distant father, more calculator than human, was one thing. Her even more remote and disinterested fiancé another.

  But Renzo was the only thing in her life that had never been a part of this grim little march toward fulfilling the sacred duty that she’d been told was her responsibility since her birth. Every single part of her life had been orchestrated to lead directly and triumphantly toward her wedding tomorrow. She had been raised on dire warnings about the perils of shirking her obligations to her family and endless stories about the many ancestors who would rise from their vaults in protest should any hint of a scandal taint their name.

  There had never been any light. Or hope. Or anything like heat.

  Sophie was so cold. Always and forever frozen solid, no matter the weather.

  Because she’d been aware since she was very small that the sorts of things that warmed a body—strong spirits, wild passion, scandalously revealing garments of any kind—were not permitted for the Carmichael-Jones heiress.

  She was to be without stain. Virginal and pure until she handed herself over to her husband, a man chosen by her father before she could walk.

  Because the world kept turning ever closer to a marvelous future, but Sophie had been raised in the past. The deep, dark past, where her father didn’t condescend to ignore her wishes—Sophie had been raised to know better than to express one. Even to herself.

  Everything had been ice, always.

  So Sophie had made herself its queen.

  But Renzo had been all the light and hope and heat she’d given up believing was possible, packed into that one long, glorious night.

  Every wild, impetuous summer Sophie had ever missed out on. Every burning hot streak of strong drink she’d never permitted herself to taste. Every dessert she’d refused, lest her figure be seen as anything but perfectly trim while clad in the finest couture, the better to reflect both wealthy families of which she was the unwilling emblem.

  Renzo had been lazy laughter and impossible fire, intense and overwhelming, vast and uncontainable and so much more than she’d been ready for that she still woke in the night in a rush, her heart pounding, as if he was touching her again—

  “Why am I here?”

  He sounded impatient. Bored, even. Something in her recoiled instantly, because she knew that particular tone of voice. Her father used it. So did her fiancé. They were busy, serious men with no time for the frothy, insubstantial concerns of the woman they traded between them like so much chattel.

  She wasn’t a person, that tone of voice told her. She was made of contracts and property, the distribution of wealth and the expectations of others. Hers wasn’t a life, it was a list of obligations and hefty consequences if she failed to meet each one.

  The old Sophie would have slunk off, duly chastened. She would never have come out here in the first place.

  But that Sophie was gone, burned to a crisp in Monaco. Forever ruined, in every sense of the term.

  This Sophie tried to find her spine, and then straightened it.

  “You contacted me.”

  “Is that the game you wish to play, cara?” Renzo lifted an indolent shoulder, then dropped it. “You sent me newspaper clippings of your engagement. The wedding of the year, I am to understand. A thousand felicitations, of course. Your fiancé is a lucky man indeed.”

  Sophie didn’t particularly care for the way he looked at her as he said that, but she was too busy reeling to respond to it.

  “Newspaper clippings...?”

  But even as she asked the question, she knew.

  She hadn’t sent Renzo anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to her, no matter how many times she woke in the night with his taste in her mouth. But she knew someone who would have.

  Poppy.

  Dear, darling Poppy, Sophie’s best friend from their school days. Romantic, dreamy Poppy, who wanted nothing but happiness for Sophie.

  And who had never seemed to understand that for all Sophie’s advantages, and she knew they were many, happiness was never on offer.

  “Don’t be tiresome, my dear,” her mother had sighed years ago, when Sophie, trembling, had dared to ask why her own choices were never given the slightest bit of consideration. “Choice is a word that poor people use because they have nothing else. You do. Try being grateful, not greedy.”

  Sophie had tried. And over the years she’d stopped longing for things she knew she could never have.

  That wasn’t Poppy’s way.

  “You demanded I meet you here,” Renzo was saying, a different sort of laziness in his voice then. This one had an edge. “And so, naturally, I placed my entire life on hold at such a summons and raced to your side like a well-trained hound.”

  He made a show of looking around, but there was nothing for miles but fields and hedges. No prying eyes. No concerned relatives who would claim to their dying day they only had Sophie’s best interests at heart.

  The stately house where her wedding was to be held in the morning was over the next hill and Sophie, who had never sneaked anywhere in her life before that night in Monaco, had felt a sickening combination of daring and scared as she’d crept out of her room and run from the hall tonight.

  It was pathetic, really.

  How had she lived twenty-six long years and failed to recognize how sad and small her life really was?

  Renzo wasn’t finished. “Now that we’re both caught up, perhaps you can tell me why I’ve been called upon to take part in this latest episode of what appears to be a rather melodramatic and messy life?”

  Sophie swallowed. The words melodramatic and messy had never applied to her life. Not ever. Not until she’d met him. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  That was the real story of her life.

  Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t understand how Renzo didn’t hear it.

  His mouth moved, then, but she would never call that a smile. Then he made it worse, reaching over to take her chin in his firm hand, the buttery leather of the gloves he wore only highlighting the intensity of his grip.

  And it was the same inside her as it had always been, gloves or no.

  Fire.

  “What lies will you tell me tonight, I wonder?” he asked, low and dark. Ominous.

  “You found me,” Sophie said, trying to keep her feet solid beneath her. Trying to ignore the wildfire heat ignited in her. Again. “I... I didn’t want...”

  She didn’t know how to do this.

  He had texted her out of nowhere, as far as she’d known.

  This is Renzo. You must want to meet.

  Now, standing outside on a cool, wet night, Sophie had to ask herself what she thought he had been offering, exactly. Blackmail?

  That was what she’d told herself. That was why she’d come.

  But she understood, now that he was touching her again, that she’d been lying to herself.

  And now she had to lie to him. Again.

  The trouble was, Sophie had never told so many lies before in her life. What would be the point? Too many people knew too much about her, and everyone was more than happy to compare notes and then decide what was in her best interest without her input. Therefore, she’d always done exactly what was expected of her. She’d done well at school because her father had made it clear that she was expected to be more than simply an ornament.

  “Clever conversation and sparkling wit are not something one is either born with or not, Sophie,” her father had told her when she’d been barely thirteen. “They’re weapons in an arsenal and I expect you to be
an excellent shot.”

  Sophie had made certain she was. After school, she’d involved herself with only carefully vetted charities, so as never to cause her father or future husband any cause for concern about what she’d done with her time.

  Or more to the point, her name.

  No carousing. No scandals. Nothing that could be considered a stain.

  She’d even agreed to marry a man she thought of as her own, personal brick wall—though far less warm and approachable than any slab of stone—on her eighteenth birthday.

  Well. Agreed was a strong word.

  Randall Grant, the sixth Earl of Langston, had been her father’s choice for her since she was in the cradle. Her agreement, such as it was, had never been in doubt.

  Dal, as Randall was known to friends and family and the girl he’d been given, had produced the Langston family ring and handed it to her with a few cold words about the joining of their families. Because that was all that mattered.

  Not Sophie herself. Not her feelings.

  Certainly not love, which Sophie thought no one in either her family or Dal’s had believed was real or of any import for at least the last few centuries.

  And her reaction—her attempt at defiance—in the face of the life that had been presented to her as a fait accompli had comprised of a single deep breath, which Sophie had held for just a moment longer than she should have as Dal stood there, holding the ring before her.

  Just a moment, while she’d imagined what might happen if she refused him—

  But that was the thing. She couldn’t imagine it. Even thinking about defying her parents and all the plans they’d made for her had made her feel light-headed.

  So she had said yes, as if Dal had asked her a question.

  As if there had ever been any doubt.

  She’d locked the heirloom ring away in her father’s safe, murmuring about how she didn’t dare flash it about until she was Dal’s countess.

  All she’d asked for was a long engagement, so she could pretend to have what passed for a normal life for just a little while—

  But she hadn’t. She hadn’t dared. She’d only been marking what time she had left.

  Until Renzo.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “DO IT,” RENZO GROWLED, snapping Sophie back to her current peril. The dark lane. The powerful man who still held her before him, that hand on her chin. “Tell me another lie to my face. See what happens.”

  Sophie didn’t know how to respond to him. She didn’t know how to respond at all. She’d been so certain that his text had been a threat. That he had planned to come here and...do something.

  To her.

  Did you truly believe it was a threat? asked a small voice inside of her that sounded far too much like her mother. Or did you imagine that Renzo might save you?

  But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? No one could save her.

  No one had ever been able to save her.

  Sophie tried to pull her chin from his grip, but he didn’t let go. And for some reason, that was what got to her. One more man was standing before her, making her do things she didn’t want to do. Like the others, Renzo wasn’t forcing her into anything. He wasn’t brutish or horrible.

  He was simply, quietly, unyieldingly exerting his will.

  And Sophie was tired of bending, suddenly. She was tired of accepting what was handed to her and making the best of it when she’d never wanted it in the first place.

  She’d made her own mistakes. Now she’d figure out how to live with them.

  “Why did you come?” she demanded of Renzo then. “I doubt I’m the only woman you’ve ever spent a night with. Do you chase them all down?”

  A flash of white teeth against the night. “Never. But then again, they do not typically furnish me with false names.”

  “How can you possibly know that if you never seek them out again?”

  The look in his eyes changed. Oh, there was still that heat. That simmering temper. But now, suddenly, there was a different kind of awareness.

  As if she had challenged him.

  She supposed she had.

  “I can think of only one reason a woman would wish to meet me the night before her wedding to another man,” Renzo said then, his tone cold enough to do her father proud. But his gaze was pure fire. “Is that who you imagine I am? A gigolo on call? You merely lift a finger and here I am, willing and able to attend to your every desire?”

  This time when she tipped her head back he released her chin.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed I am,” Renzo said, something blistering and lethal in his voice then. “And never let it be said that I do not know my place.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “I should have known that I was mixing with someone far above my station.” His voice was scathing. The look on his face was far worse than a blow could have been, she was certain. “It is no more than we peasants are good for, is it not?”

  Sophie’s heart kicked so hard she was afraid it might crack a rib. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “But of course you do. You are so blue-blooded I am surprised you do not drip sapphires wherever you walk. Is that not what you summoned me here to make clear?” He looked around again, as if he could see over the hill to the grand house that had commanded the earldom for centuries. As if he could see her family’s own estates to the north. As if he knew every shameful, snobbish thing her parents had said to her over the years. “After all, what am I to you? The bastard son of a Sicilian village woman who raised me on her own, with nothing but shame and censure to ease her path. Oh, yes. And the rich men’s washing, which she counted herself lucky to have.”

  “You don’t know anything about me—” she started, determined to defend herself when the truth was, she had no defense for what she’d done. She still couldn’t believe she’d actually done it.

  “I knew you were a virgin, Sophie,” he cut in. She still wasn’t used to it, the dark and delicious way he said her name. As if it was a caress, when she remembered his caresses too well. A mirthless smile moved over his sensual mouth, but it failed to make him any less appealing. She doubted anything could. “I suppose I have no one to blame but myself for imagining that also made you an innocent.”

  “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Another lie.” Renzo let out a small, hard laugh that was about as amused as that smile. “You know exactly what I want from you.”

  “Then I’m glad we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation at last,” Sophie said, somehow managing to sound cool despite the clambering inside of her. “I apologize for not having it with you that night.”

  “Because you were too busy sneaking off, your tail between your legs, back to your earl and your engagement and your pretty little life in a high-class cage. Is that not so?”

  It was such an apt description of Sophie’s furtive behavior that morning after in Monaco—filled with the terrible mix of sick shame at her actions and something proud and defiant deep inside of her that simply refused to hate the greatest night of her life, no matter what it made her—that she had to pause for a minute. She had to try to catch her breath.

  And when she did, she reminded herself that it didn’t matter what he called her or what he thought about her, as painful as it might be to hear. There was a far more important issue to address.

  “Renzo,” she began, because it didn’t matter how little she wanted to tell him what he needed to know. It didn’t matter that a single sentence would change both of their lives forever.

  Their lives were already altered forever. He just didn’t know it yet.

  But he didn’t look the slightest bit inclined to listen to her.

  “What I cannot understand,” he seethed at her in that same dark, dangerous way that m
ade the night seem very nearly transparent beside him, “is why you thought you could do nothing more than click your fingers and I would come running.”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, something she wasn’t sure she recognized stampeding through her, like fear. But much more acrid. “But here you are.”

  Sophie only realized she’d backed away from him when she felt the car behind her. She reached out, flattening her hands against the car’s bonnet, sleek and low, a great deal like the only other vehicle she’d seen this man drive.

  The stars had come out far above, but she didn’t need the light they threw to illuminate the man before her. He would be burned deep into her flesh forever. She saw him when she closed her eyes. He haunted her dreams. The fact that he was standing here before her now, and no matter that he seemed to hate her, was almost too much for her to take in.

  She had spent far too much time staring at pictures of him on the internet in the interim, like a lovesick teen girl, but she still remembered him from that night in Monte Carlo. She had walked away from the table of her friends, all gathered together to celebrate her upcoming nuptials at what Poppy had called her proper hen do. She had needed the air. A moment to catch her breath, and to stop pretending that marrying Randall filled her with joy. Or filled her with anything at all beyond the same, low-grade dread with which she’d faced every one of her familial obligations thus far.

  The good news was, once she provided Dal with the requisite heir and spare, she could look forward to a happy, solitary life of charity and good works. They could live apart, only coming together at certain events annually. Or they could work together as if the family name was a brand and the two of them its ambassadors, just like her own parents.

  No one would call her parents unhappy, she’d told herself as she’d tried to find her equanimity again.

  But then again, no one was likely to call them happy, either.

  Sophie just needed to resign herself to what waited for her. She knew that. She didn’t understand why the closer she got to her wedding, the less resigned she felt.

  But then she’d looked up, and there he’d been.