Renzo had been dressed in a dark suit, open at the neck, that seemed to do nothing but emphasize the long, sculpted ranginess of a body she knew at a glance was athletic in every sense of the term. His hair was a rich, too-long, dark brown, threaded through with gold, that called to mind the sorts of endless summers in the glorious sun that she had never experienced. He had the face of a poet, a sensual mouth below high cheekbones, and glorious eyes of dark, carnal amber—but he moved like a king.
She had known that he was coming for her from the first glance.
And when she lay awake at night and cataloged her sins, she knew that was the worst one. Because she hadn’t turned around or headed back to her friends. She hadn’t kept going, pushing her way through the crowd until she could hide herself in a bathroom somewhere. She hadn’t assumed her usual mask of careless indifference that the papers she tried her best not to appear in liked to call haughty.
Sophie had seen temptation on a collision course with her and she’d...done absolutely nothing to avoid it.
She had stood where she was, rooted to the floor, and while she would never admit this out loud—and especially not to him—the truth was that she hadn’t thought she could move.
One look at Renzo from across the crowded floor, right there in the grand casino, and her knees had threatened to give out.
And it didn’t help, here on a forgotten country lane back home in England, that she knew precisely what he was capable of. She knew that none of her oversize, almost-farcically innocent daydreams were off the mark.
She hadn’t been ready for a man of Renzo’s skill, much less his uninhibited imagination.
But Sophie had always been a quick learner.
“Why am I here?” Renzo growled again.
He moved closer to her, that same erotic threat a kind of loose promise that hovered in his bones. She could see it all over his face. Worse, she could feel it echo deep within, a kind of fist in her gut and below, nothing but that same bright fire that had already destroyed her.
“There are consequences to actions,” she said carefully, mimicking something her father might say, because she didn’t know another way into the subject. “Surely you know that.”
“Is this where the threat comes in?” Renzo’s laugh was low. And not kind. “You people are all the same. Carrot and stick until you get your way. And you always get your way, don’t you, Sophie?”
He was much too close then. Sophie expected him to stop, because she had nowhere to go, backed up into his car the way she was—but he didn’t stop.
He kept coming.
And he didn’t stop until he’d insinuated himself between her legs and bent her backward so for all intents and purposes, they were sprawled out together over the front of his car.
He was over her but not on her. If she strained to keep her legs apart, he wasn’t even touching her. And yet he might as well have scooped her up in his fists and held her fast.
“Let me up,” she whispered fiercely.
Desperately.
But if Renzo heard her, he gave no sign.
He didn’t claim her mouth in a bruising kiss, as she half expected, the way he had when he’d helped her from the car that night in Monaco. He held himself above her, sprawled over her body to keep her exactly where she was. Pinning her there. If she tried to move, she would be the one to rub her body against his.
And if she did...would she stop? She shuddered at the notion.
“Tell me about these consequences, cara,” he murmured. “Tell me how you have suffered. Tell me how brave you have been to forge ahead in your gilded, pampered circumstances, feted and celebrated wherever you go, so soon to be the countess of all you survey.”
His mouth was at her ear, then down along her neck, and she could feel the heat of him everywhere—but he still wasn’t touching her.
Not the way she wanted him to.
And he wasn’t done. “Where does your earl imagine you are tonight? Locked away in your virginal bridal suite, perhaps? Dressed in flowing white already, the living, lovely picture of the innocence he purchased?”
It was one thing for Sophie to think of herself as chattel in the privacy of her own head. It was something else entirely to hear Renzo say it, sardonic and mocking.
“He has not purchased me. I’m not a cow.”
“Nor are you the virgin he expects.”
“I would be shocked if he has any expectations at all.”
“When marriage is commerce, cara, the contract is signed and sealed in the marital bed. Shall I tell you how?”
A wave of misery threated to take her over then. Sophie fought it back as best she could. “Not everyone is as...elemental as you are.”
“Will you tell him why?” Renzo asked, unsmiling and much too close. “When he comes to claim his bride, will you tell him who else has been between the pale thighs he imagined were his alone to part?”
He shifted his position above her and she sucked in a breath in a messy combination of anticipation and desire, but he only went down on one elbow so he could get his face that much closer to hers.
It made everything that much worse.
Or better, something in her whispered.
“You’re disgusting,” she told him. “And he won’t notice either way.”
“I think you underestimate your groom considerably,” Renzo murmured. “What purpose is there in being an earl in the first place if not to plant a flag in unclaimed land and call it his?”
Her breath deserted her at that. “I’m not... There’s no flag—”
But Renzo kept right on. “Why did you bother to remain pure and untouched for so long, if not to gift it to this betrothed of yours who you clearly hold in such high esteem?”
Sophie pressed her fingers hard against the metal of the car beneath her. She tried to pretend she didn’t feel that instant wave of shame—but she did. Did it matter how distantly Dal treated her? She’d made a promise and she’d broken it.
Spectacularly.
Over and over again.
And then it had gotten even worse.
“I wanted to wait,” she said quietly, fighting to stay calm. Or at least sound calm. “Until I didn’t.”
“I’m sure that distinction will please him greatly.” Renzo’s mouth was a scant centimeter from the sweep of her neck and she was sure—she was sure—that he could taste her rapid, revealing pulse. “Make sure your confession is vivid. Paint a picture. A man likes to know how many times his woman cries out another man’s name and begs him not to stop.”
She shoved at him then, no longer caring if that meant she was forced to touch him. She ignored the feel of his broad, sculpted shoulders beneath her palms and focused on all the emotions swirling around inside her, much too close to the surface.
But it didn’t matter what she did, because Renzo was immovable. Another brick wall—except there was nothing cold about him. Nothing the least bit reserved. He blazed at her and she could feel it as if it was his hand between her legs, breaching her softness and pushing deep inside—
Her breath was ragged. Desperate. “My marriage is none of your business!”
She had the confused sense that she’d walked directly into a trap. Renzo tensed, coiled tight as if he planned to spring at her.
“And yet here I am, right in the middle of it. Where you put me, Sophie. Against my will.”
She shoved at him again and again, he didn’t move. At all.
“If I put you there then I’ll remove you. Consider yourself ejected. With prejudice.”
“Why did you order me to meet you?” he asked, and though his voice was deceptively mild, his dark amber eyes gleamed in the dark and made her think of lions. Tigers. Big cats that had no place roaming about the staid English countryside. “Surely you must know you’ve made a grievous tactical error, cara. You’ve given me the upper hand.
”
“The upper hand?”
And she recognized that look on his face then. It was pure triumph, and it should have made her blood chill.
But he’d melted her in Monaco and she couldn’t seem to get her preferred veneer of ice back, no matter what. Not around him.
“I know who you are,” he told her with a certain relish that washed over her like a caress and then hit her in the gut. Hard. “And I have information I must assume your earl would no doubt prefer was not in the peasant hands of a bastard Sicilian.”
“...information?”
But Sophie already knew what he would say. And still, there was a vanishingly small part of her that hoped against hope that he was the man she’d imagined he was—
“Exactly what his fiancée got up to one fine night in Monaco, for example,” Renzo said, smashing any hopes she might have had. Of his better nature. Of what she needed to do here. Of this entire situation that seemed a bigger mistake with every passing moment. “What do you imagine he would pay to keep your indiscretions quiet? Because I already know the tabloids would throw money at me. I could name any sum I wish and humiliate two of the finest families in England with one sleazy little article. I must tell you, cara, I feel drunk with power.”
“You...” She could hardly speak. Her worst nightmare kept getting worse and she had no idea how to stop it. Or contain it. Or even get her head around it. “You are—”
“Careful,” he growled. “I would advise you not to call me names. You may find that I am far worse than any insults you throw at me.”
He pushed himself back, up and off the car and away from her body. Sophie stayed where he’d left her, uncertain what to do next. She was shaking. There was water making her eyes feel too full and too glassy. And worst of all, there was that part of her that wanted him to come back and cover her again.
She was sick. That was the only explanation.
“What I am is mercenary,” Renzo told her. He watched her pitilessly as she struggled to sit up. “You know what that word means, I presume?”
“Of course I know what it means.” She sat for a moment, more winded than she should have been, and then pushed herself off the car to get her feet back on the ground.
But it didn’t make her feel better. Maybe nothing ever would again.
“What it means to you is something derogatory, I am sure,” Renzo said, still watching her in that cold, very nearly cruel way. “Everything is mercenary to those who do not need to make their own money.”
Sophie understood that was a slap. “I don’t—”
He merely lifted a brow and she fell silent, then hated herself for her easy acquiescence.
“Everything I have, everything I am, I created out of nothing,” he told her. “I have nothing polite to say about the man who left my mother pregnant to fend for herself. I have only become a better man than he could ever dream of being. And do you know how I did that?”
“Of course I know. You raced cars for years.”
“What I did, Sophie, was take every opportunity that presented itself to me. Why should this be any different?” He watched her as she straightened from the car and took a shaky step. “What consequences would you like to speak to me about?”
And she understood then.
She understood her own, treacherous heart, and why it had pushed her out here in the middle of the night to further complicate the situation she had already made untenable with what she’d done. She understood that no matter what she might have told herself about threatening texts and potential blackmail, what she’d wanted was that man she’d made up in her head in Monaco.
The man who had looked at her through a crowd and seen her. Only her. Not her family name or her father’s wealth—just her.
The man who had taken her, again and again.
The man who had learned every inch of her in the most naked, carnal, astounding way possible, there in that villa high in the hills with the glittering lights of the city so far below.
The man who had made her laugh, scream, cry, and beg him to do it all over again.
But that had just been a night. Just one night.
And he was just a man, after all. Not the savior she’d made up in her head. Not the answer to a prayer she hadn’t known she’d made.
She should never, ever have answered his text. Because this had only made everything worse.
Her hand crept over her belly, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“I thought...” she started, then stopped herself, blinking back the emotions she desperately wanted to conceal from him. “I wanted...”
“Your cake and to eat it, too. Yes? I’m familiar with the phrase.” The curve of his lips was like a razor. “Why give up the bastard for the earl if you can have them both?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted at all.”
“Of course it was.” The razor curl to his lips edged over into outright disgust. “Do you think I don’t know your type, Sophie? Cheating fiancées turn into lying wives in the blink of an eye. And bored housewives are all the same, whether their house is a hovel or a grand hall. Trust me when I tell you that Europe is littered with the detritus of broken vows. You are not as special as you might imagine.”
She shook at that ruthless character assassination, but the worst part was that she couldn’t manage to shove out a single word in her own defense. Of course he believed these things of her. Had she showed him anything different?
What had seemed like sunlight and glory to her had been nothing but tawdry. She had her little accident to prove it. All she had to do was imagine trying to explain her behavior to her fiancé—or worse, her father. She knew the words they would use.
And she would deserve them.
“Renzo,” she said, very carefully, lest she jog something inside and send all these terrible, unwieldy things spilling out into the dirt between them. “There’s something you need to know.”
“I know everything I need to know.” His words were terse. His judgment rendered. It only surprised her that she’d imagined he might be different. “What I cannot forgive is that you made me an unwitting part of your dishonesty. A vow means something to me, Sophie, and you made me break one.”
She smiled, though it felt brittle. “What vows did you break?”
“I made a promise to myself many years ago that I would never, ever take something that belonged to another,” he told her with a kind of arrogant outrage, as if she’d twisted his arm.
“You’re right,” she said then, because something broke inside of her. She hugged herself as she stepped back, away from him and his car and all these messy emotions she should have been smart enough to leave behind her in Monte Carlo. “I should never have come here tonight.”
“These are games children play, Sophie,” he told her, fury and condemnation and all that righteousness making his accent more pronounced.
“You’re the one making threats,” she pointed out.
“You can consider it a courtesy. One you did not extend to me when you decided to entangle me in your sick, sad little marital games.”
She could do nothing but nod her head, everything within her swollen painfully and near to bursting—but she couldn’t let herself give in. She couldn’t show him more of herself. She couldn’t allow him to hurt her any more than he already had.
Because the truth was, she didn’t think she could survive it. She had been frozen solid all her life. Renzo had melted her, it was true, but Sophie hadn’t understood until tonight that the ice had been her armor.
“Marry your earl or do not,” Renzo said with dark finality. “But leave me out of it. Or I will assume you are inviting me to share the details of our night in Monaco with the world.”
She swallowed, which was hard to do when she felt as if the tears she refused to shed were choking her. “I understand.”
And Sophie stood where she was for a long time after he’d gone, driving off with a muscular roar.
She wanted to cry, but didn’t allow herself the weakness.
He’d treated her like a naughty child but the truth was, Sophie thought she’d just grown up.
At last.
She already hated herself, so what was a little more fuel to that fire? She would marry Dal tomorrow, as planned. She would carry on with the life that had been so carefully plotted out for her. She would force herself to do her wifely duty and Dal would either do the math or he wouldn’t.
Babies were born early all the time.
Her stomach heaved at that, but Sophie shoved the bile back down.
She’d made her bed and now she would have to lie in it. Literally.
Something in her eased at that. There was a freedom in having no good choices, she supposed. If Dal found out, it wasn’t as if it would turn a good marriage bad. Their marriage was a business affair, cold and cruel at its best.
If she was lucky, he might even set her free.
That would have to be enough.
The child she carried might not be Dal’s. It might never know its real father. But no matter what, no matter what happened, it would be hers.
Hers.
And Sophie vowed she would love her baby enough, with all that she had, so that it would never know the difference.
CHAPTER THREE
RENZO WOKE IN the middle of the night, restless and something like agitated—when he normally slept like the dead.
He had left Sophie behind without a backward glance, roaring off in a cloud of self-righteousness and sweet revenge, delivered exactly as planned. He’d congratulated himself on the entire situation, and the way he’d handled it, all the way back to the suite of rooms he maintained in his Southwark hotel, with its views of the Thames and giddy, crowded London sprawled at his feet.
He would normally top off a satisfying and victorious day with enough strong drink to make him merry and an uninhibited woman to take the edges off. But, unaccountably, he had done neither of those things.
The Bride's Baby of Shame Page 3
