“I don’t want to be ‘maintained,’” she hurled at him, as if he’d struck a blow.
She cradled the hand he’d removed from his arm as if his fingers on her skin had left blisters.
“Do you not?” Renzo asked, his dark eyes ablaze. “What, then, do you anticipate your marriage will give you? Or is it that you prefer a certain kind of cage to call your own?”
She shook her head, and opened her mouth to refute him—but he wasn’t finished.
“If the bars are pretty and look like the British aristocracy, then why not—is that it?” He was much taller than she remembered when she stood this close to him, and it reminded her that he was entirely too strong, as well. Why was she provoking him? What did she imagine she had to gain from it? “Sadly, Sophie, I’m afraid that you lay down with a dog of the first order. Now you must handle the fleas. The child you carry is a mutt. My mutt. And your blue blood turns muddier by the moment.” He inclined his head. “You have my condolences.”
“I don’t understand why, if you think so little of me, you would go to the trouble to disrupt my wedding and—”
“I do not think so little of you,” he told her, stern and uncompromising, though that ferocious gleam in his dark eyes told a different story altogether. “I do not think of you at all. All you are to me is a liar who happens to carry within her the only thing I care about in this world.”
Sophie felt as if she was swallowing broken glass. She felt as if she was reeling, though she didn’t think she’d actually tipped over.
“That’s a remarkable amount of pressure to put on child who hasn’t even been born yet,” she said quietly. “And I didn’t sign up to be your brood mare, Renzo.”
“Listen to me.”
He bent down, putting his face entirely too close to hers, and it wasn’t until her back came up hard against the wall behind her that she realized he had moved her all the way across the room. Then he made it worse, placing a hand flat against the wall on either side of her head.
A cage in fact. No longer only in theory.
And Sophie despaired of herself, because her reaction was...fire.
Everywhere.
Renzo leaned in closer. “I am the bastard son of a man so grand and glorious he never condescended to so much as speak my name, much less extend a hand to aid me or the woman who bore me in any way. My mother worked her fingers to the bone—which I am certain is nothing but an expression a person like you might use to be poetic. Descriptive. But when I say it, it is not figurative.” Something seemed to vibrate through him, as dark and magnetic as that harsh light in his gaze.
“Her hands were cracked and bleeding. She had wounds that never healed, particularly in the winter. And still she worked. She washed clothes and mended them. She scrubbed floors. If she had pride, she cast it aside and spent eighteen years on her knees so that I might grow and prosper. And all the while, the titled, pampered pig who took his pleasure from her and then cast her aside, lived in luxury far away, where he could pretend neither she nor I existed.”
Renzo was breathing hard, as if he’d just run five miles, and that should have terrified her.
Sophie had no idea why instead, all she wanted to do was reach out and try to hold him to her, something she knew—she knew—he would never allow.
“This will never occur to a child of mine,” he told her, and Sophie understood he wasn’t simply saying it. She understood that it was a vow.
“That would never happen.” There was a ringing in her head that she couldn’t seem to clear, no matter how hard she tried. “I am not penniless. And neither is—”
“You misunderstand me.” Renzo’s voice was flat, hard. “I would not care if you were next in line to a throne, Sophie. My child will not be illegitimate. He will not only never be treated like a bastard, he will, in fact, never, ever be one.”
“My child will not be a bastard,” Sophie said, very deliberately. Very carefully, because she was so close she could see the play of his muscles beneath his skin, and all of it washed through her like a warning. “Because I’m getting married in a few hours.”
“And even if I were inclined to allow such a thing, which I’m not, how do you imagine that will go down?” Renzo shook his head. “I cannot tell if you’re truly this naive or if you’re delusional. Your earl will no more take on the by-blow of his new wife’s ill-considered affair than he will fly naked over the moon. The fact you imagine otherwise is troubling.”
“You have obviously never met the earl. He is not an emotional man.” She shrugged, as if she wasn’t caged between his arms, up against the wall on the morning of her wedding. “As far as I can tell, he cares about absolutely nothing—least of all me.”
“He is a man, Sophie,” Renzo said, and he dipped his head, making her more aware of how close he was. “Never forget this.”
How he held her there against the wall without having to put so much as a finger on her. Her hands were at her sides, her fingertips digging into the wall behind her. But she didn’t know if it was because she was trying to steady herself, or desperately trying to keep her hands from touching him of their own accord.
“Your groom is a very, very wealthy man, in fact, with a lineage that I am quite certain stretches back to some damp medieval vault somewhere, stacked high with the desiccated corpses of earls just like him. He may not care about you. He may not care about anything on this earth. But here is what I can promise you.” Renzo was so close then that Sophie could feel each word like a lick against her neck. “He will care, very much, if you attempt to pass off another man’s child as his heir.”
Her chest was rising and falling much too fast. She’d thought the urge to cry had left her, drying out forever after what had happened last night out on that deserted road, but she felt the prick of tears again. There behind her eyes, where she could neither blink them away nor control them.
“Renzo—” she began, having no idea what she could possibly say next.
But it didn’t matter.
“You are still so beautiful,” Renzo said, as if it hurt him. “And yet listen to you. Like all pretty things, you are rotten beneath it, aren’t you?”
He murmured that almost like a poem, and somehow, that made it hurt worse. As if he’d reached deep into her, taken great handfuls of her insides and tangled them up before shoving them back haphazardly.
Making certain she would never, ever be the same again.
“I don’t want any of this,” she whispered.
“Do you not?” he asked, and his gaze seemed darker. Or maybe she was just afraid he could see more deeply inside of her. So deeply she was worried that he saw things she didn’t even know were there. “I think you are a liar.”
“Of course you do. What a shock.”
“I think you lie to yourself all the time,” he continued in his relentless way. “What other explanation can there be? You could have stayed right here last night and I would never have been the wiser. You didn’t have to come out and speak to me, if you truly believed I was a threat to you. Once you did, you could have steered the conversation away from any hint of consequence. But you did not.”
He reached over then and traced a faint pattern over her cheekbone, then down the line of her jaw. She felt her hands curl into fists at her side, because this felt like nothing more than a mockery of that beautiful night they had shared. When he had done exactly this, but it had all been so different. His every touch had been a reverence.
When now, it was the opposite.
She couldn’t bear it, she thought. She kept thinking it.
And she kept discovering that she could bear almost anything. No matter how it tore her apart inside.
“Is that a tear, Sophie?” Renzo asked with that quiet malice that hurt her. Everywhere. And yet set her alight all the same. “I don’t believe that, either.”
And then h
e covered her mouth with his.
Which, Sophie realized in that same blazing instant, was exactly what she’d wanted.
CHAPTER FIVE
HER HEART GAVE a terrific jolt, whether in need or recognition of her own complicity she didn’t know, and Sophie’s hands came up.
In defense, perhaps. To ward him off or push him away, she told herself—
But all she did was find the soft fabric of his T-shirt, stretched there across his granite-hard abdomen, and then she gripped him, making fists in the material.
And surrendered to the glorious assault of his mouth on hers.His mouth was a punishment. And Sophie was sick—she had to be far sicker than she’d ever imagined possible—because she exulted in it.
It was what she’d wanted last night, out there in the wet dark. It was what she’d wanted when she’d woken up to find him there at the end of her bed.
This—he—was exactly what she wanted.
Because she ached between her legs, in that place only he had ever found. Her breasts felt hard and heavy, as if he didn’t need to touch them to make them his. She couldn’t seem to help the little noises—of greed, of longing, of total surrender—that she made in the back of her throat.
Renzo made a low, rough sound that was little more than a growl, and knocked around inside of Sophie like a song. He bent, then hauled her up against him, his hands moving to take her thighs and pull her legs around his waist.
And still he kept his mouth on hers, a delicious torment. A bittersweet temptation.
All she wore was the soft, short gown she’d slept in, and Renzo acted as if it wasn’t there. He kept his mouth fused to hers, and used the wall behind them to keep her where he wanted her. His trousers were a faint abrasion against the soft expanse of her inner thighs, and it was hard to find purchase against the buttery soft leather of his jacket.
She couldn’t help but think of that night in his villa when he’d swung her against the wall, just like this, and had kissed her with this same mad passion—and then had slowed himself down to take her where he wanted to go, but much more carefully.
There was nothing careful about Renzo this morning.
And the only thing Sophie felt about that was a curious sense of...elation.
But then Renzo was reaching between them, those long, infinitely sure fingers slipping beneath the little scrap of lace she wore to find her where she was the most soft. Where she was bright and molten and entirely his, no matter what she might have tried to tell herself.
“This is the only part of you that does not lie,” he said against her mouth, hard and dark.
And she wanted to protest, but his fingers moved then, parting her and playing with her.
She thrashed against him, feeling that touch of his everywhere. It was fire that grew and grew with every pass of his clever fingers, and a wild, insane need that she’d convinced herself she’d made seem more intense than it really was over these past weeks.
She discovered that if anything, she had seriously downplayed Renzo’s effect on her.
“There is not a single thing that comes out of your mouth that I trust,” he told her, grim and furious, but even so, the words fell through her like need. Like longing. He reached between them and she heard the sound of his zipper, but could do nothing but shudder. And yearn. “This is the only thing I trust.”
She felt the broad head of him against her entrance, and then he was thrusting inside, a deep, thick, irrevocable claim. He had her pinned to the wall, caught between him and a slab of stone—and of the two of them, she thought the stone was more yielding.
Sophie cried out at his intense possession, and his mouth was on hers again.
And then everything got serious.
Scorching need. Searing and wholly mad, and she couldn’t seem to care the way she knew she should.
There was only his mouth on hers, a granite, sensual tease. There was only the hardest part of him, slick and deep inside her, rocketing them both into sheer delight with every bone-rattling thrust.
She was nothing but a red-hot, greedy fist of pure sensation.
It was better than she remembered.
He was better.
And she was lost.
It was all she could do to hang on for dear life while he tested that impressive length of his again and again, slamming into her so hard and so deep it was as if he made them both new.
She began to shake. It started deep inside, then fanned out, rolling over her like a wave.
“This is the truth about you, Sophie,” he told her, ferocious and cruel and yet she clung to him. She wanted him. God, how she wanted him. “You lie and you cheat and you walk around dressed to shine, blue-blooded and untouchable. But this. This is who you really are.”
He thrust in once again, harder than before, and she ignited.
The wildfire consumed her. She shook and she clenched. She lost herself in the molten, delirious rush.
And she heard him murmur a word she didn’t understand as he followed her over that edge.
She had no idea how long they stood like that, tipped back against the wall with him so deep inside her.
But everything was different now, and so when he recovered himself sufficiently to stand, there was no hint of the Renzo who had taken such care of her in Monaco. That Renzo had carried her to his bath and wiped her gently with a cloth, lest she ache in any way. This Renzo merely set her to the ground and stepped back.
“Two hours,” he told her hoarsely. And she did not imagine that the hoarseness in his voice was from the exertion. Not when she could see the dark temper in his eyes. He tucked himself away and zipped himself, and he never shifted that terrible glare from her.
She had lost herself. He had not. She needed to remember that.
“I can’t do that,” she whispered. “I can’t—”
“You will do it,” Renzo told her, as if it was a foregone conclusion. “You will call this farce of a wedding off and meet me down in that lane. Or, Sophie, I will teach you a thing or two about consequences.”
* * *
There were at least two hundred people in the hall, representing almost anyone with any nod toward nobility in all of Europe.
Which was to say, Sophie told herself harshly, these people were not her friends. They weren’t here for her. They weren’t even here for Dal. This wedding was nothing but a business arrangement, which made the guest list something like...a collection of business associates.
The business they were in was continuing their ancient bloodlines, no matter the cost. And maintaining all the wealth and estates that went with the kind of bloodlines that had been around since the Crusades and in some cases, long before. Standing in the back of the chapel at Langston House, Sophie could pick out any number of couples she’d known forever who had married for similar reasons.
“You will find that our sort of marriages last longer than those predicated on sentiment,” her mother had told her when Sophie had failed to entirely hide the emotion on her face at her engagement celebration—a thinly veiled business opportunity for her father and newly minted fiancé. “If you do not give yourself over to false notions of passion and romance, the opiate of the masses and the path to despair if you’re not careful, you will discover that a partnership based on shared goals and opportunities is far more secure than any of that other nonsense.”
Sophie had been telling herself for years that she believed it.
There was no reason that should claw at her now.
She had waited out those two hours, feeling sicker by the moment. She had done nothing. She had not summoned her father to tell him that things had changed, irrevocably. She hadn’t gone to find Dal. She’d run herself a bath and climbed into it, piling her hair on top of her head and letting the steam billow all around her. She’d sunk down deep and sat there so long that if there was water
on her face, she couldn’t have said whether it was the bath, the heat, or the tears she didn’t want to admit she still had it in her to cry.
She thought she might have sat there all day. It felt as if decades had passed. Her skin began to wrinkle and she’d had to run the hot water again and again to keep it warm—but soon enough there was a knock on the door.
Sophie had closed her eyes tight, then opened them. And reminded herself that no one could possibly know that she was faintly swollen and tender between her legs unless she told them—which she obviously wouldn’t do. Of course she wouldn’t.
The knocking had come again and she’d made herself call out the appropriate reply, bright and happy the way a bride should sound on her wedding day.
Poppy had come in the way she always did. Bustling, optimistic Poppy, who could make the best of anything.
Even this.
She’d dressed in the adjoining room, a bright salon with breakfast waiting, though Sophie hadn’t been hungry. She’d sipped at a strong cup of tea while her hair and makeup had been done. Her bridesmaids had trooped in and out. Her mother had even made an appearance, smiling rigidly at the scene and then excusing herself after the photographer suggested one too many mother-daughter shots.
Because Lady Carmichael-Jones was not sentimental. At all.
It had taken Sophie a while to dress. The wedding gown she’d chosen was wide and long, as classic and traditional as everything else today, and took over the whole of one wall in her dressing room. It was a soft, dreamy white, a lovely complement to how she’d dressed Poppy and the rest in a faint pink, as soft as a whisper, to bring out the coloring that her pretty friend believed she didn’t possess.
“You are absolutely beautiful,” she’d told Poppy when her friend had come in, fully dressed.
“Don’t be silly,” Poppy demurred, the way she always did, and had run her hands over the dress that actually suited her curves rather than hiding them. “You’re the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen. Even more so today.”
The Bride's Baby of Shame Page 6
