Sophie had only smiled, because she felt a great many things that morning and not one of them made her feel beautiful.
The countdown to two hours had long since passed, and nothing had happened. Renzo had not appeared in all his dark fury. No one had come rushing to the room where Sophie was getting ready to tell her that he had turned up and was shouting horrendous, salacious truths in the middle of Langston House. No one had suggested she look up one of the gossip websites, or had brandished a tabloid.
No one had stopped in to let her know that a fairly well-known stranger had appeared, uninvited, and demanded that he speak to Dal.
Or worse, her father.
And it was only when she was stepping into her wedding gown and letting Poppy button her into it as if she was tightening the bars on Sophie’s cage that she understood that what she was feeling the most was a kind of...disappointment.
She could still feel Renzo between her legs, sweet and stinging faintly from his intense possession.
Perhaps the truth was that she’d expected that to mean something.
After all this, after everything Renzo had done and she had said to him, she still thought he would rescue her.
There was a lesson in this mess, she thought now as the music started. She was already in place down at the end of the long aisle, standing silently beside her father. She could see Poppy standing up before her, down at the altar where Dal waited, looking for all intents and purposes as if he was waiting for a bus. A bus that might in fact have run late, thus mildly inconveniencing him.
That was her groom.
And this is your life, she reminded herself, before she said or did something that might inspire her father to take it upon himself to say something similar.
There was no escape. She’d been foolhardy to imagine otherwise for even a moment.
Her father took her arm and began the long, slow walk, while Sophie tried not to panic about the fact she would be expected to grow old with a man who held her in the kind of esteem he lavished on a bus.
She would have to sleep with him. Have sex with him. How had she never thought of that before?
Sophie had considered it in the abstract, of course. But since that night in Monaco, she’d gone out of her way to avoid thinking about that part of things in any kind of detail. Dal would want heirs, naturally. She knew it was part of her job to provide them. And there was only one way she knew to go about doing that.
She tried to imagine Dal taking Renzo’s place in any of the things she’d done with him—
But her stomach lurched.
Everyone was standing and looking at her. There were cameras and phones held aloft.
And Sophie’s father was walking her down the aisle toward the duty he’d prepared her for since the cradle.
Whether you like it or not, whether your stomach lurches or not, you are going to have to do your duty, she snapped at herself. Here and in the marital bed.
She told herself it couldn’t be that bad. Women had been surrendering their bodies to duty and responsibility for centuries and somehow, the world kept turning. It wouldn’t kill her to do her part.
Her parents had said as much today.
They had stood with her in the antechamber before the ceremony, standing side by side, both of them tall and trim and perfectly composed. They never touched, Sophie had noticed, the way she always did. Having now experienced sex herself, she didn’t entirely believe that they ever had.
“This is a marvelous day for our family,” her father had said, sounding as close to jovial as Sophie had ever heard him. Which was to say, he sounded slightly less wooden and disinterested than usual. “I only wish that the former earl had lived long enough to see us merge the families together like this. It’s just as we always planned.”
“Oh, happy day,” Sophie had replied.
And didn’t entirely realize how sharp her voice was until she caught the quelling look her mother threw her.
“Pull yourself together, please,” Lady Carmichael-Jones had said coolly. Because she was always so cool she might as well have been sculpted from a block of ice. “It would not do to have the new Countess of Langston mewling and carrying on like a common trollop getting married in the back of a pub, would it?”
That was the sort of cutting comment that would normally slice Sophie into bits and leave her tongue-tied and embarrassed. Her mother’s specialty.
But Sophie wasn’t the person she had been five weeks ago. Or last night.
Or even this morning when she’d woken up.
Oh, no. Now Sophie was exactly what Renzo had made her. What he’d called her and then what he’d showed her she was. Perhaps this was who she’d been all along.
A dark and greedy thing. Selfish. Base and low and far more of a trollop than her mother could possibly imagine, Sophie was sure.
More to the point, she wasn’t afraid of everything the way she’d been before, because the worst had already happened.
It was continuing to happen right now.
“Have you spent a lot of time in the back of pubs, then, Mother?” she’d asked.
The temperature in the antechamber had plummeted.
“Let me be clear, Sophie,” her father had said after a moment of silence dragged out into several. Each icier than the last. “My expectation, in case there is some confusion, is that you will acquit yourself appropriately in all things. You were not raised to traipse about the planet, racking up indiscretions and becoming tabloid fodder for housewives in Harrogate to tut over in their local Asda.”
“You should consider this an opportunity,” her mother had agreed. “To remove yourself from the tiresome social media narrative that seems to have your generation in its claws.”
No one waited to see if Sophie was interested in narratives one way or another, she’d noticed. Much less if she’d like to exclude herself from one of them.
Because none of this was about her. None of this was ever about her.
“When in doubt,” her father had told her with great satisfaction, “think of your duty. Family and sacrifice is what has made the Carmichael-Jones family great. It will see you through.”
“No matter what comes your way,” her mother had added, “and no matter how unpleasant, all you need to do is remember who you are.”
On her father’s arm now, Sophie walked as slowly as possible down the aisle. As slow as she could without looking as if she was dragging her feet—or making her father look as if he was actually dragging her toward her groom.
She was fairly certain that little speech had been her mother’s version of instructing her only daughter to lie back and think of England.
But all Sophie could really think about was Renzo. And how, when she was with him, she thought of nothing at all. Not England. Not sacrifice. Not who she was or wasn’t.
Because there was only him. There was only that dark, addicting magic he spun with his hands. His mouth.
That hard length of him, surging deep inside of her.
But if there was a less appropriate place to think of such things, Sophie couldn’t imagine it.
The faces of the guests were a blur around her. Inside, she was nothing but a scream. Loud, long.
But no one could hear her.
No one could ever hear her.
She was the one in the white dress, walking down the aisle toward the altar, the center of everyone’s attention—
But she knew perfectly well that no one saw her. Not really.
Only Renzo ever had.
First in Monaco. But this morning here, too.
The man standing there, waiting for her at the end of the aisle, had never seen her. Not the real her. He saw what she represented. Her father’s wealth and lands. But she could have been anyone. If Sophie’s father had been in possession of sixteen daughters, she knew perfectly well
that Dal would have chosen whoever was most expedient, not necessarily Sophie.
It had nothing to do with her.
She understood that it never would.
More than that, she understood with a blinding sort of clarity everything she would have to do if she wanted to keep her baby safe in this particular cage she was walking into.
For all her bold talk to Renzo earlier, she actually agreed with him.
Dal might be more ice sculpture than man, but he was still the Earl of Langston. She could not imagine any scenario in which he would knowingly raise another man’s child as his.
That meant it was on Sophie to keep her baby safe.
And that meant it was also on Sophie to make certain her marital duty was taken care of as soon as possible. A baby might be a few weeks early, but push it a few months and that was begging for trouble.
She tried to visualize it as she moved. She put one foot in front of the other and she forced herself to imagine it.
They would lie down together in a grand bed somewhere as befit an earl. Assuming she didn’t immediately contract hypothermia from a single touch of chilly Dal’s hand, how bad could it be?
But there was a sinking sensation inside of her, and Sophie had the unpleasant feeling that it could be very, very bad indeed.
Because even if it was unremarkable and indifferent, it still wouldn’t be Renzo.
That harsh little truth sank its claws in deep, and tore at her.
But she kept walking.
Her eyes blurred. Her stomach heaved.
Sophie gripped the flowers in her hands so tight she could feel the moisture from the crushed stems making her palms sticky.
And still she walked.
She set her teeth against her tongue and bit down, so she would not say a word. No sobs. No screams. No trollops in pubs.
Just a dignified silence, no matter if it killed her. This wasn’t about her anymore. This was about her baby. She would lie back and think of her baby.
England could burn for all she cared, as long as her baby was safe.
Sophie was three-quarters of the way down the aisle when the doors slammed open behind her.
She saw Dal stand at attention, the blank look on his face sharpening.
Next to him, Poppy jolted, and then her face brightened.
“A thousand apologies,” she heard Renzo—because of course it was Renzo—drawl out, louder than all the gasps and muttering. “But I am afraid that there has been a change of plans.”
Sophie told herself not to move. To pretend it wasn’t happening, even as her father dropped her arm and wheeled around.
But she couldn’t help herself. She felt...itchy and wild, or maybe she was afraid that she was hallucinating. She didn’t know.
And there, three-quarters of the way down the aisle toward the man she’d been promised to when she was still a child, she turned.
She faced Renzo instead.
Renzo, whose eyes were dark amber and hot with rage. And a deep possessiveness that should have terrified her. It didn’t. If anything, she welcomed it.
Renzo, who strode toward her, looking for all the world as if he was out for a quiet, low-key saunter.
Right here in the middle of her wedding.
In the movies, people cried out in moments like these. People leaped up. Everyone reacted, instantly.
But not today. Not here.
Sophie was frozen in place. Her father was beside her, and she could feel his scowl, but he didn’t move. Around them, lined in all the chapel’s pews, there was nothing but shocked silence.
And then Renzo was right there before her.
“I warned you,” he murmured.
And then he simply bent, swept Sophie in his arms, and tossed her over his shoulder.
“This is unacceptable!” her father blurted out then.
“This is inevitable,” Renzo corrected him, with tremendous calm, as if he wasn’t in the middle of abducting a bride from her own wedding. “Accept it now or later, old man. Your choice.”
Renzo spun around, making Sophie dizzy, and headed toward the door.
And with every step he took, there was more noise, and not only in Sophie’s head.
A voice she thought might belong to her mother, exclaiming, which was something Lady Carmichael-Jones never did, and certainly not in public—
But then Renzo pushed his way through the doors and carried her out into the tremulous summer morning as if he had every right.
He tipped her over again, but only to set her down beside that same low-slung car he’d been driving the night before. He opened the door, then handed her in, and she didn’t pretend for a moment that his grip on her arm wasn’t anything but an order.
“Do not make me chase you,” he told her as he slammed the car door shut.
She was in shock, Sophie thought distantly. Her dress was an impractical layer cake, filling up the interior of the car, flowing over everything. The gearshift. The emergency brake. Most of the console.
She didn’t understand until Renzo threw himself into the driver’s seat that she could have taken that opportunity to run. To do...something. Escape, maybe. Lock him out of his own car, for another. Anything, actually, to indicate that she wasn’t on board with being carted out of her own wedding.
But it was too late.
Renzo turned the ignition and the car roared to life.
“I told you what would happen,” he bit out.
“So you did.”
She didn’t sound like herself. But then, if Sophie had learned anything today, it was that she had no idea who she was. Or, to be more accurate, she’d discovered that it was possible she’d never been who she’d imagined herself to be in the first place.
Because surely the proper little heiress, raised from birth to marry the Earl of Langston, would have...fought this.
Struggled, even a little bit.
Instead of what Sophie had done, which was exhale as Renzo had carried her out of that church. As if he’d saved her, after all.
Of course the proper little heiress would likely not have turned up to her own wedding pregnant with another man’s child, so there was that.
And now it was done. Even if she tossed herself out of this car at the first turn in the road and ran back to Langston House, the damage was done. There would be no carrying on with the wedding. There would be no pretending this hadn’t happened.
There would have to be explanations. And she was still pregnant.
Renzo took a turn too fast on his way out of the Langston estate, exhibiting all the mastery and control that had made him such a star on the racetrack.
He flashed her a look, dark and unreadable, before he took another curve.
And she felt that where she was still tender. She felt it everywhere, inside and out, as if they were connected. As if they were tied up tight to each other with more than just one night in Monaco and an unborn child.
More even than the disrupted wedding of the year.
“Congratulations,” Sophie said quietly. “You have well and truly ruined my life.”
But Renzo only laughed, that dark shower of sound, male and rough, that made everything worse.
And better, something treacherous whispered inside her.
Because she could feel it.
Sophie could feel again, as if that chapel had been antiseptic and gray and this was all sensation and bright color. She didn’t know how to process it. She wasn’t sure she could.
“I believe I told you I would,” Renzo said, and shifted the car into a higher gear, smooth and fast. It felt like a metaphor. And he still had all that laughter in his voice, which was nothing but lightning inside of her, flash after flash. “You are welcome.”
CHAPTER SIX
“I HATE TO interrupt this kidnapping,�
�� Sophie said mildly when Renzo pulled his sports car onto the tarmac next to his waiting jet at a private airfield outside of London. “But I’m not certain you’ve thought through the practicalities.”
“You will find, cara, that I am nothing if not practical. I did not build myself an empire by chance and the liberal application of frothy daydreams.”
Renzo didn’t wait for her to reply. He was up and out of the car, then moving around the front of it, never taking his eyes off the bridal confection exploding over the front seat of his favorite Bugatti.
It would have helped considerably if Sophie was not quite so beautiful, he thought as he moved. Or if, every time he had a taste of her, he didn’t simply want more.
More and more, as if she was an addiction.
Renzo had never permitted himself the weakness of addiction, despite the many temptations he’d fielded over the years. Drugs and drink, gambling, women—he’d had a cool head where all were concerned, always. Something spiked and edgy rolled around inside him at the notion that this woman could be what finally changed that.
She’s already changed you into a slavering addict, he told himself coldly. How many other women have you abducted?
Renzo gritted his teeth, opened the passenger door, and took Sophie’s hand to help her climb out of the low, muscular car.
The worst part was, he wasn’t immune to the symbolism of the pretty girl in the long white dress, especially as she climbed out of what he had to admit was a particularly masculine sports car. She looked like she should be starring in the wedding he had always assumed he would have one day, if only so he could ensure the legitimacy of the next generation of Crisantis.
No child of his would bear the stigma Renzo had. Not as long as he drew breath.
Of course he had always assumed that he would choose his own bride. Not that she would present herself, already pregnant and dressed for the part.
But if Renzo had learned anything over the course of his determined climb out of the pit of his humble beginnings, it was that nothing ever went as planned. Ever. He’d learned to accept that and more, to lean into the curves life threw at him, long ago.
The Bride's Baby of Shame Page 7
