The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  It was that or crash.

  “Where are we going?” Sophie asked.

  Renzo hated her composure. It had slipped a bit, there in that chapel at Langston House. He’d seen a sheen of emotion in her gaze when he’d set her down next to the car outside the wedding ceremony. But with every mile he’d driven her away from her stable little life, she’d recovered her equanimity. Her spine had grown straighter against the back of her seat. Meanwhile, her filmy, gauzy gown had been everywhere, filling up the car. Flowing all over his legs, his lap. Reminding Renzo of what he’d done—what he’d set in stone, with no possibility of changing his mind—with every moment.

  Not that he was likely to forget.

  “We are going to Sicily, of course,” he told her as he led her across the tarmac. He told himself she needed the help, dressed as she was, but he had the lowering suspicion that despite his towering rage at her attempted betrayal, what he really wanted was to just keep touching her. He cast that aside as he glared at her. “Where, pray, did you imagine I would take the mother of my only child?”

  She didn’t like it when he called her that, he could see. Something flashed in her gaze, making the gold in all that melting brown gleam a little bit harder. But she only lifted her chin.

  “I didn’t think you would take me at all. As you must have suspected when you found me halfway down the aisle toward a different groom.”

  “Did you not? A pity.”

  His temper had cooled, Renzo realized, and he now felt something very like expansive. At his ease, even. It was because he’d solved the issue at hand, whether Sophie was aware of it or not. There was nothing left but the technicalities. Where they would marry to provide his child with legitimacy. When they would accomplish this. And in between their inevitable wedding and the birth of their child? Well. There was a whole host of punishments he could inflict upon the woman who had walked down that aisle, carrying his child, with every intention of pretending it belonged to another man.

  Renzo wouldn’t be getting over that anytime soon.

  “Perhaps, in time, you will learn that I do not make idle threats.”

  “Will there be more threats then?” She asked the question brightly, and even smiled that razor-edged, polite smile of hers that no doubt cut England’s pedigreed hordes into pieces where they stood. It had a far different effect on him, and all of it located where he was hardest. “That certainly gives me something to look forward to.”

  Renzo ushered her toward the steps of the plane, unfolded before them, and forced himself to let go of her hand. Because he didn’t want to let go of it. Or her. And that was unacceptable.

  “It cheers me that you can maintain your sense of humor under such trying circumstances, Sophie,” he said when they reached the bottom of the steps. He nodded at his waiting staff, then returned his attention to the woman beside him. “It inspires me to imagine that what lies ahead will not set you back at all. I look forward to this...what do you call it? Your British lip?”

  She regarded him for a moment. “A stiff upper lip, presumably?”

  “Just so.” It was Renzo’s turn to smile, and he took it, pleased to see her pulse jump in her throat. “I look forward to seeing it in action in the days to come.”

  “I am desolated, of course, to throw a monkey wrench in the midst of what sounds like some truly delightful plans.” Sophie did not look anything like desolate. She treated him to that smile again, that he imagined women of her class were taught in their finishing schools as a matter of course. “And I certainly do not wish to impugn your manhood, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to simply pick me up and carry me into a foreign country. It generally requires a passport, for a start.”

  “The passport you left in your bag,” Renzo agreed lazily. “Along with the rest of your luggage, carefully packed for your honeymoon as a countess. Alas, that is a trip you will not be taking.”

  “You have my passport?”

  “I would suggest that you stop underestimating me, Sophie. There will come a time where I will only find it insulting.”

  “You were...in my room? Going through my things?”

  She had started to move while she spoke, climbing the stairs as she held her wedding gown in huge bunches on either side. And still it slipped and spilled everywhere, catching every little hint of breeze.

  All he wanted to do was peel it off of her, inch by inch. And then burn it, because it represented the great wrong she had attempted to perpetrate upon him. And while the fire raged, feast on what waited beneath all that soft white fabric.

  But she wasn’t on the menu at the moment, he reminded himself.

  Not quite yet.

  Renzo waited until they’d cleared the stairs entirely and had moved inside to the lounge area of his plane. He nodded toward one of the deep, cushy seats and Sophie sank into it, aiming her well-bred frown directly at him.

  Because he was supposed to apologize, he imagined, for helping himself to her travel documents and what few garments of hers did not look as if she’d purchased them specifically for her new husband.

  “Do you expect me to apologize?” he asked when it appeared she intended to stare at him forever, frown locked in place.

  “Certainly not,” she said in a tone that conveyed the opposite. “Why apologize for pawing through my belongings? Perhaps that’s normal where you come from.”

  “What is normal?” He took his own seat and lounged back in it, keeping his gaze steady on hers. “Is it—to pick an example at random—giving someone a false name and sneaking off in the middle of the night? Is it summoning them for an illicit meeting in the dark on a deserted country road, but failing to mention the most important piece of information? Or, wait. I know.” And Renzo smiled at her then, not nicely, until she jerked slightly where she sat. “Normal must be a woman who finds herself pregnant with one man’s child, yet chooses to march herself down the aisle toward another.”

  “I think you’ll find that such things are a whole lot more normal than the fragile egos of men may wish to acknowledge,” Sophie said drily.

  “Is it my fragile ego you think you have damaged here today?” He raised his brows. “Or, perhaps, it is your grasp of human decency that leaves something to be desired.”

  Renzo thought she looked pale at that, and her eyes glittered. She made a small production out of folding her hands in her lap, and as she did it she sat a bit straighter. As if she was a queen on a throne, not a bride on the run.

  He understood that this was the Carmichael-Jones heiress he was seeing before him now. This was the woman Sophie had been raised to become. Quiet, composed. Perfect for the stale, dry duties of a countess and nothing at all like the wild, half-mad, lustful creature she became when his hands were on her.

  Something to file away for later. When he could better take advantage of her weakness, as well as his own.

  “Do you have any other objections?” he asked her when she only stared back at him as if her gaze alone could shame him. Little did she know that a man raised in shame chose his path early. Either he lived in shame or became immune to it. Renzo had chosen the latter. And along with it, all those other pointless emotions that governed the lives of others. Love, for example. His father had beaten that out of him, too. “Any other obstacles you imagine you can throw in the path of what cannot be avoided? I invite you to try. Give it your best shot. I assure you, I have thought of everything.”

  She seemed to take a remarkably long time to moisten her lips, and it turned out he was not immune to that. At all. He shifted in his seat, lest she see the power she had over him.

  “How long will we be in Sicily?”

  “But that is the best part. Did I not mention it?” Renzo truly enjoyed himself as he let his mouth curve at that. “As long as it takes, Sophie. That is how long we will be in Sicily. As long as it takes.”

  He wasn�
��t surprised she didn’t have much else to say after that. Nor did she ask him to clarify what he meant, because he was certain she didn’t want to know.

  And he was more than happy to let her stew.

  Once the plane was aloft, Sophie excused herself to one of the staterooms. Renzo let her go. He had more than enough business to tend to, as ever, and anyway, he could allow her a little bit of solitude to process what had happened to her this morning. She’d woken to find him right there in her bedroom, confronting her with the scope of her lies and the consequences. She’d fought him and then she’d let him take her in a kind of fever, right there against a wall in her fiancé’s ancestral home. She’d more than let him. She’d been an active, excited participant in that same immolation.

  And then she’d gone ahead with her damned wedding anyway. That filled Renzo with pure, unadulterated rage every time he considered it, so he concentrated instead on the part he liked better.

  That being when he’d thrown open those chapel doors, strode inside, and taken what was his.

  He had never met the Earl of Langston before. Nor any of the well-titled, effortlessly wealthy people who’d attended that wedding. Nonetheless, he’d recognized the type. The big hats and conservative dress of the English peers. The carefully elegant European aristocrats as they’d submitted to another tediously proper ceremony celebrating two of their own. He was vaguely surprised his father wasn’t among them in all his princely regalia. By contrast, Renzo was nothing but a beggar at the feast.

  But he’d still walked away with the prize.

  And there was not one single part of him, the cast-off bastard son of a man very like the people who’d sat in that chapel and tutted their outrage very quietly indeed, that hadn’t enjoyed every moment of that.

  An enjoyment that would only get better and deeper with time, he was well aware. Because he hadn’t simply stolen the Carmichael-Jones heiress away from her destiny. Oh, no. Anyone could have an affair with a dirty commoner and many people in Sophie’s nosebleed-high class did. Repeatedly. But in nine months, Sophie would provide this particular cast-off Sicilian bastard with a child, thereby reminding the entire world of the fact she’d permitted him into her sapphire-blue, aristocratic body.

  Thereby polluting her haughty, noble blood.

  All he needed to do was marry her first, to add insult to injury and make sure that pollution was entirely legitimate.

  He was practically jubilant.

  And when Sophie did not emerge from the stateroom in what he considered a reasonable amount of time, Renzo went looking for her.

  He found her out of her wedding gown at last and showered, with damp hair dripping on her shoulders. She’d changed into some of the clothes he’d packed for her—a pair of trousers that molded to her shapely legs and a soft, desperately fragile sweater in a shade of pale rose that made her seem to glow as she sat there at the foot of the bed.

  That was the trouble with Sophie. She was as beautiful here, now, bedraggled and brown eyes wide, as she had been in that wedding gown. Or even that night in Monaco, gleaming as she had in all the bright lights of Monte Carlo.

  “Are you hiding?” Renzo asked.

  “Of course I am.” She gazed back at him, unsmiling, and he found himself unduly taken with the fact her narrow feet were bare, her toenails painted a glossy red. “Is this the part where you gloat?”

  He shrugged. “I prefer to do my gloating naked. Otherwise it is less satisfying, you understand.”

  “So many things to look forward to. I can hardly contain myself.”

  He handed her what he’d brought for her and watched her reaction as she took it. She blanched, which surprised him. Then held it gingerly before her, as if she expected it to bite.

  “I would have thought you would want your mobile,” he said, studying her and her reaction. “Desperately, in fact.”

  She flipped her mobile phone over and over in her hand. “The thing is, you don’t actually know anything about me. So I expect you’re going to be in for a great many surprises.”

  “Every socialite I’ve ever met is attached to her mobile,” Renzo said with a certain quiet menace that even he could feel fill the small, compact room. “But of course, you are a special little unicorn, are you not?”

  Sophie tossed the phone onto the bed beside her. And if his sardonic tone bothered her, she didn’t show it when she fixed that cool brown gaze of hers on him. Very much as if she was the one in charge here.

  “Talk me through how this is going to work,” she said. It was an order.

  Renzo opted not to take the opportunity to show her how very much he objected to being given orders. That, too, could wait.

  “Do what I tell you to do,” he said instead. “It is as simple as that.”

  She did not look as if she appreciated his simplicity.

  “You’ve dramatically, theatrically, kidnapped me from my own wedding,” she said. “I can’t say that I really mind leaving England while all of the fallout from that happens. I imagine it will get ugly.”

  “It is already ugly.” He nodded at her mobile. “You can see for yourself. It’s on all the online gossip sites already.”

  Sophie didn’t even glance at the mobile beside her on the bed. She wrinkled up her nose instead.

  “And who is more evil in the retelling? You, for storming Langston House? Or me, for allowing you to carry me off?”

  “Opinions are split.”

  “They won’t be for long.” Sophie’s smile was brittle. “I think you’ll find that the woman is always, always at fault in these things. No matter what happens. You can expect to be hailed as a great alpha hero while I will be relegated to the role of just another slut in want of a good shaming.”

  Renzo assumed that was meant to be a slap at him. What astonished him was that he felt it as such.

  “It is not as if you fought to escape me,” Renzo pointed out, perhaps a little more harshly than necessary. “You didn’t even complain. The truth is that you had no wish to marry that man. I await your expressions of gratitude that I saved you from your fate.” His smile felt thin. “Don’t flood me with them all at once.”

  “Whether I wanted to marry him or did not hardly matters.”

  “It matters to me.”

  Sophie faltered at that. Then drew herself up. “What matters is that I didn’t marry him, after all. The trouble with that is, there were two hundred guests at that wedding and any number of photographers. I’m sure there was a stampede to make it to the tabloids.”

  “I note that this is your concern.” He lounged in the doorway to the stateroom, one shoulder against the doorjamb, as if there wasn’t entirely too much of that dark mess he refused to name rumbling around inside him. “I have not heard you mention your earl.”

  “I am certain that Dal had a moment of concern over the numerous business enterprises he and my father planned to combine. Just as I’m certain that his first call was to his bank manager.”

  “This is why I am a romantic,” Renzo murmured. “Such love. Such passion. It makes my heart beat faster.”

  “I don’t need you to understand my arrangement with Dal,” Sophie said coolly. “What I do need you to understand is that you caused an enormous scandal. That’s going to follow both of us.” She slid her hand over her belly, which was still the same size Renzo remembered tasting. Repeatedly. It fascinated him that there was a child in there. His child. “It will follow this baby around. You understand, don’t you? This is something that will never go away.”

  “And this is a problem...why?”

  “Thank you for answering my question, eventually. In a roundabout way.” She shook her head. “I’ll take all this to mean we’ll be staying in Sicily for quite a long time.”

  “This is not something you need to concern yourself with.” Renzo straightened in the doorway. “Your days of mer
rily skipping around the globe, from this party to that party—”

  “I believe you have me confused for some other socialite,” Sophie said drily. “Or perhaps an American reality television star. The future Countess of Langston was not a party girl by any estimation. That would have been very seriously frowned upon. Of course, in retrospect, perhaps a party or two would have been better than running out on my own wedding.”

  “I warned you not to cross me,” Renzo reminded her softly. So softly that she flinched a little bit. He watched the tense way she held herself and told himself that what he felt then was triumph. Not that little prickle of the sort of shame he’d thought he’d exorcised years ago. “You could have met me as I asked. You could have canceled your wedding on your own. You chose to make it into a scene instead.”

  “I don’t think I’m the one who made it a scene.”

  “I gave you the opportunity to take responsibility for what you had done.” His voice was gruff, his gaze hot. It felt a little too much like losing control. “You did not take that opportunity. And as you’re so fond of consequences, I am sure you will appreciate that there is a price to be paid for that as well.”

  “So many prices to be paid around you,” Sophie said, though she never dropped his gaze. “I can’t imagine why you’re still single. But then, who could possibly afford you?”

  Renzo did not permit himself to lose control. Ever. He had to take a moment to make certain he was not about to do so here. He had been pushed around by far weightier opponents than Sophie Carmichael-Jones, for God’s sake. His own father had taught him entirely too many things about his own breaking points. There was no possible way he could allow this woman to wedge herself any further beneath his skin.

  Or at the very least, he couldn’t let her see that she’d already done it.

  “What I care about is the child,” Renzo told her when he was certain he could sound appropriately composed. “I enjoy your body, of course. I think you know that.”

  He liked turning the tables on her a little too much, perhaps. He liked the spots of color that appeared on her face when he said things like that. He liked the way she let out a shuddery sort of breath.