The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  Most of all, he liked the way she held her tongue, as if she feared that saying something would result in another intense taking, the way it had this morning.

  Though perhaps fear was not the right word to describe the look in her eyes.

  “But I have always had more women than I know what to do with,” Renzo continued, and he liked delivering that particular blow most of all. “I cannot imagine any scenario in which I would steal a woman who belongs to another save this one. I would caution you not to read anything personal into it.”

  “What a shame,” she managed to say, her brown eyes glittering with something hectic that he couldn’t quite read. “And here I’d planned to start writing you love letters.”

  “You can make jokes, Sophie. But I know how you sound when you come apart in my hands. I also know that you have never had any man but me. In the days to come, you will likely be tempted to make this something that is not.”

  “Oh, no,” Sophie said, holding his gaze, her own dark with temper. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. I don’t believe in such emotions. And while you are busy not getting the wrong idea about anything because you are so sophisticated, you are free to consider yourself a surrogate. With benefits.”

  “I hope that by ‘with benefits’ you do not mean sex,” Sophie bit out at him, bristling where she sat. “Because what happened in Langston House will never happen again. That was the absolute last time—”

  “Yes, yes.” Renzo didn’t exactly roll his eyes, as he was not a teenage girl, but he came close. “You will never touch me again. You are a vestal virgin, made new by the force of your outrage. Spare me the puffed up, Puritan melodrama, if you please. I doubt very much you could resist me if you tried.”

  “I think you’ll find I can. Happily and easily and with joy in my heart.”

  “You have thus far proven otherwise, cara. Repeatedly. When all is said and done, you are an inexperienced little thing who has had the very bad luck to imprint on me while attempting to cheat me out of my own child. Don’t imagine that I’m above using it. I’m not above using anything it takes to get exactly what I want.”

  She surged up from the end of the bed then, her hands in fists at her sides. A better man would not have found that arousing.

  Renzo thanked god he was not a better man, by any stretch of the imagination.

  “I would be careful if I were you, Renzo,” Sophie seethed at him. “If you teach someone how to use a weapon, sooner or later, they’ll use it on you.”

  “I will look forward to that sparring match, then,” he said, and waved a dismissive hand, right there in front of her face to make sure she felt sufficiently condescended to. “Back to reality, if you please. You will be my surrogate, with benefits, as I said. And I will promise you one thing. You will beg me to take you. That is inevitable.” She looked as if she might pop, so flushed with fury was she then. “But that is merely sex. It is hardly worth discussing. The part I want you to pay particular attention to is this. You will live in my home in Sicily. You will be obedient. If you simply do as you are bid, we will get along famously.”

  She looked mutinous. “If you say so.”

  “I’m not a quiet, reserved man, like your earl,” Renzo told her, his voice mild enough but the steel beneath it impossible to miss. “I do not suffer in silence. In truth, I do not suffer at all. I have created a life for myself where suffering of any kind is expressly outlawed. I will not put up with any of your antics. You will obey.”

  “Because you don’t care if I suffer. Only if you do.”

  He smiled. “Precisely.”

  “And what does obedience look like in this delightful prison you’ve prepared for me?” she asked, her voice a little bit scratchy. To match the temper he could see written all over her, he assumed. “I’m going to need you to lay it all out for me.”

  “You will meet with my family doctor when we arrive,” he told her. Stern and uncompromising. “You will follow his recommendations to the letter. You will be pleasant at all times.”

  He moved from the doorway then and he liked it when he stepped so close to her that she was forced to tip her head back to meet his eyes. He liked the heat he could see there. The truths that heat told no matter what lies spilled from her lips.

  “You have spent all these years practicing how to be elegant. That is what I expect. You have the opportunity to be an aristocratic ornament in my home, Sophie. Do you not feel complimented?”

  From the look on her face, she was not only not complimented in the least, she would have torn into him with her fingers if she thought she could get away with it.

  “So in your imagination, a pregnant woman will flit about your house, decorously. Not lumber about as I grow big and unwieldy. Is that about it?”

  “More or less.”

  “And should morning sickness overtake me, what then? Is there a place where I can be prettily, obediently sick so as not to distress you with such inelegance?”

  “I have a large and well-trained staff, of course. I’m not an animal, Sophie. I’m offended you would imagine otherwise.”

  “Wonderful. So I’ll be trotted out before you only when I am fit to be seen.” She studied him for a moment. “Is that how you plan to treat your child?”

  He reached over and helped himself to a wet, dark chunk of her hair, curling there against her shoulder. He tugged on it, perhaps not as gently as he might have.

  But then, she kept landing blows.

  “You don’t need to concern yourself with how I will treat the child you tried to take from me,” he told her softly. Almost sweetly. “If I were you, I would spend some time learning how to resign myself to the future before you. You will not be returning to England anytime soon. You do not have to worry yourself with whatever scandal we’ve left behind there today. You’ve just signed yourself up for nine months in my exclusive company. If I were you, I’d spend a little time contemplating what that means.”

  “Nine months,” she repeated, as if it was a death sentence “And then what? Will you toss me out the door as soon as I’m finished with labor?”

  “There will be ample time to figure such things out then,” he told her, gazing down at her. That pretty face. Those melting brown eyes with hints of gold. He had to remind himself how little she could be trusted. “Visitation rights, for example, because I am certainly not handing you primary custody of my own child. And little things like when and how to divorce so that it damages the child the least, and causes me as little aggravation as possible.”

  She blinked. Then frowned. “Divorce?”

  “Of course,” Renzo said. “You cannot imagine that I would wish to be married forever to a woman who once attempted to steal my child from me and hand it to another man to raise as his? Can you be so foolish?”

  She actually laughed at that. “Can you be so foolish as to imagine I would ever—ever—marry you? You seem to keep glossing this over, Renzo, because you think you know something about me because we had sex. But you ruined my life today.”

  “Oh, Sophie,” he said, and even laughed a little himself. “It amuses me that you imagine you will have a choice. You won’t. You had your opportunity to make a choice and you made the wrong one. I will not be so benevolent as to allow it again.”

  He considered putting his hands on her then and there. He could show her just how easy it would be for him to make her beg him to make use of the benefits he mentioned—but he didn’t do it. Not because he had turned into a saint in the course of this flight, God knew, but because he wanted her to fret about it. About all of it.

  He wanted this to hurt. The problem with sex when it came to Sophie was that he enjoyed bringing her pleasure a little too much for it to be the punishment he wanted. And he wanted her pleasure more than he should have.

  Renzo had no inte
ntion whatsoever of acknowledging that. And certainly not to her.

  “But—” she began, but cut herself off when he shook his head.

  “Look at that,” he drawled, and very deliberately thrust his hands in his pockets before they started something he would regret. “You can be taught, after all.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SOPHIE EXPECTED RENZO to force her hand from the start. She steeled herself, expecting him to get in her face again and talk some more about benefits.

  But once they landed in Sicily and were swept off to the village he called his, he left her to her own devices.

  It took her at least a week to understand that it was all part of his design. That, like everything having to do with Renzo, it was part of a greater, diabolical plan.

  Because he didn’t have to do anything to leave her antsy and worried and half out of her mind with what she chose to call restlessness—and no matter that it seemed chiefly located between her legs. She did it to herself.

  Day after day after day.

  The village was named after an obscure saint and had been built on a hill, centuries ago. It was a tiny little place, filled with old buildings stacked one on top of the next and winding old roads that seemed to tie themselves in knots as they meandered up and down the steep slopes. The highest building in the town was the old church, named after yet another saint. Opposite it, on a steep slope all its own with sweeping views from the Aeolian Islands to the north to Mount Etna to the south, was a castle that had been built centuries ago by the Saracens and was now a painstakingly restored private home.

  When Renzo had called this place his village, Sophie discovered, he wasn’t being unduly possessive. He’d restored the ancient castle and lived in it like a feudal lord.

  The tiny little village that lay at his feet every morning when he woke to gaze down at it was historic, but remote. It was a solid hour and thirty minutes down out of the mountains to Taormina, not that anyone had offered to take Sophie to the only nearby city. Renzo’s doctor had been waiting at the castle the day they’d arrived, and had given Sophie a comprehensive physical. He’d pronounced her in excellent health, assured her that the baby was fine, and had promised Renzo—not Sophie, but Renzo—that he would make weekly visits.

  “I don’t understand what I’m expected to do here,” Sophie said after the first week had dragged by.

  She had wandered all over the castle. She had walked the twenty minutes into town, down across a narrow little footbridge that spanned the steep ravine separating the castle from the village. She had spent time in the castle library.

  Renzo was sitting behind the desk in the office he kept here. It was a vast suite of rooms, all arching ceilings and astonishing art, with a desk facing a wall of windows over the village. He looked up when she walked in and made a great show of putting down his mobile and fixing his attention on Sophie.

  “Is that the point?” she asked. “Do you want to bore me into a coma?”

  “You say this as if you normally spend your days neck-deep in industry,” Renzo said in that patience-sorely-tried voice of his. It made her want to scream. And then he smirked, which only made it worse. “And I do not think that is the case. Unless you spent some quality time digging ditches of which I am unaware?”

  Sophie ordered herself not to react. Because she was certain that was what he wanted.

  She made herself smile instead. “You don’t know me at all, as I keep having to point out to you. I’ve worked at charities since I left school.”

  “Ah yes. ‘Worked.’”

  He made quotation marks with his fingers around the word worked, and Sophie had to bite her own tongue to make the red haze of her temper ease back a little bit.

  Because she refused—she refused—to give him what he wanted.

  “I understand you find it hard to believe,” she managed to say in as cool a tone as she could manage. “But I actually did work. It’s one of the reasons Dal and I had such a long engagement. I didn’t wish to be relegated to the ranks of the housewives, wealthy or otherwise, who do nothing but go to the charity parties without doing any of the charity work.”

  “You have sacrificed so much. Truly. And I’m certain your charitable impulses were in no way a delaying tactic to stave off your wedding for as long as possible.”

  “I’m sure it means nothing to you,” she managed to say without snapping and shouting at him the way she wanted to do, especially as his sardonic tone felt like a torch held too close to her skin. Particularly because he was right, damn him. “But I didn’t have a choice about who I was born to any more than you did. However, when my father wanted me to marry at eighteen, I declined.”

  She didn’t tell him how hard that had been. How furious her father had been. How they’d forbidden her from leaving the house for a month as they’d tried to work on her, but she’d held firm.

  It had been such a hideous ordeal that it stood to reason she’d been leery of signing up for it again.

  Or that was what she’d told herself as her wedding had drawn close.

  “I’m shocked that was an option.” Renzo sat back in his great leather chair, lounging there with that look on his face that made her hot with something she chose to believe was pure temper. It happened every time he showed how amused he was by her, and how deeply unimpressed. “I was under the impression that you gave your father the mindless obedience you have refused me. That you jumped whenever called.”

  “I did what I had to do,” Sophie said evenly.

  She’d walked too far into the room and stood there on the other side of his desk. There were chairs set there behind her, but she didn’t take one. She enjoyed the false sense of power she got by standing above him while he sat.

  And she had to make her own fun here. With him. Or she feared she would wither away.

  “What is your goal here, Renzo?” she asked when it seemed he would be content to simply sit there, watching her as if she was an animal in a zoo. “Do you need me to apologize for every moment of my entire life? I can do that, though I think we both know that that’s not actually what you’re angry about.”

  “Perhaps not. But it would make a good start.”

  “After all,” Sophie said, very deliberately, “anyone can see how you suffer. Here in this luxurious castle high on the hill, the lord of all you survey.”

  Renzo’s gaze seemed to light on fire, and Sophie hated that she could feel it inside of her. Like flame in her bloodstream and between her legs, a lick of a different fire. He rose from his chair slowly. Deliberately.

  And then he was towering above her again, and any advantage she might have imagined she had was lost—but she didn’t let herself step back the way she wanted to do. She didn’t run.

  She held his gaze as if she was daring him to come for her.

  Renzo’s beautiful mouth hardened. “I lived in squalor. Every day I would walk the streets of this village and dream that one day, I would leave it. As I got older, the dream got more complicated. It wasn’t enough to leave this place. I wanted to dominate it.”

  “I sympathize with the village.”

  He shook his head at her and the wide desk seemed insufficient, suddenly, to protect her from him. But Sophie ignored that, too.

  “I believe you were telling me a very sad story about all you have suffered, were you not?” He looked ready for a fight, sculpted into a dangerous weapon all his own. She didn’t know why she imagined she could be the one to give him that fight. “I am prepared to weep openly for you, Sophie. I am certain that any moment now, you will explain to me how your pampered upbringing made the poverty I scrambled about in seem very nearly charming by comparison.”

  “I was raised for a very specific purpose and that purpose only.” Sophie didn’t think she was going to convince this man of anything. She didn’t know what made her think she ought to try. But she pushed
on. “At least you had dreams. I didn’t. I was told what my life would be like since I was small.”

  “Yes, the great tragedy of being raised to become a wealthy, aristocratic countess. My heart bleeds.”

  “You can mock it all you like,” Sophie told him, her voice quiet and her gaze direct. “But that doesn’t change it. If I had been a boy, of course, my father would have taught me the family business. But I was a girl, so I was required to marry a man who could handle the business instead.”

  “You could always have objected. Don’t act as if you were helpless.” He laughed, in that awful way of his that made everything in her clench tight because she remembered his real laughter. Sunshine and warmth, cascading all over her, making the whole night around them feel like honey, thick and sweet. This laugh just hurt. “A girl like you, everything handed to her on silver platters, is not helpless.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Sophie threw at him. “If you know so much about my life and how I felt at any given time, why don’t you tell me how all this happened? How did I end up here, stranded in a Sicilian castle with a man who hates me? You’re the expert, after all.”

  Renzo laughed again, and it had the same effect on Sophie. But then he moved out from behind the desk and started toward her and that was...worse.

  She wanted to stand her ground. She did. But he kept coming, and she found herself backing up. His laugh took on a different note then. Predatory, she thought.

  “I’m happy to tell you,” Renzo said as he stalked her across the wide floor of his office.

  There was something in his dark gaze that made Sophie shake. She had to stop moving to lock her knees against it, but that wasn’t any better. That meant he could come much too close.

  Then her heart started pounding against her ribs as he began to move around her in a lazy sort of circle, as if he was looking for flaws. And finding them.

  “You were born selfish,” he murmured, as if these were love words—though he’d told her he didn’t believe in such things. Sophie had to fight back a shudder. She concentrated on keeping her fists by her sides. “You were handed advantage after advantage, but never realized how lucky you were. And why would you? You were surrounded by people just like you. I doubt you’re even aware that there are people in this world that would kill themselves for an opportunity to face what you consider your problems.”