The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  She wondered if he meant people like him—but didn’t dare ask. He was behind her then, and she could feel him. It was as if he was electrically charged. As if he was his own storm. She could feel her skin shiver into goose bumps because he was there, looking at her. Judging her.

  Cutting her down to size.

  “Your parents offered you a perfectly acceptable life. You were to be a countess, bathed in even more wealth and status. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it?” Was that his breath on her neck? Sophie refused to look. “You needed to create a little excitement for yourself. You needed to make yourself feel better about the life you signed up for with a tiny little rebellion. The one thing you had was your virginity and let me guess—you thought you would seize the opportunity to choose who you would give it to. You thought you would use the only thing that was truly yours.”

  It was as if he’d been in her head that night, and Sophie felt herself sway on her own feet. How could he know the things she’d told herself? She’d known what he was offering when he’d walked up to her, even before he’d spoken. She’d known that she was expected to keep her virginity for her husband. But she hadn’t cared.

  Sophie didn’t tell him that it wasn’t because she’d been hell-bent on a rebellion that night. She hadn’t been. By that point, just over a month before her wedding, she’d been nothing if not resigned.

  It hadn’t been a choose-your-own rebellion. It had been him.

  Renzo had looked at her with his face like a fallen angel and she’d decided, in an instant, that he was worth whatever price she would have to pay.

  It made her feel light-headed to think of that now. Here. With him circling her like a dangerous feline coming in for the kill.

  “After all, as you keep reminding me, yours was a life without choices,” Renzo said, soft and lethal. “That every possible choice you could make was showered with trusts and luxury and glorious estates to cushion the blow hardly signifies, I am sure. You decided you would take it upon yourself to use the only thing you had that you could barter. Your body.”

  “I’m impressed,” Sophie managed to say. She’d crossed her arms at some point, and hugged them to her as if that could contain all the buffeting, conflicting things she felt with every circle he made around her. “It’s as if you’re psychic. Who knew that in addition to driving very quickly, you could also read minds?”

  He only laughed, dark and low, stirring things inside her she didn’t entirely understand. Or want to understand.

  But the bright, throbbing thing between her legs insisted that she was a liar. That she knew full well what he did to her.

  And worse, that she craved it.

  “I could have been anyone,” he said, and she caught her breath at the lethal ferocity in his voice then, so close to her ear. She realized that he’d stopped moving and now stood behind her. Above her. Where he could see her and she had to stand there and...guess. “I assume that was your purpose in Monte Carlo. Find a man, betray the promises you’d made, and then smugly attend your own wedding comfortable in the knowledge that one of the gifts you were expected to give to your husband, you’d given away to someone else. How proud you must be.”

  Her chest was rising and falling too fast, and Sophie was sure he was well aware of it. The way, it seemed, he was aware of everything she’d thought lived only inside her, secret and safe and hidden from view.

  But she fought to keep her voice even when she spoke. “I don’t understand why, if I was champing at the bit for a chance to fling my virginity at any man who ventured near, I would wait until I was five weeks out from my wedding. And surrounded by friends who would happily report any indiscretions to my fiancé, had they seen them.”

  “Time was running out.” She was certain that Renzo shrugged then, though she didn’t see him do it. She had the sense of him there behind her, like a wall. He was that hard. That immovable. “I have known a great many women like you, Sophie. I know you don’t want to believe that. I know that deep down, you really do believe that you’re a precious little unicorn. All rainbows and butterflies and desperately unique. But I’m afraid you wealthy women are all the same.”

  “In the dark?” Sophie managed to ask, her voice sharp. “Or do you mean that in a general sense?”

  He laughed. “Both.”

  Because he was Renzo Crisanti, the man who had abducted her from her own wedding. Of course he couldn’t be shamed.

  “Here’s a reality check,” Sophie said, aware that there was too much emotion in her throat and that it bled out into her voice. “Men like you might be completely unable to make it through a day without wasting hours upon hours consumed with base, repulsive sexual fantasies. I assume that’s eighty percent of what occupies your thoughts at any given time.”

  She couldn’t bear that he was standing behind her any longer and turned, but that wasn’t any better. Because he was just as intimidating when she was facing him. More, in fact. Because when she was looking at him it was entirely too easy to get lost in the way he looked. So beautiful it hurt.

  And as out of reach as Mount Etna rising in the distance on the other side of his office windows.

  Renzo’s dark amber gaze blazed in a way that should have given her pause, but she pushed on before he could comment. “Sex was never a factor for me. There were too many expectations put on my behavior for me to even dare think about it too closely. My mother told me, again and again, that anything I did would directly reflect on the family name. And I believed her.” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “I was so concerned with accidentally staining my family with a thoughtless act that yes, I was obedient. It must be easy to stand where you are now and mock that. But then, mockery is always easy, isn’t it? You should try obedience to one’s parents on for size. It isn’t easy at all. But it used to be considered a virtue.”

  That blaze in his eyes was molten now, and she felt as if he was touching her when she knew he wasn’t. “A lecture on virtue. From you, of all people. I admit, I am intrigued against my will at the prospect of such brazen hypocrisy.”

  “It was you, Renzo,” she threw at him, fiercely, not caring that her voice was raised and she was making a spectacle of herself. Not caring about anything but telling him how wrong he was about her—as if that would do any good. “I must have seen a thousand men that weekend, but I didn’t notice any of them in particular. It was only you who caught my attention. It was only you who really saw me. My mistake is that I thought it meant something.”

  “It meant so much that you pretended to be someone else. It meant so much that you went into it already lying to me.”

  “Because you didn’t know who I was,” she said, the storm in her passed. There was nothing left but the quiet way she said that. And the helplessness she felt, because nothing she said got through to him. The only time she thought he truly saw her now was when he was deep inside her—but that was far too dangerous. “That had never happened to me before. I wanted to be the woman who would meet a stunning man and go off into a beautiful night with him, just once.”

  He studied her for a long moment. Then another, while her pulse beat so hard in her veins she was almost afraid they would rupture.

  But he didn’t react the way she was afraid he might. Or she’d hoped he might, if she was honest. He didn’t put his hands on her. And she couldn’t read the darkness in his gaze then.

  “You asked me for something to do, did you not?”

  She had almost forgotten. She swallowed, hard. “Yes. I’ve been here a week and I’m already going mad.”

  “Spend more time in the village,” Renzo suggested. “Familiarize yourself with the area. After all, at some point you will have to introduce our child to its many joys.”

  Something shifted between them at that. Sophie couldn’t quite place it—and then she understood. He’d said our child. Not his child, for once.

 
As if they were in this together.

  “People have managed to keep themselves entertained in this village since the dawn of time. I know it can’t hold a candle to the many splendors of the London charity circuit, but I suggest you find something here to occupy your days.”

  “But—”

  “Do not ask me again, Sophie,” he gritted out. “Because the suggestions I have I do not think you will like.”

  That sat there a moment, seeming to shimmer in the sunlight that poured through his windows. Or maybe that was the mask he let slip, showing her all that greed and passion that he’d been hiding behind his stony expression and all his terrible words...

  “I thought... You said...” The whole world had narrowed to that need in his gaze, and the cast of his sensual mouth, and she felt as if the air had been knocked out of her. “I thought you refused to touch me until I begged.”

  But Renzo only laughed again, and this was a new laugh.

  This one burned her to a crisp and left scorch marks all over her body, she was certain, though she didn’t dare take her eyes off of him to check.

  “You will beg, Sophie. Believe me, you will beg.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at her the way a predator would eye a meal, and she shuddered. “The only question is whether I will let you come to it on your own or whether I will...move the situation along to suit my purposes.”

  “I... But you...”

  “And the longer you stand here, wasting my time, the less inclined I am to wait.”

  Sophie stopped pretending that she could stand up to this man. She turned on her heel and bolted from the room, that dark, stirring laughter of his following her down the halls of the castle as she fled.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SOPHIE SPENT THE next week exploring the village, but not because she wanted to one day give her baby a tour of the place. She was looking for a way out.

  “There is only one bus in my village,” Renzo had told her on the drive from the airfield, down near the sea, the day they’d arrived in Sicily. “It leaves very early in the morning on market days and returns after dark, and that is only when the driver remembers to come all the way up the mountain. You should also know that the driver and his large family live in a house I own.”

  Sophie had been staring out her window at the sun-drenched landscape, unable to fully process the fact that she’d woken up that morning in Hampshire, prepared to marry Dal, and was now on the far side of Europe with a man she kept sleeping with, who was not Dal. At all.

  “Why would I need to know any of that?” she’d asked.

  “Because, cara,” he’d said in that way of his, as if he was creating intimacy every time he looked at her. “One day you will wake up and decide you wish to escape my hospitality. On that day, it will save us all a lot of trouble if you remember these small facts. There is one sporadic bus. Everyone on it will be loyal to me, especially the driver. You will get nowhere.”

  She’d looked at him then, across the expanse of the backseat they shared, and had wondered how he managed to be awful at every turn and yet her heart still flipped inside her chest whenever she looked at him. What was wrong with her?

  Had she really thrown away her whole life for...this?

  “Thank you,” she’d said stiffly. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. While walking.”

  Renzo had smiled, looking something like benevolent, which had been her warning.

  “The village is perched on a little stretch of land propped up between many steep ravines,” he’d told her. “People fall down them all the time and die, especially in the ice and snow of winter, but they are in many ways more treacherous in the summer. The road is narrow and very curvy. Pedestrians are forever walking on that road and getting struck by vehicles taking the turns too fast. It’s also a solid, steep hour’s walk to the next little town, assuming you aren’t hit by a car on the way. I can’t say I recommend it.”

  Sophie spent her second week in Sicily discovering that nothing Renzo had said to her that day was an exaggeration. The road out of town was terrifying. It shot down from the lowest part of the village in a steep, near-vertical drop, then began to curve this way and that. No matter how many times Sophie girded her loins and determined she would walk it anyway, she stopped the moment she saw a car careen up or down, promising certain death.

  She wanted to get away from Renzo. But she certainly didn’t want to die.

  The bus situation was even worse than he’d claimed. The women in the village shrugged and seemed not to know when it might run again. One cited vague “troubles” that Sophie thought might involve the driver’s personal life rather than his vehicle, not that anyone appeared to mind that much.

  There were no cars for hire. Or no cars for her to hire, anyway.

  The locals were friendly. They greeted her with smiles, and happy chatter, but she quickly realized that there was a limit to that friendliness. And that limit was Renzo.

  “How much would it cost to get to the airport?” she asked the man with the only taxi she had been able to find in town one warm afternoon.

  The man started to quote a number, but then stopped. He eyed her.

  Summer in Sicily was hot and sunny all day, then cool at night. The little village had a lovely, sunlit square, with shade trees all around where the old men sat and whiled the days away. And the taxi driver stared at her so long, Sophie was glad they’d stepped out of the direct sunlight.

  “Surely il capo can take you to the airport when he is ready, no?” the driver asked. That was what they called Renzo here, she’d learned. The boss.

  “I wasn’t planning to ask him,” Sophie confessed, and smiled as brightly as she could.

  But the driver was unmoved. “I couldn’t take you to the airport,” he told her, definitively. “Or anywhere. It would not be possible.”

  “But I can pay you,” she assured him. “Double. Triple, even.”

  The driver shook his head. Then he held up his hands and backed away, as if Sophie was threatening him.

  The way the rest of the villagers looked at her, it was as if they thought she really had.

  And when she made her way back up the hill and over the ravine—that was a steep shot down so far it made her dizzy to look over the edge of the footbridge—she found Renzo waiting for her in the castle’s grand hall.

  She didn’t say anything. Or couldn’t, to be more precise. He was dressed in a dark suit that suggested he’d been conducting video meetings from his office with his employees around the world, and she felt grubby by comparison in the hiking shorts and T-shirt she’d thrown on—selections that had been waiting for her in the closet of her rooms here when she’d arrived. She’d opted not to think too closely about where they’d come from.

  “Do you know why there is a castle here?” Renzo asked mildly.

  It was the mildness that got her back up. “Because there’s a marvelous view?”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But back when men roamed the land and built castles, the kinds of views they were looking for were oriented in defense, not leisure. This village is perfectly situated to defend itself against all comers. There is only the one road in and out. It is bordered by cliffs all around. No one can sneak up on this place. Few try.”

  He didn’t say, And also no one can leave, but Sophie got his meaning.

  “Come,” he invited her, in that low way of his that was not an invitation so much as it was an order. “We will sit, you and I. We will have a conversation like civilized people and you will tell me, Sophie, how it is you imagine you can escape me so easily.”

  His lips curved at her expression of shock, though she’d tried to conceal it.

  “The taxi driver you attempted to enlist to betray me called to tell me of your perfidy.” Renzo made a tsk-ing sound. He might as well have scraped his fingernails down her spine. She glared at him, but t
hat only made his smile deepen. “You will find that betraying me will not come quite so easily as betraying your earl.”

  “I wasn’t trying to betray you,” Sophie said tightly. “I was trying to get a ride to the airport. They’re not the same thing.”

  “Where do you imagine you can go?” he asked, almost as if he really wanted an answer to the question. But then his eyes flashed. “I will find you wherever you run. You must know this.”

  She cast around for some kind of defense, but she didn’t have one. He would view any attempt she made to leave him a betrayal. And she knew that, didn’t she? There was no sense pretending she didn’t know exactly how he’d react to her leaving. Or even any attempt on her part to leave.

  Isn’t that what you wanted? something in her asked, wicked and knowing. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted from him? His reaction?

  Renzo led her into the library, a glorious room that made Sophie’s heart ache a little every time she entered it. Beautiful books lined the walls. There was a fireplace on one side and French doors on the other that opened into a kind of sunroom and then, beyond that, a terrace with views that stretched all the way to the Mediterranean. Inside, there was a great, raised skylight that let the sunlight in and highlighted the many armchairs and couches scattered about, all of which she’d tried at different points during her forced Sicilian holiday.

  But this afternoon she followed Renzo to a little cluster of seats before the unlit fireplace, and tried to read his mood as he settled himself across from her.

  He usually dressed simply here. A T-shirt and trousers, which should have looked casual but didn’t, somehow. It wasn’t simply the excellence of the fabrics he chose, though Sophie was certain that played a part. It was Renzo himself. He was not a casual man. Even his casual clothing failed to take away from his intensity in any way.