Though that was impossible, of course. He was Renzo Crisanti. Lesser men panicked. Renzo conquered.
“What if I never walk through that door?” she asked.
Renzo made himself smile and elected not to notice how difficult it was.
He studied her as she sat there before him. He saw the way she trembled a little bit. The way she kept her mouth shut tight as if she was afraid of the things that might come out of it if she opened it.
At least if this was getting to him, it was getting to her, too.
“It’s up to you,” he told her. “But as in all things, there are consequences. The longer you take, the more I will demand. It is inevitable.”
“Consequences,” she whispered. “There are always consequences.”
“Always,” Renzo agreed.
He thought he was handling himself admirably when he kept his hands to himself. When he only sat there as if he didn’t care either way what she chose, when he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he did. He really did, and he had no place to put that to make any sense of it.
“But the good news for you, Sophie, is that I don’t just want to make you pay,” he told her, and he had the pleasure of watching those big brown eyes of hers widen, all golden heat, because however hard this was for him, it was harder for her. As it should be. That was why he smiled. “First I want to make you scream.”
CHAPTER NINE
IT TURNED OUT that having choices was harder, Sophie discovered, and no matter what her mother might once have said about poor people. Because she was the only one she’d have to blame once she made them.
Renzo storming into her wedding and carrying her out, tossed over his shoulder as if he was some kind of ancient marauder, was easy because it allowed her to hold him accountable. She had intended to marry Dal, as promised. She had never meant any of this to happen, so how could she be held responsible for something Renzo had done?
She thought a whole lot about that after Renzo left her there in the library, while she tried—and failed—to catch her breath. Right there, in the chair where he’d left her, that enigmatic look on his dark face and entirely too much carnal promise in his gaze.
Of course she couldn’t agree to be his mistress, she told herself stoutly. She was outraged that he’d even suggested such a thing, especially when he kept threatening to marry her in the same breath—
But maybe that was the trouble, she thought a bit later, when she’d showered off her walk and found herself sitting in her bedroom. It was furnished with exquisite antiques and a canopy bed she doubted she’d ever get a good night’s sleep in again, after all the images Renzo had put in her head. The sun was beginning to lower in the sky over another day in Sicily, and everything was exactly the same as it had been the day she’d arrived, except her baby was a bit bigger inside of her.
She slid her hands over her belly, imagining that she could already feel a difference. And she wasn’t quite as outraged at Renzo’s suggestion as she thought she ought to have been.
Sophie had tossed her mobile in the drawer of the bedside table without looking at it the day they’d arrived, and she hadn’t touched it since. But the word responsibility was dancing around and around in her head tonight, so she went and got it out, frowning down at the thing as she switched it on.
Sophie hadn’t wanted to look. She’d spent two weeks with her head thrust firmly in the sand, because she’d been certain that she didn’t want to know anything that was happening in the world Renzo had carried her away from.
Which is just another way to avoid taking responsibility for yourself, isn’t it? a caustic voice inside her asked.
The truth was that she very much doubted that she had anything to go home to, even if she could manage to escape this remote village.
And when she started going through all the notifications on her mobile, it was as bad as she’d imagined. Worse.
Sophie had too many voice mail messages. Entirely too many texts. Some people she’d called friends for lack of a better term had sent her links to tabloid articles shredding her to pieces, which was helpful, in the long run. Because it reminded her how few real, true friends she’d ever had.
There was only one, by her estimation. Poppy. Sweet, dependable Poppy, who was the only person Sophie wanted to talk to at all. Because she was well aware that she’d left Poppy to deal with Dal, which couldn’t have been pleasant—especially since Poppy worked for him.
But she couldn’t seem to reach Poppy, which only made her feel worse.
And everything else was character assassination and innuendo. Or outright hostility.
“Don’t bother to contact us, Sophie,” her father said in the last of the numerous messages he’d left for her, each one more vicious than the one before. “You have tarnished the family name beyond repair. I hope your tawdry affair is worth it.”
Sophie knew exactly what lay ahead for her, if she went back to London. She’d seen more than one girl who’d been raised the way she had, complete with a shiny pedestal all her own, who had then fallen straight off. She knew how it went. Some rehabilitated themselves eventually, usually after years of intense publicity campaigns—though that would never satisfy some of the bigger snobs. Some simply made lateral moves into different marriages, though Sophie had always thought privately that said lateral marriages must be even worse than the ones they might have had before.
Because it was one thing to be virtuous and untouched and worthy of one’s chilly arranged marriage. It was something else again to be damaged goods.
Just one more concern specific to her exalted position, Sophie knew. Girls without estates attached to their name and trusts that stretched back to the condescension of ancient kings had all kinds of choices. They could do as they pleased. They could marry for love, sow their wild oats as they liked, make their life anything they wanted it to be without concerning themselves with a highly polished family name.
Sophie had never had that choice. She’d never had those options.
But you have a choice now, that same little voice reminded her.
She had no doubt that Renzo would push the legitimacy issue and the marriage he wanted. Her choice was simple—did she want to spend the time before that inevitable marriage and her child’s birth the way she’d spent the past two weeks? Or did she want what he was offering instead?
Sophie had made one other decision about the course of her life, and it was what had brought her here. She’d taken one look at Renzo and had wanted him. He was the only thing she could remember wanting—because she’d learned a long time ago that there was no use wanting things she couldn’t have.
But she could have him now.
He’d said as much.
All she had to do was walk through that door on the wall nearest her bed that she hadn’t realized was only locked on her side...
Mistress. She turned the word over again and again in her head.
He’d called it a practical arrangement. Sophie couldn’t help thinking it was begging for trouble. It had been hard enough to walk away from him that night in Monaco. She’d watched him sleep as she’d dressed, feeling as if she was torn into pieces. How could she go back to her black-and-white life, so cold and precisely contoured to other people’s specifications? How could she live in all that dark and gloom when she’d finally felt all that sunlight on her face?
But she’d made herself leave anyway, because she’d thought it was the right thing to do.
It had been hard after one night. What did she think it would be like after months? And a child?
Sophie threw her mobile back in the drawer, feeling much more unsettled than she had when she’d picked it up. She didn’t bother to call her parents back, because she knew them too well. If she called now, there would be nothing but recriminations. Accusations and harsh words. If she waited, they would retreat into their usual icy ha
uteur. They always did. And that would be the best time to tell them that they had a grandchild on the way.
Because at the end of the day, her parents were nothing if not practical. The sooner she told him they had a grandchild on the way, the sooner they could start plotting out more dynasties. Which was, as far she could tell, the only time they were ever happy.
Or as close to happy as they ever got.
That night, she lay in her canopied bed, completely unable to sleep.
All she could seem to do was stare at that door on the wall. The only thing she could concentrate on was Renzo lying there, in his bed, just the way she was. Would he be naked? All that sculpted muscle there between his sheets with no other barriers? Was he lying awake just as she was, watching the door? Or was he asleep?
If she slipped through to his rooms, could she make it to the side of his bed before he knew she was there? Would he reach for her?
Or would she crawl over him, and get to revel in another moment of watching him as he slept?
The way she had that morning in Monaco before she’d run back to her life, guilty and ashamed by the things she done and let him do in turn.
“If doing it one night—and one morning—made you feel so guilty and ashamed,” she said out loud, her voice sounding strained and strange in the dark room, “why would you do more of it? As an arrangement?”
She didn’t feel as if she’d slept at all, and when she woke, the light was streaming into her room. It told her she’d stayed in bed much later than she usually did.
When she finally dressed and made her way down to the breakfast room—where there was always coffee, freshly baked pastries, and a soothing view of mountains stretching toward the sea in the distance—she stopped short, because Renzo was there.
“You look as if you didn’t get much sleep,” he murmured, that damned curve to his mouth and those dark amber eyes all over her. “Whatever could have kept you up? Tossing and turning? Too hot, perhaps?”
“Not at all.” She had stopped in the door to the bright little room set over a sweeping balcony and she couldn’t seem to make her feet move another inch. So instead, she smiled wide and lied some more. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a deep sleep.”
Renzo’s gaze lit with amusement. He didn’t call her a liar. But then, he didn’t have to.
“Have you come to a decision?” he asked instead.
Sophie forced herself to move, then. She walked over to the sideboard where the staff had prepared the usual trays of breakfast treats and selected the traditional Sicilian summer breakfast she’d come to crave each morning, sweet brioche and almond granita, which the locals ate in some form or another to ease into the hot mornings. And an extra strong small cup of espresso, because lord knew she needed that and then some to handle Renzo’s unexpected presence after having him in her head all night.
“I love the brioche here,” she said, as if that was the decision he’d asked about. “And of course I love it with gelato, but that’s a bit heavier than the granita, isn’t it?”
“That is, of course, the question I wanted answered. Your breakfast options are an enduring fascination to me. Thank you.”
She settled herself across from him at the small table as if that was normal. As if they ate together every day. And she fought to keep her expression bland when she met his too-knowing, too-amused gaze.
Something moved in her then, a little too hot, as she imagined this might be part of the arrangement if she agreed to be his mistress. Instead of having him in her head all night, she would really, truly have him, and then...would they share meals like this? Would he stop treating her with all that barely contained ferocity?
Would he forgive her for what she’d planned to do with their baby?
Will you forgive yourself? a voice from somewhere deep inside asked her then, with a certain quiet savagery that left her reeling.
The question fell through her like a blow. A series of blows, each more brutal than the last. Like shattering glass, leaving marks as it went.
And Sophie didn’t know what to do with any of it, so she let her granita melt as she stared at the man across from her.
“I don’t understand what makes you think that calling me a mistress would somehow take away all the intimacy of the arrangement,” she blurted out. If she’d had the time or capacity to think it through, she wouldn’t have said anything and she certainly wouldn’t have used that word.
Mistress. It sat there between them like a sexual act. Or maybe that was just how it felt to Sophie. It was so...debauched. Erotic, but wrapped up in such a staid and sturdy little word.
“It is an arrangement that is entirely about sex,” Renzo said, and his dark, rich voice didn’t help matters. “It is necessarily intimate. What it is not, cara, is emotional.”
“I don’t know why you imagine emotions are something you can order about the way you do everything else,” she said, with a little too much of her own feelings on display.
She regretted it instantly. The way she regretted everything that had to do with this man.
Liar, whispered that voice again, and she actually shuddered this time.
Renzo saw, of course. He saw everything. She watched his gaze shift from that amused heat to something darker. Something unreadable.
“I can’t help you with this, Sophie,” he told her after a moment. He was not wearing one of his dark king-of-the-universe suits today. That meant she could see far too much of his sculpted biceps beneath the material of his T-shirt. And the strong, golden column of his throat. And entirely too much of his beautiful chest. He was distracting. But he was still talking, and for once he didn’t sound ferocious—he simply sounded serious. “You must decide. And then you must convince me. Because when all of this is done, you and I will not play little games of pretend that it was not something you wanted.”
“I have no idea what to say to that,” she said, which was true, but not for the reasons she thought he might suspect.
“You have no choice whether or not to be here, nor what will happen,” Renzo said, his long fingers toying with his espresso cup before him in a way that made Sophie flush. “You will grow ever larger with my child. We will marry to give the child my name. These things cannot be avoided. But how you spend your time here before then? That is up to you.”
“One choice,” she whispered. “Lucky me.”
Renzo looked at her then, and she was convinced he could see straight through her. That he could see every thought, every feeling, every shred of guilt she’d ever entertained. His dark amber gaze inhabited her. It set her on fire and threw gas on the flames.
And he didn’t do anything but look.
“I have no doubt in my mind that you will be beneath me, spread out over my bed, begging for my touch,” he told her, almost offhandedly. Though there was nothing offhand about the way he was looking at her. “Sooner rather than later, in fact. So I do hope that you enjoy this time, cara mia. It is the only power you have left.”
“And here come those consequences again,” she managed to say. She even sounded relatively calm, despite the fact she felt as if he had his hands wrapped tight around her and was wringing her limp. “I was just about to say we should do it. We should jump right in—maybe right here? But you had to be awful, again, and now I just don’t know.”
His mouth curved. Slowly. Much too slowly.
It was as if he wanted her to imagine those lips all over her naked body—and she did. That was the trouble. She really did.
“Tell yourself whatever lies you require to make yourself at peace with this decision,” Renzo told her. “It will all end in the same place.”
“You’ve made my mind up for me,” she replied, and let her smile get a little sharper. “I’ll just wander the halls for the next nine months like a flesh and blood ghost.”
Renzo only laughed.
But Sophie wasn’t kidding. She spent the day doing exactly that. She wandered the castle halls. She sat in the library and paged through more books, though she couldn’t seem to concentrate on any of the words on the page. She walked down to the village and back. And all she could seem to think about were two words. Mistress, still. And forgiveness.
She couldn’t help but think they were connected.
In the evening, she took her dinner in her room and stared at her mobile again. For a long time.
And then, before she could talk herself out of it, she wrote formal letters of apology to her parents and to Dal, because she owed them at least that much.
Her parents were not warm people, or at least not to her, but they had never wavered in the things they’d wanted and Sophie had meekly gone along with all of them. The only time she’d ever stood up for herself was the matter of her engagement. Her parents had never had the slightest inkling that Sophie wasn’t happy. She’d never given them that courtesy.
And of course she knew that they wouldn’t have reacted well even if she had told them. But she couldn’t worry about their reactions now, she could only do what she felt was right. And running out on her own wedding, leaving them to sort it out in her wake, was a terrible thing to do to anyone.
She took responsibility for that.
Her letter to Dal was harder. She barely knew him, but that didn’t change the fact that both of them had expected that they would marry each other, and had agreed to go ahead with it. And the fact he was remote and made entirely of ice, as far as she could tell, didn’t change the fact that she’d made a promise to him and then broken it. First in Monaco and then, much more publicly, at Langston House.
When she hadn’t fought to escape Renzo. If she was honest, his appearance had been a relief.
She didn’t tell Dal any of that. He was a smart man and when her baby arrived, Sophie was certain he’d be more than capable of doing that math. What she did do was apologize for betraying him and humiliating him, then leaving him to pick up the pieces after she’d roared away in Renzo’s car.
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