The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

It was hard to remember that when she’d arrived they hadn’t had their evening meals together. Now Renzo insisted upon it. No matter what time he finished with his various business concerns, stuck on video calls all around the globe, Sophie waited for him. And they sat out on one of the terraces, eating and talking as the night grew deeper blue all around them and the summer sunset painted the sky.

  Renzo learned that she was funny. That the poise and elegance she could draw around her like armor was an act, not the truth of her. Sometimes they argued books. Politics. World events and history. She knew proper Italian, so he taught her his Sicilian dialect and the filthy words and phrases he doubted very much anyone else had dared utter in the presence of the excruciatingly correct Carmichael-Jones heiress.

  They talked until the stars came out and then he took her to his bed, where he got much more serious.

  He was as demanding as he was creative, and Sophie was even better than he’d imagined she was in Monaco, when she had somehow managed to knock his whole world off its axis.

  She matched him completely.

  And the madness of it was, the more he had her, the more he wanted her.

  As if there was no bottom to that hunger, the way there always had been with anything else he’d longed for. She was bottomless.

  And she was having his child.

  No matter how quickly he divorced her after she gave birth, those things would remain true.

  “Impending fatherhood agrees with me,” he said to the doctor now.

  Because he couldn’t quite bring himself to use the word that fit. Happy. He’d never imagined it was a word that could be applied to him. He’d never thought much about it either way. He’d survived his childhood. He’d survived his one and only attempt to make sense of how his father had treated his mother and him, but it had been a close call, and not one he cared to repeat.

  And his response to his father’s harsh welcome had been to make himself rich and famous instead of slinking off into the shadows to die of shame, as he’d clearly been meant to do.

  Happiness had never seemed like much of a goal next to all that.

  The doctor’s assistants prepared Sophie, rolling the machines closer to her. But she was the one who lifted her head and beckoned for Renzo to come near. He did, standing awkwardly by the side of the bed, not knowing where to look.

  And then not quite knowing what to do when Sophie took his hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  She made it entirely too easy to feel the kinds of things about her that he knew he shouldn’t. He couldn’t.

  But he didn’t have time, now, to worry about that.

  Because there was an image on the monitor. A tiny blob, curled around itself like a marvelous bean.

  “Look,” Sophie said softly. “It’s our child.”

  Their child.

  Renzo found himself holding on to Sophie’s hand a little too hard as a hard swell of pure joy threatened to take out his knees.

  And he bit his own lip before he called this woman what she was, what he dared not admit even to himself.

  Not his mistress. Or not merely his mistress, en route to being the mother of his child and his wife—if not in that order.

  But a miracle.

  * * *

  Sophie had just come back from a rambling walk one late afternoon when one of the castle staff, who largely left her to her own devices, rushed into the master bedroom.

  She’d gotten used to it being Renzo who met her here and introduced her to all the delicious things people could do with slick soap and a whole lot of hot water.

  She had to force herself to lock up her reaction to the images tumbling through her head and concentrate on the woman before her.

  “We must get you ready,” she was saying briskly. “Il capo is taking you out tonight.”

  And it didn’t occur to Sophie to argue. What il capo wanted, il capo got—and what Sophie had learned over the course of her time here was that the things Renzo wanted, she tended to love.

  She stepped into the gown that was laid out for her when she got out of the shower, a flowing, deep blue affair with a high neck in front and no back. She let the woman craft her hair into a complicated chignon that looked simple and then handled her own cosmetics, using only a bit of mascara to darken her lashes and a slick of color on her lips. She strapped herself into a high, impractical pair of sandals that the woman presented to her, admiring the clean, obviously Milanese craftsmanship.

  “You must hurry,” her attendant chided her when Sophie spent a little too long looking at herself in her mirror, wondering when she’d started to glow like that. As if she’d been plugged into an outlet. “Il capo does not like to be kept waiting.”

  And Sophie smiled, because she knew that was not entirely true.

  She walked out to the grand stairway and began to make her way toward the main floor of the castle. She was halfway down the steps when a man stepped out of the library and moved to the bottom of the stairs. Sophie knew who it was in an instant, of course. She didn’t have to see his face.

  This man was tattooed deep into her skin and fused deep into her bones. He was a part of her, and not only because their child grew bigger inside of her by the day.

  She would recognize that lean, mouthwateringly athletic form anywhere. Renzo wore another one of his dark suits tonight that effortlessly enhanced his already astonishingly beautiful form. He was dark and gorgeous and her blood heated as she moved toward him.

  He looked at her as if he already owned her.

  Which made Sophie wish that he did. Not as a part of an arrangement. Not as a mistress. The trouble with having Renzo at all, which perhaps she’d known from that very first night, was that it was never enough. She wanted everything.

  She wanted things she didn’t know how to name.

  But she knew better than to say such a thing to him. She knew better than to ruin what they had. She knew this man—this beautiful, complicated, proud man—would reject her feelings if she was ever foolish enough to mention them out loud.

  She told him with her body, every chance she got. She loved him with her hands and her mouth and the place she burned for him the hottest. She loved him when they slept tangled together, breathing as one. She loved him on those dark, wild mornings when he was inside her as she woke, catapulting her over that deliriously sweet edge before she knew her own name.

  She loved him in all the ways she could. The only way she could.

  Tonight she loved him with a smile and the way she held on to his hand when he took it in his.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Trust me,” Renzo said.

  And she did.

  She wasn’t entirely sure when that had happened, either. Maybe it had been right around the time she’d stopped blaming him for doing what she hadn’t had the courage to do herself. When she’d accepted that she should have been the one to stop her wedding and leave that life behind if she didn’t want it—instead of passive-aggressively waiting for her sins to catch up to her as she walked down the aisle in that chapel.

  But she didn’t want to think about such things tonight. Not when Renzo was dressed to devastate, that deep fire she loved so much making his dark eyes gleam.

  Another sleek, low-slung sports car waited for them out on the drive.

  “How many cars do you have?” she asked him, but she was smiling.

  Renzo opened her door for her and helped her in. “I like cars.”

  There was a time when she might have seen a statement like that as proof of his arrogance. But she knew him better now. He had told her stories of growing up in this village, with no heat in the winters. His mother had done whatever domestic work she could find to make ends meet, and Renzo had helped as soon as he was old enough.

  She couldn’t begrudge a man who’d grown up
with a hollow belly every night the things he’d earned with his own hard work. The truth was, she thought as he drove them through the village, was that she couldn’t find it in her to begrudge this man anything.

  He took the single road out of the village, but instead of turning south toward Taormina, he headed in the opposite direction. It took Sophie a moment to understand that they were headed for the next ridge. And the hotel he’d built high above a sweeping vineyard.

  Much like the castle, the hotel clung to the side of a cliff. It was all red roofs and golden light, bright against the evening. Renzo pulled up to the front of the main hotel building, and was greeted by name by the brace of valets waiting there.

  But it wasn’t only that they knew his name. They appeared to genuinely like him.

  The same thing seemed true of every hotel employee they passed when they walked inside. They were deferential, certainly, but Sophie knew the difference between professional courtesy and genuine affection. This was the latter.

  If she’d had any doubt that Renzo had done exactly what he claimed to do—that he’d really saved the village and everyone in it, along with himself—she thought this proved it.

  Renzo led her through the main part of the hotel, arranged on sumptuous levels to make the most of the views in all directions. Then he ushered her outside again, and up a path scented with night flowers and the distant sea toward a separate villa, higher up on the cliff.

  Inside, the rooms were airy and let the mountains in. And dinner had been set for them out on the terrace that ran the length of the building.

  Sophie stepped out into the sweet evening and looked out at the village she knew so well now, and beyond that, the castle where she’d lived all these weeks.

  It felt like magic, but it paled next to the enchantment of the man who came and joined her at the rail.

  “I’m not at all surprised that this hotel is successful,” she said. “The village looks like something out of a fairy tale. Complete with a perfect castle.”

  “I don’t believe in fairy tales,” Renzo said. There was a set to his jaw that she hadn’t seen in a while. Something very nearly belligerent—but in the next moment it was gone, and Sophie wondered if she’d imagined it. Especially when he smiled at her. “But as long as the guests do, that’s all that matters.”

  There was a different charge in the air between them, Sophie thought as they sat at the pretty little table and ate dinner there under the stars. A darker, more insistent kind of electricity, and there was a knot of something like anticipation deep in her belly.

  The food was exquisite. The Sicilian summer night was soft and beautiful. And the man across from her was far more stunning than any of their surroundings. Sophie thought she could happily gaze at him forever.

  They sipped small cups of strong coffee after the last of the plates had been cleared away. And when she heard the hotel staff close the front door of the villa, Sophie expected Renzo to reach for her.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he reached into the interior pocket of his suit jacket, and pulled something out. And before she could identify what it was, he stood from his seat, let his mouth curve into that sensual quirk that still drove her mad, and then pulled her up to stand with him there at the rail.

  Her heart stopped beating. Then kicked, so hard it made her dizzy.

  “What...what are you doing?”

  “I think, cara, that you know very well I am not about to break into dance.”

  His sardonic tone felt like rich chocolate, thick and decadent, pouring all over her.

  “I think I’d like to see you dance, now that you mention it.”

  “Alas, another dream that will never come true,” Renzo murmured. His expression turned serious. “You told me that your engagement to your earl involved the signing of contracts in your father’s office, did you not?”

  “Yes.” Sophie was beyond startled. She was...something else entirely, and she couldn’t seem to get a handle on it. She could only answer his questions. “I was called in. Dal was already there and he and my father signed the papers. Then, some weeks later, there was a dinner.”

  “This is not a contract for your father to sign,” Renzo told her then, gruff and serious. “This is a contract you wear yourself.”

  He presented the box he held to her and cracked it open.

  It was a diamond ring that seemed to catch every bit of light and make it brighter. And Sophie hadn’t given a lot of thought to the sort of diamond a man like Renzo might prefer, but she knew in an instant that if she had, it would not have been this one.

  She would have expected something modern and edgy from him, to match the way he fused history and a contemporary sensibility in places like this hotel or the castle across the way. An emerald cut rectangle, perhaps, to show off the carats and express his domination.

  But the ring he held before her looked like all the fairy tales he’d claimed he didn’t believe in. Three round diamonds surrounded by pavé and filigree, suitable for princesses and storybooks alike.

  It made her heart thud. And more, it told her things about Renzo she was positive he didn’t know himself.

  Like that intent fierceness in his gaze, as if he didn’t know what her answer would be. As if he was in some doubt about this thing between them, though she knew he’d never admit he entertained uncertainty. Not when he’d been so clear about the progression. Mistress. Wife only long enough to provide legitimacy to his child. An engagement, complete with a ring, hadn’t been part of it.

  But she wasn’t entirely sure he knew what she could see in him tonight, and that made her heart kick at her again. Harder than before.

  Renzo’s mouth was set in that stern line, as if what he expected from her was an argument. Because, she understood then, he had fought for everything he had. Everything.

  Even her.

  “Marry me,” he said, more order than invitation, because that was who he was. The only man Sophie loved, or ever would. “Now.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RENZO DIDN’T WAIT for Sophie to answer. He pulled the ring from the box and took her hand in his, sliding the astonishingly dreamy piece of jewelry onto her finger.

  Where, Sophie couldn’t help but notice, it fit perfectly.

  As if it was meant to be there. As if this was what had been meant to happen all along, no matter what he’d told her.

  And for a moment, everything disappeared. The island of Sicily was no more. There was no hotel, no rolling vineyards beneath the stars, no postcard-perfect village in the distance.

  There was only this particular moment of communion. Special, sacred. A kind of holy she had only experienced before when he was deep inside her, and she was showing him how much she loved him with every touch.

  This was like that. And yet more, somehow.

  Sophie felt shaken. But not in a way that left her weak. She felt shaken and strong, somehow.

  Right, a voice inside her intoned, like the ringing of a bell. This is right.

  It was as if everything was finally right, at last. It all made sense. That night in Monte Carlo led straight to this. And every step along the way felt necessary. Important.

  Their own kind of perfect.

  “Yes, I’ll marry you,” Sophie said, and smiled to keep her emotions in check, though she wasn’t sure she succeeded. “Not that you asked.”

  “I didn’t realize it was a question that needed asking.” But there was a curve to Renzo’s beautiful mouth. And he still hadn’t let go of her hand. “This was always the plan, was it not?”

  And she loved him, so she didn’t point out that bloodlessly cold arranged marriages rarely began with actual proposals like this one. She loved him, so she only smiled wider. She loved him, so she—

  Sophie frowned, as all of his words finally penetrated. “Did you say now?”


  Renzo kept his eyes on hers. That curve in his mouth became a true smile. And he lifted his free hand.

  The staff that Sophie had thought gone reappeared then. And this time, they brought in a man wreathed in smiles who bowed, complimented il capo on the happy news, and introduced himself to Sophie as the mayor of the village.

  “How is this possible?” she asked Renzo. “I thought weddings in Italy required...?”

  “The mayor owes me a favor,” Renzo replied, still holding her hand as if he thought she might make a break for it. “I rebuilt his house. In return he issued me a special marriage license, handled the paperwork, and posted the banns over the last weeks.”

  Sophie found she was breathless, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to mind. “When you said now, you meant right now.”

  Renzo only looked at her, his dark amber eyes so fierce and consuming.

  And in the end, it wasn’t a struggle. Sophie was already in love with him. She was already carrying his baby. As far she was concerned, marrying him was nothing but a technicality.

  She remembered what he’d said about their divorce and visitation rights—but she shoved it aside. That had been so long ago, now. She’d seen the look on his face when he’d looked at their baby on the ultrasound monitor. And tonight, as he’d given her the ring she wore.

  Renzo might not say he loved her. He might not know that he did. But she was sure—she was more than sure—that there was no way she was in this deep alone.

  And this time, there was no aisle to walk down and no second thoughts. They stood on the balcony with all the world sparkling there at their feet, and spoke their vows.

  When Sophie promised to love and honor Renzo, she meant it.

  And she thought he did, too.

  When the simple ceremony was done, the staff made their exit and Renzo finally swept her up and into his arms. For a moment, he simply held her there.

  She couldn’t keep herself from reaching for him. She laid the hand that now sported the two rings he’d given her against his jaw, and wasn’t certain her body could contain all the joy that pulsed in her then.