The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  It was like that light in his eyes, fierce and encompassing.

  “You married me,” Sophie said softly, and she couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

  “I told you I would,” Renzo replied, his voice low and his dark eyes aglow as he held her high against his chest. “I keep my promises, cara. You should know this about me.”

  “And your vows.”

  “Always.”

  He carried her into one of the villa’s sumptuous bedchambers. The bed was a high, commanding platform strewn with rose petals, and Renzo carefully laid her down in the middle of them.

  And then he worshipped her with his body. There was no other way to describe it.

  In a kind of reverent silence, he slipped the shoes from her feet. He set his mouth and his hands to every centimeter of her body, claiming her and exalting her.

  It was as if he was imprinting himself...everywhere. By the time he took her dress off, and stripped her down until she was wearing nothing but the rings he’d put on her finger, Sophie felt outside herself.

  Almost sick with joy. Heavy with it.

  She couldn’t touch him enough. She couldn’t kiss him, taste him, explore him enough.

  She couldn’t get enough.

  Renzo was a man possessed. He ran his hands over her belly and the beginnings of her bump, murmuring praise and devotion to his child the way he always did.

  But when it came to the rest of her, he’d clearly set himself the task of taking her apart.

  And he did. Over and over and over again.

  Sophie lost track of how many times she shattered on his fingers. His mouth.

  And when he finally pulled her on top of him, holding her where he wanted her as he surged into her, she was too far gone to be careful. She was lost in the joy of this. The beauty that was this night, this man.

  The exquisite wonder that was the light and hope they made between them.

  She heard the sound of her voice, repeating something again and again, like a chant.

  His hands gripped her hips, almost too hard for comfort, as he set an intense pace.

  “Again,” he ordered her, ferocious and commanding below her. “I want you to come again.”

  And when she didn’t obey him immediately, he moved his clever fingers to her center, and pressed down hard.

  Sophie shattered one more time. She thought she died, it went on so long, and the only thing she was aware of for a very long while was Renzo’s hoarse shout as he followed her.

  It felt like much later when she came back to herself, slumped on top of him as if he really had broken her.

  And it took her longer than it should have to realize that he was not holding her the way he normally did. He was...tense, there below her, still inside her.

  She would have said he was angry if they hadn’t just—

  But that was when she realized what she’d done. What she’d been repeating over and over again while out of her mind, hopped up on their impromptu wedding and these weeks of loving him with everything she had.

  Over and over and over again, so there could be no mistake.

  She could hear it, as if there was an echo in the room, beating her with her own words.

  I love you, she’d said, fool that she was. She’d cried it out again and again. I love you, I love you.

  Renzo, I love you.

  She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to face it when she could feel him beneath her, stiff and furious.

  But that was the old Sophie. The one who’d walked halfway down an aisle toward a man she could never love and didn’t even want because she’d imagined it was easier than causing a scene.

  The new Sophie didn’t hide from her problems. She didn’t go along with things simply to avoid conflict, no matter how much she might want to do just that.

  And she had never wanted to do it more than she did just then.

  She forced herself to open her eyes and lift her head, facing Renzo straight on.

  He was staring back at her, his dark amber eyes like a storm, his expression grim.

  And she knew that everything had changed.

  Again.

  * * *

  “You do not love me,” Renzo bit out at her.

  She was soft and much too sweet. He was still deep inside her and all he could feel was that soft heat of hers, making him stir all over again. She was his wife.

  His wife.

  But that didn’t matter. He couldn’t let that matter.

  Because all he could hear were those damned words. Those terrible, ruinous words.

  He expected her to deny it. To wave it away, and the sad part was, he knew he would accept it if she did. He would choose to believe she’d been carried away. They’d had a wedding, after all, and this one hadn’t been interrupted. She wore his rings and she’d made her pretty vows, making his child legitimate well before its birth, just as he’d always wanted.

  If she told him she’d made a mistake, he would believe her.

  He wanted to believe her, with a sharp-edged ferocity that made him feel something like dizzy.

  But Sophie pushed herself up slowly, still straddling him, as if she could feel him all over her and deep inside her and in her bones the way he could feel her.

  Her gaze was somber. Almost sad, and he had a terrible inkling—

  “I’m sorry if it upsets you,” she said, very quietly. Very distinctly. “But I do.”

  “I told you that was unacceptable from the start. Our arrangement—”

  “It turns out that my heart doesn’t care what arrangement we made,” she replied, much too softly. And with that glowing thing in her melting brown eyes that he didn’t want to identify. He didn’t want to see it, because he knew it had been there awhile. He didn’t want to admit to himself just how long. “And I think yours—”

  “No.”

  He lifted her up and off of him. Then he was rolling out of the bed before he fully understood he meant to move. All he could think about was getting away from her. Getting away from this.

  His worst nightmare come to life.

  “Renzo—”

  “You knew the rules. I told you the rules.”

  He didn’t sound like himself. And that was the trouble, wasn’t it? He hadn’t been acting like himself for weeks. All this...domestic bliss, as if that was a real possibility for a man like him. What had he been playing at?

  Renzo pulled his clothes back on in quick, determined jerks. Then he headed for the door, knowing nothing except he needed space. A hell of a lot of space. A continent or two, by his estimation.

  He should have known better. He had known better. He’d known the moment he’d laid eyes on her in that casino that he should steer clear of her.

  The trouble was, he had wanted Sophie too much.

  The trouble was, he still did.

  There had been so many warning signs and he’d ignored every one. This was supposed to be a punishment, not a love story. Because he could handle one.

  The other was nothing but a lie—he knew that better than anyone.

  He refused to handle this. He didn’t even want to think about it.

  He needed to get out of here.

  “Renzo, please!”

  When he looked over his shoulder, Sophie had pulled one of the bedsheets around her and was standing there in the center of the villa’s spacious main room, her gaze imploring.

  And he knew he would live the rest of his life and never manage to get this image of her out of his head. Her gorgeous hair tousled from his hands, hanging all around her. Her beautiful eyes, wide and hurt. That faint trembling he could see on her lips.

  His beautiful Sophie. His wife.

  “You need to leave Sicily immediately,” he growled at her.

  “Leave?” She swayed slightly
on her feet and he didn’t put out a hand to steady her. And he hated himself with a comprehensive ferocity that should have toppled him. And yet didn’t. Somehow he was still standing. “Where will I go?”

  “I have properties all over Europe. Any one of them will do.”

  He should never have brought her here in the first place. He understood that now, with the awful clarity of retrospect. There was too much of his old self here. That lonely outcast he’d been. That boy still full up on optimism and hope, in those long, cold years when he’d still imagined things could be different.

  And more, that he could change them.

  He’d been a fool then. He was a fool now. He should have known that he wouldn’t be able to keep the two separate, the way they had been for almost the whole of his adult life. Not with a woman like Sophie.

  Her smile was too pretty. It lit up parts of him he’d thought dead for more than a decade.

  But Renzo didn’t believe in resurrection.

  “You said I would stay here for the duration of my pregnancy,” she reminded him, clutching at that sheet as if it could save her from this. From him.

  But it was too late for that. No one was getting saved here, least of all the woman he’d warned not to do the very thing she’d gone ahead and done.

  “Now I’m saying that’s unacceptable,” he told her, cold and brutal. “You can’t stay here another day.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” she threw at him. “I’ve been in love with you this whole time. Don’t you realize that? Do you really believe I would have just gone off with any man who smiled at me that night in Monte Carlo?”

  “Stop,” he ordered her, though his own voice sounded ragged. “Now.”

  “Of course not,” Sophie said, answering her own question. And there was too much emotion—on her face, in her voice, filling up the villa. Filling up him, too. “It was you, Renzo. Only and ever you. I didn’t ask you to love me back. I didn’t ask you for anything.”

  He knew he didn’t make a noise, and he didn’t understand how, when everything inside him was a roar. A howl.

  “You asked for everything,” he gritted out at her, hardly knowing what he meant to say. “But I don’t have it in me. I don’t have anything to give.”

  “You do.”

  She stepped closer to him, proving that she was far more courageous than he’d ever given her credit for, and she even reached out as if she meant to touch him. And he wanted that touch. God, how he wanted it—almost as much as he wanted her to never, ever touch him with those hands of hers again, because he didn’t think he could bear it.

  But she stopped before she made contact.

  And Renzo couldn’t tell if he was happy about that or if it broke him.

  “You do,” she said again, more intently. “I know you do. I can feel it.”

  “Love is a vicious lie,” he told her, and the words hurt him as they tore from his throat. “A delusion.”

  “Renzo—”

  But he didn’t stop. “I left this place when I was eighteen. You know that. I couldn’t wait to go. What you don’t know is that I didn’t leave here to make money. All I wanted was to take care of my mother, at last. The way she’d always taken care of me.”

  “I think that’s the very definition of love.”

  “She loved my father,” Renzo told her. “She was the chambermaid in his great, grand palace in the Alps, and she loved him. He toyed with her, and she loved him. He brought home a wife, and still she loved him. And he let her because he liked it.”

  Sophie had dropped her hand back down to her side, but she didn’t back away. And she didn’t try to interrupt him again.

  “Until she fell pregnant, that was, and then he kicked her out. With nothing.” Renzo shook his head. “And she still loved him. She made excuses for him. He had duties, you see. Responsibilities. He couldn’t help that he was swept up in events and promises beyond his control. Does that sound familiar?”

  Sophie blanched at that, and Renzo hated himself all the more for drawing that line between his worthless father and his own, personal miracle.

  But he didn’t take it back.

  “And when I was eighteen and finally a man grown in my estimation, I went to find him. This man who my mother still loved all those years later, when she had done nothing but suffer and raise me, destroying her own health in the process.”

  “Did you find him?”

  Renzo’s lips thinned. “My father is not a hard man to find. Access to him is another matter, of course.” These were not pleasant memories, but he forced himself to spit them out. This story he had never told another living soul. “I had to present myself at his gates and petition for an audience. His men escorted me into his exalted presence. And I asked him why, if he’d loved my mother, he’d cast her—and me—aside.”

  He still remembered that day. Every excruciating detail. The principality his father ruled small and remote and like a little jewel, tucked out of reach. The palace like a fairy tale, high in the Alps.

  And the man who’d sat in the desperately ornate hall and smirked when he saw Renzo, because they had the same eyes.

  The same damned eyes.

  “He laughed at me,” Renzo told Sophie with the same old bitterness that had nearly killed him then. Some part of him thought it had. Because he had never been the same. “He laughed and he laughed. He called my mother names that I cannot repeat. And when I took a swing at him, he had his guards beat me.”

  Sophie only whispered his name, but he felt it like a touch. And he steeled himself to tell her the rest.

  “When I was bloody, he told me to kneel,” Renzo told her. “I declined. And so this man my mother still loved, my father, threw me into his prison. And left me there for a week.”

  He found Sophie’s face, the only bright thing in the middle of all those dark memories.

  But he didn’t believe in brightness any more than he believed in love. Or hope.

  “They dragged me before him again. And this time, he didn’t laugh. He looked me in the eye and he warned me never to return.” Renzo shook his head, trying to clear those nasty old memories. The viciousness on the older man’s face. His total lack of concern about the things he’d done to his own child. “And when I returned here, somehow, my mother knew.”

  “What he did to you?”

  “No. That I had found him. I never told her what he did.” Renzo let out a laugh then, though there was little mirth in it. “And after eighteen years of no contact, do you know what she asked me? She wanted to know how he was. If he was okay.” He found he still couldn’t believe it. “Can you imagine?”

  “She loved him,” Sophie said simply.

  Renzo was glad she did. It reminded him what was at stake here. What was happening when he should have known better than to allow it to come to this.

  “I lied to her,” Renzo told Sophie then. “I spun her a tale about a man trapped by his duty and unable to do right by her, because that was the story she’d told herself all those years. That was what she needed. And she was a sick old woman who had sacrificed too much for her folly, so she was happy to believe me. But I knew the truth. I knew that man was nothing. Less than nothing. He didn’t deserve her love and he certainly didn’t return it.” He blew out a breath, surprised to find that wounds he’d thought he cauterized years ago still had the power to hurt him. “And I let my own mother die, believing this lie. That is the kind of man I am.”

  “I’m sure it gave her comfort to believe it,” Sophie said with a kind of urgency in her voice, and too much emotion in her gaze. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Love is a curse,” Renzo told her, his voice nearly shaking from the force of his fury, black and terrible. “It is a poison. I told you not to fall in love with me, Sophie. I warned you.” He stepped back, because he wanted to step forward and he didn
’t understand it. But he knew he couldn’t allow it. “I warned you.”

  “Renzo.”

  She sounded wounded, and he hated it—but there was nothing he could do. He knew what love did. It twisted and corroded. It was nothing but lies and it ended in blood on the floor of a distant jail cell and fairy tales his mother should have known better than to believe. He knew exactly what love was.

  “What do you think will happen?” Sophie was asking, sounding as torn up as he was inside. “You can’t possibly think—”

  “Love is a sickness, nothing more,” he threw at her, and it didn’t matter how she looked at him. It didn’t matter how he felt. What mattered was what he knew. What he’d had proven to him in no uncertain terms all those years ago. “You can love me all you want, Sophie. But you can do it alone.”

  And he left her there, his rings on her hand and his baby in her belly, because she’d given him no other choice.

  Because leaving her might tear at him, more than he would have imagined possible and almost more than he could bear—but it was better than love.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FOR A LONG WHILE, Sophie stood where he had left her.

  Right there in the middle of the villa, wearing nothing but a bedsheet. And her wedding rings.

  She thought there was likely a joke in there somewhere, though she couldn’t quite feel it. Not quite yet. Something about the bride who couldn’t make it to the altar and the wife who couldn’t make it through her wedding night.

  Maybe someday she would find it funny.

  She felt like an old woman by the time she finally moved, making her way into the shower though her bones ached and there was that horrible tightness in her chest she was afraid might never go away.

  And Sophie stood in the hot spray and let the water course over her for a long, long time, as if it could wash her clean. As if it could rewind this evening to where it had all gone wrong.

  As if it could allow her to start over and be a little wiser this time.

  She didn’t let herself fall apart. She didn’t sob into the spray.

  What would be the point? Renzo had already left.

  When she finally emerged, she toweled herself off and tried not to pay any attention to the parts of her body that still seemed to hum, because longing for Renzo’s touch was only going to make this worse.