The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

  Assuming it was possible that this could get worse.

  She dressed herself in that same blue gown that Renzo had taken off of her so slowly, and swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. She combed her hair with her fingers and then gave it up as a lost cause—but then, she felt like one herself.

  And when she stepped out into the main room of the villa again, there were hotel staff there waiting for her.

  “Il capo has sent a car,” the deferential man told her, inclining his head. The woman with him did the same. “If the signora would be so kind...”

  Sophie tried to smile, but she hardly thought a grotesque twist of her lips did the job. She found she couldn’t speak. She could only follow along as Renzo’s people ushered her into a car that whisked her down the mountain.

  Away from the village. Away from the castle she’d come to feel was like a home.

  Away from Renzo.

  The car delivered her to the airport in Catania, where a first-class ticket sat waiting for her. A quick flight to Rome tonight and then on to London in the morning.

  He was sending her home.

  Sophie took the ticket at the counter with fingers gone numb. Her driver had handed her a small folio containing her passport and credit cards when she’d gotten out of the car, as well as a small case. When she made it to her gate, still in a fog, she unzipped it and looked through it. It contained the few clothes Renzo had liberated from her honeymoon luggage back in Langston House, what felt like a lifetime ago, as if he was sending her back with only what she’d had when he’d taken her.

  As if none of this had ever happened.

  She closed the case and sat back. And then found herself looking at her hands. At the two rings Renzo had slid onto her fingers earlier tonight. The romantic fantasy in diamonds and with it, a platinum eternity band. Bright and shining, no matter what angle she looked at them from.

  There was a kind of bubble in her chest, and Sophie was terribly afraid that it was filled with poison. And more, that if it burst it would destroy her.

  But the longer she stared at the rings on her finger, the more that bubble...shifted.

  Until Sophie was fairly certain it wasn’t so much pain in there as a kind of wild fury.

  The gate agent started boarding her flight, but Sophie didn’t move.

  She didn’t want to go to back to London. She didn’t want to be sent back to her parents’ house, or wherever it was Renzo thought she would go once he was rid of her. There was nothing for her but scandal and pity in England, and Sophie very much doubted she’d want to deal with any of that at all, much less in a fashion that would please her family.

  Why not just get on the plane? a voice inside asked, sounding caustic and accusatory. This is what you always do.

  And Sophie didn’t disagree. Here she was, sitting in her deep blue wedding dress, her hair still damp and her heart smashed into pieces in her chest. Renzo had raged at her. His eyes had been dark with the past, and she had known without having to ask that he didn’t see her—he saw his memories.

  And so she had stood there, like that ghost she’d been so sure she was becoming, and she had done nothing but watch him leave.

  Then she had simply acquiesced the way she always did.

  She’d let them hustle her off that mountain. She’d taken her case and her passport without a word, and she’d obediently marched up to the ticket counter and accepted what amounted to an eviction notice.

  The old Sophie would have already boarded the plane and sat there in her seat in a miserable little ball. She would have felt all the same heartache and anger that Sophie did right now, but she would have done what she’d been told to do anyway.

  Because she’d always done what she’d been told to do.

  But Renzo hadn’t married the old Sophie. Renzo had pretty much wrecked the old Sophie. And then he’d gone ahead and married this one.

  And this Sophie had absolutely no intention of shuffling off quietly into that dark night, simply because Renzo’s feelings were hurt. Or because something in his past—even something as truly awful as the story he’d told her—had ruined him and made him think he couldn’t feel things or love anyone.

  Sophie knew a thing or two about ruin, as it happened. And what she’d learned most of all was that it was entirely up to her how ruined she chose to feel.

  “Apologies, signora,” the gate agent said then, snapping Sophie back to the Catania Airport. To the here and now and the choice she needed to make. “But the plane is fully boarded and ready to depart. If you would take your seat...?”

  This time, when Sophie smiled, her lips worked the way they were meant to. She stood, gripping her case so hard in one hand she was surprised that the handle didn’t break off.

  “Thank you,” she told the gate agent. “But I won’t be getting on that plane.”

  She wasn’t going to sit around and hope that Renzo came to his senses. She wasn’t going to meekly make her way back to England, and spend her life apologizing for something she wasn’t all that sorry about to people whose opinions meant nothing to her.

  She had told him that she loved him. And Sophie might not have had a whole lot of experience with love, it was true. But she knew it wasn’t leaving when things were rough. She knew it wasn’t taking hurtful words as gospel when she knew—she knew—that whether he was aware of it or not, Renzo loved her to distraction.

  Because love was standing up for what she believed. Love was protecting her little family, the baby inside her and its beautiful, brooding, difficult father—especially when he didn’t want her to do anything of the kind.

  Renzo might not believe in love, but it was real and good whether he believed in it or not.

  Sophie was simply going to have to show him.

  * * *

  When the door to his office in the castle opened, Renzo didn’t look up.

  He’d been going over reports in a kind of fever since the middle of the night, when he’d stopped pretending that he might get a moment’s rest. He’d stared at his ceiling for a while, then decided that it was far better to immerse himself in work than lie in the bed he no longer shared with Sophie, imagining her with him. Beside him and below him.

  But the change of venue hadn’t helped.

  There was no part of this castle he’d restored with his own two hands that didn’t remind him of her. There was no escape. She was everywhere. He found himself listening for her step in the hall. He was sure he could still catch her scent in the air. And meanwhile, he felt disfigured by the things he had told her and more, the love she claimed to feel.

  I love you, she had said, her head tipped back and her face awash in bliss. I love you, Renzo. I love you.

  He would rather be in that prison again. He would rather have every bone in his body broken, repeatedly.

  He would rather anything but this.

  “It is not like you to hide, Renzo. Or to pretend that you are alone in this room when you must know very well you are not.”

  Sophie.

  Renzo took his time raising his head. He wanted to believe that she was nothing but a ghost, but he knew better. She was too alive, there before him. Flushed and fierce, her hair in a glorious tangle and her hands on her hips. She still wore the blue dress he’d had made especially for her, and that nicked something in him.

  Like a sharp blade pressed against his flesh.

  There were too many things inside of him, then. Something like panic, harsh and suffocating. That same fire that only seemed to grow the longer he knew her, the flames dancing all over him the way her fingers might.

  And in and around all of that, fury.

  The same fury that had animated him all these lonely years. The fury he’d felt when he’d buried his mother, her ears still ringing from the lies he had told. The fury that had made him famous and then rich, because it
had been what fueled him. It had been his favorite companion, down deep beneath the charm he wielded as a distraction or the laziness he assumed as a disguise.

  It was the engine that drove him. It was all he’d ever thought he wanted.

  Until Sophie had burst over him like a sunrise, making him something other than the weapon he’d made himself into over that long week in his father’s prison.

  He had been a thing of fury and fire, but she had made him flesh.

  Renzo had forgiven her the lies she’d told him, though he hadn’t intended to do such a thing. It had happened sometime in these last weeks, a simple shift he’d only noticed after it had happened. He’d even forgiven her that ill-considered walk down an English aisle.

  But this was the thing he couldn’t—wouldn’t—forgive.

  “You are meant to be on a plane,” he told her, his voice cold. “You should have landed in Rome already.”

  “It turns out that I don’t really care for Rome at this time of year,” she told him, and Renzo took an instant dislike to her tone.

  She was too calm. Much too composed.

  And the hectic glitter he could see in her dark eyes didn’t assuage him.

  “You have no business here,” he said, clipped and chilly. “I told you to leave. I meant it.”

  “And if I were your mistress, I might obey you.” Her gaze met his, bold and defiant, and he hated that it took his breath. Still. “After all, what is a mistress if not a business arrangement? Intimate, perhaps, but never emotional. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “You know where the door is.”

  Sophie’s lovely mouth curved. “Unfortunately for you, Renzo, I am not your mistress. I am your wife.”

  He didn’t like that at all. “A situation that can be easily remedied.”

  “Can it? Not for months, not if you wish your child to be born with your name.” She had the gall to let her smile widen when he scowled at her. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you expect me to simply slink away, tail between my legs, in a shroud of shame for daring to express my feelings?”

  Renzo didn’t know he’d shot to his feet, but there he was. Standing up, his hands and fists, and this maddening woman right there before him on the other side of his desk. Taunting him. Making him wish—

  But no. The mistake he had made was in letting all of this go too far already. He should have sent her off to one of his other hotels in the first place. Somewhere faraway, where he could have had her pregnancy monitored by medical personnel, and never subject himself to this.

  This terrible intimacy that felt like some kind of arthritis, making his bones protest.

  “I can’t imagine what you think this will accomplish,” he told her, making a herculean effort to sound at least as calm as she did. “You’re not going to argue me into changing my mind. I told you from the start what was between us. I regret that you got the wrong idea.” He lifted a shoulder, then dropped it, in an excellent approximation of the ease that had been second nature to him before her. “I did warn you.”

  “The issue isn’t whether or not I love you.” Sophie sounded certain of that. “You asked me to be your mistress because you claimed that too many women, if left to their own devices, fell in love with you. That was why we needed the structure. That was why you insisted on our arrangement.”

  “And you shouldn’t have broken the rules.”

  “I don’t think the rules were in place to keep me from falling in love with you,” she said gently, as if she was trying to explain astrophysics to a toddler. “You are so certain it was inevitable that you must have expected nothing less. I think you set those rules so that when it happened, you could gently disengage yourself and remind me what we’d agreed.” She shook her head, almost as if she was sad. “But instead, you married me. Not as I was heading into childbirth, as threatened. But now.”

  Renzo didn’t like the way that hit him, like some kind of indictment.

  “That was always part of the plan. I told you not to read too much into it.”

  It was Sophie’s turn to shrug and it set his teeth on edge.

  “It turns out I’m terribly emotional,” she said, much too offhandedly for Renzo’s taste. “I can’t help it. But what about you?”

  He felt as if she’d shoved a stake through his heart. Part of him wished she had. It would be simpler. Cleaner.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I would be happy to apologize for the terrible sin of falling in love with you,” she said quietly. “But first I want you to admit what we both know is the real truth.”

  When he only stared at her, she lifted her brows, looking every inch the aristocratic Carmichael-Jones heiress.

  His Sophie.

  His wife.

  “You’re in love with me, Renzo,” she said.

  He was gripped by something he couldn’t understand, then. He didn’t know its name. It held on to him, like iron fists around his throat, his chest, his gut. It clenched hard, ripping the air from his lungs. Ripping him apart, but not fast enough.

  Because he was still standing. He was still breathing.

  And worst of all, Sophie was studying him as he stood there, filled with all this rage and need and fury and darkness.

  He had the terrible feeling she could see all of it.

  That it was possible she always had.

  “I am not capable of love,” he heard himself say, like rocks scraped together. “It is not in me.”

  “I know it is.”

  Her voice was so sure. So offensively certain. Renzo wanted to rage at her. He wanted to tear something apart, with his fingers if necessary, but he didn’t let himself move. And even so, he felt as if the thing torn most was him.

  “Then you have not heard a single thing I have ever told you,” he said, through his teeth.

  “Renzo.” And he told himself he hated the way she said his name. As if it was a part of her. “You told me a story last night. About love.”

  “I told you a story about doomed, damned men and the miseries they inflict on everyone around them. If that is not what you heard, then you have too many fairy tales on the brain.”

  “You told me the story of a boy who was raised on a love story,” she corrected him.

  “I told you about a boy who was raised on a lie, Sophie.”

  “He had nothing,” Sophie continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Except hope. And he took that hope and went to find the truth of the story he’d lived with all those years.”

  “And that went so well. Hope blooms in prison, of course.”

  “Your father sounds like an awful man. He beat you, but he didn’t break you. You came back here, and you could have passed on the kind of beating he gave you. You could have ripped out your mother’s heart and stamped it into the ground.” Sophie’s eyes were shining in a way that made him...ache. “But you didn’t.”

  “You are telling me a story of weakness,” Renzo snarled at her. “Why would anyone want to hear it?”

  “You cared so much for her that you let her die believing in that love, when you knew it wasn’t true.” Sophie lifted her hands in a kind of supplication. “I can’t think of a greater love than that. I only hope that you love our child so much, that you would protect it from everything, even itself.”

  He wanted to rage at that, but he couldn’t seem to speak.

  “You love me, Renzo, and you love this child,” Sophie said, every word a blow. “And I know that you have no desire to be the kind of father yours was. Distant. Damaged. Do you?”

  There was that howling thing inside of him, more complicated than simple fury. It was like a hurricane beneath his own skin, tearing him apart from his bones on out.

  “You have to go,” he managed to grit out.

  But she didn’t seem to hear him. Or she didn’t care. She certainly didn’
t turn and leave as commanded. Instead, she moved toward him. Renzo stood as if he was frozen into place as she rounded the desk.

  “You love me,” she said again, more fervently this time. “You love our child. The only one you don’t love, as far as I can tell, is you.”

  And he was cracking wide-open. He was a hurricane, or he was consumed by one, and he couldn’t tell the difference.

  The world was a howling thing, desperate and deadly, and Renzo didn’t know how to fight it. He was known for his steadiness, and yet he felt rocked straight through. Her melting brown eyes, shot through with gold, were filled with something he didn’t want to identify.

  He didn’t want to feel any of this. He didn’t want to feel.

  Sophie reached over and took his hand in hers. His fingers dwarfed hers, but she held it between the two of hers, and it took him a moment to realize that she was holding the hand where he wore a wedding ring to match hers.

  “If you don’t love yourself, that’s all right,” Sophie told him, the faintest tremor in her voice, as if these words were wrenched from her soul. “I can love you until you learn. I can love you forever, Renzo. I feel as if I already have.”

  And maybe it wasn’t her vulnerabilities that he was so obsessed with, he thought in some distant part of his head that was still functioning. Maybe it was that she saw his, and loved him anyway.

  Maybe all of this was love.

  Maybe it always had been.

  And Renzo had learned a long time ago to lean into the curves, the sharper and more treacherous, the better.

  He didn’t think it through. He’d already thought too much and it had brought him nothing but hurricanes and loneliness, and the truth was, he was tired of both. He shifted so that he held both of her hands.

  And then, his gaze locked to hers, he sank to his knees before her.

  He had never knelt before anyone or anything. But he knelt before Sophie.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he told her with every part of his battered, furious heart right there, exposed and open. “I buy things. I wait. I possess them. That is all I know.”