She pulled her hands from his, and he felt it like a loss. But she was only moving closer, so she could smooth her palms over his jaw, and sink her fingers into his hair.
“Do you think you are the only one who is new to this?” she demanded, a catch in her throat. “Did you hear a single word I said about the way I was raised? My parents may love something, but it isn’t me. And I have never loved anything in all my life except you.”
“Ah, Sophie. But I am not a good bet.”
“Says the man I met in Monte Carlo,” she said, her lips curving into the kind of smile he wanted to take with him and hold forever in his heart.
He shook his head, but her fingers moved as if she was trying to soothe him. As if he truly was a wild beast—but if he was, he saw she loved that, too.
It was written all over her.
“You deserve love, Renzo,” she whispered. “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to tell me stories. You don’t have to protect me from lies. All you have to do is let me love you. And let yourself love me in return. Everything else will work out.”
Renzo wanted to believe it. He wanted it more than he could remember wanting anything, even the father he’d longed to find so long ago.
“How do you know?” he demanded. “How can you possibly know?”
“Because those are the vows we made,” she told him solemnly, her gaze on his. “We promised to love each other, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. It’s easy to marry for the wrong reasons. It’s easy to sign a contract and make it a business venture. It’s easy to make arrangements and keep emotions out of things.” He was gripping her hips as if he would never let go. And Sophie didn’t look away. He wasn’t sure she even blinked. “This is the hard stuff, Renzo. This is where the promises really count. Anyone can stay married when they have nothing to lose but a house. Or some money. But this? Loving you means fighting for you. The same way you would fight for me. Even if it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Or what’s the point?”
Still kneeling before her, Renzo reached up to pull her face closer to his.
“I have never believed in love,” he told her, in the way he’d said his wedding vows the night before. Deliberate. Considered. Like a contract signed in blood. “But I believe in you. I’ve tried so hard to let you go, to make you matter less—but here you are. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I can’t quench my thirst for you. It only grows.” Her gaze was too shiny again, and Renzo pushed on. “I want you below me. Beside me. I want you every way I’ve had you and a thousand ways I have yet to imagine. I want to watch you mother our child. I never know what you’ll say, and I still want to hear every word. I want everything, Sophie. Everything. I don’t know what this is.”
“You do,” she whispered. “You know you do.”
“Promise me,” he gritted out. “Promise me that you will always fight for me. For us. Even if you must fight me for us. And I will do the same.”
“Renzo,” she whispered, her lips curving as she spoke. “You tried to send me back to England. But here I am, high on a mountain in Sicily, right where I belong. You couldn’t keep me from fighting for you. You can’t.”
“I will hold you to that,” Renzo said, sure he sounded as broken as he felt.
And then he took her mouth with his.
And he was whole.
Renzo hadn’t believed in love before he met her, but she did. So he poured the things she’d taught him into his kiss.
All the longing. All the need.
The beauty of her smile that could light up any darkness, even his own heart. The magic of her laughter, that had healed him in ways he hadn’t known he was broken.
He kissed her for all the fairy tales he’d never believed in, and the story she’d told him about his own life that made him want to believe in a good tale well told, with a happy ending after all.
Just so long as it was with her.
He would learn to love her if it killed him, he told himself. He suspected he already did.
And either way, she would never spend another moment questioning his devotion to her.
He was Renzo Crisanti. If there was a happy ending to be found, he would find it. And he would give it to Sophie, who had made him believe in forever.
And he was a man who kept his vows.
So that was what he did.
* * *
Alceu Cabbrieli Crisanti came into the world as if he was in a race, like his father. On his own schedule, a good two weeks before expected, with all the intensity and fury that Sophie supposed she should have expected from a child made by a man like Renzo.
And she loved him, red faced and angry-fisted, with a kind of ferocity that would have scared her a little, had Renzo not had the same expression on his face every time he looked at the child they’d made.
“My beautiful son,” he would murmur, holding the fussing baby when he woke while Sophie prepared herself to feed him. And then, when Alceu latched onto her breast, Renzo would raise that darkly wondering gaze to hers. “My beautiful wife.”
“Our family,” she would say, as if it was a prayer.
It felt like a benediction.
They had spent a kind of honeymoon together these last months, waiting for Alceu’s arrival. For a long time they’d kept the world out, but Sophie had known that was a state of affairs that couldn’t last forever. No matter how she wished it could.
“Why can’t it?” Renzo asked at the start of her final trimester. He had been lounging beside her in their bed, his hands on her belly to feel the baby kick inside her. “What do we owe the world?”
“This isn’t about us,” she’d told him, aware that he trusted her more by the day—but that it was still a battle. That his past was always with him.
That some things would take time.
And by the time the baby was born, she’d managed to convince her strong, proud, happily fierce Sicilian husband that it was worth his time to extend an olive branch to her parents. Or to suffer it while she did, more like.
“The truth is that it will cost you nothing,” she told him after she’d made the initial phone call. “They will visit rarely, if at all. In the unlikely event they do, it will be as if they are miles away when they’re in the same room. None of that matters.”
“Then why bother?”
She’d stroked his lean jaw and marveled at the blaze in those dark amber eyes she loved so much. The blaze that was theirs. The blaze that had been there since the moment they’d clapped eyes on each other in Monaco and would be there when they were tottery and old.
Sophie and this man who still considered himself as solitary as the castle he’d rebuilt himself, even if he’d let her in. This man she was making a family with, making him less solitary by the day.
“Because they are going to be the grandparents of this child,” she told him softly. “Whether you like it or not.”
“I think it is you who do not like it, cara.”
“The family business has to be run by someone,” she said, raising her brows at him. “You fought for everything you have. Will you insist your son do the same?”
He answered her in his favorite way, with his mouth to hers, stoking that fire that only ever grew between them.
Which was as close to surrender as Renzo ever came.
Though on this particular sparkling day at the start of a Sicilian spring, Sophie thought that there were many different forms of surrender, and most of them looked like love.
Because today was Alceu’s christening, in splendid Sicilian fashion. The lovely old church in the village had been ringing its bells all morning, and all that remained was for il capo and his little family to walk across the square to begin the mass.
“We will discuss consequences tonight,” Renzo told her as they walked. He held his son against his chest the way he liked to do, and So
phie marveled at the way the Sicilian sun made the pair of them glow.
As if love lit them up from all around.
“You do love your consequences,” she murmured, laughing at him when he arched one of his king-of-the-universe looks her way. “Unfortunately for you, so do I.”
“I believe I deserve sainthood for what I am about to endure. I may take it up with the priest.”
“Poppy is my oldest and best friend,” Sophie said, the way she had a hundred times already—today alone. “There can be no other possible choice for Alceu’s godmother.”
“And why that means the man you nearly married while pregnant with my son must also be involved, I do not know,” Renzo retorted.
“Because he’s Poppy’s husband, as you are well aware.” She smiled at him, ignoring his dark expression. “And he was never cruel to me, Renzo. It was quite the opposite.”
She could see them up ahead, her best friend and the man Sophie had been supposed to marry. They waited out on the steps of the church, smiling at each other in a way that told Sophie without a single doubt that all of this had been meant to be.
Poppy and Dal never would have found each other in this way if Dal and Sophie had married. This Sophie knew for a fact.
And Sophie knew that she and Dal would never have looked at each other the way Poppy and Dal did. It was as if a warm current wrapped around the two of them and gleamed bright. As if they were connected whether or not they touched.
The fact that they were wildly, madly in love seemed to add an extra glow to the light dancing all over the square.
Not to mention, it made Sophie’s heart feel three sizes too big.
Dal had accepted Sophie’s apology. Poppy and Sophie had caught up at last—each with quite a story to tell.
And now Poppy and Dal would stand up with Sophie and Renzo and pledge to take care of the precious life they’d all had a hand in making, one way or another. Or maybe it was the other way around—Alceu was the life that had given them the courage or impetus to live the lives they’d been meant to live, not the lives they’d thought they were supposed to live.
Last June, on that bright morning outside of Winchester, could any of them have imagined they’d end up here? Much less so happy?
“Nonetheless,” Renzo was saying in that low, dark, thrilling way of his that still made Sophie shiver in delight, “there will be hell to pay. Naked hell, cara mia, I hope it goes without saying. It is because I love you that I must punish you in this way, you understand.”
“I love your punishments.” She smiled at him. “And you. Always you.”
Renzo held the back of his son’s head in his hand as if there was nothing on earth more precious, and the smile he aimed at Sophie was filled with too much love to bear and a thousand promises, sex and devotion, honor and beauty, always.
She couldn’t wait to live their whole, long, beautiful life together.
Because Sophie was a woman who kept her promises, especially to Renzo.
Each and every promise, as long as they both lived.
So that was precisely what she did.
Forever.
* * * * *
If you enjoyed THE BRIDE’S BABY OF SHAME by Caitlin Crews check out the first part of the STOLEN BRIDES duet, KIDNAPPED FOR HIS ROYAL DUTY by Jane Porter
And these other stories by Caitlin Crews
IMPRISONED BY THE GREEK’S RING
A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE
UNDONE BY THE BILLIONAIRE DUKE
All available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from INHERITED FOR THE ROYAL BED by Annie West.
Inherited for the Royal Bed
by Annie West
CHAPTER ONE
THREE MEN STRODE through the gleaming marble corridors of the Emir’s palace.
Past the great council room where the walls were hung with decorative displays of lances, swords and ancient muskets. Where brightly coloured martial standards hung as if waiting for the next call to arms.
Past sumptuous banqueting halls and audience chambers. Past colonnaded courtyards filled with pleasure gardens, the tinkle of fountains loud in this still hour after midnight. The only other noise was the march of boots.
Past the studded medieval door to the empty harem and another that led to the passage carved down, through the very rock of the citadel, to the vast treasure chambers and dungeons.
Finally they reached the corridor to the Emir’s private suite.
Sayid paused. ‘That will be all for now.’
‘But, sire, our orders are—’
Sayid swung round. ‘Your orders change tonight. Halarq is no longer on the brink of war.’
Saying it aloud still sounded unreal. Halarq had been on the verge of war most of his life, principally, but not solely, with the neighbouring kingdom of Jeirut. It was why every male was armed and trained to defend his country to the death.
Sayid thought of all those years primed for conflict. Of unending border skirmishes and casualties. Of missed opportunities to invest in better lives for the people, as opposed to diverting energy and funds into armaments.
His mouth firmed. If he achieved nothing else, he, Sayid Badawi, the new Emir of Halarq, had done that—brought peace. Later, when it sank in, he’d rejoice. Tonight all he wanted was to lay his head on a pillow for the first time in three days and find oblivion.
‘But, sire, our duty is to protect you. We spend the night at the guard stations outside your suite.’ The soldier nodded towards the other end of the long arched corridor.
‘The palace is guarded by your colleagues on the perimeter and by the latest security technology.’ Sayid’s uncle, the previous Emir, had spent lavishly on his own protection and comfort, as well as on armaments.
It was a shame he hadn’t been as ready to spend on his people.
Still the guards didn’t shift. Sayid’s patience frayed. ‘Those are my orders,’ he barked. His eyes narrowed and the guard blanched.
Instantly Sayid’s anger eased. The man was only trying to do his duty as he understood it. Questioning the orders of the Emir would, in the past, have met with terrible punishment.
‘Your devotion to duty, and to your Emir, is noted and appreciated.’ He surveyed both men, giving them time to absorb that. ‘But our security arrangements are changing. Your commander will brief you on that later. In the meantime, it’s my desire, and my order, that you return to the guard hall.’ He didn’t wait for a response but turned away.
‘That will be all,’ he said as he strode down the corridor, his dusty boots leaving marks on the graceful inlaid patterns underfoot.
Silence. They hadn’t attempted to follow.
Sayid filled his lungs with the cool night air wafting from a nearby courtyard. This was the first time he’d been alone in days. The first time he could allow himself to relax.
Tonight’s ebullient celebrations with every Halarqi clan leader, regional governor and warlord, plus most of their fighting men, had been on a monumental scale. The plain beyond the city walls was filled to the brim and the scents of festive cooking fires drifted through the whole city. Every so often the crackle of rifle fire indicated the celebration continued. They’d probably still be at it as dawn broke.
Whereas he’d be up at sunrise, in the office he hadn’t had time to make his own since his uncle’s death, immersed in the paperwork and diplomatic detail that would put flesh on the bones of the peace agreement. A peace that guaranteed the borders, the safe passage of travellers and even, potentially, trade and mutual development between Halarq and Jeirut.
Sayid’s pace slowed and he smiled, the action tugging his cheek muscles taut.
Who could blame his people for celebrating? He’d do the same if he weren’t weary from the long negotiations with Huseyn of Jeirut. And from keeping his more bellicose generals in check
long enough to prevent provocation and violence. Some had thought, despite his military record and his reputation for decisive action, he’d be easily swayed into supporting his predecessor’s war plans. But Sayid’s priority was his people, not the posturing of old men who thought others’ lives expendable.
Reaching the Emir’s private suite, he entered, a sigh of relief escaping as the tall door closed behind him. Alone, finally.
Sayid strode through, past the study and the media room, through the vast sitting room and lavish private dining parlour, to the bedroom. His eyes went immediately to the vast, beckoning bed. Its cover, embroidered in the royal colours of blue and silver, was pulled back invitingly. The overhead light was off, leaving only the gentle glow of a few decorative pierced lamps.
He rocked to a halt, tempted to forget about the state of his clothes and just topple onto the mattress as he was. He’d be asleep within seconds.
Instead he crossed the spacious room towards the bathroom. He’d shower first.
Sayid pulled off his clothes as he walked, his tension easing as the hand-stitched layers came off. The fine cotton of his shirt masked a jaw-cracking yawn as he tugged it up, over his head, rolling his shoulders in appreciation as he felt cool night air brush his flesh.
He was about to toe off one boot when something made him pause. He stilled, his weight on one foot, his senses prickling at the certainty something was out of place.
A lifetime’s training as a warrior, always aware, put him on alert.
Something was wrong. He was certain in less time than it took to form the thought.
It would serve him right if he’d dismissed his guard only to find himself under threat in his own chambers. The youngest and shortest-lived Emir of Halarq in all its history. That would be a fine epitaph!
Keeping his movements easy, Sayid wrapped the cotton of his discarded shirt around his left hand and forearm. The cloth wouldn’t stop a bullet but might deflect a knife in a pinch. He didn’t spare a glance for the long silvered scar running up that arm from his wrist to well past his elbow. It proved a well-honed knife could easily cut through several layers of clothing.
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