by Maisey Yates
“Everything looks good,” the doctor said, pulling the Doppler off Esther’s stomach and wiping her skin free of gel. “Of course, we will want to monitor you closely as twins are considered a more high-risk pregnancy. You’re young. And all of your vitals look good. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a very successful pregnancy.”
Esther was vaguely aware of nodding, while Renzo simply stood there. Like a statue straight from a Roman temple.
Seeing that neither of them had anything to say, the doctor nodded. “I’ll leave you two to discuss.”
As soon as the doctor left, Esther sagged back onto the table, flattening herself entirely, going utterly limp. “I can’t believe it.”
“You can’t believe it? You’re the one who intends to leave. Why would it concern you?”
“I’m the one who has to carry a litter,” she shot back.
“Twins are hardly a litter.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one gestating them.”
He looked stunned. Pale beneath his burnished skin. “Indeed not.” He turned away from her. “Get dressed. We have reservations.”
“I know I do. I have several reservations!”
“For dinner.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting that we just go out to dinner as though nothing’s happened?”
“I am suggesting exactly that,” he said through gritted teeth. “Get dressed. We are leaving to go to dinner.”
She growled and got off the table, moving back over to her clothes on unsteady legs. She picked up the lacy underwear that had been provided by Renzo’s stylist and slipped them up her legs, not even bothering to enjoy the lush feel of the fabric as she had been doing every other time before.
There was no pausing for lushness when you’d just found out you were carrying not one, but two babies.
She made quick work of the rest of her clothes. At least, as quick work as she could possibly make of them with her trembling fingers. “I’m ready,” she snapped.
“Very good. Now, let us cease with the dramatics and go to dinner.”
He all but hauled her out of the office, taking her to his sports car, where he yanked open the passenger-side door and held it for her.
She looked up at him, at his inscrutable face that was very much like a cloudy sky. She could tell a storm was gathering there, but she couldn’t quite make out why. Then, she jerked her focus away from him and got into the car, clasping her hands tightly in her lap and staring straight ahead.
He closed the door, then got in on his side, bringing the engine to life with an angry roar and tearing out of the parking lot like the hounds of hell were on his heels.
“You dare call me dramatic?” she asked. “If this isn’t dramatic, I don’t know what is.”
“I only just found out that I’m having two children, not one. If any of us is entitled to a bit of drama...”
“You seem to discount my role in this,” she fired back. “At every turn, in fact, you treat me as nothing more than a vessel. Not understanding at all that there is a bit of work that goes into this. Some labor, if you will.”
“Modern medicine makes it all quite simple.”
“That is...well and truly spoken only like a man. What about what this is going to do to my body? It’s going to leave me with stretch marks and then some.” She didn’t actually care about that, but she felt like poking him. Goading him. She wanted to make him feel something. Because for whatever reason this revelation had rocked her entire world, made her feel as though she herself had been tilted on her very axis. She didn’t think he had a right to be more upset than she was. And maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe it was hormones. But she didn’t particularly care.
“I will get you whatever surgery you want in order to return your body to its former glory. If you’re concerned about what lovers will be able to get afterward, don’t be.”
That statement was almost laughable.
“I am not concerned about lovers,” she said. “My life is not dependent on what other people think. Been there, done that, got rid of the overly starched ankle-length dresses. But what about what I think?”
“You are impossible. And a contradiction.”
He drove on with a bit too much fervor through the narrow streets, practically careening around every corner, forcing her to grip the door handle as they made their way through town.
They stopped in front of a small café, and he got out, handing the keys to a valet in front of the door. It took her a moment to realize that he was not coming around to open the door for her. She huffed, doing it herself and getting out, gathering the fabric of her skirt and getting herself in order once she was fully straightened.
“That was not very gentlemanly,” she said, rounding the front of the car and taking as big a step as her skirt would allow.
“I am very sorry. It has been said that I am perhaps not very gentlemanly. In fact, I believe it was said recently by you.”
“Perhaps you should listen to the feedback.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist, the heat from his hand shocking. His fingertips rested just beneath the curve of her breast, making her heart beat faster, stronger.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, his voice husky. “Please say you’ll forgive me. At least in time for the paparazzi to catch up with us. I would not want pictures of our dinner to go into the paper with you looking stormy.”
“Oh, perish the thought. We cannot have anything damaging your precious reputation.”
“Our association is entirely for my reputation. You will not ruin this. If you do, I promise I will make you pay. I will take money out of our agreement so quickly it will make your head spin. You do not want to play games with me, Esther.”
He whispered those words in her ear, and for all the world he would look like a lover telling secrets. They would never guess that it was a man on the brink issuing threats.
It galled her that they worked.
He walked them inside, without being stopped by anyone, and went to a table that he had undoubtedly sat at many times before. He did pull her chair out for her, making a gentlemanly show there as he had failed to do at the car.
“Sparkling water,” he said to the waiter when he came by.
“What if I wanted something else?” she asked, just to continue prodding at him.
“Your options are limited, as you cannot drink alcohol.”
“Still. Maybe I wanted juice.”
“Did you want juice?” he asked, his tone inflexible.
“No,” she said, feeling defeated by that.
“Then behave yourself.”
He took control like that with the rest of the dinner, proceeding to order her food—because he knew what the best dishes were at the restaurant—and not listening to any of her protestations.
She didn’t know why she should find that particularly surprising. He had done that from the beginning. She had tried to come to him, had tried to do things on her own terms, but he had taken the reins at almost every turn.
Suddenly, sitting there in this restaurant that was so far outside her experience—would have been outside her scope for imagination only a few weeks earlier—she had the sensation that she was being pulled down beneath the surface. That she was out in the middle of the sea, unable to grab hold of anything that might anchor her.
She was afraid she might drown.
She took a deep breath, tried to disguise the fact that it was just short of a gasp.
Finally, their dessert plates were cleared, and Esther felt like she might be able to approach breathing normally again. Soon, they would be back at the villa. And while she still found his palatial home overwhelming, it was at least a familiar sort of overwhelming. Or rather, it had become so over the past few days.
Then, she looked up at him, and that brief moment of sanity melted into nothing. There was a strange look in his eye, one of purpose and determination. And if there was one thing she knew about Renzo it was t
hat he was immovable at the best of times. Infused with an extra sense of purpose and he would be all-consuming.
She didn’t want to be consumed by him. Not in any capacity. Looking into his dark eyes now, an answering twist low in her stomach, she wasn’t certain she could avoid it.
He reached into the interior pocket of his jacket then, his dark eyes never wavering from hers, and then he got out of his chair, kneeling in front of her. She couldn’t breathe. If she had had the sensation of drowning before, it had become something even more profound now. Like being swept up in a tide that she couldn’t swim against. The effect those eyes always had on her.
The effect he seemed to have on her.
She was supposed to be stronger than this. Smarter than this. Immune to the charms of men. Especially men like him. Men who sought to control the world around them, from the people who populated their surroundings, to the homes they lived in, all the way down to the elements. She imagined that if a weather report disagreed with Renzo, he would rail at that until it changed its mind.
She knew all about men like that. Knew all about the importance of staying away from them.
Her mother had been normal once. That was something Esther wasn’t supposed to know. But she had found the pictures. Had seen photographs of her mother as a young girl, dressed in the trends of the day, looking very much like any average girl might have.
She had never been able to reconcile those photographs of the past with the woman she had grown up with. Quiet. Dowdy. So firmly under the command of her husband that she never dared to oppose him in any way at all.
It had been a mystery both to her father and her mother that Esther had possessed any bit of rebelliousness at all. But she had. She did. And if there was one thing Esther feared at all in the world, it was losing that. Becoming that drawn, colorless woman who had raised her.
Love had done it to her. Or more truthfully, control carefully disguised as love.
It was so easy to confuse the two, she knew. She knew because she’d done it. Because she’d imagined her father had been overbearing out of a sense of protectiveness.
Those thoughts flashed through her mind like a strobe light. Fast, confusing, blinding, obscuring what was happening in front of her.
She blinked, trying to get a grip on herself. Trying to get a grip on the moment. It wouldn’t benefit her at all to lose it now.
“Esther,” he said, his voice transforming itself into something velvet, softening the command that had been in it only moments before. Brushing itself against her skin, a lush seduction rather than a hard demand.
He was dangerous. Looking at him now, she was reminded of that. She told herself over and over again as he opened the box he had taken out of his coat pocket and held it out to her. As he revealed the diamond ring inside.
He was dangerous. This wasn’t real. This was something else. A window into a life she would never have. This was experience. Experience without consequence. She was pregnant. She was having twins. And she was playing at being rich and fancy with the father of those twins. But they weren’t her babies. Not really. And he wasn’t her fiancé. Wasn’t her man at all.
That was a good thing. A very good thing. She didn’t want anything else. Not from him. Not from anyone. She couldn’t sustain this.
But she had to go along with this. And she had to remember exactly what it was, all the while smiling and doing nothing to disrupt the facade. Which, he had reminded her, was the most important thing. She could understand it. On a surface level, she could understand. But right now, she felt jumbled up. And she hated it.
Still, when he took the ring out of the box and then took her hand in his, sliding the piece of jewelry onto her fourth finger, she felt breathless. Felt like it was something more than a show, which proved all the weakness inside her. All the weakness she had long been afraid was there.
“Will you marry me?” he finished finally, those last words the darkest, the softest of all.
This was a moment she had never even fantasized about. Ever. She had never seen marriage or relationships as anything to aspire to. But this felt... This felt like nothing she had ever known before. And the question Renzo was asking seemed to be completely different from the one her father had undoubtedly asked her mother more than twenty years ago.
Of course it was. Because it was a ruse. But more than that, this whole world might as well exist on another planet entirely.
But that doesn’t make him less dangerous. It doesn’t make him a different creature. He’s still controlling. Still hard.
And he doesn’t love you.
Her heart slammed hard against her rib cage. “Yes,” she said, both to him and to the voice inside her.
She knew Renzo didn’t love her. She didn’t want Renzo to love her. Not like that. Love like that wasn’t freedom. It was oppression.
She was confused. All messed up because of the doctor’s appointment today. Because of the revelations that had resulted. Because of her hormones and because she was—frankly—in over her head.
That was the truth of it. She, Esther Abbott, long-cloistered weirdo who knew very little about the outside world and a very definite virgin, had no business being here with a man like Renzo. She had absolutely no business being pregnant at all, and she really shouldn’t be on the receiving end of a proposal.
It was no great mystery that she felt like a jumble of feelings and pain while her head logically knew exactly what was happening. Her brain wasn’t confused at all. Not at all.
But there was something weighty about the diamond on her finger. Something substantial about her yes that she couldn’t quite quantify, and didn’t especially want to.
It was the confusion inside her, tumbling around like clothes in that rickety old dryer at the hostel, that kept her from preparing herself for what happened next. At least, that was what she told herself later.
Because before she could react, before she could catch her breath, move or prepare herself in any way, Renzo brought his hand up and cupped her cheek, sliding his thumb over her cheekbone. It was like putting a lit match up against a pool of gasoline. It set off a trail of fire from that point of contact down to the center of her body.
And while she was grappling with that, added to everything else, he closed the distance between them and his mouth met hers.
Everything burned to ash then, bright white and cleansing. Every concern, every thought, everything gone from her mind in a flash as his lips moved over hers. That was what surprised her the most. The movement.
She hadn’t imagined there was quite so much activity to being kissed. But there was. The shift of his hand against her face, sliding back to her hair, his lips learning the shape of hers and giving to accommodate that.
Then, his lips, lips she had never imagined could soften, did. And after that they parted, the shocking, wet slide of his tongue at the seam of her mouth undoing her completely. It set off an earthquake in her midsection that battled through her, leaving her devastated, hollowed out, an aching sense of being unfulfilled making her feel scraped raw.
She didn’t know what to do. And so, she did the one thing she had always feared she might do when facing down a man like this. She gave. She allowed him to part her lips, allowed him to take it deeper.
Another tremor shook her, skating down her spine and rattling her frame. She didn’t even fight it. She didn’t even hate it.
When she had left home, when she had decided that she was going to go out into the world and see everything that was there for her to take. When she had decided finally to sort through what her parents had taught her and what was true, when she had decided to find out who she was, not who she had been commanded to be, this had never factored in.
She had never imagined herself in a situation like this. In the back of her mind she had imagined that someday she would want to explore physical desire. But it had been shoved way, way to the back of her mind. It had been a priority. Because so much of her life had been about being b
ound to a group of people. Being underneath the authority of someone else.
So, she had wanted to remain solitary. And at some point, she had imagined she might make a group of friends. When she decided to settle. At some point, she had imagined she might want to find a man for a romance. But it had been so far out ahead of what she had wanted in the immediate.
Freedom. A taste of the world that had always been hidden from her. Strange food and strange air. Strange sun on skin that had always been covered before.
Suddenly, all of that was obscured. Suddenly, all of it paled in comparison to this. Which was hotter than any sun, more powerful than any air she’d ever tasted—from the salted tang of the Mediterranean to the damp grit of London—and brighter than any flavor she’d ever had on her tongue.
It was Renzo. Pure, undiluted. Everything that gaze had promised her from the moment she had first seen him. The way he had immobilized her with just a glance had been only a hint. Like when a sliver of sun was just barely visible behind a dark cloud.
The cloud had just moved. Revealing all of the brilliance behind it. Brilliance that, she had a feeling, would be permanently damaging if she allowed herself to linger in it for too long.
But just a little while longer. Just a moment. One more breath. She could skip one more breath for another taste of Renzo’s mouth.
He pulled back then, dropping one more kiss on her lips before separating from her completely. And then he curled his fingers around hers, pulling her from her chair and up against his chest. “I think,” he said, a roughness in his voice that had been absent only a moment ago, “that it is time for us to go home, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. Because there was nothing else to say. Because anything more intelligent would require three times the brain cells than she currently possessed.
And then he took her hand and led her from the restaurant. The car was waiting against the curb when they got back, and she didn’t even ask how he had made sure they wouldn’t have to wait.
He hadn’t made a phone call. She hadn’t caught any sort of signal between himself and a member of the restaurant staff. It looked like magic. More of the magic that seemed to shimmer from Renzo, that seemed to have a way of obscuring things. At least, as she saw them.
