by Lynne Graham
All the things she was prepared to do, starting here. With him.
More than that, she was certain he could also see the dreams and hopes she had long since jettisoned in her committed attempts to keep her sister and her warm and reasonably fed—if never safe or happy.
“I rather think not,” he had said, a quiet thunder stroke of a comment.
And then Cristiano Cassara had changed her life.
With a lift of one hand.
The déjà vu was intense tonight. Cristiano again sat at the bar, another untouched drink before him. He fiddled with it, turning it this way and that, but he did not lift it to his lips. She now knew the rumors about him—every rumor, in fact. That he never drank, that his father had loved his liquor too well but his wife and child too little, and that these were the rituals Cristiano performed when he was alone. The untouched drink. The sober vigil.
He still had that poet’s mouth, with its hint of sensuality she had never seen him succumb to, not once. Not even in the odd, stolen paparazzi shot of him when he couldn’t have known he was being watched. His face was a terrible kind of beautiful, harsh and brutal, with cheekbones that made a woman dream of saints and martyrs. And those dark, flashing eyes that still burned when he looked at a person directly.
She remembered what his arm had felt like beneath her hand as if her palm was a scar. All that hard, hot power.
And Julienne was not a child any longer. She was not a scared teenager, prepared to sell herself to the highest bidder—or any bidder at all—because she was devoid of options and out of choices.
Still, there was a particular agony to this moment, so long in coming.
She slid her bejeweled evening purse onto the glossy bar, and angled her body toward his.
And knew, without his having glanced her way or indicated he was anything but alone, that he had been aware of her all along. Perhaps even before she’d stepped inside the dark, deliberately close space.
But she was too good at making him into a myth, as Fleurette often complained. Tonight she planned to focus on the man.
Cristiano had succeeded his grandfather to become the CEO and president of the company not long after she’d met him ten years ago. More than that, and more importantly, he was Julienne’s boss. She had started at the company headquarters in Milan ten years ago, as a part-time job she fit in around the private studies Cristiano had arranged for her and Fleurette. First she’d been an intern. And then, once she’d finished her schooling at eighteen, she’d taken the lowest position offered and had worked her way steadily up.
That she was, in effect, Cristiano’s ward had never signified. It was never discussed, and Julienne often wondered if anyone else even knew how generous he was, or how she had personally benefitted from it. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d ever lived with him. He had put them up in one of his houses in Milan, complete with staff to tend to them, and in essence, they’d raised themselves.
We were too old already, Fleurette liked to say.
These days, Julienne lived across the sea in New York City. She’d fought hard to get to her position as the vice president of North American operations for the Cassara Corporation, reporting directly to Cristiano himself. And she’d fought even harder to close the kind of deals that would not only pay Cristiano back for his generosity all those years ago, but give back more than he’d given.
It had taken years.
He looked at her now, that dark gaze of his cool and assessing.
But no less harsh.
She would have felt let down if it had been, she understood.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as politely as if she was looking at him across a table in one of the Cassara Corporation’s many offices.
“You were insistent, Ms. Boucher,” he said, and there was that undercurrent of disapproval in his voice that let her know that he was astonished that she’d dared. And that she’d persisted, despite his secretary’s best efforts.
Julienne smiled, still polite and calm. “You met me here once before.”
And she knew as she said it that she was breaking all their rules. The unspoken boundaries all three of them had maintained for a decade. She and Fleurette never mentioned him or how they’d made it from a sad, half-abandoned French hill town to a lavishly appointed, semidetached townhouse in the center of Milan. He never indicated he knew either one of them. Sometimes Julienne had worried that he’d forgotten what he’d done for them—that it had meant so little to him when it had altered the whole of hers and Fleurette’s lives.
But no, she could see he hadn’t forgotten. More, she could see his astonishment, there in his eyes like a thread of gold in the brown depths. His dark brows rose, and he looked almost...arrested.
“I did.” His study of her made her want to shake. She didn’t, somehow. Not outwardly. “A meeting neither one of us has referenced in a decade. To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected trip down memory lane, Ms. Boucher?”
His voice was crisp. A distinct and deliberate slap, though as stern and controlled as everything else he did.
He meant her to wilt and she wanted to, but then, she had built herself in his image. She was made of sterner stuff because he was, and because she’d always assumed he expected it. She kept her cool smile on her face.
“In that decade, I have kept track of what you must have spent to rescue Fleurette and me. Then care for us.” She named a staggering number and saw that light in his eyes change again, to something far more sharp and assessing that she could feel like a fist in her belly. And lower, like heat. “With the latest deal we closed and the amount I have in a separate fund with your name on it, I believe I have repaid that sum. With interest.”
His eyes were dark brown, like the bittersweet chocolate his family made. And yet that could hardly begin to describe their ferocity, or the intense way they narrowed on her now.
“I do not recall asking for repayment. Or even acknowledgment.”
“Nonetheless.” She took a deep breath. “My resignation letter waits for you in Milan.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon. You are resigning?”
“I am. I have.”
She reached out and did what she’d done ten years ago. She put her hand on his arm, but this time, she meant it.
Oh, how she meant it.
“Cristiano,” she said quietly. Invitingly, she hoped. “Would you like to buy me that drink?”
Copyright © 2020 by Caitlin Crews
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ISBN: 9781488059346
The Innocent’s Forgotten Wedding
Copyright © 2020 by Lynne Graham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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