by Dani Collins
But his ever-present aversion to dredging up his mother’s situation rose in him. He never discussed her with anyone, ashamed to admit what he was. He carried a lot of guilt, too. His very existence had contributed to her agony. He had burdened her and ultimately let her down. He hadn’t seen her suicide coming, but should have. He hadn’t had many resources at the time, but he should have done something. In his heart, he was convinced he could have stopped her had he been there.
Pia pensively refreshed her lipstick, casting him a look with her reflection.
“Is this the sort of marriage we’ll have? One where we keep secrets? Because I was prepared to start mine to Sebastián by telling him I was pregnant with another man’s child. The least you could tell me is how I come to be refusing him.” She began pulling the pins from her hair.
“Never say that name to me again,” he suggested pleasantly, moving to stand behind her in the mirror.
He picked out a few pins himself, concentrating on releasing the twist without causing her any discomfort.
She held very still, eyes downcast, her exposed nape begging for the press of his lips. He combed his fingers through the mass, watched the play of light through the silken strands, enjoying the smooth caress between his fingers.
“I don’t know what sort of marriage we’ll have,” he admitted. “Marrying and starting a family has not been on my radar. I spent most of my life rootless, my own security tenuous. Until a few years ago, I was in no position to support anyone but myself. When I finally began making money, it was buckets of it. I had to pivot to defend against a different kind of predator, not the kind who eat the weak, but the kind who challenge the strong.”
He let his hands rest on her shoulders and lightly dug his thumbs into the tendons at the base of her neck. Like magic, the stiff, aloof expression on her face melted. She closed her eyes and her expression grew so sensually blissful, he nearly picked her up and carried her to his bed.
But he had to make her understand.
“Mistrust is ingrained in me. I don’t know yet if you’re friend or foe, Pia. I certainly have no illusions that your parents will be on my side.”
Her eyes opened, the shadows in them difficult to interpret.
“I only know that you’re carrying my child. That our child will need you. That makes you as much my responsibility as the baby is.”
“So you don’t trust me, but I’m supposed to trust you?” she asked huskily. “Even if you keep secrets?”
He smiled. “Your intelligence is one of your most attractive qualities. Do you know that?”
“Almost as high a compliment as having a great personality.” She brushed his hands off her shoulders and moved away.
“I meant it as a compliment. Why compliment your looks when your beauty is obvious.” Even when she was walking away. Her skirt was a hip-hugging knit that caressed her backside and thighs every time she moved. He’d been admiring it all afternoon.
She stood in the middle of the room, hand on her middle, expression tight, face pale. “We should go.”
“Nausea?” Now he wanted to tuck her into his bed and cuddle her.
“It comes and goes. I have biscuits in the car that help.”
“When do you see the doctor next? Any concerns?”
“None. Everything is normal. I have an appointment in the new year.”
“I’ll come.” He was already looking forward to it.
“If you like.” The chill was back. So annoying, but he soon learned she came by it honestly.
* * *
Marble floors gleamed beneath a chandelier of icicle-like crystals as they entered the Montero villa. A wide staircase led to a gallery where stark, contemporary art decorated the walls.
The butler directed them into a showpiece of a parlor, the sort of room Angelo had glimpsed as a child, but had been held back from entering by his mother’s tense hand on his arm, her voice sharp with caution. It was not a place he had been welcome and, judging by the expressions on the Duque and Duquessa’s faces, he was no more welcome today.
“Navarro,” her mother repeated, glancing sharply between them.
“Pia’s plus one at the ball,” Angelo lied smoothly so Pia wouldn’t have to. “I trust my generous donation made up for concealing our relationship.”
“Relationship.” La Reina’s tone dropped to subarctic levels. “How did you meet? The university? I don’t believe I’m familiar with your family.”
“No?” Angelo countered, thinking La Reina had probably been marrying Javier about the time his grandmother had become his father’s second wife. But he couldn’t think about the dirty secrets from his past. Not now when he needed to be on the top of his game.
“Nemesis Tech,” Javier identified as he shook Angelo’s hand with a solid grip. “I’ve read of your developments with integrated photonics. The first light-based microchip to be commercially viable.”
“The reason smartphones can do so many things at once without bursting into flames,” Pia translated for her mother.
“My team gets all the credit,” Angelo said smoothly. “I only backed the winning horse.” And flogged it to any manufacturer with money, from smart toasters to NASA.
“Technology,” her mother said with a tolerant smile as they all sat. “Perhaps an introduction to Cesar would be prudent.” La Reina sent that to Pia in a not so subtle query as to why her daughter had brought a stranger into their home on short notice. One who had not defined his use of the word relationship.
“Introductions to the rest of the family will happen in due course.” Pia was utterly composed, hands folded in her lap, voice lacking inflection, face unreadable. Much as she’d been when she had kicked him in the gonads with her news. “I’m pregnant. Angelo is the father. We’ll marry as quickly as possible.”
The ensuing silence was so profound that the click of the door broke it like a gunshot. The butler came up against the charged air as though he had hit a noxious cloud. He persevered through it to bring Pia’s requested cranberry mocktini and Angelo’s glass of Javier’s private label brandy.
“Dinner as scheduled, señora?” the butler murmured as he set the drinks.
“Push it back until I inform you.” La Reina waited until the door had been closed again. Her color hadn’t risen. Her voice hadn’t changed. She only prompted, “Javier?”
“The Estrada merger was an ideal fit for the fuel cell innovations Cesar is pursuing. Microprocessing is a different direction entirely.”
Sebastián again? Angelo wondered if they realized he could buy that fool’s enterprise a dozen times over and his next generation chip wasn’t even on the market yet.
“Rico enjoys the challenge of a pivot.” Pia spoke as though they were discussing the purchase of a car or some other innocuous detail. “Cesar will find ways to capitalize. Both of them have dealt with the unexpected before.”
“They have,” her mother agreed.
Another profound silence. Pia stacked her white hands. Her mother sipped her frosted glass of white wine.
“I understand the social ramifications,” Pia said, spine never faltering from its finishing school posture. “We’ll marry as quietly as possible. Remove to a honeymoon somewhere unobtrusive and return after the holiday party season dies down.”
“I never agreed to that,” Angelo cut in.
“To marriage? Then we put Sebastián off for a year,” La Reina said to Pia, apparently enjoying a quick pivot herself. “It’s only fair to his future heir that there be clear distinction. You’ll go away, as you do, and we’ll work out a suitable arrangement with...” She gave Angelo a disdainful nod.
His scalp nearly came off. “I didn’t agree to some furtive, backroom ceremony that implies we have something to be ashamed of. We’ll marry with a proper wedding where everyone we know is invited.”
These people really
knew how to allow a silence to do their talking. He looked from Pia’s downcast lashes, to La Reina’s pointedly raised brows, to Javier’s disinterested sip of his brandy.
“Are you embarrassed that your daughter is pregnant by me?” Angelo asked Javier. It was a double-barreled question, one the older man neatly brushed aside.
“The children and the family’s social standing are La Reina’s bailiwick.”
“Is that a yes or a no?” Angelo asked with more antagonism.
“Angelo.” Pia’s clammy hand touched his.
“When one is drawing the wrong sort of attention, one ought to mitigate the damage,” La Reina said in a chilly voice. “Take control of the conversation and lower the tone, for instance.”
He barked out a humorless laugh.
“Am I speaking too plainly? My child is not something indecent to be swept under the rug.” A bastard. A stain. The product of a crime. No one was saying it, but he heard the labels from his past and felt each one like the whip of a belt.
“Keeping a low profile will benefit all of us, including the baby,” Pia said.
“If you act like we’ve done something wrong, people are going to believe we have. No.” He rose, too angry to sit here like one of these overcivilized relics clutching their pearls. “Speed up the timetable if you’d rather not be showing in our photos,” he told Pia. “The sooner the better works for me, but we are giving this wedding every bit as much fanfare as you would with one of those interchangeable grooms on your mother’s list. We’ll announce our engagement with a press release tomorrow.”
“Have you thought this through, Pia?” her mother asked as if he hadn’t spoken. “Faustina’s parents are backing your father’s challenger because of Rico’s situation with Poppy. This reinforces accusations that Monteros lack moral fortitude.”
“Maybe they do,” Angelo interjected. “Given you don’t want to recognize your own grandchild.”
“I didn’t say we wouldn’t recognize the child. Of course the child will be a Monetero.” La Reina sent a small frown of affront toward her daughter. “Pia.”
The word was a signal of some kind. Pia stood.
“Angelo and I will iron out the details in private, but I wanted you to be informed. We won’t stay for dinner. Thank you for seeing us.”
Angelo was no stranger to being shunned and insulted and run off like a mangy cur. He didn’t intend to hang around for more of the same, but he was astounded that Pia allowed herself to be dismissed like some panhandler daring to come to the door.
“Will you take me home or shall I ask Mother’s driver?” Pia asked him, her face a blank mask.
Angelo shot one last glower at her parents. “I’ll take you home.”
CHAPTER SIX
“IT’S BEEN A long day. I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” Pia said when Angelo ignored her direction to turn into her street.
“We’re not going to the hotel.” He still sounded furious.
She bit back a whimper of helplessness, one limp, cold hand cradled in the other. It really had been a long day. She wasn’t up to further confrontations. Nevertheless, she tried to explain. “That wasn’t shame they were expressing.”
“The hell it wasn’t.”
“It was damage control.”
“Yes, your father’s election prospects. Quelle surprise.”
“It’s not about votes. Not the way you think. My father is actually a good politician. He’s extremely well-read, believes in science and facts and weighs the costs and benefits very objectively. He’s never swayed by special interests or emotional pleas and certainly not by suitcases full of cash, only by sound reasoning. It’s in the country’s best interest that he retains his seat. That becomes more challenging when his children are having babies out of wedlock every other year.”
“You’re ashamed,” he accused.
“I’m embarrassed that I showed a lack of self-discipline.” And that she had embraced longing and hope and other nonsensical ideals that weren’t based in logic. Soon she would advertise that bad judgment on the big screen that her belly would become. “I failed to live up to expectations. No one enjoys failing.”
“You failed to stand up for our child.”
His words, his tone, caused a spasming clench across her chest. Guilt. Anguish. Resignation. It was so intense, she had to take a moment to breathe through it.
How did she explain there was no point in growing indignant with them? Demanding feelings when there were none?
He turned into a private airfield. A stab of panic struck.
“Where are you going?” Was he so angry that he was leaving her? She couldn’t blame him, but the profound sense of abandonment that gripped her as she faced him climbing onto a jet and disappearing was nearly more than she could bear.
“We are going to my home.”
She opened her mouth, but he was jamming the car into Park and flinging himself from it, handing her car fob to someone with instructions to drive it to her home.
Stunned, she didn’t move until Angelo came around to open her door.
“I don’t have any luggage.” That wasn’t entirely true. She kept a clean pair of jeans and a warm pullover in the back seat for weather changes in the field.
“We’ll manage.” He jerked his head at the waiting jet.
“Angelo.” She sought to reason with him, but he cut her off.
“What the hell do you have to stay here for? They didn’t congratulate you on our baby or your doctorate or your forthcoming marriage. They don’t care about you so why would you want to do anything they tell you to do?”
Tears slammed into her eyes. She fought them back, fought back the clawing sensation in her throat and the sick nausea that roiled in her belly.
The sad fact was, these weren’t tears because her parents overlooked her accomplishments or disapproved of her choice in a husband. This was a deeper anguish that aligned directly with the rejection he was feeling on behalf of their child.
She knew that injured anger so well. It hurt her that he was experiencing it. Hurt her that their baby might one day see it and feel it.
She looked at the jet, thought about how many times she had done exactly this—jumped on an airplane yet never quite managed to outrun this ache. Or had anyone chase her and tell her she was missed.
For once, however, she wouldn’t be alone in her pain.
She cleared her throat and asked that her laptop and other effects be transferred aboard. She waited until they were in the air, after they’d been served a light bisque with puff pastry and Angelo seemed marginally less incensed, to try to explain.
“My parents are not emotional people. They will never be happy about this baby because they aren’t capable of it. If you expect an effusive expression of joy from them in response to anything, you will be sorely disappointed.” She had had to learn that lesson over and over. It still hurt, but it remained true. “On the other hand, they aren’t specifically unhappy, either. What you witnessed was resistance to a course correction.”
“Something I’ve witnessed twice today,” he said darkly.
She fought letting him see how stricken she was to be likened to her mother, which only made her more like La Reina, she supposed.
“One doesn’t achieve a goal by giving in the minute an obstacle is encountered,” Pia said, her voice empty of the defensiveness squeezing her in a vise. “I had no idea how you would react to this. Of course I tried to preserve the life I had planned for myself. That’s very natural and human.”
His snort disparaged the bunch of them as any such thing.
“How will your family react?” she asked stiffly.
He flinched and turned his profile away. “I don’t have any.”
Given what he had told her of his father and his childhood, she had wondered. This was obviously a raw topic for h
im so she didn’t go digging around, only ate the last morsel of lobster in her bowl.
“Mine may not be the most demonstrative family, but we are loyal. What you saw as sweeping under a rug, my mother saw as a genuine effort to shield the entire family from adverse consequences. I would prefer to marry in private,” she added.
“I stand by my response. Ducking attention implies we have something to hide.” He sounded immovable.
She realized her phone was blowing up. “Did we just come into range or something?”
“The pilot has turned on the Wi-Fi, yes.”
She looked at the numerous texts and missed calls from her brothers, the notifications from the family lawyer, her mother’s assistant, the family’s PR manager and—Really, Mother?—Sebastián.
“Who is it?” Angelo asked with a frown.
“Everyone.” She quit scrolling and considered turning it off, but Poppy rang through with a face call. Pia made the split-second decision to accept so she could test the temperature with her brothers.
“Why didn’t you tell me when you were here? I’m pregnant, too,” Poppy said.
“What?” Pia’s brief soar of excitement fell away. “Are you crying?”
“Yes.” Poppy laughed and wiped her eyes. “I had to ask Rico to put Lily to bed. She doesn’t understand that you can cry from being happy and hormonal, but I totally broke down when he told me. I’m so happy. And I don’t want to steal her thunder, but I would bet any money Sorcha is pregnant, too. I haven’t seen her take so much as a nip of alcohol in weeks. This is so perfect, Pia.”
It really wasn’t, but Pia was pleased by Poppy’s reaction. She congratulated her on her own pregnancy, then had to ask, “Is Rico upset with me?”
“Of course not. He’s worried. But thrilled,” Poppy hurried to clarify. “He’s been on the phone to Cesar a few times. They want to talk to you. And Angelo.” Poppy gave her a look that accused her of holding back.