“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Cassara. Not stalking you.”
“Have we reverted, then, to Mr. Cassara? Fascinating. I had my mouth between your legs, cara. Surely that buys a man some measure of intimacy.”
“I didn’t want to presume.”
She sounded prim, but there was heat on her cheeks. And the oddest notion occurred to him, then. Could it be that his favorite ice queen was less cool and unbothered than she looked? How...delightful.
He didn’t really want to think too hard about how delightful he found it. Because that brought him right back to snide commentary from a dead man.
“I told you what name to use,” he said quietly now, his gaze on hers while the night they’d shared played in his head. “You may sob it again, if you wish. If that makes you more comfortable.”
“I need a moment of your time, that’s all,” she said. Almost formally. But then there was that heat on her cheeks again, brighter than before, and he wondered what images she played in her head. “Not your name.”
Cristiano lifted his hands and spread them wide, in keeping with a casualness he in no way felt. “I have nothing but time, naturally. I am a man of leisure, capable at any moment of playing tourist in my own city.”
She blinked at that, her cheeks reddened further, and he got the distinct impression that she’d expected him to put up a fight. That she was braced for it.
“You’re not the only one interested in another taste, Julienne,” he said, feeling magnanimous. Because she was here, finally. Because it wasn’t yet another ghost to haunt him and distract him, whether he believed in ghosts or not. It was her, this time. It was finally her. “I tried to find you in Manhattan, but you’d moved.”
She coughed, as if to cover a sound of shock. “You came to Manhattan?”
He arched a brow. “I often have business in Manhattan. As you are well aware.”
But there was a different, softer light in her gaze. “Yes, right. You didn’t make a special trip. I understand.” She smiled at him and he didn’t know how he kept his hands off her. “It was my sister’s turn, you see.”
“Her turn?”
A fresh flush made her cheeks glow. “I can’t imagine why you’d be interested in this story.”
“Her turn to do what?” Cristiano inquired silkily. “I trust it will not involve any Monte Carlo reenactments.”
“God. No.” She seemed to hear her own vehemence then, and looked away, that belligerent chin of hers firming. “Ever since you rescued us that night, we followed my path through the Cassara Corporation because it was the fastest way to meet our goals. To repay you and reclaim our lives. But once I resigned, it was time to follow Fleurette’s path. It’s only fair.”
“Why must you choose? Why can’t you both do as you like instead of hiding away so theatrically?”
It was only after he asked the question, out here as the moody spring night drew close, that Cristiano thought to question why on earth it was he was standing about having random conversations with this woman. When he’d spent six months dreaming of all the other things he could do with her. With her mouth. With every square inch of her delectable body. With that heat he could feel between them even now. Even though they weren’t touching.
“That was the deal we made ten years ago,” Julienne said, stoutly. “And I didn’t imagine anyone would be looking for me after my resignation or I would have left my forwarding details, with no theater whatsoever. We’re in Seattle now.”
“Seattle.” He pronounced the name of the American city as if it might bite. “That is off to the west, is it not?”
“The Pacific Northwest, actually.”
“You will forgive me if I do not spend a great amount of time tramping about the primeval forests of the American northwest, Pacific or otherwise,” Cristiano said, his voice going edgy despite his best efforts. “As I traffic neither in legacy technology nor flannel shirts.”
“I don’t recall asking you for a review of Seattle’s charms,” Julienne said, with a smile he realized was fixed. “I’m merely telling you that we moved. And time passed.”
“That is what time does.” His jaw was tight. And impatience beat in him, hard and hot. “Have you turned up in the piazza to tell me bedtime stories, cara? If I’m a good boy, will you provide me with warm milk and a pat on the head? You will understand if I decline the kind offer, I hope.”
He watched her straighten her shoulders. Then that chin of hers tipped up. “My sister wants me to have nothing to do with you or Cassara chocolates ever again. She claims she is the practical one, you understand, but it’s actually because she cannot bear to think about where we came from. If she could, I think she would wipe Monaco from the map entirely. To say nothing of that hill town where we were born.”
“I find the emotional travails of your sister at least as interesting as the story of your domestic arrangements. In case you wondered.”
“She argued strenuously against my coming here.”
“Had you reached out to me, I would have offered a counterargument.” Because she kept talking, and all he could concentrate on was her mouth.
“Cristiano—” she began.
“First, the counterargument, if you please.”
And he indulged himself, because he no longer had the strength to hold himself back. Or the will. Or the slightest inclination.
Cristiano reached over, taking his time as he slid his palm along her jawline to cup her cheek. Because he wanted to feel her silky softness. And her heat.
Her breath fanned out, half a gasp and half something else. It was like music to him.
And her eyes were sweet like candy, if darker tonight. Dark enough to remind him of the precise shade they’d been when he’d been deep inside of her. He felt himself harden, until his need was more like an ache.
He felt those iron chains he kept locked tight around him, to keep all his compartments in a tidy order, snap open—but not as if she’d broken them.
It was as if she was the key.
And Cristiano couldn’t allow himself to think about that.
Instead, he leaned forward and nipped at that lower lip of hers, full and tempting.
And maybe she said his name. He couldn’t tell because his blood was roaring in his ears, and the faintest taste of her was enough to make his whole body clench tight.
He bent again, and covered her mouth with his.
And on some level he expected it to be a disappointment. Because no kiss could possibly live up to his memories. He had exaggerated her taste. Her fit. He expected to find that he’d sold himself a fantasy no reality could ever match.
But instead, Julienne took the top of his head off.
He forgot where they were. He forgot the crowd, the weather. The ancient cathedral that blocked out the better part of the sky.
All of that was so much dust in the wind to him, because Julienne was kissing him again, and it was better than anything Cristiano could possibly have remembered.
It was better.
It was her.
He swept her into his arms like the romantic he had never been, tilting her back so he could take more, taste more, lose himself more—
And it was only when he heard the high-pitched tittering sound of a set of teenage girls nearby that reality reasserted itself.
“Dio santo!” he growled furiously, there against her mouth. “What have you done to me, woman?”
But Julienne pulled back, stepping out of his embrace. And the expression he saw on her face made no sense at all, because she looked...stricken. More, she’d gone pale, leaving only two bright splotches on those cheekbones of hers, like flags.
“I’m afraid my sister was right.” Her voice was husky. Distressed. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Indeed not,” he agreed. “You should have found me somewhere private
, so I could greet you properly. And without risk of arrest.”
And he watched her change again, a sweep of pink taking over her face as if she’d leaped from an ice bath into a furnace. She even laughed a little, fanning at her face while she did.
“You’re overheating, Julienne,” he said shortly. “It is obviously that ridiculous coat.”
Cristiano reached over, grasped the zipper that she’d tugged up to just beneath her chin, and pulled it loose.
And later, he would remember that she’d made a noise. That her arms came up as if to ward him off.
Here, now, he watched her mouth drop open. He watched her eyes darken, just the way he liked them. And then his gaze dropped down to trace the curves of that body he’d learned in such exquisite detail that their single night together was branded forever into his mind.
His first thought was that she must have augmented her breasts, however little that made sense with what he knew of her, because they were bigger. Rounder and plumper, which made his mouth water. His palms itch.
And his gaze moved lower still, to take her all in—
But he stopped.
Because his mind simply refused to make sense of what he saw.
Worse, what it meant.
The bells of the city began to ring out the hour. Eight strikes, and each one like a poisoned spear thrust deep into his chest.
Her hands crept up and covered her belly, but it was too late. And her hands were too small.
Because Julienne Boucher had a giant belly. It was big, round and unmistakably pregnant.
Six months, something in him intoned. Six. Months.
Cristiano could not comprehend it.
He could not do more than stare.
“I didn’t know for a long time,” Julienne told him, hurriedly, though he wasn’t sure he could make sense of her words. Or anything outside of that lurching in him. That great, deep howl. “I wasn’t ill, you see. I was fairly fatigued, that’s all. But a bit of fatigue seemed like a reasonable response to working as hard as I’ve done for the past ten years. Or to what happened in Monte Carlo, even. And then there was the move out west and all the details of setting up a new life. All of those things are fatiguing, are they not?”
She was talking too fast. And he kept staring at that belly of hers, that enormous belly.
Where she carried a child.
Where she carried his—
But he couldn’t go there. His entire body and mind rejected it.
Julienne was still talking, her words tripping over each other. “When my clothes stopped fitting, I assumed it was because I was finally relaxing. Enjoying my food and no longer desperate to keep up appearances, always pretending I had nothing in common with that trashy little wannabe tramp who found you in Monte Carlo all those years ago. I congratulated myself on letting go, at last.”
Was that what she expected? His congratulations?
Cristiano’s throat worked, but he could not seem to produce a sound.
“So I didn’t understand until quite late,” she told him, her gaze wide and solemn. “A month ago, maybe six weeks, I happened to get out of the bath and look at myself in a mirror sideways. And then I began to count back.”
“Six months,” Cristiano said, as if from a great distance, and across the great desert of that howling thing in him.
“Six months,” Julienne agreed. She cleared her throat. “And I want to make something perfectly clear, Cristiano. This was not my intention. This was never my intention. I wanted the bookends we spoke of that night, nothing more. You owe me nothing.”
All he could do was stare at her. Not a ghost tonight. Not a common haunt, a memory he couldn’t shake.
But his own, personal demon, come to destroy him.
“I’m here because I thought it was the right thing to do. To tell you, I mean, but you should feel no sense of obligation. I truly mean that. Fleurette doesn’t think I need to tell you at all, but I know you are an honorable man. You have always been an honorable man. And I felt certain that you would wish to know, even if you don’t—”
The howling thing inside him stopped. But behind it was something far blacker. His rage.
He lifted his gaze to meet hers, his eyes like fire, and Julienne stopped talking.
Abruptly.
As if he’d slapped her.
Cristiano had never slapped a woman in his life, but in that moment, the chaos in him had control. And he could not have said what he might do next. He was a man allergic to uncertainty, and yet he had no idea.
“Cristiano,” she began, carefully.
“You have said enough, I think.”
He hardly recognized his own voice. It was stark. Harsh. As gray and cold as the city all around them. And inside him, the guilt and the shame that had always lurked there, waiting, rose up like the tide. Sweeping him under at last, then dragging him out to sea.
And that was the trouble with shame. With guilt. It only felt like drowning when the harder truth was he lived on. Despite everything, he lived on.
“Cristiano. Please.” Julienne’s eyes took on a particular sheen that some part of him recognized as tears. An emotion he did not wish to name.
He was far past that.
Out in that cold sea, going under, far away from any land.
“I will never forgive you for this,” he told her, whole winters on his face. In his soul. And that terrible sea that choked him in his voice. “Mark my words, Julienne. I will never forgive you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE WAS SOMETHING raw and frozen in his gaze, and Julienne’s chest hurt as if she’d breathed in too deep on a frigid morning, but Cristiano did not say anything further. Not to her.
He made two terse phone calls in a clipped, dark tone, then ushered her back across the piazza, his long, athletic stride giving her no quarter.
But it didn’t occur to her not to go with him.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, if she was honest with herself. Him to cry out in joy? Gather her into an embrace and dance around the piazza, like one of those strange American commercials for prescription medication?
“He will hate you,” Fleurette had said, a judge handing down a verdict. “He will hate you, he will hate the baby, and I cannot see why it’s the moral thing to do to subject either one of you to him. You repaid him already, Julienne. You do not owe him anything else. Ever.”
She had not wanted to believe her sister.
More than that, she could admit—with a creeping sense of shame that bloomed all the brighter as he marched her to a waiting car, then bundled her into the back—she had wanted...
This, she supposed. Whatever this looked like.
Maybe all she’d wanted was to see him again. And this particular excuse to see him again was unassailable, whether he forgave her or not. She wasn’t seeking his forgiveness. She was having his child.
And she would have to live with the part of her that exulted in that, and not because there was a life inside her that she was already desperately, hopelessly in love with. Or not only that. There was also the part of her that took far too much pleasure in the notion that their lives would forevermore be tangled together now, hers and Cristiano’s, no matter what reaction he had to her pregnancy.
Julienne was certain that a better person would not feel such things. A good mother would be focused on the baby and not on her own treacherous heart. But as hard as she tried to expunge herself of such self-interested, foolish emotion, it remained.
Taunting her.
Making her wonder if he knew—and if that was why he couldn’t forgive her. God knew she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself, either.
Julienne did not ask where they were headed. He did not offer the information. They sat in the backseat of the car, separated by a few tense inches and a vast, unconquerable gulf
of the fury that came off him in thick waves.
But she recognized the building they arrived at, sometime later. It was the house where she and Fleurette had lived in those first years after Monte Carlo, only leaving when Julienne had gotten her first real job at in the Cassara Corporation’s UK office.
She shot him a sharp look as he ushered her out of the car and into the old house, but his face was closed down tight. Unreadable, save for that black, cold thing.
And Julienne understood that this was not a trip down memory lane when she saw the men waiting for them in the kitchen.
“I am a doctor,” the oldest of the men said, smiling slightly while his white hair gleamed. “I believe I once treated you for bronchitis.”
“Of course,” Julienne murmured politely, feeling faintly ridiculous. She had no memory of having bronchitis or meeting any doctors, but then, that first six months or so after Cristiano had rescued them from Monte Carlo remained a blessed blur, even now.
The old man nodded. “If you’ll come with me...?”
And it was not until the examination was done—until the necessary samples were taken and Julienne was dressed and sitting in the old living room that she had once believed was the very pinnacle of style and luxury—that she accepted the fact that Cristiano had hurt her feelings.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she muttered to herself, glaring down at her hands as she wound them together over the very crest of her bump. “He cannot take your word for it. How many women must turn up with paternity claims? He would be a fool if he did not verify this personally.”
And if she knew anything about Cristiano Cassara, it was that he was never a fool.
That didn’t make her feelings hurt any less, but it felt better to think about things practically. No matter how impractical she might feel on the inside.
Her mobile buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out, not surprised to see that she’d missed a host of messages from Fleurette.
Did you tell him?
Was it terrible?
Are you okay?
The Italian's Pregnant Cinderella Page 5