She indulged him when he wanted to get his hands on her bump, or put his mouth there so he could speak to his son.
But they were not far off from her due date when he realized that it wasn’t that there was a different light in her eyes when she looked at him these days. It was that there was an absence of light.
He didn’t know how he could have missed it.
And what made it worse was that he didn’t figure out what it was that was getting so deeply beneath his skin until Fleurette appeared, in her usual defiant state, a few days before Julienne was due.
“I can’t miss the birth of my nephew,” Fleurette announced when she saw him, and her gaze, Cristiano could not help but notice, was bright and hot and not particularly friendly. “I won’t.”
“Of course not,” he murmured.
And then he’d been called upon to handle a near disaster at one of their processing facilities. He’d spent all day handling the various politics between his plant manager and the local government in that country, and a full contingent of his attorneys.
When he arrived home, it was late. He was surprised to find lights still on, when Julienne had taken to a far earlier bedtime these days.
He nodded at his housekeeper as he entered, accepting the mail and messages she’d prepared for him.
And then he drifted further into the house, following a sound he’d very rarely heard here.
Had never heard here, or any place he’d ever lived in Milan, if he was honest.
Laughter.
He loosened his tie as he followed the surprising burst of it, past the study and the rooms he normally used to the small salon Julienne had claimed as her own in the back of the house. In the month that she had lived with him here, she had slowly substituted some of the furnishings, making it less a random collection of items a designer had chosen, and more hers.
Tonight, as he stood at the threshold, out in the dark hall beyond, the first thing he noticed was the light.
Endless, glorious light, and not only from the lamps she’d lit.
It was all over her face. Julienne sat in a comfortable armchair that she’d told him would be perfect for nursing his son. Before her, Fleurette was telling a story, sitting cross-legged on the floor gesticulating widely while also doing something with Julienne’s feet.
Painting her nails, he realized in the next moment. Or supposedly painting them, when she wasn’t waving her arms about.
And Julienne looked...alive.
Her eyes shone, sweet and bright, all toffee and no darkness. Her face was filled with laughter, and hope and that astonishing quicksilver song he only heard when he was deep inside her and she was calling out his name.
Cristiano felt his heart flip in his chest, as if heralding a cardiac event.
He felt frozen where he stood, staring at this woman. His wife. As if he’d never seen her before.
Perhaps you haven’t, a dark voice inside him suggested. Why would you deserve her?
He didn’t think he made a sound, so caught was he in all her brightness. The glorious shine of it.
Cristiano could have stared at her forever. He felt thirsty. Ravenous. And only that light and joy she generated could make it better. Could make him better.
But that was when she turned, saw him standing there and blinked.
“Cristiano,” she said, her voice changing. And her face changing with it. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
And he watched, feeling as if there was a hatchet buried deep in his chest, as all that light dimmed.
As if looking at him switched it off, that quickly.
Something in him thudded then, unpleasantly.
“I only just arrived,” he heard himself say.
He glanced at her sister, but Fleurette’s face was studiously blank. A condemnation in itself.
Cristiano felt his pulse kick in when he looked back at Julienne, because she was looking at him the exact same way she had since the night of their wedding. Calmly, yes. Coolly, even.
But with no trace whatsoever of all that glorious light.
“I will not disturb you,” he said shortly, and left them there.
He went to his office in the house, but he couldn’t focus on the work he needed to do, no matter how long he sat at his desk. And when he stopped pretending to work and stared at a shot of whiskey instead, daring himself to truly become his father once and for all, there was something in him that longed for the oblivion.
More than usual.
It would be so much easier not to feel anything. He could imagine it so clearly.
But he didn’t take the drink. He didn’t take the easy way out.
And when he climbed the stairs to the master bedroom and found Julienne there, he felt his heart stutter inside him when she looked at him in that same mild, empty way.
“Your sister being here makes you very happy,” he said, studying Julienne’s face for signs of...something. Something to stave off this panicked thing inside him.
“She’s not really my sister. Or not only my sister. She’s also my best friend.” Her gaze rested on him. “And she loves me with every last cell in her body.”
“Because you rescued her,” Cristiano said.
And he saw a flash of something across her face then, but it wasn’t that same light he’d seen earlier. It was temper.
But it was better than nothing.
And even as he thought that, it occurred to him that he felt most connected to Julienne—the person, if he was honest, he felt most connected to on the planet—through passion. Whether that passion was based in anger or desire, it was the only language he knew.
It was the only vocabulary he possessed.
And so perhaps it was not surprising that he felt something far too close to bereft as he watched her fight it back.
“You don’t love someone because they do things for you,” Julienne said, and though her gaze was hard on his, her voice was resolute. “You love them. That’s all. And if a situation arises where you can do something for them, then you do it. But it’s not a transaction.”
And Cristiano understood, in a sickening flash, that transactions were all he knew.
That the people who had raised him had taught him passion, and he had equated it with their brand of drama. Theatrics. Operatic displays, cruelty and fiery conclusions.
He stared at this woman, ripe and round with his child, and for the first time in his life, Cristiano didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. How to reach her, or find a way back to that beautiful light of hers that he was very much afraid he had already extinguished.
And this time he didn’t think he could ignore the uncertainty and make it go away.
“I see how you’re looking at me,” Julienne said, and didn’t quite roll her eyes. Because she was not her sister. Not yet. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask anything of you that you can’t give, Cristiano. I married you knowing exactly who you are.”
And a week ago, a month ago, he might have accepted that. He might have nodded, thought that sounded like a perfectly reasonable bargain and carried on.
Tonight, those words sounded like an indictment.
But everything was different now.
Because she was different, and he had made her that way, and he wasn’t sure that he could stand it.
He moved toward her, getting his hands on her body. Filling his fingers with the thick fall of her pretty hair, and then taking her mouth with his.
Because these were the only words he knew. This was the only passion that made sense to him.
This was the only way that he could make her sing with joy, for him.
And he proved it, to himself and to her, over and over again that night.
But in the morning, he left her with her sister, entirely too aware of the way she only seemed to relax once Fleurette was near. An
d he knew that as soon as the door closed behind him, she would once again light up the way she hadn’t for him—not since their wedding.
And it was with a sense of fatalism, or possibly surrender—not that he’d ever had such a sensation before—that instead of going into his office, he went to Tuscany.
When the helicopter delivered him to his usual spot near the villa, he did not go inside. He took one of the property’s hardy SUVs instead, and drove out into the hills.
An hour or so later, he wound around on a bumpy dirt lane, having left the cultivated part of the Cassara fields behind some time ago. And there the cottage sat, right where he remembered it, solid and defiant in the middle of nowhere.
Summer was coming, and the clearing where the cottage stood was carpeted with wildflowers. He walked toward the front of the small home, lecturing himself on the strange prickling he felt all over his body. It was not a wicked enchantment. She was not a witch.
Those had been the fancies of the boy he’d been, who’d been taught to hate her.
And it was only when he drew close that he realized that she was there. Right there. Folded into a chair on the front porch, watching his approach.
She looked wrinkled and wise, but her dark eyes still burned. She was dressed all in black, though he doubted very much that was any kind of nod to her widowhood. Her hands were like claws, her knuckles large as they clutched the head of her cane.
“You have the look of a salesman about you,” she said, and her voice was precisely as he recalled it. More robust than a woman should sound on the cusp of ninety, to his way of thinking, and threaded through with a deep and abiding dislike. “A Cassara salesman, no less. The very worst kind.”
“Hello, Grandmother,” he replied.
The old woman sniffed. “Whatever it is you’ve come to say, I’m not interested. I do not require assistance. I do not wish to be placed in a home with other old people. I will die as I have lived here, happily alone and usually left to my own devices—as God intended.”
“I didn’t come here to put you in a home. Or argue with you, for that matter.”
But it seemed she was making a list. “My health is none of your business, but it is excellent, since you’ve come looking. If you wish to develop this land, you will have to do so over my dead body. But never fear. I may be thriving at the moment but an old woman can only live so long. You may have to learn to wait for what you want—a trait no man in your family has ever possessed.”
“I don’t need your land. For God’s sake.”
“The last time you were here, boy, I thought I might make you cry. Is that why you returned? To test yourself against childhood nightmares? I’m delighted to try again.”
She laughed and that part he remembered too well. Because it wasn’t the demure, carefully cultivated laughter of the women he’d always known. He’d considered it unhinged when he’d been younger. But now, he understood.
It was joy. Pure joy, the kind Julienne shared with her sister and never him. It was uncontrolled. Untamed.
This is how men tell stories about women they can’t control, Julienne had told him. Whores. Witches.
His grandfather had made his wife into a witch. How had Cristiano never seen that? And Piero was the one who had been heralded as a hero upon his death. When what he’d been was a selfish man who did as he liked. Who selected the people he would care for—Sofia Tomasi, Cristiano—and discarded those he disdained, like the woman he’d married and his only remaining son.
Nor had he ever seemed unduly concerned about the consequences.
It was like a mountain crumbling on top of him, sucking him under and crushing him there.
And Cristiano understood, with a pang of a deep, harsh grief, that this take on his beloved grandfather was not something he could unknow. It was not something he could pretend he hadn’t seen.
“I do not think I will cry,” he said to the grandmother he should have known all these years, his voice low. “If I am honest, I would sooner dig out my eyes and feed them to the crows.”
She hooted derisively. “What do crows want with a rich man’s eyes?”
He should not have been here, no matter what revelations might have come to him overnight. Making this her problem was proving that he was like all the rest of his family. That he was just like them, selfish to the core.
Cristiano had no idea what he hoped to gain.
But he stayed where he was, there on the porch of this cottage he’d avoided for most of his life.
“Grandmother,” he said, with a stiff formality that in no way matched the moment but he thought she deserved nonetheless. “I’ve come to talk to you about love.”
“Love?” The old woman cackled. “Your father was a drunk and his father a liar. They raised you in their spitting image. Too rich, too pampered and cruel with it. What can you possibly know of love?”
He didn’t flinch away from the glare she settled on him.
“Nothing at all,” he said quietly.
His grandmother studied him for what felt to Cristiano like a very long time. A lifetime, perhaps. The lifetime he might have known this woman, if things had been different. If his grandfather had been the hero Cristiano had always seen in him, instead of the man he was.
“If there is no love, there is no life,” she said at last, and again he had the sense of some enchantment after all. Some spell she was casting as she spoke, and not because she was a witch. But because she might well be magic. “You can live on, mind. But it’s nothing but going through the motions. I would not have imagined a Cassara would care about this distinction. You don’t have to be fully alive to count all the money, after all.”
“I have a wife,” Cristiano heard himself say, as if the words were torn from somewhere deep inside him. Torn from the mouth of a version of himself he had never been—a version of himself who did things like ask for advice. “She says she loves me.”
This old woman looked at him with canny, clever eyes, as if she’d known him all his life. And knew him better than he knew himself.
“But you, naturally, cannot be asked to concern yourself with the petty concerns of the heart. Not when you have sweet things to shove down throats. Sugar in place of character will never end well, boy. What do you want me to do? Build your poor wife a cottage next door? Or direct her to a coffin like your mother’s?” And there wasn’t the faintest trace of age in the look she leveled on him, then. “Those are the only two options for Cassara wives, as I understand it.”
Cristiano did not argue, though he wanted to. Desperately.
“There has to be a third option,” he said, his voice gruff. “There has to be.”
“There is.” His grandmother lifted her cane and pointed it at him. “You. Change yourself, boy. Not her. She’s changed enough already if she’s with you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN THE DOOR to her bedroom swung open, Julienne told herself that she was prepared.
Because what had this last month or so since their wedding been if not an exercise in preparation?
She arranged her face in a polite smile. She’d become good at it, she thought. She would remain calm and cool no matter what. She would not give up, the way his grandmother had, no matter the provocation. She was not sacrificing herself, no matter what Fleurette thought, she was choosing—
But the usual litany she chanted at herself blew away like smoke.
Because the man who came to the door was not her husband.
It was Cristiano, but a version of him she had not seen in a long time.
Not since that night in Monte Carlo, in fact. The second time around, when he had proven to her that, in truth, she hardly knew him at all.
He’d proven it again and again, deliciously.
And that’s the reason you’re in this state now, she reminded herself tartly. About to have a baby in a
marriage that feels like you’re choking and drowning, daily.
She might have resolved to live with it. But the man who slammed the bedroom door behind him made her jump a bit, there in their bed where she was propped up against the pillows, supposedly reading a book on breastfeeding.
“What has happened?” she asked, staring at him.
And Julienne was unable, in the face of all the ferocity she saw in him, to keep her tone even at all. The way she’d been doing since their brusque wedding, because it was that or start screaming. And she was afraid that once she started screaming she wouldn’t stop. She’d felt it claw in her, those screams she wouldn’t let loose, when she’d told him she loved him and he’d told her love was a lie.
A lie.
And had very clearly meant it.
“I’ve been to Tuscany,” Cristiano said, and his voice wasn’t his. Not really. It was gruff, dark. But there was a different undercurrent. It was one she didn’t know.
“Did something happen to the villa?”
“Villa Cassara has stood for hundreds of years. It will stand forever. And in any case, I didn’t go to the villa.”
“Cristiano.” She used the repressive tone she sometimes employed on her sister, and it had about the same effect. One of his arrogant brows rose, with no hint of repentance. “I can’t tell if something is wrong or not. Is it?”
“Something is terribly wrong,” he told her, dark and urgent. “You are wrong.”
He might as well have hauled off and punched her in the belly. Julienne felt her jaw drop open, even as in the next moment she told herself that she absolutely refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her react like that. Or at all.
“Perhaps you missed the news,” she managed to say crisply. “I have married a Cassara. I think you know full well that’s a fast track to wrongness.” She inclined her head in a fair mockery of the aristocratic way he did it. “I will accept your condolences.”
“You have changed, Julienne.”
He moved closer to the bed, where she’d been agitatedly turning pages in her book but failing to read a single word. Because the office had called, looking for him, and that told her only that he was off doing something he didn’t want anyone to know about.
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