Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  He laughed a bit at that as he moved through Piazza Navona and its annual Christmas Market that made the crowded square even more filled and frenetic. He dodged the usual stream of tourists and his own countrymen, taking in the night air and already surrendering to the pollution of Christmas that would invade everything until the Epiphany, then thankfully disappear into the clarity of the New Year.

  The night was cold and leaning toward dampness. It was the perfect sort of weather to ask himself how he’d ended up with the coldest, most clinical woman imaginable tonight. Was that really what he was reduced to? A laboratory experiment masquerading as a marriage?

  He knew he needed to marry, but somehow, he had imagined it would be...less cold-blooded. Warmer. Or cordial, at the very least.

  And he wanted to make his babies his own damned self. More than that, he had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps in any regard. Once he married, Pascal had no intention of cheating. He was not planning to have “arrangements” on the side. He wasn’t planning on having an on the side, for that matter.

  He had no intention of creating another woman like his mother, so fragile and so lost she couldn’t take care of her own son. And he would never, ever risk the possibility that he might create an illegitimate child of his own.

  The very idea made him sick.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he knew it was Guglielmo, checking in the way he always did after these excruciating “dates” that were little more than vetting sessions. Because Pascal persisted in imagining that he could cut through all the nonsense, ask for exactly what he wanted and then get it. It had worked in business, why not in marriage?

  Pascal didn’t answer the call.

  There were a million more things that required his attention, but he couldn’t face them just yet. Instead, he lost himself in the chaotic embrace of the Eternal City. Rome was a monument, yet Rome was ever-changing. Rome was a contradiction. Rome was where Pascal felt alive. It was the place where he had grown to understand that his very existence was an affront to some, and it was where he finally figured out how to claim that existence and make sense of it.

  Walking through Rome had always soothed him. And kept him alive, some dark years. Long nights with his feet, his thoughts and the grand Roman sprawl had made him whole, time and time again.

  So there was no reason at all that he should be caught up in memories of a tiny, sleepy village with steep mountains all around and very few people, where he had never been anything but broken.

  He stopped by a fountain in a forgotten courtyard, steps from the roar of a busy road. The water tumbled from the pursed lips of an old god made stone, and in the dark, he almost believed he could see her reflection there in the water the way he always did in his head.

  Sweet Cecilia, half nurse and half angel. A woman so lovely and so innocent that he had nearly betrayed every vow he’d ever made to himself and stayed up there in all that towering silence.

  The very notion was absurd. He was Pascal Furlani. Not for him the pastoral delights, such as they were, of a remote mountain village of interest to absolutely no one unless they happened to either have been there for centuries or were a part of the quiet abbey that had also been there, in one form or another, since right about the dawn of time. Not for him a life forgotten and tucked away like that, out of sight.

  She would have taken her vows by now, Pascal assumed, and become a full nun like the others in the order. Or perhaps his last, half-dreamt night there had been her fall from grace. Would she have stayed? Taken her place outside the abbey walls? Perhaps she lived in the village proper now, or off in the fields that dotted the hillsides with some or other farmer. She would be settled now, one way or the other. Committed to her Lord or married to some man, and unrecognizable.

  Just as he was.

  Pascal was not haunted by the specter of his childhood. He had lived through it, transcended it and moved on. He had mourned his mother’s death, then buried her with greater reverence than she had ever shown him. He rarely thought of his father these days, preferring to decimate the old man and his penny-tante shipping concern from afar.

  Pascal did not look back. Ever.

  Unless it was to her. Cecilia.

  His personal ghost.

  “Enough,” he muttered. He pulled a coin from his pocket, then flipped it to the air, watching as it tumbled into the water before him. He had made his last reckless decision the night he’d chosen to drive like a maniac up into those mountains in search of one of Italy’s many ski resorts. He had been on leave from the army and the idea—or some demon—had seized him, which in those days was all Pascal needed. That and a bottle of something strong.

  He had never made it to a ski resort. He’d spun out on a mountain pass after making a wrong turn. The clunker of a car he’d been driving—good for absolutely nothing save ejecting him through the windshield with great force—was the only reason he’d lived.

  The car had burst into flames, and Pascal would have burned, too, had he not been tossed off into the unforgiving wilderness.

  But even the fire was a blessing in disguise. It had alerted the villagers. They’d trooped out in the middle of the dark December night, collected his broken body and had settled him into what passed for the local hospital. The clinic connected to the abbey, where slowly, carefully, the nuns had nursed him back to health.

  Pascal had been torn open, broken and out of his mind for weeks. It had taken him longer than that to heal. Then painfully learn how to move again when the casts came off.

  And the greatest danger of it all was not the infections he risked or the bones that healed differently than they’d been. It was not his discharge from the military, or the entirely new life he was forced to face—and figure out while lying flat on his back—thanks to the wreckage of the old.

  It was the fact that life in that forgotten village felt sweet. Easy. Good.

  It had been the greatest temptation of his life to simply...remain.

  And his favorite nun had been a part of that.

  Not quite a nun, he corrected himself now, his hands deep in his pockets as he brooded at the fountain before him. She had been a novice of the order, young and sweet and uncorrupted—until she’d met him.

  But when he thought of what happened between them, her cool smiles and soft hands, blooming into that one night of almost unbearable passion that still made his body stir after all these years—he couldn’t help but think that she had been the one to do the corrupting.

  He was a master of the universe by any reckoning, and yet...here he stood. In a dark, forgotten corner of the greatest city on earth, the world literally at his feet, her face in his memories making the city dim.

  It was an outrage. It was unacceptable.

  Pascal headed toward his home, three stories of the top of a building that he had refurbished to suit his particular taste. Distinctively modern inside and an appropriately battered, ancient-looking facade.

  It was not lost on him that for all intents and purposes, that description could have been about him.

  When he reached his building, he didn’t go inside. He headed to his garage instead and somehow or another, almost without conscious thought, he found himself in one of his cars. Then heading north. This time he was neither as drunk nor as reckless as he’d been six years ago, but still. A man did not possess a car as fast as his if he did not plan to use it.

  He drove for six hours, through what remained of the night and into the dawn. He stopped for breakfast and strong coffee when he reached Verona. When the espresso had revived him sufficiently, he called Guglielmo to tell him where he was.

  “And may I ask, sir, why you are a great many kilometers away from the office? May I assume that your meeting last night did not go as well as you hoped?”

  “You may assume what you like,” Pascal replied.

  And as
he lingered over another espresso, Pascal had ample time to ask himself what exactly he thought he was doing. The answer came to him after he’d gotten back on the road.

  The months he’d spent in the care of that abbey was the only time in his life that he could recall straying so far from who he was, and he’d resented it ever since. Bitterly. Cecilia had been a kind of enchantment. A witch in a nun’s habit.

  He’d told himself he was well rid of her when he’d come back down the mountain and remembered himself at last. He’d meant it. He’d gone about creating his company and doing every last thing he’d ever dreamed.

  And yet...he couldn’t seem to move on. No matter how many empires he built, no matter how much richer he made himself, he was still haunted by her face.

  It was high time for an exorcism.

  Two hours later he found himself on the same mountain where he’d nearly died six years ago. It was a cold, crisp morning in another December, and he treated the winding mountain road with a great deal more respect than he had back then.

  And this time he pulled off to the side of the road when he reached the top, because he could see the village before him.

  It looked like a storybook, which only made him more determined to scrape it off whatever passed for his battered soul. It was like a dream in the morning light. Snowcapped mountains all around, and down in the small valley, fields cut by a tumbling river. What passed for the center of town was a clump of old buildings that dated from centuries past. The church stood at one end of the village with the abbey behind it and off to one side, the hospital where he had survived his recovery. He stared at it a long while, aware that his fingers were on his scars again.

  Something in him turned over, with a low hum.

  He told himself it was sheer horror that a man like him, raised in the middle of one of the most frenetic and sophisticated cities in the world, not to mention the luxurious lifestyle he now enjoyed, should ever have imagined that he could stay here.

  Here.

  It beggared belief.

  He started up the car again, following the road down and around and around, until it reached the valley floor.

  Where everything was exactly as he’d left it.

  There was no reason that his heart should be clattering about in his chest as he drove the familiar road to the church. He would find the old priest and ask after Cecilia. He would almost surely find such a reunion faintly horrifying, and once he did, he would leave. The truth was, he’d come a very great distance for what he expected to take all of a few moments. He could have—and should have—sent Guglielmo. Or some other underling, who could have reported back on whether Cecilia was still here. For that matter, there had been no earthly reason for him to drive through the night like a man possessed. He could have taken his helicopter and landed it in the field behind the church, the same field he’d stared at week after week after week from his hospital bed.

  No wonder he’d become fixated on the novice nun who’d cared for him. There had been nothing else to do. Except, Mother Superior had told him serenely, pray.

  Pascal had not prayed then. He considered a prayer for deliverance now instead. Because he had surrendered to this fantasy for absolutely no good reason. This appalling tour through his own nostalgia.

  “You might as well get it over with,” he growled at himself.

  He unfolded himself from the low-slung sports car and stood beside it a moment. It was midmorning now, and though it was a clear day, the wind rushed down from the mountain peaks and sliced straight through him. He was dressed for a sophisticated dinner in Rome, not a trip to the hinterland.

  He adjusted the jacket of his bespoke suit with two impatient tugs of his hands, and didn’t bother looking around. The village felt deserted. If memory served, what few villagers there were rarely congregated before the afternoon, if then. The nuns had chosen this valley well. It was the perfect spot for silent contemplation.

  Pascal walked up the steps to the front door of the church. The weathered door stood open a crack, and he pushed his way inside, and then paused for a moment in the vestibule as he was walloped with memories.

  It smelled the same. It looked the same. And it made his head spin as if he’d overindulged again.

  What year is this? he asked himself.

  The church might not have changed in the past century. But Pascal had changed tremendously since he’d left here. That was what he needed to remember.

  He moved into the church proper, his gaze moving from the quiet, empty pews to the candles flickering in the alcoves. He saw no hint of the old, garrulous priest who he recalled so vividly from six years ago. The place was deserted—

  But then he heard a noise. He took a few more steps and saw a washer woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the floor before the altar with her back to him.

  She did not look around as he started down the aisle, and that gave Pascal ample opportunity to remember all the other times he’d done this exact same walk. All the times the priest had encouraged him to look within for a change, rather than continuing to look outside himself.

  What is the point of all this power you seek if your heart is empty? the old man had asked him.

  What do you know of either power or a heart? Pascal had replied. And he’d laughed.

  But Pascal did not think the old man had been kidding. And those sneaky words were one more ghost that he couldn’t quite get to leave him alone.

  He dropped his gaze from the stained glass in the small nave, and stood there, several feet away from the woman on the floor. He expected her to stop what she was doing, for she must have heard him, but she didn’t. Not even when he cleared his throat.

  “If I might have a moment of your attention, signorina,” he said, his voice echoing back at him from all around.

  She moved then. She sat back on her knees, and tugged the headphones out of her ears in one smooth motion. And Pascal was caught, somehow, in the smoothness of it.

  But then she shifted around to face him, still down there on the stone floor. And everything...stopped.

  That face.

  Her face.

  He’d been seeing it for years.

  He knew every millimeter of her heart-shaped face, and the rich brown hair touched with gold that surrounded it. He knew that wide, generous mouth, and the delicate nose.

  Most of all, he knew those eyes. Startling violet set above cheekbones made for poetry.

  He knew her, his angel of mercy and the ghost that had haunted him for years.

  It was Cecilia. His Cecilia.

  “My God,” he whispered. “It’s you.”

  “It’s me,” she replied, her voice flat. Hard. And that was when he noticed that those violet eyes of hers were bright on his. And murderous. “And you can’t have him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  CECILIA REGINALD WAS no stranger to fear or disappointment.

  It was right there in the name she’d been left with all those years ago when the English lady—her mother, presumably—had stayed in the only pensione in the village for the weekend, given a fake name, and then had left her three-year-old behind when she’d run off. Never to return.

  Cecilia had always known that she was disposable, though she happily remembered very little of that first, lost life. Just as she’d always known that Pascal Furlani, who had discarded her when she was fully grown and able to recall every painful second of it, would be back.

  At first, she had dreamed of his return. Wished for it, fervently, as if he’d disappeared from the village by mistake somehow. Because assuming he did the right thing—and she’d assumed he would then—would have solved her problems in a neat, orderly and time-honored fashion. Because his coming back would have made sense of the wreckage that her neat, orderly life had become in the chaotic wake he’d left behind him.

  And because she had imagined h
erself in love with him.

  But of course, that was not when he had deigned to tear himself away from his meteoric rise to wealth and prominence and return at long last. Not when she would have greeted his return with nothing short of delight. Instead, he came back now, when she wanted it least. And not only because she no longer believed in such childish notions as being in love.

  “Who is him?” he asked. “And why do you imagine I would wish to have him, whatever that means?”

  She didn’t miss the affront in that deep, rich voice of his she’d done her best to forget. Or try to forget.

  Just as she didn’t miss the crack of power in it, either. It seared through her like a lightning strike and she added the unpleasant intensity of the sensation to the list of things she blamed him for.

  Cecilia knelt there on the floor, her weight back on her heels, and her hands wet from scrubbing the stones. She had to crane her neck back to look up at him. Up and up and up, for he seemed much taller than she remembered him. While she imagined she looked shriveled and ruined and infinitely hardened by the years—because that was how she felt, certainly.

  Back then she’d had faith. She’d believed that people were mostly good and life was certain to work out well, one way or another, even for abandoned girls like her.

  She’d learned. Oh, how she’d learned.

  Cecilia was fairly certain she wore every last lesson right there on her face.

  Meanwhile Pascal looked like he’d stepped straight out of the pages of one of those glossy magazines she pretended she didn’t know existed and had certainly never scoured, just to see his face. He looked like the lofty, arrogant man he’d gone off to become, leaving her here to handle the mess he’d made. And the man in those magazines bore no resemblance whatsoever to the broken, half-wild creature she’d taken far too much pleasure in nursing back to health.

  If there had ever been anything broken in Pascal Furlani, she couldn’t see it now. Were it not for the scars on the left side of his jaw that she knew continued down across his chest—though in her memory, they were far more raw and angry than the silver lines she could see today—she would have been hard-pressed to imagine that anything could ever have touched this man at all.