Most of Pascal’s adult life had been an exercise in proving that he did, in fact, exist.
In his father’s face, one way or another, in a way that could not be ignored.
And he didn’t know how to reconcile that part of him with a man who wanted nothing more than the woman who only suffered his touch while she was asleep to want him while she was awake.
As desperately as he wanted her.
“Your new husband has been telling us romantic stories about the two of you, signora,” said Pascal’s least favorite board member, Carlo Buccio, with his silver hair, fussy beard and the cane he used as a prop. Carlo was forever looking for ways to take more away from Pascal. To render him little more than a figurehead, because that was the thing about power. People always wanted more of it. And better still, they wanted others around them to have less. He and his mustachioed sidekick, Massimo Pugliese, prided themselves on being thorns in Pascal’s side.
He recalled, then, that they had also taken a field trip to the mountains. No doubt they were annoyed that their version of Pascal’s life hadn’t been splashed all over the tabloids first.
“Surely it cannot all have been fairy tales,” Massimo chimed in, right on cue.
Pascal could do nothing but watch a series of complicated emotions chase themselves across Cecilia’s face. He gritted his teeth as she shifted her condemning glare from him and looked at the rest of the assembled men.
But to his surprise, she laughed.
“Romance and fairy tales in a corporate boardroom?” Cecilia asked lightly. “How inappropriate. Why on earth would such a private matter be discussed at all?”
And something in Pascal hummed a bit at that, amusement and admiration at once, though it hardly wiped away the tension that gripped him.
Because this was no trophy wife, clearly. This was no airheaded little bimbo, whose worth was in the picture she made while hanging on a rich man’s arm. Not that Cecilia didn’t make a pretty picture, but the glory of his wife, Pascal understood then as he never had before, was that she exuded that same matter-of-fact grace that her Mother Superior did. It wasn’t holier than thou. It was the way she held herself and the frankness of her violet gaze. She didn’t simper. She didn’t avert her eyes. She didn’t shrink down with so many male gazes trained upon her.
She stood there in his glass and stone meeting room as a kind of beacon. Of what was right, no matter what.
It was subtle, but effective. There was a mass clearing of throats and shuffling feet, as a room full of powerful men readjusted themselves to what Pascal could only consider the enduring power of the nunnery.
Cecilia might not be a nun. She might not have made it through her novitiate period, thanks to him. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been convent-bred—or that she couldn’t wield it like a weapon when she chose.
He had been so focused on claiming her that he hadn’t stopped to fully appreciate what she brought to the table.
“I was under the seemingly quaint impression that one’s private life was just that.” And Cecilia might have been standing there as if she was addressing the room, but Pascal had no illusions. He knew that she was speaking directly to him when she said that. She even turned that gaze of hers on him again. “Private.”
“Privacy is for far less powerful people, signora,” Massimo said with his patented obsequiousness.
Cecilia merely turned a bland gaze his way. “How powerful is my five-year-old son?”
“Pascal has been filling us in on this...secret relationship of yours,” Carlo said, his voice ripe with insinuation.
Pascal tensed even further in his chair at the head of the long table. Because she was clearly not happy with him, and here was her chance to vent her spleen. Here was her chance to get back everything she imagined had been taken from her. All she had to do was tell the story of what had actually happened, with all the bitterness and hurt she’d shown when she’d told the same story to him. These men would twist to suit themselves—and what they wanted to believe, so long as it advanced their position at his expense—and Pascal would have no choice but to go to war. Again.
And he saw the exact moment Cecilia understood that.
She blinked, and he could see her violet gaze turn canny. Considering. She turned it on him, and not for the first time, he wondered what she saw. If he had ever haunted her the way she did him.
He couldn’t bear the tension and so he stood to break it, smoothing his hand down the front of his suit. He kept his gaze intent on Cecilia.
And then he waited for her to betray him, the way everyone who had ever vowed to love him had, sooner or later. His mother. His father. Now his wife, who had stood in a church and made her vows, though he’d told himself then that he hadn’t believed them.
Because, of course, he’d forced her to that altar. He’d made her take those vows.
But in the dark of night, with her hair a fragrant cloud across his chest and her soft curves pressed into his side, he’d wanted to believe that every word she’d uttered before the priest had been true.
He’d wanted it more than could possibly be wise. Or healthy.
And all of that led here. Where he, a man who had callously betrayed anyone who ventured close to him in turn, waited in a moment that stretched on and on into eternity, for his just deserts.
Lord knew Pascal was full up on just deserts. He’d been choking them down his whole life.
Cecilia’s lovely mouth curved, slightly. Her eyes flashed.
And Pascal was already calculating his response. Damage control. Counterattacks. The best way to undercut whatever she was about to say—
“I beg your pardon,” Cecilia said, and again her voice was mild in the same way Mother Superior’s always was. Kind, almost. And underneath it, absolute steel. It took Pascal a moment to notice she was not looking at him—she was looking at Carlo. “Something that is a secret to you, signor, is not necessarily a secret to the people involved. What a strange question. Would you like to share with the room every detail of your private relationships?”
For a moment Pascal couldn’t process that.
It wasn’t only that she’d taken aim at one of the most notorious philanderers in Rome, whose complicated series of mistresses left him eternally open to tabloid speculation. As did his wife’s equally comprehensive selection of lovers, many of whom she paraded beneath Carlo’s nose.
He supposed that it wouldn’t have mattered whom she’d asked that question. There wasn’t a man in this room whose private life could bear the scrutiny. It was only Pascal, who had lacked a wife and had insisted upon a social life over the past few years, who was subject to these patronizing reviews of his intimate relations.
It took a long moment for her question to penetrate, and for him to admire the way Cecilia had done it—so beautifully shifting the conversation away from Pascal.
It took another kick of his heart for him to understand the far more salient point.
She had not betrayed him when she’d had the chance.
She had not betrayed him.
And it was as if the floor dropped away from beneath his feet. As if the world shuddered to a halt and then stood still for a moment. Still and impossibly, confoundingly airless.
He felt tight, everywhere. As if he had exploded, and then had contained each and every shard, binding all the jagged edges inside himself.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think.
She had not betrayed him.
Cecilia turned her gaze back to his, then, and everything else fell away.
There was only this. Those violet eyes filled with temper, sadness, sheer fury and something else he couldn’t name.
There was only her, standing there in the clothes he’d bought for her, looking like every dream he’d ever had of the perfect wife.
Because the only dream he’d ever had
, in all these years, had been her.
Her. Cecilia.
The only person alive who had not betrayed him at the first opportunity.
The fact that they were still standing here in full view of his entire shark tank full of grasping directors impressed itself upon him, then, as if from a great distance. Pascal moved from the table, distantly amazed that his body still worked. That the explosion that was still rolling through him in the form of aftershocks had not, in fact, taken him out at the knees. That while he might feel every one of those jagged edges, they were not necessarily visible.
His head was spinning. He could feel the thump of his heart, and the tightness in his gut. He expected his hands to be shaking when he reached out to usher Cecilia back through the door, but they weren’t.
Somehow they weren’t.
He excused himself, and her, or maybe he sang a happy song—he would never know. It was all noise and wonder and her inside him.
More than that, he didn’t care what any of his board members thought. Not any longer.
He led Cecilia out of the meeting room. And for the first time since he’d built it, Pascal cursed the bright, open office he’d been so proud of before. He led her through a maze of glass and too many eyes, winding his way back to his own office, when all he wanted was privacy. A closed door. A place to hide and figure out what the hell had just happened.
When they reached his office at last, he ignored Guglielmo and motioned for Cecilia to precede him inside. She did, her back in a beautiful straight line as she moved ahead of him, then kept walking across the floor toward the bank of windows.
For a moment he could only stare. Ancient, beautiful Rome outside the glass and his Cecilia within. It made his chest hurt.
“Why did you do that?”
He threw the question at her, his voice a rough, low sort of growl as he closed the door behind him. Then locked it, for safe measure. And he hit the button that darkened the glass all around them, making his walls distinctly opaque and private at last.
But he didn’t move from the door.
“A better question is why you did it,” she replied, keeping her back to him. “Why would you share pictures of our wedding with the world? Why would you tell them lies about us? And why—” And that was when she turned, her violet eyes dark with that fury again. “Why on earth would you give them pictures of Dante, Pascal?”
And for a blistering moment it was as if he couldn’t remember why he’d made the very distinct choices he had. As if all she needed to do was look at him with her otherworldly eyes, and he was lost.
But he refused to accept that. He refused.
He opened his mouth to give her his reasons. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have them, or hadn’t suspected he might be called upon to do just that. After all, he had long since made an art out of acting the bastard he knew he was. Biologically and otherwise.
Yet somehow, beneath that steady violet gaze, he found he couldn’t do it.
Cecilia had not betrayed him, but he couldn’t say the same.
He remembered his own mother then. Wailing on the floor after another rejection from his father.
We are the dirt beneath his feet, Marissa would cry.
Pascal had spent so long exulting in that status, turning it around and making it a virtue, that he’d forgotten the truth of it. He could call it whatever he liked. He could dress it up and use it to his advantage, and he had.
But dirt was still dirt.
He looked at Cecilia, his beautiful wife who had been wholly innocent until she’d met him. And he knew that sooner or later, the longer he kept her with him, all he would do was tarnish her, too.
He would cover her in dirt. Hadn’t he already done so?
She had been pure, and he had corrupted her. She had built herself a life after he’d left, putting together the pieces of a fall from grace right there in the abbey where she’d been raised, and making it something beautiful. And he had ruined that, too.
He had forced her into coming with him. Threatened her with the loss of her child.
That was who he was. A man who had never known one of his parents and had suffered for it, and yet had thrown himself wholeheartedly into pressuring the only parent his own son had ever known into doing as he wished. And more, making her believe that he would take the child away from her.
Dirt into dirt. Dirt forever, staining him no matter how exquisitely he dressed these days. Dirt was who he was.
The distance between them seemed far more vast and unconquerable than simply the span of his office floor.
He wished that he’d done something on one of those torturous nights when he’d lain awake, holding her in his arms and wondering how he would keep from breaking. He wished he’d simply turned, set his mouth against her skin, and let it happen.
Where would they be now?
But of course he hadn’t done it. Pascal preferred to armor everything, especially if it would have been better to cherish it. If there was a gift that could be given, he could be counted upon to break it first. To make it into a challenge instead.
Because going to one war or another was all he knew how to do.
That and cover any good thing he found in his own brand of dirt and kick it around a few times, just for good measure.
If he was any kind of man at all, he would fall to his knees here and now, and beg her the way he’d told her she would beg him.
If he was something more than a grim monument to a whole life spent avenging himself on a man who stoutly refused to care one way or the other, he would have thanked her.
Loved her. Cherished her.
Just like the vows he’d made himself, there in the only place on this planet where he’d ever briefly toyed with the idea that he could be more than just an angry man. A good one, say. Or simply...whole.
But he couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t make himself do it.
“I did it because that is who I am,” he told her, and his voice sounded like the old man he would become. Bitter. Old. Calcified by his own grim march toward the darkness. “I seek my own ends, Cecilia. Always. I know no other way.”
She sucked in a shocked sort of breath as if he’d punched her, so he kept going.
“Nothing and no one is safe,” he growled. “I will use you. I will use our child. I will use anything and everything if it serves my purpose. Did you expect something else of a man who threatened you as I have?”
And he braced himself for tears. Temper. It was one thing to stand and deliver his own character assassination. It would be something else again to hear her do it. But he told himself he was prepared.
Because it wasn’t as if, no matter what she said, it wouldn’t be the truth. She took a few steps toward him, and then stopped, almost as if she hadn’t meant to move. He wondered, almost idly, if she would strike him. If he would let her.
But she didn’t raise her hands. Instead, Cecilia studied him, for the span of a long, hard breath. Then another.
She took another step toward him, and he couldn’t help himself. He could only admire how quickly and easily she had taken to his new role of hers, however little she’d enjoyed her time in Rome. Even in a temper, as today, she had dressed from the wardrobe he’d provided her. Her honey-colored hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon. It only emphasized her unusual eyes. She wore a wool dress that hugged her lithe curves and a pair of boots in butter-soft leather. She looked simple, yet elegant. She always had.
The only difference now was that the clothes she wore enhanced what was already there, in a way the ragged, torn clothes she’d worn in her role as a cleaner never could.
It was due to his own arrogance that he’d ever imagined she was within his reach.
Accordingly, he stood where he was, ready for anything she might throw at him.
“That’s a dark p
icture you paint,” was all she said. “Of a dark and remorseless man, incapable of changing himself for the better.”
He couldn’t read her expression. Or her voice. He could feel his pulse, rocketing through him too hard. Too fast. “It is an accurate portrait.”
“You say that as if I did not already know exactly who you were, Pascal.”
His lips thinned at that. “Then I should not have to tell you these things. But I will.” He told himself his throat was not dry. He was not too tense. That none of those things were happening to him, because he should have been perfectly calm. “If I were you, Cecilia, I would go.”
“Go?”
“Take the child. Leave. You were right all along—this was a mistake.”
The words felt to him like a thunderclap. Intense and huge. Impossible to ignore.
And everyone knew that when thunder rumbled, the storm could not be far behind.
“I could do that.” But Cecilia’s voice was too quiet. Too soft, and yet not weak at all. Steel serenity, and he knew precisely where she’d learned it. Her violet gaze held his. “Or instead, I could beg.”
Beg.
The word seemed to take over his head, his chest, him. It seemed to pour in from the sprawling, ancient city outside to fill the room. It was in his blood, bruising and powerful.
I could beg, she had said.
And he remembered, again that moment on a frozen field high up in the mountains. He remembered how deeply and fervently he had wanted all the things he knew he couldn’t have. Because he had never had them.
His woman. His son.
A family.
I could beg, she’d said.
He knew better. He was Pascal Furlani, not another, softer man. And all he knew how to do was struggle. How to fight. How to punish the world in general and his father in particular for failing him.
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