Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  She could accept anything. She could make anything work, and had.

  But here, now, in this marriage that she could have resisted, but hadn’t—all so she could have the pleasure of pretending he’d forced her into it—she was done accepting things. Working with whatever came her way. Making the best of it.

  He tasted like everything she’d ever wanted, and that was what she wanted now. Everything. Cecilia had no intention of settling for anything less.

  “No,” she said.

  Pascal stared at her in that frozen, arrogant way he had as if he assumed he must have misheard her. Because certainly no one could possibly dare cross him.

  “No?” he echoed as if he didn’t quite understand.

  “I told you what I want.” Her voice was distinct and steady. And she held his gaze. “And for once, Pascal, I’m not willing to settle for less. If it’s too much for you, I understand. But I’m not running away from anything. If you can’t handle this...”

  And then her voice cracked, because she wasn’t a machine. She was a woman, flesh and blood, and fighting for the man she loved the only way she knew how.

  “If you don’t know how to fight for us, I can’t help you.”

  “Cecilia—”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “Dante and I are staying put. But I won’t stop you if you need to run away, Pascal. Again.”

  Then, before she could change her mind and beg him all over again—and in a whole different way, possibly involving tears—Cecilia turned her back on him.

  No matter how much it hurt.

  And this time she was the one who walked away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PASCAL STOOD THERE for a long, long time after the door closed behind him.

  After she’d left him the way he’d told her she should.

  He stood there in that office that he’d been so proud of before. The office that represented who he was. All he had. All he was.

  But instead of admiring the sharp, modern lines and their juxtaposition with ancient Rome right there outside his window, all he could see was Cecilia.

  She was everything he’d ever wanted. Poise. Grace. Elegance.

  And somehow, despite all that, she loved him.

  She loved him.

  How could she possibly love him?

  Pascal could feel his heart kicking at him as if it was trying to beat him up from the inside out. He was hardly aware of it when he wheeled around, grabbing his heavy coat on the way out, and muttered something largely incomprehensible to Guglielmo.

  He needed to get out. He needed to get away.

  He threw himself into the streets, the way he always had.

  Rome was his first love. The eternal city—and his eternal and only salvation. Rome was how he had learned who he was, what he could do. Rome had made him. There had been years Pascal had believed that only the battered old streets of this city knew him at all.

  He walked and he walked, chasing the December day toward its brief afternoon. It was two days before Christmas and the weather was raw. Damp and cold. Still, it suited his mood. It matched the tumult within.

  He navigated his way over slick stone and around knots of people. It seemed to him as he moved that he could feel the pulse of the city inside him, the whispers of three thousand years of so many lives. Hopes and dreams, loss and grief, all there beneath his feet.

  It was as if the stones themselves seem to hum with all the life—and love—that had happened here. Too many times to count. Rome was stories that could never be told, lives tangled together and lost in time. Myths that anyone could recite and smaller, hidden tales no one would ever know. He could hear that humming everywhere. He could feel it shoot straight down his spine.

  Then again, he thought as he found himself in a far-off piazza lit up with Christmas trees and a festive market, it could as easily be the carolers.

  He stood there in a neighborhood he rarely visited, a part of the same grand mosaic of stories lost and found, lived and lost. And though it was not his custom to play the slightest attention to Christmas songs, or Christmas itself if he could avoid it, he found himself listening despite himself as they sang.

  Songs of joy. Songs of peace.

  Pascal had always preferred to believe they were lies...but the familiar songs didn’t feel like a lie this gloomy evening. He did.

  And maybe that was why, sometime later, he found himself in a neighborhood he usually preferred to avoid. And worse, standing outside the house he knew well though he had only ever seen it in pictures. There had been some dark years when he had set men on this house, to watch it. To report back. To give him a sense of what it was he fought.

  He had sworn to himself that he would never come here himself. Never in person. Not after all those times his mother had come here when Pascal was a child, only to be turned away.

  Over and over again as she wept that she was dirt.

  Pascal had vowed that he would never allow his father the opportunity to do the same to him.

  But it was a short, bitter sort of day, and the long night was already gathering. He looked through the lit-up windows at tidy, unremarkable rooms that indicated the owners were well-off—if not particularly flashy. Even here there were Christmas trees on display and festive decorations that looked as if they were part of a design feature, not the kind of family nostalgia he’d always assumed the people who lived here indulged in.

  Mostly because he never would.

  And then a man he’d seen in pictures—often in a split frame next to his own face but never in the flesh—walked into the main room and frowned as he looked around as if searching for a mislaid item.

  Likely not his discarded son, Pascal thought bitterly. Never that.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected to see. A monster, perhaps. A worthy opponent, certainly. A focal point for everything he’d done and all the ways he’d gloried in rolling around in the dirt just to throw it here.

  But all he saw in the bright windows was a shriveled old man. Alone.

  And if the look on his face was any guide as he huffed around his little domain, an unhappy one to boot.

  Once again Pascal felt as if the ground had been snatched out from beneath his feet, there where he stood in the narrow road as the darkness fell around him and the winter night grew colder.

  For the first time—maybe ever, if he was honest—he had to ask himself why he had expended so much energy to build an entire life at this sad, tired, mean creature. The life he saw through the windows was so narrow. So small.

  And exactly where you’re headed, a voice inside him that sounded a lot like hers warned him.

  Because all Pascal had done in all this time was make himself small, too.

  And it was as if something vast opened up inside him then.

  Cecilia.

  She was endless. She had walked into his life and nothing had been the same. First, she had brought him to life. Then she had given him the tools to build an empire worthy of her, though it had cost her. And when he’d finally returned to her, haunted by her after all those years, she’d given him a son.

  And today she’d told him she loved him, when no one else had ever tried.

  She was more than beauty and she was deeper than truth. She was faith. She was hope.

  But he’d let her walk away. And he’d come here instead, to watch an old man who had been given the whole of Pascal’s lifetime to right a wrong, change his ways, offer a hand across a great divide...and hadn’t.

  Pascal felt twisted up with the things he didn’t know today, but of one thing he was utterly sure. Whatever became of him, he did not want to end up like his father.

  All he had to do was open up this death grip of his, let the old man go, and choose. Not to be so small. Not to consign himself to the very same fate. Not to chase the same end the w
ay he’d been doing all this time.

  Because Pascal had a child, too.

  And Dante was his chance to remake the world. Not to narrow it, choke it with hate, make it hurt and fight and plot revenge.

  Dante was his chance to do the opposite. Instead of being the monster his father had been and ever would be, Pascal could be the father he had always wished he’d had.

  There was only one way out of the dark and into the light.

  All Pascal had to do was finally be man enough to take it.

  He turned his back on the house. The man. The father so undeserving of that title. He began to walk, putting distance between him and the street where his mother had wailed to no avail. And as he moved, the dirt from that street that had been on him his whole life fell away, because it had never been his. It belonged where he’d found it.

  And as he broke into a run, he knew without a shred of doubt that he would never return.

  Pascal ran through the streets of his beloved city. The colors and the sounds, the stories and the songs, all began to blend. All the piazzas done up for Christmas, all the people in throngs and gathered in the cafés.

  All of them out here in the December dark to bask, together, in the light they made to beat it back.

  Hope. Faith.

  Pascal finally understood.

  He only hoped he wasn’t too late.

  When he made it to his home at last, he threw himself in through the door, staggering into his foyer. At first he hardly recognized the space, until he realized what she’d done. She’d brought it inside from the streets—the trees all lit up, the chaotic joy of it all. Evergreen trees made bright like a taunt—

  Was this what she’d left him to remember her by?

  Pascal was sure that she had gone already. That she had ordered the staff to decorate and had packed up Dante, then taken herself off, just as he’d told her to do. Because when he had been offered the choice to stay or leave, he’d left. Six years ago he’d simply left her.

  Why shouldn’t she do the same?

  He shouted for his housekeeper, then shouted for his car—

  “I let the housekeeper go tonight,” came a voice from behind him. “She has her own family to decorate for.”

  Pascal turned, slowly. Because he was sure he was imagining it.

  But she was there, walking toward him from the hall that led to Dante’s suite.

  “I just put Dante to bed,” Cecilia said quietly when she came to a stop before him, still dressed in the same clothes he’d seen on her—and off her—earlier. “You’re shouting loud enough to wake the dead. One small boy will wake a whole lot more easily.”

  She was still here.

  For a moment that was all that he could think about. It was all that mattered.

  And as her words penetrated the mad, howling thing inside him, he realized that she clearly wasn’t going anywhere—not tonight anyway—if she’d put Dante down to sleep.

  He moved toward her, and he felt as if he had the weight of a thousand worlds clinging to each of his limbs as he moved. The world he’d grown up in. The world he’d made.

  The world he’d left behind him tonight.

  When he reached her, he put his hands on her shoulders as if he needed to assure himself that she was real.

  Because he needed her to be real. He needed it more than air.

  “Cecilia,” he said, because her name was like a song and he’d been trying to get that particular tune out of his head for far too long.

  Tonight he’d stopped trying.

  And it was time to start singing it instead.

  “Pascal,” she whispered back, her wide violet eyes solemn.

  And then, finally, while the storm raged inside him and his bones ached with the effort, Pascal Furlani sang the only song that mattered.

  He surrendered.

  He sank down on his knees, took her hands in his and begged.

  “Please don’t leave me,” he said, urgent and low. “I know I’ve given you no reason to stay, no reason to do anything but hate me. But Cecilia, I can’t live without you. I’ve tried.”

  She shifted as if she would say something—

  But he cut her off, because he couldn’t stop now.

  “I love you,” he told her. “I built empires in your absence, but all I saw was your ghost. You have haunted me since the moment I woke up in pieces and saw you there, smiling. You taught me how to live. To love. To imagine that I could be the kind of man who could do either when I’d never thought I was much of anything but another man’s dirt. I don’t deserve you. I never will.”

  “Pascal—”

  “Cecilia,” he said, a song and a vow, and her—always her, “I need you to stay here. I need to become the man I imagined I was when I was smashed into a million pieces and you alone made me whole. I need to become that man so I can be the husband you deserve. The father Dante deserves. And I am very much afraid that only you can teach me how.”

  There were tears in the corners of her lovely eyes, and they chased each other down her cheeks as she sank down on her knees so she could be there with him in the sparkling light of so many Christmas trees.

  “Pascal,” she whispered. “Don’t you understand? It’s already done. I am your wife. That means you help me. And I help you. And we love each other, forever. That was what we promised.”

  “I know how to make money,” he told her, the intensity in his voice inside him, too. “But what I want is to make you happy. To make our son happy. To make more babies, and make them happy, too.”

  “I want all of those things,” she said. “And I want you happy, too. Pascal, you deserve to be happy.”

  “I don’t deserve you,” he managed to say. “I know that much.”

  Her hands smoothed over his face then. She traced his scars and she held his gaze, and the light he saw in her eyes humbled him. Exalted him.

  Made him whole.

  “You have hurt me more than I ever thought I could be hurt,” she whispered fiercely. “But that could never have been possible if you hadn’t also made me the happiest I’ve ever been. I have to think that that’s the point. The hurt and the happiness. All of it wrapped up together. If we do it together, I think that’s love.”

  And then he was kissing her, or she was kissing him. But they were together. And all of this was theirs, that fire, that need. All that brightness they made together, to banish the night, glowed between them.

  Pascal began to imagine it always would.

  “I promise you,” he told her then, his voice as serious as his mouth was hot against hers. “I will never leave you again.”

  “I will never leave you, either,” she replied in the same solemn way as if these were the vows that mattered, here on their knees in Rome with all the Christmas lights to guide them. “We will fight for each other, not against each other.”

  “You and me, my love,” he agreed hoarsely. “That will make all the difference.”

  For each other, not against. Pascal felt that settle there inside him, deep into his bones.

  Choose love, she’d implored him. Just once.

  And finally, with everything he had and everything he hoped he would be, that was exactly what Pascal did.

  He chose Cecilia.

  Forever.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THREE YEARS LATER Pascal basked in the sweetness of another perfect Christmas Day.

  Up in the mountains the brooding Dolomites stood tall, high above them. He was certain he could feel them there, even in the dark. They had impressed themselves upon him so completely that sometimes he thought he could feel them down in Rome.

  He heard a soft sound and turned to see his beautiful wife coming into the room that was lit only by the fire on one side and a tall, gleaming Christmas tree on the other.

  He had built
her this cottage that was no cottage at all. He had set it outside the small village, up in the foothills, so they could gaze down upon the pretty valley together. The abbey, the church and all those beautiful fields that had been his only entertainment once.

  The villagers muttered about rich men and their houses in the hills, but Pascal didn’t care if they talked about him beneath their breath as long as they treated his wife as they should. And they did, because Cecilia was theirs no matter the rarefied air she breathed as Signora Furlani. And with every visit, they thawed toward her husband, too.

  Pascal would have sworn he didn’t care about such things. He wouldn’t have once. But Cecilia cared deeply about the good opinion of the people here—and therefore, Pascal did, too.

  There was no limit to the things he would do for her.

  “Come,” he said now, reaching out his hand. And his Cecilia could still smile at him the way she did now, making his world stop and shudder. “I have built us a fire.”

  She took his hand and let him draw her close, then lead her over toward the fire.

  “Dante told me he was not sleepy at all and would stay up all night, to spite me if necessary,” Cecilia confided with a laugh. “But he was out before I turned off the light.”

  Dante was eight now, filled with his father’s stubborn purpose. Pascal anticipated that he would always be the way he was now, prepared to butt heads at the slightest provocation—and also the quickest to apologize and the first to declare his affection. Even thinking of the boy made Pascal smile.

  “And Giulia?” Pascal asked, his smile widening as he thought of their headstrong and deeply beloved two-year-old daughter.

  “Dead to the world,” Cecilia said happily.

  Pascal pulled her into his arms, then down onto the rug before the fire. They stretched out together as the flames leaped and danced in the grate. And Cecilia sighed at the way they fit, the way she always did.

  Because years might have passed, but the spark between them never took more than the simplest touch to build up into the flames that could still burn them both to ash. And sometimes it took only a look.