“How old are you?” he had replied, in richly compelling French blurred slightly with an Italian accent. Julienne hadn’t expected the question. Who knew men were discerning—about anything? Her experience so far had not allowed for the possibility. She drew in a breath, prepared to claim she was a more palatable eighteen, despite the fact sixteen was perfectly legal. But his dark eyes flashed as if he knew what she meant to do. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Old enough,” she replied, trying to sound husky. Throaty. Wasn’t that how women sounded in situations like this? “Past the age of consent, if that is what you mean.”
He had looked at her, through her. In her whole life, before and since, Julienne had never felt so seen. In that moment she was certain that Cristiano Cassara could see everything. Everything. What had happened, what she’d had planned. The one-way spiral of the life before her and the squalid bleakness she’d left behind. Fleurette out there in an alley, the emptiness in Julienne’s wallet and belly alike, and what she was prepared to do to change both.
All the things she was prepared to do, starting here. With him.
More than that, she was certain he could also see the dreams and hopes she had long since jettisoned in her committed attempts to keep her sister and her warm and reasonably fed—if never safe or happy.
“I rather think not,” he had said, a quiet thunder stroke of a comment.
And then Cristiano Cassara had changed her life.
With a lift of one hand.
The déjà vu was intense tonight. Cristiano again sat at the bar, another untouched drink before him. He fiddled with it, turning it this way and that, but he did not lift it to his lips. She now knew the rumors about him—every rumor, in fact. That he never drank, that his father had loved his liquor too well but his wife and child too little, and that these were the rituals Cristiano performed when he was alone. The untouched drink. The sober vigil.
He still had that poet’s mouth, with its hint of sensuality she had never seen him succumb to, not once. Not even in the odd, stolen paparazzi shot of him when he couldn’t have known he was being watched. His face was a terrible kind of beautiful, harsh and brutal, with cheekbones that made a woman dream of saints and martyrs. And those dark, flashing eyes that still burned when he looked at a person directly.
She remembered what his arm had felt like beneath her hand as if her palm was a scar. All that hard, hot power.
And Julienne was not a child any longer. She was not a scared teenager, prepared to sell herself to the highest bidder—or any bidder at all—because she was devoid of options and out of choices.
Still, there was a particular agony to this moment, so long in coming.
She slid her bejeweled evening purse onto the glossy bar, and angled her body toward his.
And knew, without his having glanced her way or indicated he was anything but alone, that he had been aware of her all along. Perhaps even before she’d stepped inside the dark, deliberately close space.
But she was too good at making him into a myth, as Fleurette often complained. Tonight she planned to focus on the man.
Cristiano had succeeded his grandfather to become the CEO and president of the company not long after she’d met him ten years ago. More than that, and more importantly, he was Julienne’s boss. She had started at the company headquarters in Milan ten years ago, as a part-time job she fit in around the private studies Cristiano had arranged for her and Fleurette. First she’d been an intern. And then, once she’d finished her schooling at eighteen, she’d taken the lowest position offered and had worked her way steadily up.
That she was, in effect, Cristiano’s ward had never signified. It was never discussed, and Julienne often wondered if anyone else even knew how generous he was, or how she had personally benefitted from it. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d ever lived with him. He had put them up in one of his houses in Milan, complete with staff to tend to them, and in essence, they’d raised themselves.
We were too old already, Fleurette liked to say.
These days, Julienne lived across the sea in New York City. She’d fought hard to get to her position as the vice president of North American operations for the Cassara Corporation, reporting directly to Cristiano himself. And she’d fought even harder to close the kind of deals that would not only pay Cristiano back for his generosity all those years ago, but give back more than he’d given.
It had taken years.
He looked at her now, that dark gaze of his cool and assessing.
But no less harsh.
She would have felt let down if it had been, she understood.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as politely as if she was looking at him across a table in one of the Cassara Corporation’s many offices.
“You were insistent, Ms. Boucher,” he said, and there was that undercurrent of disapproval in his voice that let her know that he was astonished that she’d dared. And that she’d persisted, despite his secretary’s best efforts.
Julienne smiled, still polite and calm. “You met me here once before.”
And she knew as she said it that she was breaking all their rules. The unspoken boundaries all three of them had maintained for a decade. She and Fleurette never mentioned him or how they’d made it from a sad, half-abandoned French hill town to a lavishly appointed, semidetached townhouse in the center of Milan. He never indicated he knew either one of them. Sometimes Julienne had worried that he’d forgotten what he’d done for them—that it had meant so little to him when it had altered the whole of hers and Fleurette’s lives.
But no, she could see he hadn’t forgotten. More, she could see his astonishment, there in his eyes like a thread of gold in the brown depths. His dark brows rose, and he looked almost...arrested.
“I did.” His study of her made her want to shake. She didn’t, somehow. Not outwardly. “A meeting neither one of us has referenced in a decade. To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected trip down memory lane, Ms. Boucher?”
His voice was crisp. A distinct and deliberate slap, though as stern and controlled as everything else he did.
He meant her to wilt and she wanted to, but then, she had built herself in his image. She was made of sterner stuff because he was, and because she’d always assumed he expected it. She kept her cool smile on her face.
“In that decade, I have kept track of what you must have spent to rescue Fleurette and me. Then care for us.” She named a staggering number and saw that light in his eyes change again, to something far more sharp and assessing that she could feel like a fist in her belly. And lower, like heat. “With the latest deal we closed and the amount I have in a separate fund with your name on it, I believe I have repaid that sum. With interest.”
His eyes were dark brown, like the bittersweet chocolate his family made. And yet that could hardly begin to describe their ferocity, or the intense way they narrowed on her now.
“I do not recall asking for repayment. Or even acknowledgment.”
“Nonetheless.” She took a deep breath. “My resignation letter waits for you in Milan.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon. You are resigning?”
“I am. I have.”
She reached out and did what she’d done ten years ago. She put her hand on his arm, but this time, she meant it.
Oh, how she meant it.
“Cristiano,” she said quietly. Invitingly, she hoped. “Would you like to buy me that drink?”
CHAPTER TWO
CRISTIANO CASSARA DID NOT care for surprises.
He had arranged his life with great precision, the better to avoid the unpleasant shock of events that went in directions he had not already foreseen. Cristiano had a deep and abiding dismay for chaos or mess of any kind, thanks to a childhood brimming over with nothing but, and had therefore dedicated himself to organizing as much of the world as possible to suit h
is requirements.
Something that was easier than perhaps it ought to have been when one was a Cassara.
He should have deeply disliked the fact that this woman had deliberately shifted the ground beneath their feet. That she had not stayed put in the compartment where he’d placed her years ago.
He told himself he did.
But it was too late. Something in him had shifted, too, without a care for how little he liked the sensation. And he suddenly found himself looking at Julienne Boucher as if he’d never seen her before.
As if she was a beautiful woman he’d happened to meet in a bar in Monte Carlo, instead of all the other things she’d been to him over time. His attempt at kindness, at a kind of redemption. The embodiment of his guilt. And possibly the best vice president the Cassara Corporation had ever had, save himself.
“What exactly are you offering me?” he asked, finding his gaze intent on hers. He did nothing to temper it. “And more important, why are you offering it?”
“You could have taken what I was offering ten years ago. You didn’t.”
He gazed down at the hand she’d laid on his arm as if it was a writhing, poisonous snake. When he raised his gaze to hers once more, he felt certain it was frigid.
Yet somehow, she did not retreat.
“Are you suggesting that because I did not behave like an animal then I might reverse course now?” He blinked in an astonishment that was in no way exaggerated. “I don’t know what is more offensive. That you think I require pity sex or worse, that you imagine I might accept it.”
He had meant to sound cold. Exacting. And yet somehow the word sex seemed to linger between them, making its own weather.
“That’s not what I meant to suggest at all.”
And through the kick of the temper he usually fought much harder to keep under wraps, he was aware that Julienne did not seem upset. She gazed back at him calmly, her face open and her eyes clear, and he was forced to think back to all the other times this woman had sat before him in her other role. As his employee.
Which was the only way he had thought about her since she’d joined the company as an intern approximately a thousand years ago. He had watched her meteoric rise from intern to vice president with a detached sort of interest, the way he would have noted any other rapid ascent, and he had sat in many meetings face-to-face with her coolness. Cristiano would not have had said he’d admired the way she handled herself, but he had appreciated it. On behalf of the Cassara Corporation, of course.
It occurred to him now that she was not afraid of him. Not intimidated in the least, which was unusual.
Remarkable, even.
“I have always been enormously grateful to you,” she said, leaving her viper of a hand where it was. Cristiano had the notion he could feel the heat of it through the fine wool of the suit his tailors had crafted precisely for the late October weather, when that was unlikely. As unlikely as the wholly unexpected response his body was having to her. “How could I not be? And I always planned to repay you, because that is the decent thing to do, is it not?”
His mouth was full of ice, it seemed. “It is unnecessary.”
“To you, yes. Which only makes it more necessary to me.”
Again he stared down at her hand, trying to recall the last time someone had dared place a hand upon him without an invitation and his express permission. Nothing came to mind.
Not even his father had dared, after a certain point. When Cristiano had finally grown too tall.
And the longer her hand rested there on his forearm, the less unpleasant he found it, no matter what he told himself. Quite the opposite, in fact. That heat instead seemed to wind through him, a peculiar treachery.
There were more betrayals. The longer she stood there, too close to him, he noticed things. He noticed her. Her narrow, elegant fingers. The carefully polished nails, in a quietly sophisticated shade that made him think of what her skin might look like, flushed with pleasure against smooth sheets.
Unbidden, Cristiano remembered the last time she’d put her hand on him, here in this same bar a lifetime ago. He couldn’t say he’d thought about it since—and yet now he suddenly had a perfect recollection of her same hand in the same place, though she had been altogether rougher then. Her nails had been ragged and untended, or bitten down to the quick. And her eyes had been glazed with misery and fear, not...
But he did not wish to define what it was he saw in Julienne’s gaze just then.
No matter his body’s enthusiastic response.
“The Cassara Corporation has been mother and father to me,” Julienne said, with a soft intensity that he ordered himself to ignore. But couldn’t. “A family as well as a job. But you were the one who saved me. Right here. And then again and again over the years by providing me every opportunity to save myself. So I did, but all the while, I had you there as a guide. Or a goal, maybe.”
“If you mean in a business sense, I must tell you, Ms. Boucher, that this is no way to go about—”
Her hand tightened on his arm. Cristiano felt the sensation race through him like an electric shock.
“It’s not about business. Or why would I resign?” Julienne looked far more composed than he felt, and Cristiano hardly knew how to account for such a thing. “I wanted to repay our debt to you in ten years. I’ve done that now. But as those ten years passed, I found myself wishing that I could convince you to take my initial offer, after all.”
When he glared at her, she only smiled. “Not for money, of course. I’m not in the same circumstances I was then. I’m not sixteen. I’m an adult woman, no longer your employee, and fully in control of her own faculties. I am not coerced. I am not desperate. When I found out you were going to be in Monaco again so soon after my last deal went through, it seemed the perfect bookend.”
“A ‘bookend’?” Cristiano repeated, and it was bad enough that he was looking at her now. Truly seeing her, after so long making it his business to act as if she wasn’t quite there.
It was distinctly uncomfortable.
Because Julienne might have been a scraggly, terrified teenager ten years ago, covered in too much mascara and obvious misery. But that version of her was gone. She had grown into a beautiful woman, whether he chose to admit it or not. Her hair gleamed that burnished gold and brown that made him...hungry. Her eyes were too clever by half, fixed on him with an intensity and a sincerity that made his blood heat.
And he would have to be a dead man not to notice that her body, no longer packaged in a tacky dress that had been much too old for her, was a quiet symphony of curves and grace.
Cristiano did not indulge himself with his employees, as a matter of honor and good business sense alike. Both virtues, to his mind, and both traits his own father had distinctly lacked.
But Julienne had tendered her resignation.
And enveloped as they were in the dim embrace of a quiet bar tucked away in the midst of Monte Carlo’s frenetic opulence, he could hardly remember why he should have objected to any of this in the first place.
Julienne did not know it, but she was already connected to him in ways that would have made him far more than merely uncomfortable, had he allowed the strict compartments he kept inside him to open wide at any point in the past ten years. He never had.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to now, but her hand was on his arm and there was that heat—
Cristiano had not been in this specific bar by chance ten years ago. He disliked Monaco intensely, associating it as he did with the worst of his father’s notorious excesses. It had been in this very bar that he had indulged in the last of those terrible scenes with Giacomo Cassara. His father had been cruel. Cristiano had returned the favor. And he had been sitting right here, staring at his father’s favorite drink—the demon Giacomo had carried about on his back, night and day, for as long as Cristiano could remember, wondering at
his own descent into cruelty and what it might herald—when Julienne had appeared beside him.
He had been engaged in nothing less than a battle for his own soul that night. The endless war with his father was one of attrition, and any victories Cristiano scored grew more Pyrrhic by the day. He had begun to wonder if it was worth attempting to live up to his grandfather’s antiquated notions of honor when Giacomo was so busy dedicating himself to living down to every expectation.
Cristiano had been raised by two men, one a saint and one a devil, and that night he’d been wavering between them.
That was the mess that Julienne Boucher had walked in on, tottering on heels she clearly didn’t yet know how to walk in.
He had glanced up to find her there beside him, as pale as she was determined. And there had never been any question that he might help himself to her, as his tastes ran to the enthusiastic, not the unwilling. Or the transactional. He’d felt for a moment as if he had his grandfather on one shoulder and his father on the other.
And in the middle stood a girl with poverty all over her like the too-tight dress she wore and a fixed smile on her too-young face, offering herself to him.
Cristiano had not been tempted to sample her wares. He wasn’t remotely interested in teenagers, heaven forbid. And he certainly did not troll for sex from the streets. But it had taken him a beat too long to say so. To brush off the whispering devil spilling poison into his ear—the one telling him to ignore her, the one insisting she wasn’t his problem when he had enough of his own, the one who wanted him to turn his back on her and get back to his already messy evening—and do what was right.
That he had wavered at all, that he was that selfish, disgusted him.
And perhaps that was why he had not simply given her some money from his pocket and gone on his way. It was the guilt he couldn’t shake that had made him go further. It was the stain of his shame that had turned him into her benefactor.
To prove that he was nothing like his father.
Even if, later that same night, he had learned that in truth, he was worse.
The Italian's Pregnant Cinderella (Passion In Paradise Book 8) Page 2