The Bride's Baby of Shame

by Caitlin Crews

But she reminded herself why he was here. Why she even knew him.

  Sophie had stepped out of line exactly once. She’d sneaked out of her cage, thrown caution to the wind, and this was the result.

  She’d handed over her innocence to a man who could not possibly understand what it was she’d surrendered to him. And then she’d allowed herself to imagine, like some kind of child, that he could rescue her from this life she’d been born into. That she could see him again the night before her wedding and feel that same sense of impossible homecoming she’d felt in his villa in Monaco. That he would somehow make it all okay.

  But he wasn’t that man. That man doesn’t exist, she told herself harshly.

  And if last night had taught her anything, it was that throwing away her safe, knowable, perfectly plotted-out life for a taste of passion led to nothing but being left there on the side of a country lane. In the rain.

  Pregnant on the side of the road, literally.

  Sophie knew she had nobody to blame for that but herself.

  “I think that you are carrying a child,” Renzo was saying, low and furious, that lazy grip of his on the post...harder. Tighter. “My child. And you must understand that if that is so, I cannot permit you to go ahead with this wedding of yours.”

  “It’s not up to you,” she managed to say. “Think of all the things you called me last night. What makes you imagine that I would obey you in anything?”

  “I have so far been very kind to you, cara. I would advise you not test the boundaries of my patience.”

  “I didn’t send you that newspaper clipping.” Sophie sat straighter, even though it made her spine ache. “I didn’t summon you here. I thought you texted me...” She shook her head. “Why would anyone do such a thing? I assumed it was a threat. And, sure enough, when you appeared, you set about threatening me as soon as possible.”

  “Did you feel threatened?” Renzo asked softly, that edge in his voice much worse than anything he’d said. “Let me assure you, Sophie, that I have not begun to threaten you. Last night was a game. This, here, this lie you tell with every breath...” He shook his head, though his gaze never left her. “I am no longer playing.”

  “I think you have me confused with someone who cares whether you are playing games or not,” Sophie told him, with tremendous composure she was nowhere near feeling.

  Renzo dropped his arm to his side and it was astonishing how much more threatening that was. As if he was no longer bothering to pretend that he was in any way at his ease—something that could only bode ill for Sophie.

  “I will ask you one more time,” he growled at her, his accent more pronounced, as if to indicate exactly how far south this was headed. Assuming there was a worse place to go than him here, in her bedroom at Langston House, with her and Dal’s entire families and wedding parties in residence. “Are you carrying my child? Is that the consequence you dared not tell me about last night?”

  Sophie wished she wasn’t in bed, her hair everywhere, wearing nothing but a flimsy little sleeping gown. She wished she was wrapped in sheets of armor. Encased in steel. She tried to pretend that she was tough and strong and brave—anything but what she was, a scared twenty-six-year-old in deep over her head with this man, in a situation she’d caused.

  That was the part that made her the most panicky. The fact that she had done this. No one had done it to her. She could so easily have stayed with her friends that night in Monte Carlo, stayed the virgin she was expected to be, and woken up in the morning prepared to meet her obligations as expected.

  Without a brand-new pregnancy that should never have happened in the first place, or the sort of unfortunate connection to a Sicilian race car driver that would send her father into paroxysms of rage.

  Oh, the things she wished.

  Sophie told herself it didn’t matter what she wished or how she felt, it only mattered what she allowed Renzo to see. And even that mattered only insofar as it allowed her to clean up her own mess.

  “Here’s a hypothetical.” She cleared her throat, wishing her mouth wasn’t so dry. “Let’s say you were, in fact, the father of a child who came about thanks to a one-night stand that should never have happened. That no one must ever suspect happened. What then? What claim do you imagine that gives you?”

  “What claim?” He bared his teeth at her. “It gives me the only claim. My child, my claim.”

  “That might be more meaningful if I was a free woman,” Sophie said quietly. “But I am not.”

  “That sounds a great deal like your problem, not mine. And certainly not my child’s.”

  “You were a mistake,” Sophie said, emphasizing that last word. “What right do you imagine you have to barge into my life and change it now? I never promised you anything. And I don’t recall you making any pledges yourself.”

  “I don’t think you have the slightest idea what I might have done, since you sneaked off before I woke.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Which you, in all your years of playing the field in the full glare of the tabloids, never did. Not even once. You preferred to lounge about and spend the mornings with each and every one of your conquests, making affirmations and discussing commitment over breakfast.”

  “None of them fell pregnant.”

  “How would you know?” she asked. “Did all the vows you exchanged after your single night in their company extend to them sharing their fertility status with you weeks later?”

  “I know because I have never failed to use protection before.”

  “Until me,” Sophie said, and couldn’t quite keep her tone as mild as she would have liked. “What luck.”

  Renzo didn’t say anything. And despite herself, Sophie remembered how it had happened. When he’d lifted her against him, right there against the wall. When he’d somehow understood—almost instantly—how little experience she had. He’d laid her down right there on the floor and had taken his time. He’d stripped her as if the act of removing her clothes was a caress.

  Then he’d set his mouth between her legs and utterly destroyed her.

  And after that, things had only gotten more intense.

  But there was no use thinking about any of that now. There was no point and there was certainly no use. She was as trapped as she’d ever been. His presence here didn’t change that—it just made what she had to do that much worse.

  “In any case,” Sophie said when the silence dragged on too long, “this is not my decision to make. After our wedding, I will speak to the earl and see how he wishes to handle things.”

  “Know this, if nothing else. Your little earl has no authority over my child.”

  “But what he does have is authority over me,” Sophie threw back at him with all the anguish she’d been bottling up inside of her these last weeks. “He will be my husband in a matter of hours and, as perhaps you might have guessed, it is not a modern arrangement. It will be quite traditional, and I imagine the decision—all decisions—will not be mine to make. And if that’s the case, believe me, they will certainly not be yours to make, either.”

  She hardly knew what she was saying. She couldn’t imagine Dal asserting his authority over anything—he was far too cold. Remote. He would be far more likely to curl his lip and banish her to a family parcel of land off in the Shetland Islands or somewhere equally far enough away to feel like an appropriate prison.

  But she saw no reason to share that with Renzo.

  She didn’t know what she expected. But it wasn’t the laugh that Renzo let out then, loud and long. She might even have thought it was a real laugh if she’d never heard the other.

  And if she felt a terrible pang at the thought of his real laughter, spilling over her like light and heat as they sprawled there in his wide bed in Monaco—well. Her entire life was a story of compromises she’d made even before being asked, because that was her role. Sacrifices that only seemed so i
n retrospect, when she realized what it was she’d missed out on. Obligation over everything, even common sense.

  That was what being the Carmichael-Jones heiress meant. That was what it had always meant.

  It took precedence over everything, even this. Especially this.

  “I will assume that all of this is your roundabout way of telling me that yes, you are indeed pregnant,” Renzo said, his voice sounding rougher than usual. Thicker, maybe. Harsher. “You were a virgin when I met you. I can therefore only assume that the baby is mine, as I suspected.”

  “There is a great deal of debate on that,” she told him, tilting her chin up as if she thought he might take a swing at her. As if she wanted him to. “After you, I thought—why not take a tour of Europe? From one bed to the next until I got my fill. As you do. So really, it could be anyone’s.”

  All Renzo did was shift his weight. Or move again without seeming to move at all. She thought his eyes got darker. Or they landed more heavily on her, somehow. All she knew was that the world seemed to shift, then tilt, and all she could seem to do was hold on to the bed beneath her and hope for the best.

  He did not dignify her claims of sleeping her way across Europe with a response, which only made her want to provoke him all the more.

  She told herself she had no earthly idea why she would do such a thing.

  “You should consider your next move very carefully,” Renzo told her matter-of-factly. As if he was a general delivering orders to troops whose lives depended on obeying him. “You should bear in mind that I could make a scene now. I could have half the house in this room in the next five minutes, to witness you and me in bed together, mere hours before your wedding. I’d invite you to ask yourself how you think your friends and family would handle such a thing.”

  Sophie could imagine it all too well. Her father would become apoplectic as his dynastic dreams faded away before his very eyes. Her mother might actually swoon from the shame of it. She even imagined that Dal might allow his expression to frost over into an expression of refined disgust, the deepest feeling she imagined he was capable of experiencing.

  Beyond that, Sophie herself would be humiliated, and on a grand scale. The guests would inevitably sell their stories, which Sophie’s parents would find almost more unpalatable than the story itself, and which Sophie could expect to haunt her. The wedding would be off, of course. The things that an earl might choose to ignore years into his arranged marriage and after Sophie had dutifully given him children, he would, naturally, be unable to overlook today.

  A cheating wife was one thing, especially when they could expect to have little relationship of their own. Or so it seemed with all the people Sophie knew in her claustrophobic circles. But a cheating fiancée with the gall to parade her lover beneath his roof mere hours before the wedding ceremony? That was something else.

  If it wasn’t, Sophie’s father would never have spent all these years lecturing her mercilessly on the value of virtue.

  “I’m sure it would be fine,” she said now, trying to brazen her way through.

  Renzo did not look the least bit impressed with the attempt.

  “I’m going to allow you the opportunity to do the right thing,” he told her, almost kindly. But she could see his face and she knew that whatever else was motivating him right now, it wasn’t kindness. “Let us be clear, you and I. You do not deserve this courtesy from me. It is a measure, cara mia, of what a forgiving man I am. Charitable unto my soul. If I were you, I would consider flinging yourself at my feet to show your gratitude.”

  Last night Sophie had been afraid she might cry. This morning, however, that feeling was gone. It had been replaced by this...flashing thing like lightning that swirled around inside of her and made her want nothing more than to land a punch or two. The way he kept doing.

  “Charitable. Forgiving.” She shook her head. “I think perhaps you’re translating the words wrong from Italian, Renzo.”

  “Is that a dig?” His smile then was so sharp she thought it could have cut steel into tiny shavings. “Be aware, Sophie. I am not your earl. I was not raised with silver spoons stuffed in every orifice, starched and scrubbed within an inch of my life into some cordial automaton. I am not polite. I am not courteous. I was raised with nothing and was forced to make everything that I now possess. And I will do anything to keep what is mine.” That smile began to remind her of nothing so much as fangs. “You have no idea what you have done. None at all.”

  He looked scary and intense, and there was a time—perhaps only a few hours ago—where she would have found that almost too much to bear. But he had said and done these things to her already, and here she still was. She could bear anything.

  And the light coming through her heavy curtains was no longer quite so pale or insubstantial. It looked like sunlight.

  Her wedding day had arrived, despite her best efforts and no matter that there had been a reappearance of the shockingly beautiful—if wildly overwhelming—Sicilian there before her.

  It had been profoundly childish to imagine she could escape this particular noose around her neck. She didn’t know how she’d managed to pretend, for even a moment, that she might somehow manage to buck the tremendous weight of two ancient families’ expectations. No matter what she’d done.

  Sophie made a big show of yawning, complete with a theatrical stretch.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she murmured, though she kept her gaze locked to his. “Blah-blah-blah. I will pay. I will rue the day. I will cry myself to sleep and your name will be a curse.” She sounded so bored she was surprised she could sit upright, and she waved a languid hand to underscore her tone. “This is all very melodramatic and the truth is, you’ve jumped to a lot of mad, unsubstantiated conclusions. You’re lucky I haven’t called to have you thrown out of this house. But I will. You have exactly five seconds to go before I do.”

  “Do you truly wish to test me, Sophie?” Renzo drawled, so soft and deadly it shivered over her skin like its own breeze. “Can you really believe I am a man to be trifled with? I would not have imagined you could be so foolish.”

  There was some kind of devil in her, needling her. Kicking at her. It made her want to open up her mouth and say something else he wouldn’t be able to forgive. It made her want to hurt him, however she could—

  She wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt her last night.

  Sophie felt the air go out of her at that. Was that really who she was? She wanted to hurt this man because he wasn’t the fantasy she’d built in her head? Could anyone have lived up to that?

  Or had she known he couldn’t—that no one could?

  Did you simply want justification to swan off into the prison of this marriage and get to feel superior and self-righteous? asked a little voice within.

  Condemning her thoroughly with a simple question she didn’t want to answer.

  And as if he could see it, or simply knew it somehow in that way he seemed to know all sorts of things about her he shouldn’t, Renzo smiled again.

  This time she thought it might cut her in half.

  “Do what you must,” he told her, with a quiet sort of conviction that made it too hard, suddenly, to sit still. “Have whatever conversations you feel you need to have. I will leave you to it. And I will expect you on that very same lane where you met me last night. You have two hours.”

  “Or what?” she asked.

  Her heart was thumping again, even louder, and so hard she felt vaguely ill. But her voice was barely a whisper.

  “You don’t want to know or what,” Renzo assured her. “Trust me on this.”

  And with that, he turned toward the door.

  Sophie couldn’t understand what was happening inside of her. There was that lightning flash, urging her on to do things she knew were well-nigh suicidal. There was that reservoir of something thicker, deeper. Sadder, something in her whis
pered. The part of her that remembered him different than this. The part that remembered him generous and like sunshine.

  Her brief escape, not a prison all his own.

  And more than that she felt something hollow, like an ache that only kept expanding, that wanted things she couldn’t seem to make sense of in her own head.

  Maybe that was why she was up and on her feet without giving herself a moment to consider it. To think better of it.

  But then again, had she really had a wholly coherent thought since the doctor had come back in with the news she hadn’t wanted at her physical a few days ago?

  Sophie had no time to consider that question now, because she scrabbled to the side of the bed and charged across the floor, chasing that long-legged stride of his. And then she threw herself at him, or close enough.

  She grabbed at his arm, which didn’t help anything. His leather coat was desperately soft, covering a bicep that appeared to be sculpted from stone. Renzo cast a glance down at her grip, then her face, his sensual mouth flat.

  Something hectic glittered in his dark amber eyes like a warning Sophie knew she should heed.

  “You can’t just come in here and throw all these threats around,” she hissed at him.

  “I think you will find that I did exactly that,” he said in that menacingly soft way of his that should have stopped her dead. And possibly made her cry, too. “Because I can. And more than that, you must understand that these are not idle threats. These are promises. If I were you, I would make peace with that now.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?” she threw at him, furious and panicked and something else she dared not name. “You are going to ruin my life and why? Just to hurt me? You must know that anything you do to hurt me will hurt this baby, too.”

  He reached down and put his hand over hers, then peeled her fingers from his arm, demonstrating his superior strength slowly and implacably and without hurting her at all.

  Which, of course, made it worse.

  “No child of mine will know a moment’s want,” Renzo told her, something dark she couldn’t understand in his voice. “Ever. You, on the other hand, I will maintain only as long as necessary. Why? Do you have a list of demands?”