snapped. “He doesn’t take a private jet to get his shopping done, I grant you, but his life is full. He wants for nothing. And I’m sorry that you think cleaning is beneath you, but luckily, I don’t. I make a good living. I take care of myself and my son. Not everybody needs to be rich.”
“Not everyone can be rich, it is true. But you happen to be raising the son and heir of a man who is. Several times over.”
“Money only buys things, Pascal,” she said with the dismissiveness of someone who had never lived more or less by their wits in the worst parts of a major city. “It certainly doesn’t make a person happy. As anyone who looks at you can tell quite clearly.”
“How would you know?” he asked, his tone deadly.
She flushed again. “I make Dante perfectly happy. That’s what matters.”
“You live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but cows and nuns. What kind of life is this for a boy?”
“There was a time when you thought this valley was paradise,” she threw at him. “It hasn’t changed any. But if you have, there is no need for you to suffer the cows and the nuns a moment more. You can turn around and leave right now.”
“I don’t think you’re understanding me.” He sounded almost gentle, he noted, which was at odds with that cold fury inside him. He leaned into it, because it was better than that terrible fissure. “I am Pascal Furlani and we are discussing the sole heir to everything I have built. No son and heir of mine can grow up like this, so far away from everything that matters.”
She scowled. “Then it’s a lucky thing your name isn’t on his birth certificate, isn’t it? You don’t have to worry yourself about how he’s raised.”
Pascal couldn’t seem to do anything but stay frozen solid where he stood, staring at her as if, were he to focus, he could make this go away. He could turn her into the ghost she should have been, not…this. Not mother to another bastard child, but this one his. His.
The scandal when it was discovered—because these things were always discovered, as Pascal knew all too well himself—would brand him the worst kind of hypocrite, given he’d never made any secret of his feelings on his own father’s behavior. He’d made himself the asterisk forever attached to his father’s name. Now he would have his own, and he knew full well the tabloids would have a field day with him.
But the thought of scandal made a different sort of apprehension grip him.
“Did you tell the members of my board about this child?” he demanded.
“I didn’t want to tell you about this child,” she replied furiously, her scowl deepening. “So no, I didn’t share the news with two complete strangers marching around the village officiously, asking rude questions.”
“But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have seen you. Or have asked someone else. Or otherwise figured it out.”
“I didn’t much care what they did.” And now she sounded impatient, which was just one more insult to add to the pile. “Just so long as they left. Which I would also like you to do. Now.”
Pascal couldn’t let himself think directly about the child. His child. His son. It was too much. It was so heavy he was convinced it would flatten him—but thinking about his spiteful, grasping board members in possession of this secret he hadn’t known he was keeping was different. It was easier to think about what they would do with the information than it was to think about the information itself.
Or that the information was a little boy who didn’t know he had a father who would never, ever have abandoned him if he’d had the choice.
“This is a disaster,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
But she heard him. Maybe he’d wanted her to hear him.
“Funnily enough, that’s what I thought you would say.” Her scowl smoothed out and her chin went up as if she was wrapping herself in armor. “As a matter of fact, all of this is happening precisely the way I imagined it would. So why don’t we fast-forward to the inevitable end without all of this carrying on that won’t get us anywhere?” Her violet eyes flashed as they held his gaze. “Just go. Leave here and return to your money and your life in Rome. No one has to know that you ever came here. Dante and I will muddle along as we always have and you can spend your time however it is you like. No harm, no foul.”
And she even waved her hand through the air with a languid indifference that made something in Pascal simply…snap.
One moment he was standing frozen and still in his fury, and the next he had moved toward her. He wrapped his hands around her soft, narrow shoulders, then held her there before him.
Cecilia made a slight startled sound. Her hands came up and she braced her fingers against his abdomen, though she didn’t push him away or try to pull back from him. It was as if she was holding her breath, waiting to see what he would do.
But all he did was lower his face so it was directly in hers.
“This is not going to go away,” he promised her, a thundering thing in his voice, though he kept it low. Even. “I am not going to go away. I have a son. A son. You have made me a father and taken it away from me, and I will never forgive you for either one of those things. But I know now. And nothing will be the same. Do you understand me?”
He expected her to order him to let go of her, which he would do, of course, because he wasn’t the animal she seemed to think he was. Even if it wasn’t exactly lost on him that even now, even with what he knew, his body was having a far more enthusiastic reaction to the close proximity with the woman who had haunted him all these years. Her shoulders fit perfectly in his palms, as ever.
And the last time he’d been this close to her, it had been a prelude to his mouth on hers. Then the hardest part of him deep inside her melting, clenching heat, making them both ache. Then shatter. Then do it all over again.
“That,” she said very distinctly, her violet eyes wide and fixed to his, “is absolutely never happening again.”
For the first time since he’d walked into this church, he saw the woman he’d left here six years ago. The one who had always known what he was thinking. The one who had so often been thinking the very same thing.
She certainly was now.
And she had kept this secret from him. She had made him into his worst nightmare. Pascal wanted to crush her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to tear apart this church and rip this whole valley apart with his hands. He wanted to rage hard enough to turn back time, so that he could prevent this tragedy from happening in the first place.
Or, something far more insidious whispered inside him, so you could stay this time. The way you wanted to back then.
And that thought was the biggest betrayal of them all.
Because staying here had never been an option, no matter how much he’d wanted it once. And no matter what price it turned out he’d have to pay for going.
Pascal stopped fighting that roar inside him. He surrendered to the yawning thing, rage and grief, fury and need.
He had never forgotten Cecilia Reginald.
