that he would kiss her again.
Because it cut the knees straight out of her argument, not to mention all her prepared rebukes. It reminded her too well of the reasons she’d given up everything she knew for him.
The truth was, it had been years since she could even imagine how it was that she’d allowed a torn-up soldier to turn her from her chosen path so easily. Sometimes she would sit up at night, when Dante was sound asleep and looked angelic, instead of the whirl of holy terror and inexhaustible energy he could be when he was awake. She would gaze at him, allowing herself to feel that flood of maternal love—but still completely unable to understand how it all happened.
How had a person as quiet and contained as she was…do what she did?
Her life had been divided into before Pascal and after him, and the further she got away from those stolen months, the less he seemed real in her memories. There were a thousand stories about the fecklessness of youth, after all. Everyone knew that young girls were easy pickings, and as embarrassing as it might have been for Cecilia to think of herself in that way, that was the story she’d accepted about herself. That was the story she told, when it was necessary to tell it at all, here in a small valley filled with people who had known her since the day she’d arrived here and could tell her story for her. And often did.
It was a hard shock to discover that all she’d done was mute the man.
Because the reality of Pascal was in full, living color. And his kiss was electrifying.
And Cecilia understood that she’d been lying to herself for a long, long time.
She found she didn’t know quite how to process any of that.
“This is all irrelevant,” she said now. She moved away from him, aware that her body no longer felt like her own. That irritated her almost more than the rest, because it had taken her so long to get it back. There had been Pascal, then Dante, and years before she’d become simply Cecilia again. “Feel free to send your lawyers. Do your worst. I can’t say I care.”
“Lawyers?” He sounded mystified, though she didn’t look back at him to see. “What do my lawyers have to do with anything?”
“Rich men are renowned for going to great lengths to make sure they don’t have to give away any of their money, for any reason. Call it what you like. I’m not going to fight you.”
“I’m not following you.” And his voice changed as he said that. Less the man as surprised as she was at the way that kiss had exploded between them and more…dangerous. It sent a shiver down her spine. Because suddenly, she had no trouble imagining him as a leader of men. A captain of his industry in every regard. “Was I planning to give away my money in some capacity?”
“I’m sure you’ll have a battalion of documents for me to sign. So you don’t have to claim Dante. And so I will never make any kind of claim on you. Whatever. What I’m trying to say is that I expect it.”
“Cecilia.” Her name was like an oath. “There is no circumstance under which I would knowingly renounce my claim to my own child. Understand this now.”
She couldn’t help but look back at him then, though she instantly wished she hadn’t. There was an intensity in Pascal’s black-gold gaze that made her clench her teeth tight to hold back the shudder that threatened to take her over.
But all that did was send all that sensation spiraling down through her body until it lodged low in her belly.
“You say that now.” She told herself he couldn’t see her reaction to him. That all she had to do was pretend she wasn’t having one. “I think it’s likely the shock. Once it wears off you’ll change your tune. You’ll want nothing more than to get back to your preferred life.”
“This is what you think of me?” His voice was quiet, but she didn’t mistake it for weakness. Not when it seemed to fill the small church, swelling up from the stones at her feet. “You concealed my own child from me for all these years. Now you imagine that having learned of him at last, I will abandon him all over again. This from a woman who spent months sitting at my bedside. Talking to me. Getting to know me in some small way, I would have thought.”
That pricked at her. “The man I thought I knew would never have left the way you did, in the dark of night. With no word.”
Pascal didn’t move toward her, so there was no reason she should have felt as if he loomed over her, trapping her, when she’d put several pews between them.
“Remind me, whose hurt feelings are at play here?” he asked in that same quiet way that hummed in her, intense and demanding. “Mine, because of the consequences of my actions? Or yours, because you feel slighted by a choice that might have had to do with you, but you must have known full well had nothing to do with the child.”
“It doesn’t matter whose feelings are hurt,” she fired back, stung. And something like terrified that he’d hit on something she hadn’t even known was inside her. Was she truly so petty? It made her stomach hurt that she couldn’t immediately answer in the negative. “What matters is that I don’t intend to allow my child to play victim to your periodic sentimentality.”
He let out a harsh sound. “I have no idea what that means.”
“You can’t possibly want him,” Cecilia said, exasperated.
She had the sense of him growing bigger again. Sharper, this time. Like a loaded weapon, pointed straight at her.
“You do not have the slightest idea what it is I want,” he said in that same deadly tone. “How can you, when I hardly know myself? You have known about this child’s existence for the past six years. I have known about it for thirty minutes. Pray, do not tell me what it is I want when I am still reacting to the news that this child exists.”
“I don’t want Dante to have to pay for it while you sort through your emotions.”
“Cecilia. You do not get to decide what and how I feel about any of this. And you certainly will not dictate what I do.”
She didn’t mistake that for anything but the threat it was.
“This isn’t one of your boardrooms, Pascal,” she threw at him. “He’s my child. You don’t get to rip open his life unless I say you can, and I say you absolutely can’t.”
Pascal laughed. But it was not a sound of amusement.
Cecilia felt it like a kick to the gut.
“You should never have kept my son from me all this time, but you did,” he told her, his voice as dark as his gaze, and that thunderous expression he wore. “We all get to do what we can get away with, don’t we? And now that I know about him, there is nothing that will keep me from him. And you should know that there is very little I can’t get away with, cara.”
“Stop threatening me!” she snapped at him.
He laughed again, and it was not exactly soothing. “I have yet to begin threatening you.”
She panicked. There was no other way to put it. She wasn’t sure she could feel the top of her head; her lips still throbbed, she could taste him and he showed no sign whatsoever of slowing down.
“Who’s
