her bucket. With perhaps too much force, she reflected, when water sloshed over the sides.
“What do you want, Pascal?” she demanded.
Through her gritted teeth.
He looked down at her from his irritatingly great height. “I thought I came here to expel old ghosts.”
“I don’t believe you’d know a ghost if one appeared at the foot of your bed, wreathed in chains and moaning your name.”
Again he blinked as if he expected the movement of his eyelids to bring underlings running to serve him. Something that likely occurred with depressing regularity down in Rome.
“You do not believe that you have haunted me these past years, cara?” And she couldn’t say she cared for the way he used the endearment, either. Like a sharp-edged blade, and he wasn’t afraid to cut her. “I cannot say I believe it, either. And yet here I am, when I vowed I would never return.”
“I suggest you turn around, return to wherever you came from and uphold your vow.”
He did not take her suggestion. Instead, he stayed where he was and studied her for a moment.
“I do not understand why my board would be at all interested in you,” he said after what felt like an eternity. Or three. “I’ve never kept this part of my life a secret. Everyone knows I nearly died in the mountains and it changed me profoundly. I discuss it often enough. Why would they come here now? What could they hope to find here besides an old lover?”
Cecilia could hardly breathe. She couldn’t imagine what expression she wore on her face. An old lover. Was that what she was to him? Was that all she was?
But she kept her cool, no matter what it cost her, because she had to. She had to. She would not react to the tightness in her chest. The shortness in her breath.
Or that wild, betraying tumult in her pulse.
All that she could chalk up to fear, she told herself as Pascal gazed down at her, arrogant and impatient. It was nothing but panic, surely. The strange feeling, too much like some kind of anticipation, she felt that her worst fear was being realized in the extraordinary flesh whether she liked it or not.
She could understand that. It was her other reactions that concerned her more. Most especially that melting low in her belly that told her terrible truths about her true feelings about Pascal’s return that she wanted desperately to deny.
She got to her feet then, taking her time. And as she did, she was fiercely glad that she looked like who and what she was: a woman who washed floors for a living. She was nothing like the sorts of pampered women Pascal always had on his arm in the magazine pictures that were burned into her head. Cecilia knew she bore no resemblance to them and never would. She was not elegant. Her jeans were too big, decidedly ripped and horribly stained. She wore a ratty T-shirt beneath the long-sleeve buttoned-up shirt she’d tied off at her waist. Her hair was a disaster, no matter that she’d tied it back with an old scarf.
She expected she looked more or less tragic to a man like him. He was no doubt asking himself how he’d ever lowered himself to touch one such as her. She wondered it herself.
But this was a good thing, she told herself sternly. Because he needed to go away and never come back. And if she disgusted him now, well, she was only what she’d had to become. To survive him. If that got him to leave, great. Whatever worked.
She ignored the small pang that notion gave her.
“I expected you to be wearing a nun’s habit,” he said, and she opted not to hear the wicked undertone in his voice. Much less…remember the way she’d thrilled to it, once.
“I chose not to become a nun.” She did not say, because of you.
But his eyes narrowed anyway. “I thought that was your life’s ambition. Was it not?”
“People change.”
“You seem markedly changed, in fact. One might even say, distinctly hardened.”
“I’m no longer a foolish girl easily taken advantage of by traveling soldiers, if that’s what you mean.”
His head canted to one side, and his black eyes gleamed. “Did I take advantage of you, Cecilia? That’s not how I recall it.”
She eyed him. “Whether you recall it that way or not, that’s how it was.”
“Tell me, then, how precisely did I take advantage of you? Was it when you crawled into my hospital bed, threw your leg over me and then rode us both to a mad finish?”
She remembered it as he said it. She remembered everything. The wonder of taking him inside her. The madness, the dizzy whirl. His big hands wrapped around her hips and his intent, ferociously greedy gaze.
No one had ever explained to her that the trouble with temptation was that it felt like coming home, wreathed in light and glory.
That melting sensation grew worse, but she refused to let herself squirm the way she wanted to do.
Because this wasn’t about her.
“I always wondered what it would be like to have a conversation like this with you,” Cecilia said when she was sure she could manage to sound calm. Faintly bored. And it was not untrue, though as the years passed, the content of the conversation had changed in her head. She’d asked fewer questions. At some point she’d even become magnanimous. She’d practiced it enough in mirrors. “I find it’s less productive than I might have imagined. I don’t understand why you’re here. I am not haunted.”
Only furious, still and always, but she didn’t tell him that. He didn’t deserve to know.
“Can it be as simple as catching up with an old friend?” he asked as if he was…reasonable in any way. Palatable.
She made a scoffing sound. “Please. We were never friends.”
To her surprise, his mouth curved. “Cecilia. Of course we were.”
Something in her chest seemed to stutter to a halt then. Something different from the panic, the heat.
Because she remembered other things, too. Long afternoons when she would sit by his bedside, holding his hand or mopping his brow with a cool cloth. In those early days, when no one had known if he would make it, she’d sung to him. Songs of praise and joy interspersed with silly nursery rhymes and the like, all calculated to soothe.
When he grew stronger, he would tell her stories. He couldn’t believe that she had never been to Rome. That she had never been more than a couple of hours out of this valley, for that matter. Or not that she could recall. He painted pictures for her with his words, of ancient ruins interspersed with traffic charging this way and that, sidewalk cafés, beautiful fountains. Later, when she was no longer a novitiate and often found herself up in the middle of the night—either because she was worried about her future, or because sleep was a rarity for a woman in her position—she’d looked up pictures online and found the city he described. In bright detail.
He’d made her feel as if she knew it personally. Sometimes she thought she hated him for that.
“Either
