child. He pointed a railing finger at her.
“You have no idea what they’re really capable of. And you definitely don’t have the resources to hold them at a decent distance. So, no. Do not think for a minute that I will leave it to you to ‘handle’ security. I can’t even say I will take the babies and let you live your life away from us because you are part of this now, like it or not. So you will come to Paris with me and I will handle security.”
At some point she had pulled a cushion across her chest and had drawn her knees up, buffering herself against his outburst.
He pushed his fingers through his hair, scratching at his tight scalp, feeling like a bully now that the worst of his temper was spent, but—
“This was why I didn’t want children. This is how I knew it would be.” He was defeated by circumstance. “But we’re here now, so we’ll do what we must. You’ll marry me.”
“No,” she said in a husk of a voice, lips white.
He drew in a tested breath, frustration returning in a flood of heat. “Did you hear what I just said? You can’t stay here.”
“Yes, I heard you. Fine. I’ll live behind your iron curtain, but—” She swallowed. “But I won’t marry you.” Her chin came up in what he knew was her stand-ground face.
His ears buzzed as he sifted through her words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll live with you, but I won’t live with you.” She flushed and pulled her shoulders up defensively around her ears.
“You don’t want to sleep with me?” His heart bottomed out. She couldn’t mean that.
She flinched and looked away, blinking hard. “No. I don’t.”
“Liar.” It came out of him as a breath of absolute truth. A dying wish.
She made a face that held shame and guilt and self-contempt, but when she brought her gaze back to his, she didn’t try to convince him she was being honest. She couldn’t.
The naked vulnerability in her expression caught at something inside him, though. It was out of character and gut-wrenching, making him tamp it down with resistance. Cinnia was tough. He had always liked that about her. He needed her to be resilient and as impermeable as he was. It was too much on him if she was fragile.
Despite the revelation of weakness, however, she was resolved.
“We can carry on pretty much as we did before.” Her voice was a tangle of conflicted emotions. “I’ll work remotely around your schedule and go into my office when I can. I’ll have to see what my doctor says about travel, but I’m not up for a lot. I was planning to take a few months off work when the babies come, but I don’t care where we are when that happens. We can figure that out as we go along, but I’m not going to take up with you again.”
“It’s not ‘taking up.’ It’s marriage.” Did she realize how deeply she was insulting him? “Are you trying to make some kind of point? Damn it, Cinnia, are you still trying to prove something to a man in your past who has nothing to do with me?” He wanted to physically hunt down the jerk and shake him.
Her stare flattened to a tundra wasteland of blue that chilled him to the marrow.
“Do you want to marry me, Henri? If I wasn’t pregnant, would you even be here right now? If I had ended things purely because I wanted to marry and have children, would you have crossed a street to even say, ‘Nice to see you’? No. So, no, I’m not being perverse. Yes, this has everything to do with you. If you want to marry me, you can damn well get down on one knee, ask nicely and mean it.”
Cinnia went upstairs to pack.
Henri forced himself to sit and drink his cold tea while he ate a sandwich, determined to regain his composure after his flare-up.
He hadn’t meant to ignite like that, but Ramon was the only one who really understood how dark that time had been after their father’s death. Grief had crippled all of them, but a fresh round of attention had fallen on them with the funeral—the girls especially. At fifteen, they’d been long-legged fillies, striking in their youthful blossom of womanhood, hauntingly beautiful in their sorrow.
He and Ramon were used to being sexually objectified by then, but nothing had prepared any of them for the reprehensible, predatory way strange men had begun stalking the girls once the photos were published. For Trella, it had been particularly insidious, sparking panic attacks that had been debilitating.
While other young men his age were drinking themselves stupid, hooking up and partying, he and Ramon had been forced to a level of maturity that exceeded any geezer on the board.
In some ways, combating those dinosaurs for control of Sauveterre International had been a much-appreciated outlet. Ramon was the verbal one, passionately arguing their case and hotly quitting a tense meeting to let off steam by racing cars.
Henri had retreated to spreadsheets and numbers, facts and figures that fueled his ruthless pushback against attempts to sideline him.
He couldn’t count the nights he’d sat in a room lit only by the screen of his laptop, angry with his father for abandoning him to this, but sorry for him. Empathizing with him while silently begging for advice on how best to protect his mother and sisters.
Things had grown easier as the girls had matured and taken more responsibility for their own safety. Hell, Trella’s self-imposed seclusion had been a relief when it came to how vigilant they all had to be, not that Henri would have ever asked her to go to those lengths.
But he’d never forgotten those first years of wearing his father’s mantle, wondering how he would withstand the next day or the one after that. The pressure was too much to expect of anyone. It had hardened his resolve against ever having children and being charged with their safety.
Yet here he was. With Cinnia.
Leaning on his elbows, he rested his tight lips against his linked fingers, examining the assumption he had made before he’d even confirmed her pregnancy. Of course they would marry. For all his reluctance to become a family man, he was the product of one. He and Cinnia were compatible in many ways. It was a natural conclusion.
But she didn’t want to rekindle their physical relationship. If the reason was medical, she would have said, “I can’t,” but her words had been “I won’t.”
Because she wanted more than sex?
Do you love me?
He jerked to his feet as though he could escape his own ruminations by physically running from them. Now, more than ever, he couldn’t afford such distractions. Look at him, dwelling on things that couldn’t be changed when he should be putting wheels into motion for all that had changed.
He shook off his introspection, decided to tell his mother when Cinnia was with him, and video-called Ramon.
When he and his brother had been children, his mother had always spoken Spanish while their father had used his native French. They had wanted their boys to be fluent in both. Before he and Ramon went to school and learned otherwise, they had thought that
