should have known that I was mixing with someone far above my station.” His voice was scathing. The look on his face was far worse than a blow could have been, she was certain. “It is no more than we peasants are good for, is it not?”
Sophie’s heart kicked so hard she was afraid it might crack a rib. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“But of course you do. You are so blue-blooded I am surprised you do not drip sapphires wherever you walk. Is that not what you summoned me here to make clear?” He looked around again, as if he could see over the hill to the grand house that had commanded the earldom for centuries. As if he could see her family’s own estates to the north. As if he knew every shameful, snobbish thing her parents had said to her over the years. “After all, what am I to you? The bastard son of a Sicilian village woman who raised me on her own, with nothing but shame and censure to ease her path. Oh, yes. And the rich men’s washing, which she counted herself lucky to have.”
“You don’t know anything about me—” she started, determined to defend herself when the truth was, she had no defense for what she’d done. She still couldn’t believe she’d actually done it.
“I knew you were a virgin, Sophie,” he cut in. She still wasn’t used to it, the dark and delicious way he said her name. As if it was a caress, when she remembered his caresses too well. A mirthless smile moved over his sensual mouth, but it failed to make him any less appealing. She doubted anything could. “I suppose I have no one to blame but myself for imagining that also made you an innocent.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Another lie.” Renzo let out a small, hard laugh that was about as amused as that smile. “You know exactly what I want from you.”
“Then I’m glad we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation at last,” Sophie said, somehow managing to sound cool despite the clambering inside of her. “I apologize for not having it with you that night.”
“Because you were too busy sneaking off, your tail between your legs, back to your earl and your engagement and your pretty little life in a high-class cage. Is that not so?”
It was such an apt description of Sophie’s furtive behavior that morning after in Monaco—filled with the terrible mix of sick shame at her actions and something proud and defiant deep inside of her that simply refused to hate the greatest night of her life, no matter what it made her—that she had to pause for a minute. She had to try to catch her breath.
And when she did, she reminded herself that it didn’t matter what he called her or what he thought about her, as painful as it might be to hear. There was a far more important issue to address.
“Renzo,” she began, because it didn’t matter how little she wanted to tell him what he needed to know. It didn’t matter that a single sentence would change both of their lives forever.
Their lives were already altered forever. He just didn’t know it yet.
But he didn’t look the slightest bit inclined to listen to her.
“What I cannot understand,” he seethed at her in that same dark, dangerous way that made the night seem very nearly transparent beside him, “is why you thought you could do nothing more than click your fingers and I would come running.”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly, something she wasn’t sure she recognized stampeding through her, like fear. But much more acrid. “But here you are.”
Sophie only realized she’d backed away from him when she felt the car behind her. She reached out, flattening her hands against the car’s bonnet, sleek and low, a great deal like the only other vehicle she’d seen this man drive.
The stars had come out far above, but she didn’t need the light they threw to illuminate the man before her. He would be burned deep into her flesh forever. She saw him when she closed her eyes. He haunted her dreams. The fact that he was standing here before her now, and no matter that he seemed to hate her, was almost too much for her to take in.
She had spent far too much time staring at pictures of him on the internet in the interim, like a lovesick teen girl, but she still remembered him from that night in Monte Carlo. She had walked away from the table of her friends, all gathered together to celebrate her upcoming nuptials at what Poppy had called her proper hen do. She had needed the air. A moment to catch her breath, and to stop pretending that marrying Randall filled her with joy. Or filled her with anything at all beyond the same, low-grade dread with which she’d faced every one of her familial obligations thus far.
The good news was, once she provided Dal with the requisite heir and spare, she could look forward to a happy, solitary life of charity and good works. They could live apart, only coming together at certain events annually. Or they could work together as if the family name was a brand and the two of them its ambassadors, just like her own parents.
No one would call her parents unhappy, she’d told herself as she’d tried to find her equanimity again.
But then again, no one was likely to call them happy, either.
Sophie just needed to resign herself to what waited for her. She knew that. She didn’t understand why the closer she got to her wedding, the less resigned she felt.
But then she’d looked up, and there he’d been.
Renzo had been dressed in a dark suit, open at the neck, that seemed to do nothing but emphasize the long, sculpted ranginess of a body she knew at a glance was athletic in every sense of the term. His hair was a rich, too-long, dark brown, threaded through with gold, that called to mind the sorts of endless summers in the glorious sun that she had never experienced. He had the face of a poet, a sensual mouth below high cheekbones, and glorious eyes of dark, carnal amber—but he moved like a king.
She had known that he was coming for her from the first glance.
And when she lay awake at night and cataloged her sins, she knew that was the worst one. Because she hadn’t turned around or headed back to her friends. She hadn’t kept going, pushing her way through the crowd until she could hide herself in a bathroom somewhere. She hadn’t assumed her usual mask of careless indifference that the papers she tried her best not to appear in liked to call haughty.
Sophie had seen temptation on a collision course with her and she’d...done absolutely nothing to avoid it.
She had stood where she was, rooted to the floor, and while she would never admit this out loud—and especially not to him—the truth was that she hadn’t thought she could move.
One look at Renzo from across the crowded floor, right there in the grand casino, and her knees had threatened to give out.
And it didn’t help, here on a forgotten country lane back home in England, that she knew precisely what he was capable of. She knew that none of her oversize, almost-farcically innocent daydreams were off the mark.
She hadn’t been ready for a man of Renzo’s skill, much less his uninhibited imagination.
But Sophie had always been a quick learner.
“Why am I here?” Renzo growled again.
He moved closer to her, that same erotic threat a kind of loose promise that hovered in his bones. She could see
