the future, or...anything at all.
Her excitement morphed into horror, into fear.
As she watched him disappear from view, she didn’t know whether to be heartbroken or relieved over the fact that she would never see him again.
ALLEGRA WAS CONVINCED that things could not possibly get worse than they already were. It didn’t matter how many times she had wished over the past few weeks that her period would come. It refused to come. It did not matter how fervently she prayed that there would only be one pink line on the test that she took at home that morning. There were two.
It did not matter that she was engaged to be married to a prince and that she was supposed to give birth to his royal heirs. Because he was not the man she had slept with. No, she had slept with only one man, and she had no idea who he was.
She had gone over a great many options in her mind since making the unsettling discovery that morning. The first being that she could quickly fly to wherever her fiancé was and seduce him.
There were several reasons that wouldn’t work, not the least of which being that she couldn’t spend her entire life lying to a man about the paternity of his child. Also, Raphael wasn’t stupid. He was a prince, and he required an heir. An heir who was his by blood. That meant that he would undoubtedly be doing paternity tests to establish whether or not the child was actually his. And, since Allegra knew it wasn’t, there was really no point at all in considering that kind of subterfuge. But she had. For a moment. Only because the alternative was going to blow her life wide apart.
Ultimately, she had decided on blowing her life apart. Because there really was no other option. And so, she was here at her brother’s office in Rome, ready to confess all to the one person who might not kill her where she stood.
Though, before she actually engaged in confession she thought she might try a soft introduction.
“Did you enjoy the party?” she asked.
Renzo looked up from his work, one dark brow raised. “Which party?”
“Right. I forgot. You go to a lot of parties. The one that you took me to.”
“It was very good. What little I stayed for.”
“You were there for a while.” She tapped the top of the desk with her fingertip, carefully not looking directly at Renzo.
“Yes,” he said, pushing his chair away from his desk and moving into a standing position. “Why are you questioning me? Is there some kind of unflattering tabloid story? Photographs?”
“Could there be?” she asked.
“I am me, Allegra. It is always a possibility.”
“I suppose that’s true.” It occurred to her that she may very well end up as a tabloid spectacle too. All these years of behaving, of fantasizing about misbehaving, but never stepping out of line, and she had potentially created the biggest scandal of all.
“You have something to ask me. Do it. And you can be on your way. You can shop. I imagine that’s why you’re actually in Rome.”
He could imagine it all he wanted, it didn’t make it true. She was here to speak to him, because she had to find out what he knew about the masked man at the party in Venice.
“You know almost everyone important,” she said. She knew in her gut that the man she had been with was important. He had that air of authority about him. That sort of personality that commanded the attention of everyone in the room.
“Almost everyone,” he said dryly. “Presidents. Kings. Why do you bring that up?”
“Because I... I just was curious. There was a man at the party.”
“You should not be inquiring about men, Allegra,” he said, his tone warning. “Especially since I believe you are already engaged.”
“Sure. Technically. But I’m just curious about this one.”
“And that is enough for me to know that if I tell you anything our father may well separate my head from my body.”
“You don’t care about that,” she said. “I know you don’t. You don’t go to great lengths to please them. In fact, you don’t try to please them at all. Stop pretending that you care when you don’t.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “All right. Ask away.”
“He arrived late. He was wearing a mask that looked like a skull, dressed all in black.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Renzo’s lips. And then, he did something that Allegra rarely saw him do: he laughed.
“What?” she asked, fury rioting through her. She was having a crisis and he was laughing at her. “What’s so funny about that?”
“I’m very sorry to tell you that I believe your head was turned by Cristian. I know you will loathe that. As I know you loathe him.”
Ice slipped down through her, chilling her, making her feel ill. “No,” she said. “That was not Cristian.”
“Protest all you like, but it was. Perhaps it’s for the best that Mother and Father have arranged your marriage? It seems that left to your own devices you have terrible taste.”
“No,” she said, getting more furious. “There is no way that that was Cristian Acosta. I would have... I would have... Turned to stone.”
“Just by looking at him?” Something strange crossed over her brother’s face.
“Yes,” she said.
Obviously he would find out eventually. They all would. Unless... They didn’t. Perhaps, Cristian did not have to know.
Raphael would have to know, there was no way around that. Their engagement was off. And her life would be all the better for it. But, if the man she had been with was truly Cristian, then he would no more believe it than she did.
He saw her as a spoiled, selfish child, and nothing more. If she turned up pregnant, he would never connect the woman he’d had up against the wall with Allegra.
Her stomach turned. Cristian. It didn’t seem possible. How could she... How could she have ever...
A question she had asked herself over and over again, even before she had discovered the identity of the man she had been with.
And so she made a decision then. She was not going to tell him. What good would come of it? He would either want nothing to do with her and the baby, or he would want everything to do with them. Frankly, she preferred the former, but feared the latter.
“Never mind,” she said. “Clearly I was being silly.”
“Clearly,” Renzo said, going back to his work.
Allegra’s mind was made up. She would break off her engagement, and seeing
