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The Bride’s Baby Of Shame
CAITLIN CREWS
He knows the bride’s secret…… she’s carrying his baby!Dutiful heiress Sophie has never challenged her gilded existence, even agreeing to a convenient marriage at her father’s command. Until she meets ruthless Sicilian Renzo—one carnal night awakens unimaginable desires, and leaves her pregnant! When Renzo uncovers her secret, he’ll stop at nothing to legitimise his child—including storming Sophie’s wedding and stealing her as his own bride!
He knows the bride’s secret...
...she’s carrying his baby!
Dutiful heiress Sophie has never challenged her gilded existence, even agreeing to a convenient marriage at her father’s command. Until she meets ruthless Sicilian Renzo—one carnal night awakens unimaginable desires, and leaves her pregnant! When Renzo uncovers her secret, he’ll stop at nothing to legitimize his child—including storming Sophie’s wedding and stealing her as his own bride!
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She even teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).
Also by Caitlin Crews (#uc806acc0-6e75-589f-acc6-5a2d928abd40)
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
A Baby to Bind His Bride
Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring
Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Billionaire’s Secret Princess
Stolen Brides collection
The Bride’s Baby of Shame
And look out for the previous Stolen Brides book Kidnapped for His Royal Duty by Jane Porter Available now
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
The Bride’s Baby of Shame
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07226-7
THE BRIDE’S BABY OF SHAME
В© 2018 Caitlin Crews
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to the memory of the best Christmas afternoon tea ever, with our editors Megan Haslam and Flo Nicoll in London, when Jane and I came up with the idea for this duet. And then had so much fun writing it!
Contents
Cover (#ue0889979-e156-572f-86f3-17ffbe8ce73f)
Back Cover Text (#uea020ddd-865b-5942-9319-5b2bcac9628e)
About the Author (#u5292aac9-5217-5a62-9f23-d31a989d647d)
Booklist (#u7cf63646-fab3-5cdc-86d6-d2118f3949a1)
Title Page (#uc5ef5f14-e3e5-5b58-9b88-ee686baf7624)
Copyright (#ue91cad9d-48fc-544b-91ad-f80e32ef1651)
Dedication (#uc16e0366-c73c-5efc-8a34-ec74ce2afe1b)
CHAPTER ONE (#u8b6c4c26-e7bd-5126-bae7-731debbb6208)
CHAPTER TWO (#u5053b833-23bb-52ff-be9c-e14df00bfc06)
CHAPTER THREE (#udc0b0b51-ecb2-519d-b753-78a8eb9ce07d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc806acc0-6e75-589f-acc6-5a2d928abd40)
RENZO CRISANTI LOATHED ENGLAND.
He was no fan of great, sprawling London, choking on commuters and tourists and lumbering red buses wherever he turned. He disliked the countryside, oppressively green and ever damp. He preferred his native Sicily, its mountains and sweeping Mediterranean views. England was too dour and grim for a man who had gone from the colorful streets of his hometown to a career racing impossibly fast cars all over the planet.
He might have retired from racing, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a Sicilian. In his opinion, that made him the best of Italy plus that little bit extra—and it meant he was fundamentally unsuited to what the English called their summer.
Even on an evening like tonight in late June, the English sky was wringing itself out, much colder and rainier than it ought to have been in Renzo’s estimation.
He preferred his own small village in the mountains outside Taormina at this time of year. A warmer sea in the distance and a happier sun to go along with the sweep of all that history, with Mount Etna rising in all her glory above it all.
Instead, he found himself just outside Winchester, England, winding in and around rolling hills so far out into the countryside that there was hardly any light. There had been a towering cathedral rising up over the medieval city, but still, Renzo preferred the battered, ageless wilderness of the Sicilian countryside to all this manicured charm. He’d felt hemmed in as he’d driven through the Winchester city center before heading out to the surrounding fields.
He wished he’d followed his initial knee-jerk reaction to this whole situation weeks ago.
Because Renzo had known Sophie Carmichael-Jones was nothing but trouble the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
Steer clear, something had whispered inside him the moment he’d seen her, like a kick in the gut.
But he’d paid that foreboding voice no mind.
Renzo had been in Monaco for the annual motor race, though not as a driver. He’d stopped racing while he was ahead and still in one piece several years back, and had channeled his notoriety into a line of clubs, a few select hotels dotted around Europe, and a vineyard back in Sicily. And where better than Monaco to advertise to the very high-class, European clientele he hoped to serve? He’d been enjoying a drink with some friends when he’d happened to look up and see her.
She had glowed. That was the first thing he’d noticed, as if she’d walloped him with all that shine. She’d worn a metallic gown that had been perfectly demure on its own, but that hadn’t been the source of all that light. That had come straight from her.
Renzo was no stranger to beautiful women. They flocked to him and he, in turn, considered himself something of a connoisseur. But this one... Her dark hair had been pulled back with a certain insouciance, only a few tendrils escaping and showing the faintest hint of a deep copper beneath the lights. Her lips had been painted siren red, her brows were dark, and she’d worn large, gleaming earrings that Renzo had known in an instant were real despite their size. She’d looked elegant. Chic. Endless legs that suggested a certain coltishness and that lovely, inescapably aristocratic face.
But her eyes, brown and shot through with gold, had been so sad.
Their gazes had collided, there on the floor of the Casino de Monte Carlo. Renzo had lost his train of thought. Not something that often happened to a man who’d made his name and his first fortune thanks to his singular focus and steady hands.
He’d stood up from his table, crossed the floor, and found himself standing before her without knowing he’d meant to move.
He had been aware of everything about her, there in the middle of a crowd that he’d hardly noticed. She’d caught her breath. He’d seen color high on her cheeks. And he’d known that the chemistry he could feel, electric and intense, was affecting her, too.
It was insanity.
“You must tell me two things,” he’d told her, feeling as if they were all alone when he knew full well that they were not. That half of Europe stood arrayed around them. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to care. “One, your name. And two, why you are so sad. This is Monte Carlo, cara. Nothing but joy is permitted.”
“I’m not sad at all,” she’d said after a moment, and somehow, he hadn’t been surprised that she was English, though she’d spoken to him in the same Italian he’d used. Just with that unmistakable accent. “That would require far more emotion than the situation warrants. A better description is resigned.”
“You are far too young and much too beautiful for resignation.”
Her lovely lips had curved, and Renzo had wanted nothing more than to taste that red-slicked smile. Then, there. He wasn’t fussy.
“While you strike me as far too sophisticated for such idle flattery,” she’d replied.
Renzo had been in the grip of a fever. Looking back, that was the only explanation. He’d reached over and taken her hand in his—
And they’d both breathed a little heavily at the contact.
He’d been aware of his own heartbeat, intense and demanding. He’d seen her pulse, there in the column of her neck, drumming out the same insistent rhythm. He would never know how he had restrained himself from leaning over and covering it with his mouth.
It had been as if they’d made lightning between them, such wild electricity he marveled the whole of Monaco didn’t burst into flames. It was as if their skin could scarcely contain it.
Renzo had known then and there that he would be inside this beautiful stranger within the hour.
Or die trying.
“Let me try this, then,” he had said, casting aside his customary charm for the urgency the moment appeared to warrant. “I need you, cara. I don’t care who you are or what you had planned tonight. I want you. I want to taste every part of you again and again, until I would know you in the blackest night. I want to taste you in my mouth. I want everything—and then I want to do it again. And again. Until there’s nothing left of either one of us.”
“I don’t believe in immolation,” she’d said, though her voice was hoarse.
“You will.”
She had shuddered. She had swayed slightly on her feet. She shot a look over her shoulder, somewhere through the crowd, then had returned her attention to him.
He could read her need and better yet, her surrender, all over her face.
Renzo had wasted no time. He took her hand in his and led her to the private exit, where he could retrieve his car without any interference from fans or photographers. In moments, they’d been speeding away, up into the hills toward the villa he maintained far above glittering Monaco and the Côte d’Azur spread out below.
“I am Renzo Crisanti,” he had told her, because there was something in him that needed her to know him, whatever that meant. Whatever came next. “And, bellissima, you still haven’t told me your name.”
She had shifted beside him, all sleek lines and the quiet, humming intensity of her considerable beauty—so much like the cars he loved and handled the same way he intended to handle her.
With all his skill and focus. With all the acute ferocity that had propelled him to the top of his profession.
There was a reason Renzo had never had a crash. And he didn’t plan to change his record that night, not even for this mysterious woman who’d already had him tight and hard and greedy when all he’d had of her was a brief touch of her hand.
It was as if he’d never had another woman in his life.
“You can call me Elizabeth,” she’d said.
It was the first lie she’d told him, Renzo thought now, trying to tamp down his temper. But it was nowhere near the last.
He pulled his car over to the side of the road, near what looked like an abandoned old croft—or whatever it was they called their falling-down sheds in this part of England. He cut the engine and unfolded himself from the low-slung sports car, adjusting the ends of the driving gloves he wore out of habit as he stood there beside the vehicle and attempted to access his usual, legendary calm. The motor made its noises, as if protesting that he’d cut the drive short. The summer rain had let off, but the night was still cool. Renzo flipped up the collar of his leather jacket against the pervasive damp and checked his watch, impatient.
And perhaps something a good deal more intense than merely impatient, if he was honest.
Because he had a score to settle with the woman he was meeting here, off in the middle of nowhere, so late at night in a foreign country.
As if he was answering a summons. As if he, Renzo Crisanti, were so malleable and easily led he would travel across the whole of Europe for a woman he had already bedded.
His fingers stung and he released them, unaware he’d clenched his hands into fists at his sides.
At first he thought it was just a shadow, moving rapidly down the hill from one of England’s grand old houses in the distance. The directions she’d sent had been explicit. This country lane to that little byway, skirting around the edges of stately manors and rolling fields lined in hedgerows. But the more he watched, his eyes adjusting to the inky dark, the more he recognized the figure approaching him as Sophie.
Sophie, who’d given Renzo her innocence without thinking to warn him.
Sophie, who had called herself Elizabeth on that long, hot, and impossibly carnal night in Monaco.
Sophie, who had lied to him. To him.
Sophie, who had sneaked away while he slept, leaving him with nothing—not even her real name—until she’d chosen to reveal it in the most humiliating way possible, in a hastily mailed newspaper clipping.
Of Sophie Elizabeth Carmichael-Jones, daughter of a wealthy and titled British family, who was engaged to marry an earl.
Sophie, his Sophie, who would be another man’s wife in the morning.
Renzo’s jaw ached. He forced himself to unclench his teeth, and his fists again, while he was at it. He was a man known far and wide for the boneless, lazy manner with which he conducted both his business and his pleasure. It was his trademark.
It was a mask he had carefully cultivated to hide the truth—that he was a true Sicilian in every sense of the term, especially when it came to the volcanic temper he’d spent his life learning to keep under strict control.
This woman made him a stranger to himself.
She skidded a bit on the wet grass at the bottom of the hill, then righted herself. And her swift, indrawn breath as she started toward him seemed to crack through him like thunder.
There were no lights out here, lost somewhere in England’s greenest hills, for his sins—but Renzo could see her perfectly. He’d meant what he’d told her in Monte Carlo.
He would know her if he was blind.
Her stride. Her scent. The particular way she held her head. The little sound of erotic distress she made in the back of her throat when he—
But this was not the time for such things. Not when there was so much to discuss, and her with the wedding of the year in the morning.
She was wearing a simple pair of leggings tucked into high boots and what looked like long-sleeved shirts, layered one on top of the other. Her clothes molded themselves to her trim figure and showed off the sleek, sweet curve of her behind and those long, long legs he’d had wrapped around his shoulders while he’d thrust deep inside her and made them both groan. Her dark chestnut hair fell down all around her, looking like a soft black curtain in the darkness.
She stopped before him, and for a moment, all he could think about was that night. She’d been sitting naked in his bed, laughing at something he’d said while she’d piled her hair on the top of her head and had tied it in a knot.
So simple. So unconsciously alluring. Then, and now when he knew better.
So devious, he reminded himself harshly.
But what he remembered most was that he’d had her three times by then.
It was a hunger he couldn’t contain, couldn’t reason away, couldn’t even douse afterward when he’d wanted to think of other things. It had been weeks and yet here it was again, as voracious and as greedy as it had been that night in Monaco.
Worse, perhaps, because he had tasted her. Because he knew exactly what he was missing.
Renzo thought he likely vibrated with his need for her, only now it made him as darkly furious as it did hard.
“Renzo...”
She said his name quietly, tipping her head back so she could look him in the eye.
And if her eyes were sad, or resigned, or anything else at all, he told himself he didn’t care.
“How nice to see you again, Sophie,” he said in English, a language they had never spoken to each other.
He saw her shudder at the sound, but he forged on, unwilling to permit himself to do anything but what he’d come here to do.
Which was make her pay.
“Please accept my deepest congratulations on your upcoming wedding. I read all about it in the papers,” he drawled, flint and rage and no mask to hide it. “Tomorrow, is it not?”
* * *
Sophie felt sick.
She wanted to blame it on the shocking news she’d gotten two days ago at her doctor’s office, but she knew better.
It wasn’t the mistake she’d made or the person she now had to accept she was because of it.
It wasn’t the miraculous little accident that was growing inside her, whether she believed it or not. The accident that was proof that those stolen hours in Monaco hadn’t been a dream, after all—that what had happened between her and this startlingly handsome stranger had been real. It was something she could cling to no matter how much of a mess she found herself in now.
But that wasn’t what had her stomach in knots tonight.
No. It was the way Renzo was looking at her.
As if he hated her.
Which was fair enough. Sophie wasn’t too fond of herself at the moment, now she knew the truth about the headaches she’d been having the past week or so, and that oddly thick sensation that wasn’t quite nausea—
But Sophie wasn’t sure she could bear it. Not from him.
Her distant father, more calculator than human, was one thing. Her even more remote and disinterested fiancГ© another.
But Renzo was the only thing in her life that had never been a part of this grim little march toward fulfilling the sacred duty that she’d been told was her responsibility since her birth. Every single part of her life had been orchestrated to lead directly and triumphantly toward her wedding tomorrow. She had been raised on dire warnings about the perils of shirking her obligations to her family and endless stories about the many ancestors who would rise from their vaults in protest should any hint of a scandal taint their name.
There had never been any light. Or hope. Or anything like heat.
Sophie was so cold. Always and forever frozen solid, no matter the weather.
Because she’d been aware since she was very small that the sorts of things that warmed a body—strong spirits, wild passion, scandalously revealing garments of any kind—were not permitted for the Carmichael-Jones heiress.
She was to be without stain. Virginal and pure until she handed herself over to her husband, a man chosen by her father before she could walk.
Because the world kept turning ever closer to a marvelous future, but Sophie had been raised in the past. The deep, dark past, where her father didn’t condescend to ignore her wishes—Sophie had been raised to know better than to express one. Even to herself.
Everything had been ice, always.
So Sophie had made herself its queen.
But Renzo had been all the light and hope and heat she’d given up believing was possible, packed into that one long, glorious night.
Every wild, impetuous summer Sophie had ever missed out on. Every burning hot streak of strong drink she’d never permitted herself to taste. Every dessert she’d refused, lest her figure be seen as anything but perfectly trim while clad in the finest couture, the better to reflect both wealthy families of which she was the unwilling emblem.
Renzo had been lazy laughter and impossible fire, intense and overwhelming, vast and uncontainable and so much more than she’d been ready for that she still woke in the night in a rush, her heart pounding, as if he was touching her again—
“Why am I here?”
He sounded impatient. Bored, even. Something in her recoiled instantly, because she knew that particular tone of voice. Her father used it. So did her fiancГ©. They were busy, serious men with no time for the frothy, insubstantial concerns of the woman they traded between them like so much chattel.
She wasn’t a person, that tone of voice told her. She was made of contracts and property, the distribution of wealth and the expectations of others. Hers wasn’t a life, it was a list of obligations and hefty consequences if she failed to meet each one.
The old Sophie would have slunk off, duly chastened. She would never have come out here in the first place.
But that Sophie was gone, burned to a crisp in Monaco. Forever ruined, in every sense of the term.
This Sophie tried to find her spine, and then straightened it.
“You contacted me.”
“Is that the game you wish to play, cara?” Renzo lifted an indolent shoulder, then dropped it. “You sent me newspaper clippings of your engagement. The wedding of the year, I am to understand. A thousand felicitations, of course. Your fiancé is a lucky man indeed.”
Sophie didn’t particularly care for the way he looked at her as he said that, but she was too busy reeling to respond to it.
“Newspaper clippings...?”
But even as she asked the question, she knew.
She hadn’t sent Renzo anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to her, no matter how many times she woke in the night with his taste in her mouth. But she knew someone who would have.
Poppy.
Dear, darling Poppy, Sophie’s best friend from their school days. Romantic, dreamy Poppy, who wanted nothing but happiness for Sophie.
And who had never seemed to understand that for all Sophie’s advantages, and she knew they were many, happiness was never on offer.
“Don’t be tiresome, my dear,” her mother had sighed years ago, when Sophie, trembling, had dared to ask why her own choices were never given the slightest bit of consideration. “Choice is a word that poor people use because they have nothing else. You do. Try being grateful, not greedy.”
Sophie had tried. And over the years she’d stopped longing for things she knew she could never have.
That wasn’t Poppy’s way.
“You demanded I meet you here,” Renzo was saying, a different sort of laziness in his voice then. This one had an edge. “And so, naturally, I placed my entire life on hold at such a summons and raced to your side like a well-trained hound.”
He made a show of looking around, but there was nothing for miles but fields and hedges. No prying eyes. No concerned relatives who would claim to their dying day they only had Sophie’s best interests at heart.
The stately house where her wedding was to be held in the morning was over the next hill and Sophie, who had never sneaked anywhere in her life before that night in Monaco, had felt a sickening combination of daring and scared as she’d crept out of her room and run from the hall tonight.
It was pathetic, really.
How had she lived twenty-six long years and failed to recognize how sad and small her life really was?
Renzo wasn’t finished. “Now that we’re both caught up, perhaps you can tell me why I’ve been called upon to take part in this latest episode of what appears to be a rather melodramatic and messy life?”
Sophie swallowed. The words melodramatic and messy had never applied to her life. Not ever. Not until she’d met him. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
That was the real story of her life.
Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t understand how Renzo didn’t hear it.
His mouth moved, then, but she would never call that a smile. Then he made it worse, reaching over to take her chin in his firm hand, the buttery leather of the gloves he wore only highlighting the intensity of his grip.
And it was the same inside her as it had always been, gloves or no.
Fire.
“What lies will you tell me tonight, I wonder?” he asked, low and dark. Ominous.
“You found me,” Sophie said, trying to keep her feet solid beneath her. Trying to ignore the wildfire heat ignited in her. Again. “I... I didn’t want...”
She didn’t know how to do this.
He had texted her out of nowhere, as far as she’d known.
This is Renzo. You must want to meet.
Now, standing outside on a cool, wet night, Sophie had to ask herself what she thought he had been offering, exactly. Blackmail?
That was what she’d told herself. That was why she’d come.
But she understood, now that he was touching her again, that she’d been lying to herself.
And now she had to lie to him. Again.
The trouble was, Sophie had never told so many lies before in her life. What would be the point? Too many people knew too much about her, and everyone was more than happy to compare notes and then decide what was in her best interest without her input. Therefore, she’d always done exactly what was expected of her. She’d done well at school because her father had made it clear that she was expected to be more than simply an ornament.
“Clever conversation and sparkling wit are not something one is either born with or not, Sophie,” her father had told her when she’d been barely thirteen. “They’re weapons in an arsenal and I expect you to be an excellent shot.”
Sophie had made certain she was. After school, she’d involved herself with only carefully vetted charities, so as never to cause her father or future husband any cause for concern about what she’d done with her time.
Or more to the point, her name.
No carousing. No scandals. Nothing that could be considered a stain.
She’d even agreed to marry a man she thought of as her own, personal brick wall—though far less warm and approachable than any slab of stone—on her eighteenth birthday.
Well. Agreed was a strong word.
Randall Grant, the sixth Earl of Langston, had been her father’s choice for her since she was in the cradle. Her agreement, such as it was, had never been in doubt.
Dal, as Randall was known to friends and family and the girl he’d been given, had produced the Langston family ring and handed it to her with a few cold words about the joining of their families. Because that was all that mattered.
Not Sophie herself. Not her feelings.
Certainly not love, which Sophie thought no one in either her family or Dal’s had believed was real or of any import for at least the last few centuries.
And her reaction—her attempt at defiance—in the face of the life that had been presented to her as a fait accompli had comprised of a single deep breath, which Sophie had held for just a moment longer than she should have as Dal stood there, holding the ring before her.
Just a moment, while she’d imagined what might happen if she refused him—
But that was the thing. She couldn’t imagine it. Even thinking about defying her parents and all the plans they’d made for her had made her feel light-headed.
So she had said yes, as if Dal had asked her a question.
As if there had ever been any doubt.
She’d locked the heirloom ring away in her father’s safe, murmuring about how she didn’t dare flash it about until she was Dal’s countess.
All she’d asked for was a long engagement, so she could pretend to have what passed for a normal life for just a little while—
But she hadn’t. She hadn’t dared. She’d only been marking what time she had left.
Until Renzo.
CHAPTER TWO (#uc806acc0-6e75-589f-acc6-5a2d928abd40)
“DO IT,” RENZO GROWLED, snapping Sophie back to her current peril. The dark lane. The powerful man who still held her before him, that hand on her chin. “Tell me another lie to my face. See what happens.”
Sophie didn’t know how to respond to him. She didn’t know how to respond at all. She’d been so certain that his text had been a threat. That he had planned to come here and...do something.
To her.
Did you truly believe it was a threat? asked a small voice inside of her that sounded far too much like her mother. Or did you imagine that Renzo might save you?
But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? No one could save her.
No one had ever been able to save her.
Sophie tried to pull her chin from his grip, but he didn’t let go. And for some reason, that was what got to her. One more man was standing before her, making her do things she didn’t want to do. Like the others, Renzo wasn’t forcing her into anything. He wasn’t brutish or horrible.
He was simply, quietly, unyieldingly exerting his will.
And Sophie was tired of bending, suddenly. She was tired of accepting what was handed to her and making the best of it when she’d never wanted it in the first place.
She’d made her own mistakes. Now she’d figure out how to live with them.
“Why did you come?” she demanded of Renzo then. “I doubt I’m the only woman you’ve ever spent a night with. Do you chase them all down?”
A flash of white teeth against the night. “Never. But then again, they do not typically furnish me with false names.”
“How can you possibly know that if you never seek them out again?”
The look in his eyes changed. Oh, there was still that heat. That simmering temper. But now, suddenly, there was a different kind of awareness.
As if she had challenged him.
She supposed she had.
“I can think of only one reason a woman would wish to meet me the night before her wedding to another man,” Renzo said then, his tone cold enough to do her father proud. But his gaze was pure fire. “Is that who you imagine I am? A gigolo on call? You merely lift a finger and here I am, willing and able to attend to your every desire?”
This time when she tipped her head back he released her chin.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Indeed I am,” Renzo said, something blistering and lethal in his voice then. “And never let it be said that I do not know my place.”
“I don’t know what—”
“I 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 it all over his face. Worse, she could feel it echo deep within, a kind of fist in her gut and below, nothing but that same bright fire that had already destroyed her.
“There are consequences to actions,” she said carefully, mimicking something her father might say, because she didn’t know another way into the subject. “Surely you know that.”
“Is this where the threat comes in?” Renzo’s laugh was low. And not kind. “You people are all the same. Carrot and stick until you get your way. And you always get your way, don’t you, Sophie?”
He was much too close then. Sophie expected him to stop, because she had nowhere to go, backed up into his car the way she was—but he didn’t stop.
He kept coming.
And he didn’t stop until he’d insinuated himself between her legs and bent her backward so for all intents and purposes, they were sprawled out together over the front of his car.
He was over her but not on her. If she strained to keep her legs apart, he wasn’t even touching her. And yet he might as well have scooped her up in his fists and held her fast.
“Let me up,” she whispered fiercely.
Desperately.
But if Renzo heard her, he gave no sign.
He didn’t claim her mouth in a bruising kiss, as she half expected, the way he had when he’d helped her from the car that night in Monaco. He held himself above her, sprawled over her body to keep her exactly where she was. Pinning her there. If she tried to move, she would be the one to rub her body against his.
And if she did...would she stop? She shuddered at the notion.
“Tell me about these consequences, cara,” he murmured. “Tell me how you have suffered. Tell me how brave you have been to forge ahead in your gilded, pampered circumstances, feted and celebrated wherever you go, so soon to be the countess of all you survey.”
His mouth was at her ear, then down along her neck, and she could feel the heat of him everywhere—but he still wasn’t touching her.
Not the way she wanted him to.
And he wasn’t done. “Where does your earl imagine you are tonight? Locked away in your virginal bridal suite, perhaps? Dressed in flowing white already, the living, lovely picture of the innocence he purchased?”
It was one thing for Sophie to think of herself as chattel in the privacy of her own head. It was something else entirely to hear Renzo say it, sardonic and mocking.
“He has not purchased me. I’m not a cow.”
“Nor are you the virgin he expects.”
“I would be shocked if he has any expectations at all.”
“When marriage is commerce, cara, the contract is signed and sealed in the marital bed. Shall I tell you how?”
A wave of misery threated to take her over then. Sophie fought it back as best she could. “Not everyone is as...elemental as you are.”
“Will you tell him why?” Renzo asked, unsmiling and much too close. “When he comes to claim his bride, will you tell him who else has been between the pale thighs he imagined were his alone to part?”
He shifted his position above her and she sucked in a breath in a messy combination of anticipation and desire, but he only went down on one elbow so he could get his face that much closer to hers.
It made everything that much worse.
Or better, something in her whispered.
“You’re disgusting,” she told him. “And he won’t notice either way.”
“I think you underestimate your groom considerably,” Renzo murmured. “What purpose is there in being an earl in the first place if not to plant a flag in unclaimed land and call it his?”
Her breath deserted her at that. “I’m not... There’s no flag—”
But Renzo kept right on. “Why did you bother to remain pure and untouched for so long, if not to gift it to this betrothed of yours who you clearly hold in such high esteem?”
Sophie pressed her fingers hard against the metal of the car beneath her. She tried to pretend she didn’t feel that instant wave of shame—but she did. Did it matter how distantly Dal treated her? She’d made a promise and she’d broken it.
Spectacularly.
Over and over again.
And then it had gotten even worse.
“I wanted to wait,” she said quietly, fighting to stay calm. Or at least sound calm. “Until I didn’t.”
“I’m sure that distinction will please him greatly.” Renzo’s mouth was a scant centimeter from the sweep of her neck and she was sure—she was sure—that he could taste her rapid, revealing pulse. “Make sure your confession is vivid. Paint a picture. A man likes to know how many times his woman cries out another man’s name and begs him not to stop.”
She shoved at him then, no longer caring if that meant she was forced to touch him. She ignored the feel of his broad, sculpted shoulders beneath her palms and focused on all the emotions swirling around inside her, much too close to the surface.
But it didn’t matter what she did, because Renzo was immovable. Another brick wall—except there was nothing cold about him. Nothing the least bit reserved. He blazed at her and she could feel it as if it was his hand between her legs, breaching her softness and pushing deep inside—
Her breath was ragged. Desperate. “My marriage is none of your business!”
She had the confused sense that she’d walked directly into a trap. Renzo tensed, coiled tight as if he planned to spring at her.
“And yet here I am, right in the middle of it. Where you put me, Sophie. Against my will.”
She shoved at him again and again, he didn’t move. At all.
“If I put you there then I’ll remove you. Consider yourself ejected. With prejudice.”
“Why did you order me to meet you?” he asked, and though his voice was deceptively mild, his dark amber eyes gleamed in the dark and made her think of lions. Tigers. Big cats that had no place roaming about the staid English countryside. “Surely you must know you’ve made a grievous tactical error, cara. You’ve given me the upper hand.”
“The upper hand?”
And she recognized that look on his face then. It was pure triumph, and it should have made her blood chill.
But he’d melted her in Monaco and she couldn’t seem to get her preferred veneer of ice back, no matter what. Not around him.
“I know who you are,” he told her with a certain relish that washed over her like a caress and then hit her in the gut. Hard. “And I have information I must assume your earl would no doubt prefer was not in the peasant hands of a bastard Sicilian.”
“...information?”
But Sophie already knew what he would say. And still, there was a vanishingly small part of her that hoped against hope that he was the man she’d imagined he was—
“Exactly what his fiancée got up to one fine night in Monaco, for example,” Renzo said, smashing any hopes she might have had. Of his better nature. Of what she needed to do here. Of this entire situation that seemed a bigger mistake with every passing moment. “What do you imagine he would pay to keep your indiscretions quiet? Because I already know the tabloids would throw money at me. I could name any sum I wish and humiliate two of the finest families in England with one sleazy little article. I must tell you, cara, I feel drunk with power.”
“You...” She could hardly speak. Her worst nightmare kept getting worse and she had no idea how to stop it. Or contain it. Or even get her head around it. “You are—”
“Careful,” he growled. “I would advise you not to call me names. You may find that I am far worse than any insults you throw at me.”
He pushed himself back, up and off the car and away from her body. Sophie stayed where he’d left her, uncertain what to do next. She was shaking. There was water making her eyes feel too full and too glassy. And worst of all, there was that part of her that wanted him to come back and cover her again.
She was sick. That was the only explanation.
“What I am is mercenary,” Renzo told her. He watched her pitilessly as she struggled to sit up. “You know what that word means, I presume?”
“Of course I know what it means.” She sat for a moment, more winded than she should have been, and then pushed herself off the car to get her feet back on the ground.
But it didn’t make her feel better. Maybe nothing ever would again.
“What it means to you is something derogatory, I am sure,” Renzo said, still watching her in that cold, very nearly cruel way. “Everything is mercenary to those who do not need to make their own money.”
Sophie understood that was a slap. “I don’t—”
He merely lifted a brow and she fell silent, then hated herself for her easy acquiescence.
“Everything I have, everything I am, I created out of nothing,” he told her. “I have nothing polite to say about the man who left my mother pregnant to fend for herself. I have only become a better man than he could ever dream of being. And do you know how I did that?”
“Of course I know. You raced cars for years.”
“What I did, Sophie, was take every opportunity that presented itself to me. Why should this be any different?” He watched her as she straightened from the car and took a shaky step. “What consequences would you like to speak to me about?”
And she understood then.
She understood her own, treacherous heart, and why it had pushed her out here in the middle of the night to further complicate the situation she had already made untenable with what she’d done. She understood that no matter what she might have told herself about threatening texts and potential blackmail, what she’d wanted was that man she’d made up in her head in Monaco.
The man who had looked at her through a crowd and seen her. Only her. Not her family name or her father’s wealth—just her.
The man who had taken her, again and again.
The man who had learned every inch of her in the most naked, carnal, astounding way possible, there in that villa high in the hills with the glittering lights of the city so far below.
The man who had made her laugh, scream, cry, and beg him to do it all over again.
But that had just been a night. Just one night.
And he was just a man, after all. Not the savior she’d made up in her head. Not the answer to a prayer she hadn’t known she’d made.
She should never, ever have answered his text. Because this had only made everything worse.
Her hand crept over her belly, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“I thought...” she started, then stopped herself, blinking back the emotions she desperately wanted to conceal from him. “I wanted...”
“Your cake and to eat it, too. Yes? I’m familiar with the phrase.” The curve of his lips was like a razor. “Why give up the bastard for the earl if you can have them both?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted at all.”
“Of course it was.” The razor curl to his lips edged over into outright disgust. “Do you think I don’t know your type, Sophie? Cheating fiancées turn into lying wives in the blink of an eye. And bored housewives are all the same, whether their house is a hovel or a grand hall. Trust me when I tell you that Europe is littered with the detritus of broken vows. You are not as special as you might imagine.”
She shook at that ruthless character assassination, but the worst part was that she couldn’t manage to shove out a single word in her own defense. Of course he believed these things of her. Had she showed him anything different?
What had seemed like sunlight and glory to her had been nothing but tawdry. She had her little accident to prove it. All she had to do was imagine trying to explain her behavior to her fiancé—or worse, her father. She knew the words they would use.
And she would deserve them.
“Renzo,” she said, very carefully, lest she jog something inside and send all these terrible, unwieldy things spilling out into the dirt between them. “There’s something you need to know.”
“I know everything I need to know.” His words were terse. His judgment rendered. It only surprised her that she’d imagined he might be different. “What I cannot forgive is that you made me an unwitting part of your dishonesty. A vow means something to me, Sophie, and you made me break one.”
She smiled, though it felt brittle. “What vows did you break?”
“I made a promise to myself many years ago that I would never, ever take something that belonged to another,” he told her with a kind of arrogant outrage, as if she’d twisted his arm.
“You’re right,” she said then, because something broke inside of her. She hugged herself as she stepped back, away from him and his car and all these messy emotions she should have been smart enough to leave behind her in Monte Carlo. “I should never have come here tonight.”
“These are games children play, Sophie,” he told her, fury and condemnation and all that righteousness making his accent more pronounced.
“You’re the one making threats,” she pointed out.
“You can consider it a courtesy. One you did not extend to me when you decided to entangle me in your sick, sad little marital games.”
She could do nothing but nod her head, everything within her swollen painfully and near to bursting—but she couldn’t let herself give in. She couldn’t show him more of herself. She couldn’t allow him to hurt her any more than he already had.
Because the truth was, she didn’t think she could survive it. She had been frozen solid all her life. Renzo had melted her, it was true, but Sophie hadn’t understood until tonight that the ice had been her armor.
“Marry your earl or do not,” Renzo said with dark finality. “But leave me out of it. Or I will assume you are inviting me to share the details of our night in Monaco with the world.”
She swallowed, which was hard to do when she felt as if the tears she refused to shed were choking her. “I understand.”
He didn’t say another word. He stalked around to the driver’s side and climbed into the car with a grace that should not have been possible for a man his size.
And Sophie stood where she was for a long time after he’d gone, driving off with a muscular roar.
She wanted to cry, but didn’t allow herself the weakness.
He’d treated her like a naughty child but the truth was, Sophie thought she’d just grown up.
At last.
She already hated herself, so what was a little more fuel to that fire? She would marry Dal tomorrow, as planned. She would carry on with the life that had been so carefully plotted out for her. She would force herself to do her wifely duty and Dal would either do the math or he wouldn’t.
Babies were born early all the time.
Her stomach heaved at that, but Sophie shoved the bile back down.
She’d made her bed and now she would have to lie in it. Literally.
Something in her eased at that. There was a freedom in having no good choices, she supposed. If Dal found out, it wasn’t as if it would turn a good marriage bad. Their marriage was a business affair, cold and cruel at its best.
If she was lucky, he might even set her free.
That would have to be enough.
The child she carried might not be Dal’s. It might never know its real father. But no matter what, no matter what happened, it would be hers.
Hers.
And Sophie vowed she would love her baby enough, with all that she had, so that it would never know the difference.
CHAPTER THREE (#uc806acc0-6e75-589f-acc6-5a2d928abd40)
RENZO WOKE IN the middle of the night, restless and something like agitated—when he normally slept like the dead.
He had left Sophie behind without a backward glance, roaring off in a cloud of self-righteousness and sweet revenge, delivered exactly as planned. He’d congratulated himself on the entire situation, and the way he’d handled it, all the way back to the suite of rooms he maintained in his Southwark hotel, with its views of the Thames and giddy, crowded London sprawled at his feet.
He would normally top off a satisfying and victorious day with enough strong drink to make him merry and an uninhibited woman to take the edges off. But, unaccountably, he had done neither of those things.
Not because he was mourning anything, he’d assured himself. It was nothing to him if a one-night stand who’d lied to him repeatedly was getting married. It was entirely possible every one-night stand he’d ever enjoyed had raced off to marry someone else—why should he care?
He’d sat there in the fine bar on a high floor in his hotel, surrounded by gleaming, beautiful people, none of whom likely knew the first thing about Sophie Carmichael-Jones and her wedding plans, and told himself that he felt nothing at all.
Nothing save triumph, that was.
He had been less able to lie to himself, however, when every image in his head as he’d drifted off to sleep was of Sophie and all the ways he’d had her in Monaco, each more addictive than the last. And a thousand new ways he could avail himself of her lush, remarkably acrobatic loveliness, if she’d been in the vicinity instead of off in a stately house in Hampshire, ready to wed a bloody earl in the morning.
She was a hunger that nothing else could possibly satisfy, and the fact that was so infuriated Renzo.
Still, he had been certain that come the dawn—and with it the inevitability of her high-society wedding, with all its trappings and titles and trumpeting self-regard on the pages of every tabloid rag in Europe—the raging hunger would disappear, to be replaced by his usual indifference toward anything and everything that appeared in his rearview mirror.
But here he was. Wide-awake before dawn.
His body was hot and tight and too many sensations swirled all over him, as if Sophie was beside him in this bed when he knew very well she was not.
He rolled out of the wide platform bed and refused to handle his body’s demands on his own. His lips thinned at the thought.
Renzo was not an adolescent boy, all testosterone and infatuation. He would not use his own hands and spill his own seed with the name of an unattainable female on his lips, as if he was fifteen. He hadn’t done such things when he’d actually been fifteen, for that matter, loping around the ancient cliffside town where he’d been the no-account bastard son of a shamed whore of a mother—and therefore might as well have been invisible to the village girls.
He wasn’t invisible now. The village girls who had snubbed him then were grown now. Married to the men they’d found more appropriate and settled there on the edge of the very cliff that Renzo had imagined throwing himself over, more than once, to escape the realities of a bastard’s life in that place. And these days Renzo’s illegitimacy was rarely mentioned. He was the local celebrity who had not only gone on to a glorious motor racing career, but had systematically bought and rebuilt every structure in that damned town, then opened a hotel on the next ridge, until there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the king of that tiny little village was.
That was how Renzo handled things. He waited. He bought it.
Then he made it his.
But that wasn’t possible in this situation. He padded over to the wall of windows that let in the insistent gleam of one of the world’s premiere cities, but he didn’t see London Bridge there before him. Or the Shard.
It was as if Sophie was haunting him, though Renzo had never before believed in ghosts.
There, alone in the dark with only London as witness, he no longer felt that sense of triumph.
Instead, he remembered her responses. The catch in her throat. The wonder in her gaze.
The way she’d looped her arms around his neck when he’d lifted her against the wall—directly inside the front door to his villa, because he couldn’t wait another moment—and had blushed.
From head to toe, as he’d soon discovered.
He had quickly learned that she was a virgin, and he’d reveled in that fact. That she was entirely his. That he was the only man alive to taste her, touch her, learn how she delighted in every new thing he taught her.
Renzo had never been a possessive man. But Sophie had brought it out in him.
Earlier tonight he’d accused her of being a virgin as a technicality only.
He wanted to believe that, of course. A woman who was meant to be a countess might well keep her hymen intact in preparation for her marriage while involving herself in all manner of other debaucheries. He’d met women like that before—hell, he’d happily participated in the debauchery.
He’d wanted nothing more than to make Sophie pay for thinking that she could pull one over on him. Or perhaps what he had really wanted to make her pay for was the fact that she’d succeeded.
But the truth was, he realized as he stood there and stared out at a city he completely failed to see, it didn’t make sense.
Renzo knew any number of mercenary women. They were a lot like him, each and every one of them. They knew what they wanted and they proceeded to go out there and get it. They used everything they had. Status if they had it. Wiles if they did not. Whatever it took to get what they wanted.
He had learned to recognize one of his ilk from afar. Long before they made it into his bed, Renzo knew them for that steel in their gaze and their particular brand of avid keenness. He had never been wrong.
And he’d never been caught by a grifter like himself, either.
Renzo might have convinced himself otherwise since he’d received that newspaper clipping by post, but he hadn’t read that kind of sharpness in Sophie.
Not when she’d been calling herself Elizabeth, flowing like sweet honey all over his hands, and charming him within an inch of his life.
Renzo was not easily charmed.
It occurred to him then—high over the Thames in the middle of the night with nothing in his head but the only woman who had ever deceived him—that it was possible he had been hasty.
He had been so busy scoring points, making sure he got in as many digs at her as possible, that he hadn’t allowed himself to really listen to the things she said.
And more, the things she hadn’t said.
He, of all people, should have known better. After all, he’d spent his entire childhood trying to live up to the fantasy of what he’d imagined he ought to have been and what becoming it would do for him. If he was perfectly well behaved. If he transcended the poverty in which he’d been raised. If he never, ever, allowed what others thought of him or his circumstances to hold him back. If he made his own way in the world, as best he could, whatever that looked like. If he made himself a star in his chosen field and instead of throwing his money away like so many of his peers, used it to build himself a little empire.
If he did all the right things, he’d told himself for far longer than he should have, surely that would gain his father’s notice.
But it never had.
Not in the way he wanted, anyway. And when he’d decided to force the issue, it hadn’t ended well.
Renzo’s idealism, immature and pathetic by any estimation, had been fully beaten out of him in his eighteenth year, courtesy of the very wealthy, very titled prince who had left his mother pregnant with him. Literally beaten it out of him. He’d had relapses since then, it was true, but he’d always learned the same damned lesson in the end.
Meeting his father had taught Renzo that there were no better places or people, as he’d been tempted to imagine. There were no misunderstandings that explained away eighteen years of poverty and shame. There was only reality and in it, people did what suited them with little or no thought to the effect that their actions might have on others.
If it was impossible to conceive of how a person could do something heinous to someone else, a good rule of thumb was to assume that person had been thinking only and ever of themselves.
That lesson had been pounded into Renzo’s fool head again and again and again, particularly during that one vile week when he’d been eighteen and stupid and had foolishly imagined his own father would treat him well because of their blood tie. He knew better now.
Still, he’d let this woman throw him.
He knew all about women like Sophie Carmichael-Jones. They thought themselves so high-and-mighty, so far above the peasants—but at the end of the day, they were motivated by money. The same as Renzo’s mother had been, desperate to keep a roof over her head by any means possible. The same as Renzo had learned to be, making certain he excelled at whatever he did to pay her bills. The only difference was that the Carmichael-Joneses of the world believed their own scrabbling for cash was more meaningful, somehow, because it was wrapped up in estates and titles, ancient claims and other such things.
Renzo did not share this belief.
A hustler was a hustler, in his estimation.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the signs in Sophie, his sad-eyed innocent with the prettiest smile he’d ever beheld.
She’d spoken to him of consequences and he’d thought he’d give her a few—but hours later, he couldn’t seem to get that particular word out of his head.
He crossed his arms over his chest and found himself scowling down at the Thames as it wound on, unheeding, the same as it had done for centuries.
It had taken more self-control than he’d imagined it would to be near Sophie again and not take her.
His body had reacted as if they had been lovers for decades. He had been hard and ready the instant he’d seen her come out of the shadows. Even then, when he knew who she really was and had no intention whatsoever of giving her access to him again, his body had made its own wishes known.
He wanted her despite everything. Still. Now.
He hadn’t known, from one moment to the next, which one of them he was more furious at. Her, for the lies she had told him and the way she’d made him complicit in her own betrayal of her fiancé. Or him, for wanting her with an edge that bordered on desperation, even then.
Consequences, something in him whispered.
He remembered how she’d stood there before him in the close, wet dark.
Gone was the glowing, carefree woman who’d given herself to him so freely in Monaco. In England, apparently, Sophie was drawn. Agitated.
And had kept holding a hand over her belly, as if her meal had not quite agreed with her...
Consequences, he thought again.
And found himself cursing in a fluid, filthy Sicilian dialect when another possibility altogether occurred to him.
He’d believed he was furious before.
But now...
Renzo thought a far better word to describe his feelings was volcanic.
* * *
Sophie woke in a confused, hurtling rush and her first thought was that it was much too early to be awake. The light was thin and halting, creeping in between the curtains she’d neglected to close as if uncertain of its reception.
Her second thought was that today was her wedding day.
And that unpleasant reality slapped at her, waking her up even more whether she liked it or not.
“I can see you are not asleep,” came a familiar voice from much too close. “It is best to stop pretending, Sophie.”
It was voice that should not have been anywhere near her, not here.
Not in Langston House where, in a few short hours, she would become the latest in a long line of unenthused countesses.
She told herself she was dreaming even though her eyes were wide-open.
Sophie took her time turning over in her bed, then sitting up gingerly as if she expected it to hurt, somehow. And still, no matter how long she stared or blinked, she couldn’t make Renzo disappear.
He lounged there at the foot of the four-poster bed, here in her bedroom in Langston House as if she’d conjured him up from one of the dreams that had plagued her all night.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“It turns out we have more to discuss.”
She didn’t like the way he said that, dark and something like lethal.
“How did you get in here?” Sophie looked around wildly. She didn’t know what she expected to find. Her father bursting through the door, perhaps, assuming Renzo had barged his way into Langston House like some kind of marauder? Or even Poppy, always so concerned, calling out her name?
But it really was early. If she ignored the wild pounding in her chest, there was no sound. Anywhere. No one seemed to be awake but the two of them. Langston House felt still all around.
And Renzo was here.
Right here, in this bedroom Sophie had been installed in as the future Countess of Langston. It was all tapestries, priceless art, and frothy antique chairs that looked too fragile to sit in, as befitted a room that regularly appeared in guidebooks.
“You can’t be here,” she managed to say, clutching the bedclothes to her like some kind of security blanket.
“Talk to me some more about the consequences you mentioned, if you please,” Renzo said mildly. So mildly it made every hair on her body seem to stand straight up in warning.
He was dressed the way he had been the night before. Dark trousers and boots, sleek and spare, as if to highlight his lean, brooding athleticism. That thick hair of his looked messy, as if he’d spent the hours since she’d last seen him running his fingers through it again and again. The leather jacket he’d worn in the rain last night was open now over the kind of soft, impossibly simple T-shirt that looked as if it was nothing more than a throwaway piece—and yet clung to his sculpted chest, hugging him and exalting him in turn, and likely costing more than some people’s mortgages.
If she was a better person, Sophie thought, she wouldn’t find him so attractive, even now, when she knew exactly what kind of trouble he’d brought into her life. When she knew that she should have walked away from him that night in Monte Carlo and let him remain nothing but a daydream she might have taken out and sighed over throughout the coming years of her dry, dutiful marriage.
It took a moment for his words to penetrate. And when they did, a kind of icicle formed inside of her, sharp and long and frigid.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips too dry and her throat not much better.
“I think you do.” Renzo stood at the foot of her bed, one hand looped around one of the posts in a lazy, easy sort of grip that did absolutely nothing to calm Sophie’s nerves. Not when she was sure she could feel that same hard, steady hand wrapped around her neck. Or much, much lower. “I think you came to tell me something last night but let my temper scare you off. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say you used my temper as an excuse to keep from telling me, would it not?”
Sophie found her hands covering her belly again, there beneath her comforter. Worse, Renzo’s dark gaze followed the movement, as if he could see straight through the pile of soft linen to the truth.
“What would be accurate to say is that you took the opportunity last night to make an uncomfortable situation worse,” she said, sounding more in control than she felt. She very deliberately removed her hands from her belly and set them on the top of her blankets where Renzo could see them. Where they could be inoffensive and tell him nothing. “That’s on you. It has nothing at all to do with me.”
“It has everything to do with you, cara.”
“I would like you to leave,” she told him, fighting to keep her voice calm. “You’ve threatened me already. I don’t know what showing up here, hours before I’m meant to marry, could possibly accomplish. Or is this more punishment?”
Renzo’s lips quirked into something no sane person would call a smile. He didn’t move and yet he seemed to loom there, growing larger by the second and consuming all the air in the bedchamber.
He made it hard to breathe. Or see straight.
Or remember why, exactly, she’d marched back up to Langston House last night filled with new resolve about what she would do and how she would manage her marriage—no matter Dal’s reaction to her pregnancy. Assuming she even told him.
She was aware that such concerns made her a terrible person. On some level, she thought she would always hate herself for the things she’d found herself thinking in these awful days. But none of that mattered.
What mattered was keeping her baby safe, one way or another. She couldn’t afford to care too much what that looked like.
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