AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her stomach dropped away. Her memories of that time were so dim they were only blurry impressions. A pretty dress. A crowd of adults. Nothing more.
But Cristiano had been there. She must have seen him and clearly he’d remembered her.
She stared at him, her heart pounding. Before, she’d noted that he was older, certainly much older than she was, but she hadn’t thought about it again. She hadn’t thought about it last night, either—had been too desperate for him.
There had been a vague familiarity to his name when she’d first heard it, but she hadn’t remembered anything. She’d been too young.
‘Why...?’ She stopped, not sure which question to ask first since there were so many.
‘Why did I bring you here? Why did I not tell you I knew?’ He asked them for her. ‘Because you were familiar and I wanted to know why. And when I discovered who you were I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to tell me. I wanted you to trust me.’
A sudden foreboding wound through her. ‘What do you want from me?’
He smiled again, his predator’s smile, and it chilled her. ‘What do I want from you? I want you to help me get my revenge, of course.’
Ice spread through her.
Did you think he wanted you for real?
She fought to think, fought her pity for him and for what had happened to him.
‘How? I don’t understand.’
‘I’m going to marry you, Leonie. And I’m going to invite your father to our wedding, to watch as a Velazquez takes a precious de Riero daughter the way he took my son.’
The ferocity on Cristiano’s face, gleaming in his eyes, made the ice inside her deepen, yet at the same time it gave her a peculiar and unwanted little thrill.
‘You will be mine, Leonie. And there will be nothing he can do to stop it.’
You want to be someone’s.
The thought tangled with all the other emotions knotting in her chest, too many to sort out and deal with. So she tried to concentrate only on the thing that made any kind of sense to her.
‘It won’t work,’ she said. ‘My father doesn’t care. He left me to rot in the streets.’
Something flickered across Cristiano’s intense features. ‘No, he didn’t. He thought you were dead. Didn’t you know?’
Her stomach dropped away. Dead? He thought she was dead?
‘What?’ she whispered, hoarse with shock. ‘No, my mother told me he got rid of us. That he’d wanted a son, and she couldn’t have any more children. And he...he...’ She trailed off, because it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.
Maybe it is and your mother lied to you.
This time the expression on Cristiano’s face was unmistakable: pity.
‘He didn’t get rid of you,’ he said quietly. ‘I know. I was there. Your mother left him, and took you with her, and you both disappeared. A week or so later he got word that you’d both died in a fire in Barcelona.’
‘No,’ she repeated pointlessly. ‘No. We came to Paris. Mamá had to get a job. I wanted to go home, but she told me we couldn’t because Papá didn’t want us. She couldn’t give him the son he’d always wanted so he kicked us out.’ Leonie took a shaken breath. ‘Why would she say that if it wasn’t true?’
Cristiano only shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she didn’t want you to find out that he’d been having an affair with my wife.’
Does it matter why? She lied to you.
The shock settled inside her, coating all those tangled emotions inside her, freezing them.
‘All this time I thought he didn’t look for me because he didn’t care,’ she said thickly. ‘But it wasn’t that. He thought...he thought I was dead.’
Cristiano’s anger had cooled, and a remote expression settled over his face. ‘I wouldn’t ascribe any tender emotion to him if I were you. He didn’t demand proof of your deaths. He merely took some stranger’s word for it.’
