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CHAPTER EIGHT
ROMEWASASPARKLING, sprawling mess of a too-big city, Cecilia was a wife when she had never planned to marry—much less in such haste and upon command—and there wasn’t a single part of this sudden new life she was going to have to find her way through, one way or another, that made any sense to her.
Pascal had driven them down from the mountains, stopping only for the odd meal or the chance to stretch his legs. Or better still, to let Dante wear himself out enough to resume the trip. For her part, Cecilia had changed into a traveling outfit after the ceremony, too aware that it was an outfit her brand-new husband—herhusband—had picked out for her. She hadn’t wanted to wear anything he’d given her, but she also didn’t want any of the nuns to know how fraught and strained her brand-new marriage was. Already.
“I don’t want you to dress me,” she’d told him, scowling over the clothes he’d delivered to her the night before the ceremony. A wedding dress, traveling clothes and a sharp order to leave all her packing to the staff he planned to unleash on the cottage after they left. His staff would take all the personal items and leave behind the furniture. Maybe she’d been mad about that, too. Maybe she was mad about everything. “Like some horrid little doll.”
“Thus far I have only provided you with the wardrobe I would prefer you to wear,” he’d replied in that dark, stirring way of his. His black-gold eyes had glittered. “Would you like me to dress you, as well? Because that is a different proposition altogether.”
She didn’t want to think about that.
Or to be more precise, it was all she thought about the last long night she was still herself. She’d tossed and turned and scowled at her ceiling, and none of it had changed a thing. She’d woken up, put on the wedding dress he’d chosen for her and walked down the aisle as ordered.
And now she was Pascal’s wife.
The truth was, she didn’t want to think too hard or too closely about any part of it. Not the wedding ceremony. Not the fact that she’d left behind the only home she had ever known for a future she could only describe as unknown. And unsettled.
And she certainly did not want to think about that taunt of hisafterthe ceremony.
She would not beg him. For anything. Ever.
But even as she thought such things, and meant them, a quick glance toward her new husband—and the way he navigated the roads with confidence and ease—made something deep inside her…quiver.
She busied herself with Dante, who was overexcited and could hardly contain himself over the course of the long drive. There were tears. Tantrums. Too much sugar, not enough videos, and by the time they finally made it all the way into Rome, Pascal was tightlipped and Cecilia was thoroughly frazzled.
But not too frazzled to be a little smug about it.
“Just remember,” she told Pascal as they finally got out of the car, there in a garage that was itself almost too fancy for her to take in, “you asked for this.”
Pascal only gave her a dark look. Then he picked Dante up—because the boy had finally gone to sleep—and led the way inside. Up a stair and into three full floors of what Pascal calledhome.
Cecilia’s first impression had been…overwhelming.
She’d chalked it up to fatigue. All that glittering, all those views, the soaring entry hall that went all the way up to a chandelier the size of her cottage, and all thatstuffthat shrieked its dizzying cost at decibels she didn’t think she could truly understand.
The next morning it was even worse.
Because it had been one thing to see magazine spreads of a powerful man in a rich person’s clothes. The magazines were filled with such men after all. It was something else again to be steeped in all that power rather than simply reading about it at a remove. To have it wrapped around her, choking her and making her think that she had been very foolish indeed to come here.
All Cecilia had been thinking about when she’d agreed to this was staying close to her child. And that was all that mattered, she told herself sternly that morning as she crept around the huge, hushed apartment that was the largest single residence she’d ever been in. But she should probably also have spared a thought or two for the fact she was a simple woman.
Cecilia’s version of a complicated life had included the boundaries of the same small village that was the only home she’d ever known, and the good or bad opinions of the people who lived there with her. And whether she’d lived inside the abbey walls or in a cottage outside the grounds, the abbey that had always been the center of that village had also been her whole world.
You didn’t have a choice,she reminded herself tartly.You had to come here.
But that didn’t make things any better.
She was…dizzy. Whatever the opposite of altitude sickness was. And that feeling didn’t go away as the days passed, the darkness of the waning year enlivened only by the signs of Christmas everywhere she looked in her adopted new city.
Pascal had been good to his word. As far as Cecilia could tell, he had employed a literal army of staff to care for Dante’s every possible need. Each and every one of whom Dante found fascinating, so as much as Cecilia might have wanted to reclaim her only child’s attention, he didn’t want to go with her when she sought him out and found him playing, or doing crafts, or practicing scales on the piano that had its own room. He wanted to continue doing what he was doing, in the company of all the new people who he, of course, found far more entertaining and fascinating than his own mother.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do with myself now that you’ve forced me to come here,” she had seethed at Pascal one morning several days after they’d arrived, feeling brittle enough that she might break in two. “I am not used to all this idleness.”
Pascal had been in the office he used when he was home, starting his day with a stack of financial papers from around the world and a cup of the strong espresso he preferred.
The look he’d given her had seared through her.
“You are in Rome,” he’d said, sounding faintly astonished that such a thing needed to be said. Or perhaps that was his innate arrogance. “If you cannot entertain yourself here, Cecilia, you cannot be entertained.”
