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Cecilia turned her gaze back to his, then, and everything else fell away.
There was only this. Those violet eyes filled with temper, sadness, sheer fury and something else he couldn’t name.
There was only her, standing there in the clothes he’d bought for her, looking like every dream he’d ever had of the perfect wife.
Because the only dream he’d ever had, in all these years, had been her.
Her. Cecilia.
The only person alive who had not betrayed him at the first opportunity.
The fact that they were still standing here in full view of his entire shark tank full of grasping directors impressed itself upon him, then, as if from a great distance. Pascal moved from the table, distantly amazed that his body still worked. That the explosion that was still rolling through him in the form of aftershocks had not, in fact, taken him out at the knees. That while he might feel every one of those jagged edges, they were not necessarily visible.
His head was spinning. He could feel the thump of his heart, and the tightness in his gut. He expected his hands to be shaking when he reached out to usher Cecilia back through the door, but they weren’t.
Somehow they weren’t.
He excused himself, and her, or maybe he sang a happy song—he would never know. It was all noise and wonder andherinside him.
More than that, he didn’t care what any of his board members thought. Not any longer.
He led Cecilia out of the meeting room. And for the first time since he’d built it, Pascal cursed the bright, open office he’d been so proud of before. He led her through a maze of glass and too many eyes, winding his way back to his own office, when all he wanted was privacy. A closed door. A place to hide and figure out what the hell had just happened.
When they reached his office at last, he ignored Guglielmo and motioned for Cecilia to precede him inside. She did, her back in a beautiful straight line as she moved ahead of him, then kept walking across the floor toward the bank of windows.
For a moment he could only stare. Ancient, beautiful Rome outside the glass and his Cecilia within. It made his chest hurt.
“Why did you do that?”
He threw the question at her, his voice a rough, low sort of growl as he closed the door behind him. Then locked it, for safe measure. And he hit the button that darkened the glass all around them, making his walls distinctly opaque and private at last.
But he didn’t move from the door.
“A better question is why you did it,” she replied, keeping her back to him. “Why would you share pictures of our wedding with the world? Why would you tell them lies about us? And why—” And that was when she turned, her violet eyes dark with that fury again. “Why on earth would you give them pictures of Dante, Pascal?”
And for a blistering moment it was as if he couldn’t remember why he’d made the very distinct choices he had. As if all she needed to do was look at him with her otherworldly eyes, and he was lost.
But he refused to accept that.He refused.
He opened his mouth to give her his reasons. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have them, or hadn’t suspected he might be called upon to do just that. After all, he had long since made an art out of acting the bastard he knew he was. Biologically and otherwise.
Yet somehow, beneath that steady violet gaze, he found he couldn’t do it.
Cecilia had not betrayed him, but he couldn’t say the same.
He remembered his own mother then. Wailing on the floor after another rejection from his father.
We are the dirt beneath his feet, Marissa would cry.
Pascal had spent so long exulting in that status, turning it around and making it a virtue, that he’d forgotten the truth of it. He could call it whatever he liked. He could dress it up and use it to his advantage, and he had.
But dirt was still dirt.
He looked at Cecilia, his beautiful wife who had been wholly innocent until she’d met him. And he knew that sooner or later, the longer he kept her with him, all he would do was tarnish her, too.
He would cover her in dirt. Hadn’t he already done so?
She had been pure, and he had corrupted her. She had built herself a life after he’d left, putting together the pieces of a fall from grace right there in the abbey where she’d been raised, and making it something beautiful. And he had ruined that, too.
