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And she’d already started down this road. She might as well say all the things she’d been carrying around inside her all these years, or at least the highlights, because she had no intention of having this discussion again.
“What is there to discuss?” she asked. “I fell asleep in your arms. It was the first time I had done something like that, as every other moment we’d had together had been so furtive. Stolen. But not that night. You asked me to stay and I stayed. And when I woke up in the morning, you had left the valley for good.” She made a noise that no one could mistake for a laugh. “In case you’re wondering, I woke up the way you left me. Naked. With the sun beaming in the windows and Mother Superior standing at the foot of the bed.”
Back then she could have read every expression that moved over his face. Every glint in his eye. But though she could see something shift there today, she couldn’t twist it into any kind of sense. And it was stunning, the things that could wallop a person. The ways that grief could sneak into the most surprising crevices and well up there, like tears.
“Is that why you’re not a nun?” he asked.
She wondered if he knew what a loaded question that was.
It is not for me to tell you what to do, child,Mother Superior had said when Cecilia’s condition became clear.That is between you and God. But I will tell you this. I have known you since you were delivered to our door. I watched you grow up. And I greeted, with joy, the notion that you might join the sisters here. But the truth is, the order is the only family you’ve known. I have to ask myself if you truly wish to dedicate yourself to this life, or if what you want most of all is family. And now you will have your own. Do you truly wish to give that up?
“In the end,” Cecilia said now to the man who was a catalyst for both her greatest shame and deepest joy in life, damn him, “I was not a good fit for the order.”
“Not a good fit? You’d already been living in that abbey for most of your life. How could you not be perfect for them? Why would they let you walk away?”
She glared at him. “These are all interesting questions. But not from someone who ran off in the middle of the night. If you had questions to ask me, Pascal, you could have asked them then.”
“I did notrun off,” he bit out. And if she wasn’t mistaken, there was something like temper in his voice then. Sparking in that black gaze of his. “You must always have known,cara, that my destiny was never here.”
Her palms stung and she realized she’d curled her hands into fists. She forced herself to unclench her fingers, one by one.
“That became clear once you left. And then failed to return for six years.”
“I’m here now.”
“And I’m sure that any moment, the heavens will open up and hosannas will rain down upon us all,” Cecilia retorted. Archly. “But until that moment, you will forgive me if I am somewhat less enthused.”
“The Cecilia I remember would never have spoken to me this way.” One of his brows rose. Imperiously. “I remember soft, cool hands. A pretty singing voice. And cheeks that were forever pinkening.”
“That girl was an idiot.” Cecilia sniffed. “And she died six years ago, when she woke to find herself not at all the person she’d imagined herself to be.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Don’t you? I thought that I was a moral, upstanding, pure and wholesome individual. A woman who truly wished to dedicate herself to a life of service. But it turned out that I was wicked straight through, shameless enough to flaunt it in the very abbey that raised me, and so foolish that I actually believed that the man who had engineered my fall might stick around to help with a rough landing. Alas. He did not.”
His stern mouth looked starker somehow. “I was told that all sins would be forgiven if I were to do what was inevitable, what I would do anyway, and leave.”
Cecilia opened her mouth to argue that, but something about the way he said it tugged at her. “What do you mean, you were told?”
But he didn’t answer the question. He studied her for a moment, then another, his hand on his jaw.
“You have yet to explain to me what my board members were doing here. Let me guess who it was. An older gentleman, perhaps? Silver hair and beard, a theatrical cane and a penchant for dressing like an uptight Victorian? And his trusty sidekick, the younger man, round and possessed of an overly glossy mustache?”
He had described the two men exactly.
She shrugged. “They didn’t leave their names.”
“But I can see from your expression that they were the ones who came here. Why?”
“Your story of narrowly escaping death in the Dolomites, and the recovery that allowed you ample time to shore up your scheme to take over the world, is practically a fairy tale told to small children at this point. Everyone has heard it.”
“I’m delighted that you have paid such close attention.”
“But that’s my point,” Cecilia said coolly. “No attention was required. The story was everywhere. You’re fairly ubiquitous these days, aren’t you?”
“If by ubiquitous you mean wealthy and powerful, I accept the description proudly.”
“Because that’s what matters to you.” She couldn’t seem to help herself. Because she had to keep poking and poking to make sure that he really was this stranger he’d turned into. That the man she’d thought he was had never been anything but a figment of her own imagination. She had to becertain. “Money at all costs. No matter who it hurts.”
