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“You have said enough, I think.”
He hardly recognized his own voice. It was stark. Harsh. As gray and cold as the city all around them. And inside him, the guilt and the shame that had always lurked there, waiting, rose up like the tide. Sweeping him under at last, then dragging him out to sea.
And that was the trouble with shame. With guilt. It only felt like drowning when the harder truth was he lived on. Despite everything, he lived on.
“Cristiano. Please.” Julienne’s eyes took on a particular sheen that some part of him recognized as tears. An emotion he did not wish to name.
He was far past that.
Out in that cold sea, going under, far away from any land.
“I will never forgive you for this,” he told her, whole winters on his face. In his soul. And that terrible sea that choked him in his voice. “Mark my words, Julienne. I will never forgive you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THEREWASSOMETHINGraw and frozen in his gaze, and Julienne’s chest hurt as if she’d breathed in too deep on a frigid morning, but Cristiano did not say anything further. Not to her.
He made two terse phone calls in a clipped, dark tone, then ushered her back across thepiazza, his long, athletic stride giving her no quarter.
But it didn’t occur to her not to go with him.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, if she was honest with herself. Him to cry out in joy? Gather her into an embrace and dance around thepiazza, like one of those strange American commercials for prescription medication?
“He will hate you,” Fleurette had said, a judge handing down a verdict. “He will hate you, he will hate the baby, and I cannot see why it’s the moral thing to do to subject either one of you to him. You repaid him already, Julienne. You do not owe him anything else. Ever.”
She had not wanted to believe her sister.
More than that, she could admit—with a creeping sense of shame that bloomed all the brighter as he marched her to a waiting car, then bundled her into the back—she had wanted...
This, she supposed. Whateverthislooked like.
Maybe all she’d wanted was to see him again. And this particular excuse to see him again was unassailable, whether he forgave her or not. She wasn’t seeking his forgiveness. She was having his child.
And she would have to live with the part of her that exulted in that, and not because there was a life inside her that she was already desperately, hopelessly in love with. Or notonlythat. There was also the part of her that took far too much pleasure in the notion that their lives would forevermore be tangled together now, hers and Cristiano’s, no matter what reaction he had to her pregnancy.
Julienne was certain that a better person would not feel such things. A good mother would be focused on the baby and not on her own treacherous heart. But as hard as she tried to expunge herself of such self-interested, foolish emotion, it remained.
Taunting her.
Making her wonder if he knew—and if that was why he couldn’t forgive her. God knew she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself, either.
Julienne did not ask where they were headed. He did not offer the information. They sat in the backseat of the car, separated by a few tense inches and a vast, unconquerable gulf of the fury that came off him in thick waves.
But she recognized the building they arrived at, sometime later. It was the house where she and Fleurette had lived in those first years after Monte Carlo, only leaving when Julienne had gotten her first real job at in the Cassara Corporation’s UK office.
She shot him a sharp look as he ushered her out of the car and into the old house, but his face was closed down tight. Unreadable, save for that black, cold thing.
And Julienne understood that this was not a trip down memory lane when she saw the men waiting for them in the kitchen.
“I am a doctor,” the oldest of the men said, smiling slightly while his white hair gleamed. “I believe I once treated you for bronchitis.”
“Of course,” Julienne murmured politely, feeling faintly ridiculous. She had no memory of having bronchitis or meeting any doctors, but then, that first six months or so after Cristiano had rescued them from Monte Carlo remained a blessed blur, even now.
The old man nodded. “If you’ll come with me...?”
And it was not until the examination was done—until the necessary samples were taken and Julienne was dressed and sitting in the old living room that she had once believed was the very pinnacle of style and luxury—that she accepted the fact that Cristiano had hurt her feelings.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she muttered to herself, glaring down at her hands as she wound them together over the very crest of her bump. “He cannot take your word for it. How many women must turn up with paternity claims? He would be a fool if he did not verify this personally.”
