AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m afraid you will find that is not up to you tolet medo anything,” he replied, too softly “It is done.”
She shot to her feet, cursing her new, pregnant body and how unsteady it made her feel on her own feet. And now the trembling inside of her had spread to the rest of her limbs. Now she simply shook, and there was no way he didn’t see it.
He saw it, all right. What was clear was that he didn’t care.
“This is not the stone age, Cristiano. What you’re talking about is illegal. Kidnap. False imprisonment. Do you want me to go on?”
“You’re welcome to put your complaint in writing, of course.” His gaze was impassive. His expression like stone. “You are no longer employed by the company and can therefore claim no access to the human resources department, but I’ll be certain to read any complaint of yours as closely as it deserves.”
He only watched her as she gaped at him, and she couldn’t help another incredulous laugh. “I’m not going to go with you, Cristiano. I will never, ever sign up to be locked away in some tower in the middle of nowhere, with or without my baby.”
“Do you have an alternative?” he asked her quietly, that glittering thing in his gaze a weapon. And he’d hit his mark, dead center. “Ask yourself this, please. Can you run from me? And if you do, do you truly believe I will not catch you?”
“Cristiano...” she whispered, though she had the terrible feeling it was already too late.
And that his name was less a song on her lips tonight than it had been once.
Especially when his mouth moved into that grim, hard line. “The question is not whether or not I can do what I wish. It is not even whether or not I should. The question is, Julienne, what can you possibly do to stop me?”
CHAPTER SIX
THEVILLACASSARAwas as beautiful as it was quietly renowned. It was a triumph of Italian country glory set down to make the most of the gentle Tuscan hills where, it was rumored, Cassaras had dreamed of sweet things for many generations.
Julienne had been a little too aware of the difference between reality and corporate marketing after all her years as a glorified candy seller, but that didn’t make the Cassara family home any less impressive. If she’d been an invited guest, she would no doubt have called the place a paradise.
But the villa wasn’t hers for a holiday. It was a prison. And it didn’t matter how beautiful a prison was. What mattered was that she couldn’t leave it as she chose.
Julienne had succumbed with embarrassingly little trouble. Cristiano had been implacable, as ever, but worse—he’d been correct. She could not outrun him. She certainly couldn’t fight him off.
She was six months pregnant and more debilitating by far, she had lost her heart to him a long time ago.
And so she had clung to what shreds of dignity she had remaining. She had let him march her out of the house where she and Fleurette had once lived—where she had made him into a myth in her head. A legend of all that was good and right, when maybe that had been nothing but a fairy tale a lost girl told herself as she figured out how to find her way out of her own dark woods.
She rather thought it said unfortunate things about her that she felt more grief over the loss of her made-up version of Cristiano than she did about the fact he handed her into another car, escorted her to the Cassara Corporation offices, then took her to the roof where the Duomo rose in the distance. There he’d strapped her into his waiting helicopter.
Her priorities had shifted around when he hadn’t boarded the helicopter himself, but let her fly away with his staff instead. She’d had nothing to do but think about the appropriate things to grieve as they flew through the night, away from the lights of Milan, then south toward Florence and the Tuscan countryside.
In the dark, as the helicopter came in to land, it was entirely too easy to see that there was absolutely nothing rolling out in all directions. Nothing but a vast inky black stretch, with only the villa casting off light, a small bright beacon in all the dark.
Her first, panicked assessment had not been wrong.
The next morning, Julienne had woken up in the room that the smiling housekeeper had escorted her to the night before. The room could easily have starred in a magazine spread on the wonders of Italian villas. Outside her windows, it didn’t look any more real. It was a glorious stretch of pretty fields toward the horizon, the view studded with cypress trees, red poppies and purples wisteria.
But Julienne wasn’t here to marvel at the pretty land and gardens. She was here against her will.
“You need to remember that,” she told herself sternly.
The villa sat at the crest of a hill and no matter how high she climbed or how far she looked or walked in any direction, there was nothing. No other villas. No adorable Italian villages, tucked charmingly away beyond this hill or that.
Even if there hadn’t been evident security, there to patrol the boundaries of the Cassara estate, it wasn’t as if she could simply walk off and expect to get away. The estate didn’t appear on any maps. It was so resolutely unmappable, in fact, that her mobile kept suggesting she was in the center of Florence.
She might have set off anyway, because Italy had been populated for thousands of years and she was bound to findsomeoneif she walked far enough,but it wasn’t just her she had to think about these days. And she didn’t feel she could risk herself when she had the baby to consider.
It turned out that she could spend a lot of time brooding about that, too.
But it wasn’t until later that first day that she truly realized exactly what it was that Cristiano had planned for her.
There was staff, but they only nodded and excused themselves. It became clear very quickly that they’d been instructed not to speak to her. Hours later, she found herself standing on one of the many patios, staring out at fields as the fog rolled in.
