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It was beautiful. And it was also...empty. No cars, no traffic. No signs of life. No indication that there was anything here, or anywhere near, but her.
Isolation to go along with her imprisonment, she understood then. Not just prison, but solitary confinement.
“You cannot expect me to live like this,” she told him over the phone when she called him, shortly after that unpleasant revelation. “How can you remain in Milan, leaving me to molder away out in these fields?”
“Stranded in the prettiest prison on earth.” His voice was a dark rasp that should have horrified her. It didn’t. “My heart bleeds.”
“I’ve lived in cities almost all my life.” Because the oppressive silence of the hill town she’d grown up in haunted her still. The only sound had been the wind. And the endless judgment of the citizens. But she didn’t tell him that. She hardly liked admitting it to herself. “Do you really think I will take to the pastoral experience? I’ll explode if I stay here.”
“There is noif, Julienne.” His voice was glacial. As immovable as he was. “You will stay right where you are. Your every need is attended to and who knows? Perhaps a spot of quiet contemplation will do you some good.”
“And what of you?” she snapped back at him, gripping her mobile so tightly she was surprised it didn’t snap in half. “Do you plan to live your life as if you don’t have a woman and a baby hidden away out here like some syphilitic eighteenth century nobleman?”
“Enjoy the fresh air,” he growled at her. “Indulge in la dolce vita. You are at the Villa Cassara, after all. The sweet life is guaranteed.”
And it was only when he’d rung off that it occurred to her that really, he hadn’t had to take her furious call in the first place. It wasn’t as if the grand head of the Cassara Corporation answered his own phone, unless he wished it.
If he wanted to truly isolate her, if he wanted to keep her caged up here, there wasn’t a single thing she could do about it unless she wanted to call the police.
Assuming there were police to call, this far away from anywhere.
Julienne wasn’t proud of herself for crying, but she couldn’t stop. Not for days, off and on. She blamed her hormones. But then, as one week ticked over into the next, something else kicked in.
She was a survivor, after all. She’d survived her beginnings in France, which was more than some could claim, her own poor, lost mother among them. And she hadn’t accidentally survived it. She’d been prepared to do the unthinkable to rescue herself from that life. It made her stomach hurt to think of it now, but if Cristiano hadn’t been sitting at that bar in Monte Carlo, someone else would have been. Some other man.
And Julienne would have done what she needed to do.
That thought often brought her shame. But now, left to her own devices in her lovely Tuscan prison, she decided instead to think of it as a strength.
She would do what she needed to do, because she always did.
Because that was who she was.
In this case, stranded here as she was, she had to accept that there was no way out. Unless she wanted to pull off an elaborate scheme that would involve stealing one of the vehicles—and behaving as if she wasn’t pregnant. Maybe it would come to that, but first, she thought she’d try something else.
She’d always been extraordinarily good at doing her research. This had been a Cassara residence for generations. What she needed to do was gather as much information as possible where she was, and see where it led her.
And the more information, the better.
Because she intended to use it as a weapon.
“What do you mean, ‘there are reporters’?” Cristiano asked in icy disbelief.
His secretary stood on the other side of the large desk and...quailed. When Massimo was normally unflappable. It was his superpower, in fact. Cristiano couldn’t say that he liked the evidence that even the dependably immovable Massimo could look anything but in total control of all things, all the time.
Julienne,a voice inside him said. Foreboding, perhaps. Or simply a warning.
Because it couldn’t be anything else.
“From what I can gather, sir, there are some questions about your grandfather’s relationship with a woman,” Massimo said, his face studiously blank. “A woman not your grandmother.”
Cristiano ground his teeth together, but could not bring himself to speak.
Maybe that was a good thing.
Massimo gazed back at him as if, given his preference, he would have chopped off his own head rather than said such a thing. “I’m only repeating what the great mess of them had been shouting down in the lobby.”
“Themessof them,” Cristiano repeated. He had to fight for every scrap of advertising space across all media, but a whisper of scandal brought the vultures out in spades. But then, this was something he knew all too well after a lifetime as his father’s son.
