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Because he knew better. He knew what he was.
“Neither you nor the child will want for anything.” His lips thinned. “What more can you require of me than that?”
“Explain to me how this is going to go,” she said, in the brisk manner he recognized too well from her days as one of his vice presidents. His favorite vice president, he could admit, now she’d vacated her post. “I will have the baby here, presumably? And I do not doubt that you will see to it that the finest medical team in Europe is on hand. After he is born, I’m sure you will produce nannies. Tutors. Do you anticipate that he will simply live here forever? That he and I will shuffle around the Tuscan hills until we are interred beneath the soil ourselves?”
His teeth ached. Again. “There’s no need to be dramatic.”
“My mistake. Because there is no inherent drama whatsoever in imprisoning the mother of your child against her will.”
“Neither you nor the child will want for anything,” he gritted out again, repeating himself.
“The child will want a father,” she threw back at him. “And I—”
But she stopped herself. And he found himself roaming closer, not sure what it was that compelled him. That glow of hers, maybe, now mixed with the heat of her temper.
Cristiano had never seen anything so bright.
And he could not tell if he wanted to lock her away or put his hands on her instead. He could not tell which one hurt, which tempted him or how on earth he could possibly handle this. Her.
The baby.
“Finish your sentence,” he dared her. “What is ityouwant, Julienne?”
“I have known you for a long time, Cristiano. A very long time. I have seen the best of you firsthand. I have also seen you on one of your cold rampages, striking terror into whole divisions with a single stare.”
“And yet you do not know me at all,” he retorted.
“I know enough. You have your rules, don’t you? You like to be alone. No friends, no family, only work. You like a woman, but only for a night.”
“In this, I think you’ll find, I am no different than any other man.”
“But you’re not a playboy, forever in search of flesh and sin,” she said, and there was a different kind of light in her dark eyes. He could feel the echo of it inside him. “You’re afraid.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
IFSHE’DTHROWNa lit match at him, she doubted Cristiano would look more thunderstruck.
But that was good, she assured herself as that thunderstruck expression tipped over into something significantly more forbidding. He might not want to know how she felt, but she was compelled to tell him anyway, for her sins.
There had to be something deeply wrong with her that this man—hercaptor, lest she forgot—could stride in here with a look on his face that suggested she was already trying his patience, and she should want nothing more than to go to him. To put her hands on him. To press her mouth to his and feel the kick of that race through her all over again.
“Call the police,” Fleurette had snapped at her, the first day. And every day since. “Or I will.”
“I can’t call the police,” Julienne replied every time. Today she’d added, “think of the baby, please, Fleurette. Does he need to come into the world to find his father in jail?”
But her sister knew her too well, and had responded to that pious tone with a snort.
“Maybe you should think of the baby,” she’d shot right back. “With your head, Julienne. Instead of whatever it is you’re thinking with these days.”
Julienne did not wish to examine what part of her person she might have been using lately, thank you. What mattered was that there would be no police. Paparazzi, perhaps, thanks to the wealth of personal letters Cristiano’s grandfather had kept in this library. Passionate letters, both the ones he’d received and copies of those he’d sent, which meant Julienne had the full picture of his extramarital affair—a relationship filled with longing and complaint, years of yearning and plans for more. Always more.
And privately, she might have felt somewhat ashamed about sharing those sentiments with the world by calling some of the contacts she’d made in her time at Cassara Chocolates, then letting them run with what she’d dug up. Then again, who wasn’t fascinated with stories of marital infidelity, long-term mistresses paraded around in plain view, and the truth about great men who had been very nearly canonized after their deaths?
Besides, she told herself now as Cristiano scowled at her, what else was she supposed to do? She was a kidnap victim. A kidnap victim held in glorious luxury, it was true, but all the lovely trappings in the world couldn’t change the fact she couldn’t leave.
Oh,said a voice inside her that sounded far too much like her sister,do youwantto leave? Because that certainly isn’t clear.
That landed like a punch. Because Julienne knew, now, that anything she might have told herself about her motivations was a lie. She’d known that the moment she’d looked up and seen him there, smoldering and furious and still with that darkness all over his face.
