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As if she had not simply surprised him with this baby. As if she’d broken him instead. A notion that made her want to reach out and make it better, somehow, with her hands.
Fleurette would be appalled, she knew. But then, Fleurette was often and easily appalled. It was part of her charm.
“I must have misheard you, Julienne,” Cristiano said after what felt like a long, long while, in a conversational tone she in no way believed. Not when she could see that simmering fury in his dark gaze. “It sounded as if you called me a coward.”
“It’s a choice you have to make,” she threw back at him, head high, as if he didn’t get to her at all. Because he shouldn’t have gotten to her. “You can be a father or you can be afraid. So far, it appears you’ve chosen the latter.”
Because surely they could both figure out how to be better parents than the ones they’d had. She had to believe that was possible.
Cristiano’s glower took on a new weight, but she refused to be cowed. And as he prowled toward her, she reminded herself that he hadn’t exactly become less dangerous in the week he’d left her here.
What was wrong with her that something in her thrilled to that?
And worse, there was that melting between her legs. As if her body had already made its choices and would happily, exultantly, make them all over again.
“You are not the only person I met in that bar ten years ago,” he told her when he reached the table.
She felt a jolt at that, an awful kick. Was he trying to say...? But she couldn’t even complete that question in her own head.
“I was there in the first place because I knew my father was there that night,” he continued, sounding even darker than before. “He loved Monte Carlo. The excess soothed him. And when I found him, he was blind drunk, as ever. But in his blindness he retained a certain, vicious clarity. Particularly when it came to me.”
“In vino veritasis a lie,” Julienne said quietly, something she knew all too well. And she refused to acknowledge the sense of deep relief she felt that he was not telling her a story of how he’d had some other woman in that place she now thought of as theirs—the good and bad of it alike. “You must have learned the truth of this years ago.”
Cristiano’s mouth did something stark and bitter. “My father was not pleased to see me, which was the typical state of affairs between us.”
That bitter curve to his mouth only deepened, leaving brackets in his hard face. And Julienne wished, suddenly, that he had not started to tell her this tale. She had a terrible feeling about where he was going with it.
But she couldn’t seem to speak when she needed to most.
Cristiano kept going, one hand on the table between them. “We had a fundamental disagreement, my father and I. He believed that it was his right to behave as he wished, without a single thought for any other living human being. In particular, my mother, who he took great pleasure in bullying. And I believed that if he wanted to careen about from one bottle to the next, then communicate with his fists, he should remove himself entirely from the rest of polite society. These were incompatible positions, obviously.”
And there was something about the way he was looking at her, that bittersweet gaze of his direct. Intense. Daring her to...argue? Deny him the opportunity to tell this story? She couldn’t tell. But whatever he was daring her to do, it made her pulse pick up. Her heart began to kick through her, slow and hard and insistent.
“I had long ago outgrown any need to rail at my father in the hope that he would become a different man before my eyes. Those are trials of adolescence and I had long ago become inured to his opinions of me. They mattered less and less in the course of my actual life and work. Left to my own devices, I rarely saw him.”
“Except that night,” Julienne managed to croak out, though her throat felt almost too tight to bear.
“That night it was necessary for me to seek him out,” Cristiano agreed, the banked fury in that dark gaze of his making her neck prickle. “It was not a task I relished, though if I am honest, there was a part of me that wanted it, too. My grandfather was concerned about the future of the company he had spent his life building. He was as disgusted with my father as I was was—more, probably. And after many years spent waiting and hoping that my father might straighten himself out and rejoin the family and the company as a contributing member, my grandfather had made a final decision. He’d gone ahead and cut my father off entirely. And had written him out of his will to boot.”
Julienne wanted to reach for him, but knew that Cristiano would never allow it. He stood too stiffly. His eyes were too dark. She braced her hands on the swell of her belly, and tried to focus on the story he was telling. And not how she longed to soothe a man who didn’t want to feel better. Who would actively avoid it if possible, in fact.
“Why were you the messenger?” she asked quietly instead, a sense of injustice welling up in her on his behalf. “Shouldn’t this have been something your grandfather told your father himself? It was his will.”
“My father and I did not see each other much, but my father and my grandfather had not spoken in years,” Cristiano said with a certain briskness that told Julienne a great many things about his family without him having to elaborate. And it occurred to her to wonder why she had always assumed that someone with his money must necessarily have no problems. Why she’d imagined that the money itself would protect him, when, of course, complicated people kept right on complicating things no matter their tax bracket. “It fell to me to deliver the news to him, if I chose.”
“If you chose?”
“I didn’t have to tell him that night. I could have waited for the inevitable explosion when he discovered his funding had disappeared, and for good. I might have, were it not for my mother.”
Julienne blinked. “She wasn’t still with him. Was she?”
“My mother believed deeply in the sanctity of marriage,” Cristiano replied, his voice as hard as it was cold. As if he was turning to ice before her eyes. “Or perhaps it was more that she felt she had made her bed and was required to lie in it ever after. I can’t say. I understood her very little, if I’m honest.”
Julienne shook her head. “But surely she wasn’t required to stay if your father was cruel to her.”
“There is no ‘get out of jail’ card for a bad marriage,” Cristiano said, a hard amusement in his voice that in no way made it to his eyes. “Not for my mother. She was raised to endure. This story you have dug up about my grandfather and Sofia Tomasi—I used to tell my mother that she should use it as her example. That it was possible to have something better. Different, anyway, even if she did choose to remain married. But she was horrified at the very idea.”
“So she stayed.”
