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“She endured.” Cristiano blew out a breath. “I admired my grandfather deeply. In many ways, he is the only hero I have ever known. But when he cut off my father, I knew that he was condemning my mother to more abuse. It was the only time we fought.”
Julienne searched his face, but there was only granite. “Did you think that if you spoke to your father he’d be nicer to your mother? I would have been afraid that it would make him go in the opposite direction.”
“I did not beg a man like Giacomo Cassara to treat his wife better.” Cristiano’s eyes gleamed with that cold near amusement that made Julienne shiver. “I wanted him to know first that despite his best efforts, his inheritance was mine. And second, that I didn’t care what he did with himself, but I would be watching over my mother. And prepared to take matters into my own hands if any harm befell her.”
Julienne’s mind spun. She tried to remember the bits and pieces of Cassara family history that had trickled down to her over the years. This rumor, that rumor. She knew his mother was no longer alive, of course. But did that mean...?
“My father proceeded to tell me that he thought about drowning me when I was a child. Repeatedly. Among other, less savory parental notions.” Cristiano paused, his mouth in a flat, hard line. “And then he staggered out of the bar. He collected my mother where, unbeknownst to me, she was waiting for him in a rented flat, and told the valet that he was driving them back to Milan. Meanwhile, I looked up from a dark contemplation of the only example of fatherhood I knew personally...to find you there. Determined to sell yourself.”
“Whatever your father said to you is a reflection of him, not you. You must know that.”
“Spare me the pop psychology, please.” His dark eyes glittered, remote and icily furious at once. “You and I can sit here and discuss at length the ways in which my father was a pathetic example of a man. But that does not change the fact there is something wrong with me. With this blood in my veins.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but a frigid glare stopped her.
“I always think of my grandfather as a good man, but as you have uncovered, there are reasons to think otherwise. If you traipsed across the length of this property and found my grandmother, she would tell you that the Cassaras are nothing but monsters. Devils sent to this earth to plague the decent.”
“In fairness, it seems your grandfather was fairly unrepentant about the fact he was cheating on her.” Julienne gestured at the table and the collection of letters. “He even brags about it.”
“There was only one good Cassara, and he died a long time ago,” Cristiano said. Firmly. “I never had any plans for there to be another.”
“Cristiano...”
“But there is more to the story.” And she was too well trained to obey that commanding voice of his. She’d been doing it for years. She fell silent without even meaning to do so while he kept telling her this same story that bookended hers. “While I was busy making arrangements for you and your sister and having you transported out of the country, my father was driving to Milan. But he never made it.”
The memory, foggy before, snapped back into place. There had been a car accident. She remembered the whispers she’d heard in the office about his past. And even more vaguely, the research she’d done on his family when he’d first installed them in the house in Milan.
But she didn’t want him to say it. Not here. She wanted to leap across the sun-drenched library table and throw her hands over his mouth to keep his words in.
As if that could make it any better for him.
The baby kicked then. Hard. Sharing her distress, maybe, And for a moment she didn’t have to wonder why she couldn’t breathe.
“They say he lost control of the car in the Montferrat hills. But I know better. He was already drunk, and I had agitated him. And I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that the loss of a man like my father keeps me up at night. It doesn’t. It’s my mother I can’t let go.” Cristiano’s hard gaze bored into her. “He killed my mother, and it was my fault, and I have to live with that.”
“Cristiano—”
“And then I have to ask myself, what kind of man does not care that he sent his own father to his death?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Julienne said fiercely. She stepped out from behind the table and moved toward him, even though it was foolish. She couldn’t seem to help herself. “You weren’t the one who’d had too much to drink. You weren’t driving the car.”
“I knew what he was and I knew what might happen if he went off half-cocked. This is what I’m talking about, Julienne.” And she could see something besides that glacial cold in his dark eyes as she came closer. The torture. The pain. Her stomach twisted—forhim. “I killed my mother as surely as if I was behind the wheel. And I let my father kill the both of them, because some part of me cared that little about where he would go and what he would do once he left that bar. Because the truth is, there is nothing good in me. I play a good game, but scratch the surface, and I’m nothing but another Cassara monster. A breaker of vows. A bully. A son who took great pleasure in taunting his father into staggering off and getting behind the wheel. One way or another, that makes me a killer.”
Julienne felt like crying. Or possibly already was. Her eyes were glassy and the library was becoming blurred at the edges.
But in the center of everything was Cristiano.
“None of that is true,” she managed to say.
And then she closed the last bit of distance between them and slid her hands on his chest.
He jolted as if she’d shocked him. His hands moved to capture hers, and she thought he would push her away, but he didn’t.
And for a very long moment, they stood there, frozen.
“You are nothing like your father,” she told him with all the ferocity she could muster. “I knew your grandfather too, don’t forget, and the difference between you and him is that you don’t make vows unless you know you can keep them. Forever. There are a thousand things that can make an innocent child grow into a man like your father, but none of them are in your blood, Cristiano. Not one of them.”
And before he could argue any further, she thrust herself up on her tiptoes, somehow balancing the weight of her belly, and pressed a kiss to his mouth.
