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That was what a girl said, she’d been told by brittle, hard edged Annette, who had never been much of a mother. Every time Annette went off to what she called herparties,she came back with less of herself. As if someone had reached inside her, scraped out everything in there and left her to walk around an empty hollow.
She had died when Julienne was fourteen and everyone had called it a blessing.
Julienne had intended to survive, no matter how hollow she was inside. And unlike Annette, Julienne did not plan to forget her obligations to Fleurette, who had only been ten, then. She would take care of her sister if it killed her. And she would not consign Fleurette to the same fate.
At least one of them should survive without that scraped-out emptiness. Just one.
“How old are you?” he had replied, in richly compelling French blurred slightly with an Italian accent. Julienne hadn’t expected the question. Who knew men were discerning—about anything? Her experience so far had not allowed for the possibility. She drew in a breath, prepared to claim she was a more palatable eighteen, despite the fact sixteen was perfectly legal. But his dark eyes flashed as if he knew what she meant to do. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Old enough,” she replied, trying to sound husky. Throaty. Wasn’t that how women sounded in situations like this? “Past the age of consent, if that is what you mean.”
He had looked at her, through her. In her whole life, before and since, Julienne had never felt soseen.In that moment she was certain that Cristiano Cassara could see everything.Everything.What had happened, what she’d had planned. The one-way spiral of the life before her and the squalid bleakness she’d left behind. Fleurette out there in an alley, the emptiness in Julienne’s wallet and belly alike, and what she was prepared to do to change both.
All the things she was prepared to do, starting here. With him.
More than that, she was certain he could also see the dreams and hopes she had long since jettisoned in her committed attempts to keep her sister and her warm and reasonably fed—if never safe or happy.
“I rather think not,” he had said, a quiet thunder stroke of a comment.
And then Cristiano Cassara had changed her life.
With a lift of one hand.
The déjà vu was intense tonight. Cristiano again sat at the bar, another untouched drink before him. He fiddled with it, turning it this way and that, but he did not lift it to his lips. She now knew the rumors about him—every rumor, in fact. That he never drank, that his father had loved his liquor too well but his wife and child too little, and that these were the rituals Cristiano performed when he was alone. The untouched drink. The sober vigil.
He still had that poet’s mouth, with its hint of sensuality she had never seen him succumb to, not once. Not even in the odd, stolen paparazzi shot of him when he couldn’t have known he was being watched. His face was a terrible kind of beautiful, harsh and brutal, with cheekbones that made a woman dream of saints and martyrs. And those dark, flashing eyes that still burned when he looked at a person directly.
She remembered what his arm had felt like beneath her hand as if her palm was a scar. All that hard, hot power.
And Julienne was not a child any longer. She was not a scared teenager, prepared to sell herself to the highest bidder—or any bidder at all—because she was devoid of options and out of choices.
Still, there was a particular agony to this moment, so long in coming.
She slid her bejeweled evening purse onto the glossy bar, and angled her body toward his.
And knew, without his having glanced her way or indicated he was anything but alone, that he had been aware of her all along. Perhaps even before she’d stepped inside the dark, deliberately close space.
But she was too good at making him into a myth, as Fleurette often complained. Tonight she planned to focus on the man.
Cristiano had succeeded his grandfather to become the CEO and president of the company not long after she’d met him ten years ago. More than that, and more importantly, he was Julienne’s boss. She had started at the company headquarters in Milan ten years ago, as a part-time job she fit in around the private studies Cristiano had arranged for her and Fleurette. First she’d been an intern. And then, once she’d finished her schooling at eighteen, she’d taken the lowest position offered and had worked her way steadily up.
That she was, in effect, Cristiano’s ward had never signified. It was never discussed, and Julienne often wondered if anyone else even knew how generous he was, or how she had personally benefitted from it. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d ever lived with him. He had put them up in one of his houses in Milan, complete with staff to tend to them, and in essence, they’d raised themselves.
We were too old already,Fleurette liked to say.
These days, Julienne lived across the sea in New York City. She’d fought hard to get to her position as the vice president of North American operations for the Cassara Corporation, reporting directly to Cristiano himself. And she’d fought even harder to close the kind of deals that would not only pay Cristiano back for his generosity all those years ago, but give back more than he’d given.
It had taken years.
He looked at her now, that dark gaze of his cool and assessing.
But no less harsh.
She would have felt let down if it had been, she understood.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as politely as if she was looking at him across a table in one of the Cassara Corporation’s many offices.
“You were insistent, Ms. Boucher,” he said, and there was that undercurrent of disapproval in his voice that let her know that he was astonished that she’d dared. And that she’d persisted, despite his secretary’s best efforts.
