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There was hot color on her cheeks, then, and something perilously close to disappointment in her eyes. When, if he was honest with himself, it had been his intention to prick her temper.
Not disappoint her.
He had already disappointed the first woman who had ever meant something to him. He couldn’t bear the idea that he was doing it again.
“People choose who they are,” Julienne told him, her voice much too quiet. Not shrill, not furious. Just that quiet directness that scraped at him, leaving deep grooves inside her. “Every day, you choose. It’s not destiny that makes a man, or his bloodline. It’s how he behaves.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You forget how you met me,” she shot back.
Cristiano had not forgotten. And now, because of what had happened ten years later, all his memories of her were infused with an eroticism the reality had not possessed. Like all those years in offices around the world when he somehow hadn’t fully looked at her. He remembered them like torture now. And when he thought of Monte Carlo now, she was this version of Julienne both times—not the terrified sixteen-year-old she’d been then.
You are sick,he accused himself.Do you need any further proof?
But then, he had despaired of himself for the whole of the last decade.
“You never asked either one of us too much about where we came from,” Julienne said now, still sitting back in her chair and frowning at him. “Which was a mercy, as neither Fleurette nor I ever wanted to speak of it. You told me that first night that you assumed that if selling my body was my only option, my other options must be wretched indeed.”
“You have mentioned your mother before,” he said darkly. He didn’t wish to have this conversation. Or any conversation. He wanted to remain in merry ignorance forever, if that would keep this woman at arm’s length. If that was what he wanted. Which, he assured himself forcefully then, he did. Of course he did. “I understand that your childhood was unpleasant.”
If she heard his repressive tones, she ignored it.
“In my village, they called my mother a ‘party girl,’” Julienne told him. “A lovely euphemism, is it not? When what she was, always, was an addict. She had me when she was seventeen. Sometimes she liked to claim that I ruined her life, but even as a child, I knew that wasn’t true. She was the one who ruined her life, over and over again.”
“I don’t see what the story has to do with our situation,” Cristiano said gruffly.
Because the last thing he needed was to have more reasons tofeel thingswhere this woman was concerned.
“It’s hard for me to look back and figure out what I knew then and what I know now, thanks to the passing of so many years.” Julienne sighed. “But my mother would do anything for a good time. At a certain point they began to tease me about it in school. Everyone knew who the easiest woman in the village was, and how they could get their hands on her. So you see, when I decided to sell myself, I knew what to do. I thought I would try to differentiate myself from my poor mother by charging more than a pack of cigarettes or a ride home.”
His jaw was so tight he worried it might shatter. “I do not see the purpose of wandering off down memory lane, Julienne.”
But she didn’t relent. “Men began to look at me early. Too early. There were leers, suggestive comments. One of my mother’s friends told me that the Boucher women had a certain look. That anyone could tell they were made to be whores. And yes, he saidwomen.He wanted to be sure to include Fleurette, who could not have been more than eight at the time. It was as if we had price tags around our necks, and a clock counting down. All the men in that village were waiting for was the opportunity.”
That chin of hers rose, defiant and something more.
And there was a howl in him that Cristiano doubted would ever fade.
Julienne’s smile was brittle. “On the day I decided to leave that town forever, I had been propositioned no less than three times. It was just an ordinary day. And I knew, you see, that it was only a matter of time before I surrendered to my fate. There was nowhere to go on that cursed hill. No one would hire one of the Boucher women to do an honest job. Who would have a whore like that behind the counter? Or even sweeping a floor where decent people might go?”
“Why are you telling me this?” Cristiano demanded, convinced there was ground glass in his mouth as he spoke. “Is it your intention that I find this village and burn it to the ground?”
He would do it personally. And with pleasure.
“You are a Cassara,” she threw at him, her voice fierce, then. “The blood you are so ashamed to have in your veins makes you a billionaire twice over. You can buy anything you wish. You were never trapped in a forgotten hill town, doomed to be a whore. And yes, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a benefactor at the least likely moment. But I didn’t lounge about, bemoaning my good luck. I claimed it. Don’t you see? I worked night and day to be worthy of my rescue.”
Cristiano didn’t know when he had stopped pretending to pick at his dinner. Or when they’d faced off, there at the corner of the great table in the dining room, staring each other down as if at any moment one of them might throw a punch.
What was wrong with him that he almost thought it would be a relief?
“I know you cannot be suggesting that I am...lazy, is it?”
“Not lazy, perhaps. But you certainly do work at your self-pity the way others work for a paycheck.”
He growled. “Be very, very careful,cara.”
“Or what?” Julienne asked wildly, and laughed in a way he could not say he enjoyed at all. “Let me guess. You will imprison me on a remote property and leave me to live out my days in forced solitude. That will show me.”
