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“Here is one thing you apparently did not learn in your vicious little hill town.” He leaned closer to her, which was a mistake. “Things can always get worse. They often do.”
Julienne sighed, a great heaving sound, as if plagued. By him, presumably.
“When our son is old enough, will you sit right here this table and tell him these things?” she demanded. When he was used to making the demands in all situations. “Will you make certain to let him know that he’s cursed already? As doomed as I was? How will you make sure that he’s aware of the Cassara corrosion that already pollutes him?”
Cristiano found he couldn’t answer that. He only stared back at her, something dark and edgy gripping him. Crushing him.
“When he seeks his father for comfort, will you push him down to the ground? Slap him until he cries—or stops crying? That’s what your father did to you, didn’t he?”
“Stop it,” he ordered her, with a stranger’s voice.
But her eyes were too bright with an emotion he couldn’t identify.
“I know. You’ll wait until he really needs you. When he’s a man grown but still needs a father figure. You’ll get drunk. You’ll say appalling things, calculated to slice him into pieces. Then you’ll totter out of the bar, hurt yourself, and blame him for it.”
She might as well have thrown a bomb at him. Cristiano wished she had.
“That is more than enough,” he growled at her. “I believe you’ve made your point.”
But he could see that wild thing was still on her, in her. She stared straight at him, challenge stamped on every inch of her, opened her mouth—
And Cristiano did not want to hear whatever came next.
He pushed back from his chair, hardly aware that he was moving, and then he was looming over her. But that was good, because she sucked in a breath. And did not say whatever shattering thing was next on her list.
A win, as far as he was concerned.
He pulled out her chair so he could lean down over her and brace himself on the arms, holding her there.
And he remembered, with an electric flash of need and longing, that night in Monte Carlo. That alcove he’d found off the lobby.
He could tell from the way her breath changed and her color heightened that she remembered it too.
“You poke and poke and poke,” he said, his voice so low he wasn’t certain it was anything more than a dark rumble. “You must know that this cannot end well, Julienne.”
“That’s the point,” she threw back at him, defiant to the end, which made him feel...something almost like helpless, in the face of all her beauty and resolve. “It never will end, Cristiano. If all goes according to plan, a father dies before his son. And you have to ask yourself a question, right now. Do you want your son to talk about you the way you talk about your own father? Or do you want something better for both of you?”
“I told you, no more. No more, Julienne.”
He didn’t raise his voice so much as he leaned into the way he said the words, staining them both with all that intensity inside of him.
Julienne didn’t flinch. She didn’t so much as bat an eye. He watched her breathe, watched those extra full breasts move, and her belly with it. And it occurred to him that he was most furious with her not because she was wrong.
But because he had the terrible suspicion that she was right.
Cristiano couldn’t face it. So he bent down instead, took her defiant chin in his hand, and kissed her.
And he could not have said the things that battled inside him, then. He wouldn’t have known where to begin.
The losses he had suffered, one after the next. His enduring shame and guilt, first because there was something about him that had made his own father hate him as a child. And then later, that he had hated his father enough in return to let him stumble out of that bar and toward the certain death he should have anticipated would steal away his mother, too.
He had let it happen. Or he hadn’t cared enough to stop it.
His hands were stained with the blood of two deaths that he could have prevented.
If only he had been a different man.
He wanted to forget. He wanted her shine, her light,that glowinstead.
