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“I want better for my son,” Julienne said now. “I want to give him absolutely everything, and I don’t need you to try to make me feel badly about that.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel badly,” Fleurette said, her voice tight. “I came, didn’t I? I’m wearing a pastel dress that makes me feel dead inside. I’m perfectly appropriate and ready to applaud. But I’m also your sister.”
“Fleurette. Please.”
“And you once sacrificed yourselffor me,so I think you can do me the courtesy of listening to me. I’m not asking you to hide in an alley and save yourself.”
Julienne met her sister’s gaze in the mirror. And it was there between them, the way it always was. That same dark night. What she’d been prepared to do. What Fleurette would have had to live with. The ghost of what could have been.
She found she couldn’t speak, so she nodded. Jerkily.
“I don’t think you’re doing any of this for the right reasons,” Fleurette said. Julienne said nothing, but rubbed her belly ostentatiously. Her sister rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m aware that you’re pregnant. But I think you want to wrap all of this up in a pretty little bow. You saved yourself for this man. You ranted on and on about bookends, and then you went out of your way to make it happen. I don’t want to speculate how you ended up pregnant.”
“The usual way, I assure you.”
Another eye roll. “My point is, we got a raw deal. We never had a chance. If you’d walked up to any other man in that bar, neither one of us would be standing here right now. We both know where we’d be, if not the precise street address.”
“Do you think I don’t think about that every day?”
“I know you do.” Fleurette’s voice and gaze were intense. “And I understand why you want this to be neat. Tidy. If you marry the man who saved us all those years ago, does it wipe the slate clean? If you have his baby, and live with him, do you wash all the sin away?”
“Because it can’t possibly be true that I love him.”
But Julienne’s voice sounded tinny and hollow, and there was a great weight deep in her belly that felt too much like a stone.
“Maybe you love him and maybe you don’t,” Fleurette said, her undertone something like urgent. “Maybe you’ve confused love with a sense of obligation. But none of that matters.”
“It matters to me quite a lot, actually.”
“Julienne, you deserve someone who lovesyou,” Fleurette said, scowling at her. “You deserve to be loved, full stop. You deserve someone who loves every single thing about you, always. Someone who does not require acts of sacrifice in return for simply not being disgusting in a bar ten years ago. You’ve spent a life surviving and sacrificing—for me, for us, for your baby. But what about you? What would happen if you livedfor youinstead?”
“I’ve never felt more alive in my life,” Julienne threw at her. “Ever.”
And she expected her sister to fight back, but she didn’t. She only held Julienne’s gaze for a long, long time, then nodded.
“Then I’m thrilled to be here to celebrate you,” she said quietly.
But Julienne couldn’t get those words out of her head.What about you?
Fleurette did not disrupt the wedding, as promised. And Julienne couldn’t have said why there was a part of her that found that disappointing. Did she want the excuse?
You want an enemy,came that voice inside, again sounding too much like the too-wise Fleurette.You want to fight your way into this marriage, and better still, have something to fight against.
And she found her hands were damp as she walked along the colonnade, and out to meet her fate. Her husband. With no enemies and no fights.
It was a quiet, simple affair, out on the terrace where Cristiano had gone down to his knees and kissed her baby. His baby.
Our baby,she thought fiercely.
It was quiet, simple, and fast. The priest intoned their vows, they both responded appropriately, and then Julienne watched as if from a great distance as Cristiano slid a pair of rings onto her hand. He provided her with one to put on his hand in return.
And then it was done.
She was married to Cristiano Cassara. Just as she’d always dreamed.
There was a small, pleasant dinner. Then Fleurette took her leave, and the sisters stared at each other. Neither one mentioning how strange it was that Fleurette had flown across the planet to witness a decidedly unromantic wedding ceremony and wasn’t even staying the night.
“I love you,” Fleurette said fiercely, and hugged her, hard. “Always.”
