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Perhaps you haven’t,a dark voice inside him suggested.Why would you deserve her?
He didn’t think he made a sound, so caught was he in all her brightness. The glorious shine of it.
Cristiano could have stared at her forever. He felt thirsty. Ravenous. And only that light and joy she generated could make it better. Could makehimbetter.
But that was when she turned, saw him standing there and blinked.
“Cristiano,” she said, her voice changing. And her face changing with it. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
And he watched, feeling as if there was a hatchet buried deep in his chest, as all that light dimmed.
As if looking at him switched it off, that quickly.
Something in him thudded then, unpleasantly.
“I only just arrived,” he heard himself say.
He glanced at her sister, but Fleurette’s face was studiously blank. A condemnation in itself.
Cristiano felt his pulse kick in when he looked back at Julienne, because she was looking at him the exact same way she had since the night of their wedding. Calmly, yes. Coolly, even.
But with no trace whatsoever of all that glorious light.
“I will not disturb you,” he said shortly, and left them there.
He went to his office in the house, but he couldn’t focus on the work he needed to do, no matter how long he sat at his desk. And when he stopped pretending to work and stared at a shot of whiskey instead, daring himself to truly become his father once and for all, there was something in him that longed for the oblivion.
More than usual.
It would be so much easiernotto feel anything. He could imagine it so clearly.
But he didn’t take the drink. He didn’t take the easy way out.
And when he climbed the stairs to the master bedroom and found Julienne there, he felt his heart stutter inside him when she looked at him in that same mild, empty way.
“Your sister being here makes you very happy,” he said, studying Julienne’s face for signs of...something. Something to stave off this panicked thing inside him.
“She’s not really my sister. Or not only my sister. She’s also my best friend.” Her gaze rested on him. “And she loves me with every last cell in her body.”
“Because you rescued her,” Cristiano said.
And he saw a flash ofsomethingacross her face then, but it wasn’t that same light he’d seen earlier. It was temper.
But it was better than nothing.
And even as he thought that, it occurred to him that he felt most connected to Julienne—the person, if he was honest, he felt most connected to on the planet—through passion. Whether that passion was based in anger or desire, it was the only language he knew.
It was the only vocabulary he possessed.
And so perhaps it was not surprising that he felt something far too close to bereft as he watched her fight it back.
“You don’t love someone because they do things for you,” Julienne said, and though her gaze was hard on his, her voice was resolute. “You love them. That’s all. And if a situation arises where you can do something for them, then you do it. But it’s not a transaction.”
And Cristiano understood, in a sickening flash, that transactions were all he knew.
That the people who had raised him had taught him passion, and he had equated it with their brand of drama. Theatrics. Operatic displays, cruelty and fiery conclusions.
He stared at this woman, ripe and round with his child, and for the first time in his life, Cristiano didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. How to reach her, or find a way back to that beautiful light of hers that he was very much afraid he had already extinguished.
