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“Because you spoke to me of whores and witches.” And that grimness on his face began to look...ravaged, instead. “You made me question who it was who told me that particular fairy tale, and why. And because you married me and began at once to fade. And I want you to understand this, if nothing else, Julienne. I have no intention of repeating any of this history.”
“I told you I would burn it to the ground,” Julienne told him fiercely, thinking of that cold, sick feeling in her belly when his office had called. And the gloating letters from his grandfather’s mistress. “I meant it.”
His gaze on hers was savage. And beautiful. “There is nothing to burn save the empty, hollow carcass of the man I was before I met you.”
And there was no pretending, then, that her heart wasn’t beating hard and mad for him.
For hope.
But she couldn’t seem to make herself speak.
“I told myself all was well,” Cristiano said in that same tone. “And I wanted to believe it. But all the while, you looked at me through a stranger’s eyes. No light. No joy. And in all the time I have known you, Julienne, you have never looked at me like that.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she managed to get out. “Really.”
And there was a kind of panic in her then. She fought against it, trying to roll herself out of the nest she’d made of too many pillows, but then he was there.
Cristiano was at the side of the bed, and then he was sitting there beside her. And this time, he didn’t put his hands on her belly, or address himself to her bump.
He took her hands. And he looked into her eyes.
“Last night I came upon you laughing with your sister,” he said, and she’d never heard him sound like this. Gravel and ice, certainly, but something hot and alive beneath. “And I couldn’t help but think to myself that I had extinguished all that light. All that joy. Because when you look at me now, there’s nothing but heartbreak on your face. Andtesoro mio, you must know that I cannot bear for you to be broken.I cannot bear it.”
Julienne wanted to reach out to him. She wanted to fix this, whatever it was. It was as if the ice in him had cracked at last, she realized. And what she was seeing was the man beneath it.
Uncontrolled. Untamed.
Real,a voice in her whispered.
Cristiano kept going, his hands on hers. “My whole life I have equated emotion with pain. Terror. Grief and loss. The deeper the emotion, the more passion in its display, and the worse it has always been. I have watched a man I respected act as if what he’d done to his wife was something she deserved. That she’d brought upon herself. He wasproudof it.”
He shook his head, a cynicism she’d never seen before in his gaze, not when he spoke of his beloved grandfather. And Julienne didn’t entirely understand how she could feel all that same cynicism when it came to Piero Cassara, but want to soothe it away from Cristiano. With her hands, her mouth, whatever worked.
But he was still speaking, intent and low. “And I watched another man I never respected abuse my mother, who, it must be said, put more energy into martyring herself to her marriage than she ever did into raising her own child. These were the emotions I knew growing up. This was the passion that marked the Cassara family. Of course I told you that love was a lie. Do you know the only person who ever used that word in my hearing?” His mouth, firm and hard, thinned into grimness again. “Sofia Tomasi, the housekeeper who welcomed my grandmother into the Villa when Paola was a shy eighteen-year-old bride. Sofia loved my father, or so she liked to tell me, and she showed that love by undermining my grandmother at every turn. Pretending to befriend her and then using her confidences against her.”
He shook his head, but the gaze he kept trained on her was fierce. “Every example of love I have ever seen has been a lie, Julienne. Save yours.”
And his hands were on hers, so she gripped him, hard. She didn’t care about the wetness on her cheeks, not as long as she could keep looking at him. At his face, torn apart by something deep and strong.Ravaged,she thought again.
She would take from him in an instant if she could. If only she could.
“You have loved me unwaveringly,” Cristiano said and there was a kind of wonder in his voice. “You loved me when I was a bitter, angry man who had just sent his own parents to their deaths.”
She did her best not to shout,That is not your fault.
He shifted, his fingers laced with hers now. “That you are so fierce about that is only further testament to the kind of person you are. You loved me then, Julienne. You loved me when I threw you and your sister into this house, then threw money at you to assuage my guilt, and did absolutely nothing to help you make your way in the world.”
“Aside from paying for it.”
“Money does not keep anyone warm, try as they might,” he growled.
And it was her turn to smile, through the tears that blurred her vision. “Cristiano. I do love you. I have always loved you. But please, take it from me, the money to pay a heating bill in a cold winter keeps anyone warm enough. Everything else is icing on the cake.”
He reached over and traced that smile on her mouth with his fingers, as if it was a priceless work of art. As if she was.
“That smile.”
And his voice was so intense, then, it nearly hurt to hear him. Nearly. Instead, she melted.
