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Cristiano had been raised by two men, one a saint and one a devil, and that night he’d been wavering between them.
That was the mess that Julienne Boucher had walked in on, tottering on heels she clearly didn’t yet know how to walk in.
He had glanced up to find her there beside him, as pale as she was determined. And there had never been any question that he might help himself to her, as his tastes ran to the enthusiastic, not the unwilling. Or the transactional. He’d felt for a moment as if he had his grandfather on one shoulder and his father on the other.
And in the middle stood a girl with poverty all over her like the too-tight dress she wore and a fixed smile on her too-young face, offering herself to him.
Cristiano had not been tempted to sample her wares. He wasn’t remotely interested in teenagers, heaven forbid. And he certainly did not troll for sex from the streets. But it had taken him a beat too long to say so. To brush off the whispering devil spilling poison into his ear—the one telling him to ignore her, the one insisting she wasn’t his problem when he had enough of his own, the one who wanted him to turn his back on her and get back to his already messy evening—and do what was right.
That he had wavered at all, that he was that selfish, disgusted him.
And perhaps that was why he had not simply given her some money from his pocket and gone on his way. It was the guilt he couldn’t shake that had made him go further. It was the stain of his shame that had turned him into her benefactor.
To prove that he was nothing like his father.
Even if, later that same night, he had learned that in truth, he was worse.
But tonight, Julienne did not come to him as a desperate child determined to sell her body for survival. She came to him as a woman, and a beautiful one at that, with a body she could have shared with any man in Monaco, if she so chose.
And still she’d chosen him.
He couldn’t deny he liked the symmetry of it.
Cristiano couldn’t go back in time and change that brief, terrible moment when he’d very nearly turned his back on the girl she’d been. Very nearly abandoning her to her fate with whatever jackals populated places like this. Vile men like his own father, selfish and destructive and heedless of the damage he caused.
So easily could Cristiano have broken her and condemned her younger sister, too, simply by walking away from Julienne that night.
He carried the weight of that, two bright lives he could have extinguished in one fell swoop, around with him. They were an enduring reminder of how close he’d come to becoming more like his father, the cost of housing and educating and outfitting them negligible to a man of his wealth—and a small dent indeed next to the soul he’d nearly lost.
They had been an act of kindness to prove he had it in him. Then an act of penance for the other things he’d lost that night.
One way or another, Julienne and her sister had long been his personal cross to bear.
And it was tempting, oh, so tempting, to put them down once and for all.
“Are you going to answer me?” Julienne asked, and she tilted her head slightly to one side as she asked it, once again signaling how little she was intimidated by him. It was a novel experience. Cristiano should have been outraged at her temerity. Her lack of respect.
Instead, he found himself intrigued.
“How can I?” he replied after a moment. “I don’t know what it is you are offering.”
“Me. I’m offering me.”
“I appreciate the offer. And that you are no longer making it while barely legal.” He considered her, the light from behind the bar making her face seem very nearly luminous. “But you see, I have rules.”
“I’ve worked for you for ten years, Mr. Cassara. If, all of a sudden, you did not have rules for every given situation,thatwould be concerning.”
He thought of his guilt, his shame. That brief, glaring moment when he had understood himself to be no better than the father he disdained with every particle of his being. The father who had humiliated him, rampaged through his childhood and laughed in the face of his pain.
How easy would it be to wash that moment away. He had saved the girl, after all. And the result of what he’d actually done—instead of merelythought—was Julienne.
Julienne, the youngest vice president in the history of the Cassara Corporation—aside from Cristiano himself.
Julienne, who looked at him without the calculation he had grown to expect in the eyes of women who dared attempt to get close to him—or rather, to his plump bank accounts. Julienne, whose toffee-colored eyes were filled with heat. Longing, even.
He had come back to this terrible place at least once each year since that night to stand a vigil. To remember who he’d nearly become.
Maybe,a voice in him suggested,it is time to let it go.
