CHAPTER THREE
HERWORDSWEREIMPOSSIBLE.
They made no sense, no matter how loudly they echoed in his head.
Pascal thought perhaps he staggered back beneath the weight of all that impossibility, possibly even crumpled to the floor—but of course, he did no such thing. He was frozen into place as surely as if the stones beneath him had made him a statue, staring back at her.
In horror. In confusion.
There must be some mistake,a sliver of rationality deep inside him insisted.
“What did you say?” he managed to ask through a mouth that no longer felt like his own.
Because while he was certain he had heard her perfectly well, no matter how he tried to rearrange those words in his head, they still didn’t make sense. They couldn’t make sense.
“This isn’t something Iwantto tell you,” Cecilia said, tilting her chin up in a belligerent sort of way that was one more thing that didn’t make sense.
Because the sweet almost-nun he’d known hadn’t had the faintest hint of belligerence in her entire body. Though her body was obviously the last thing in the world he needed to be thinking about just now.
“It’s the right thing to do,” she was saying. “So. Now you know.”
And then, astonishingly, nodded in punctuation. As if the subject was now closed.
“I cannot be understanding you.” His voice sounded as little like his own as the words felt in his mouth, and he still couldn’t seem to move the way he wanted to. Or at all.
Cecilia sighed as if he was testing her patience, another affront to add to the list. “You have a son, Pascal. And you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that. If memory serves, you never spared the slightest thought for any kind of birth control. What did you think would happen?”
It was the sheer insult of that—and the unfairness—that seared through him, hot enough to loosen his paralysis.
“I was recovering from a car accident in a hospital,” he gritted out. “When do you imagine I might have nipped out to the shops and found appropriate protection? I assumed you had taken care of it.”
“Taken care of it?” She actually laughed, which nearly let Pascal’s temper get the better of him. But she didn’t seem to notice. Or care if she did. “I was raised in a convent. With real-life, actual nuns. It might surprise you to learn that the finer details of condom use during premarital sex didn’t come up much during morning prayers.”
Pascal dragged his hands through his hair, though it was cut almost too short to allow it. Unless he was very much mistaken, his hands were actually shaking, something that might have horrified him unto his soul at any other moment. But right now he could hardly do more than note it and move on. It was that or succumb to the high tide swamping him, drowning him, tugging him violently out to sea.
“I cannot have a son,” he snapped out, not caring that his words were far too angry for a place like this. Holy and quiet, with the watchful eyes of too many saints upon him—and none of them as sharp as Cecilia’s gaze. “I cannot.”
Cecilia sniffed. And her remarkable eyes sparked with what he thought was temper, however little that made sense to him.
“And yet you do. But don’t worry. He’s perfect, and he doesn’t need you.” The gleam in her eyes intensified, and he felt it like a blow to the center of his chest. “Feel free to run back to your glossy magazines. Your lingerie models. Whatever makes you happy, Pascal. You can pretend we don’t exist. The way you’ve been doing for six years.”
“How dare you take that tone with me.” His voice was soft, because his fury was so intense he thought it might have singed his vocal cords. The rage and grief in him so hot and blistering he wasn’t sure he’d ever speak in a normal voice again. “You never told me you were pregnant.”
“How would I have done that?” She fired the question at him, plunking her bucket back down on the stone floor with a loud crash. She even took a step toward him as if she wanted this confrontation to get physical. “The first time I saw you mentioned in the papers, two years had gone by. Before that? You’d just disappeared overnight. The army had discharged you, and even if they hadn’t, they weren’t about to hand out a forwarding address. What was I supposed to have done?”
“You knew I was from Rome. You knew—”
If he hadn’t been close enough to see the pulse in her neck go wild, he might have believed the cold smile she aimed at him meant she wasn’t affected by this interaction. But Pascal wasn’t sure that knowledge was helpful.
“Right. So you think I should have…what? Wandered up and down the Spanish Steps while heavily pregnant?” she demanded. “Calling out your name? Or better still, climbed atop the Trevi Fountain with a newborn in my arms, demanding that someone in the crowd take me to you? How do think that would have worked?”
That she had a point only made his anguish worse.
How could this have happened? He couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to tear down this godforsaken church with his hands as if that would change the way she was looking at him. As if it could turn back time.
As if that could save him from the nasty reality that he’d become exactly what he most loathed without knowing it.
“You keep mentioning magazines, which means you clearly saw me in one,” he found himself saying as if he could argue the conviction from her face. As if he could make this her fault and make it better, or different, by shrugging off the blame. “You must have known the company existed. That must mean youcould havecontacted me. You obviously chose not to do so.”