“You know that, do you?” she blazed at him. “With all your experience handling children? Raising them?”
“If I lack experience raising children, Cecilia,” he’d replied silken and dangerous, “whose fault is that?”
And she had paled, but she hadn’t backed down. “He’s more fragile than he looks.”
“If children were not resilient, neither you nor I would be here today. And yet here we are.”
She had let out a shaky sort of breath. “I don’t know that I think we should base anything on your childhood or mine. In fact, I imagine that the wisest course of action is to think about our childhoods and do the precise opposite.”
Cecilia had decided that they should tell Dante that they were marrying together. As the united front she insisted they would have to become if any of this was to work. Pascal did not remind her that she was no longer in control of the terms—or anything else. He assumed that must have been obvious to her already.
“And by work,” she snapped at him when he arrived the following morning at the appointed time, “I do not mean to your satisfaction. I mean, we have to find a way to make sure this is about Dante. Because it can only be about Dante.”
“Whatever else could it be about, Cecilia?” he had asked. Silkily enough that she’d flushed.
But when Dante was told of their plan, he’d grinned. “Do we get to be a family? Everyone else gets to be a family.”
“Yes,” Cecilia had said, her voice suspiciously rough and her eyes too bright. “We would get to be a family. We would all live under one roof. But it wouldn’t be here. We would have to move down to Rome, where your father lives.”
The little boy had seemed far more concerned with the toy truck he was slamming repeatedly into the leg of the sofa then the conversation.
“Paolo’s mother told me about Rome,” he said matter-of-factly. “She’s from there. You can get gelato anytime you want. Not only when the abbey cook makes it.”
“And there you have it,” Pascal murmured. “Easy.”
The look Cecilia had given him then was murderous.
And he was twisted enough to enjoy that, too.
She hadn’t objected when Pascal had spent the rest of the intervening days as much with Dante as possible. He walked the boy to his care. And didn’t bother to discuss his feelings on the topic of the soon-to-be Signora Furlani spending her days cleaning, because she only had so many days left here. If she wanted to spend them on her hands and knees on unforgiving stone floors, it was nothing to him.
It was on one of those days that she found him in his little cell, tending to the work that was always piling up on his laptop. He heard a faint noise, looked up—and there she was, standing in his doorway with a mop clenched in one hand.
And for a moment it was as if they’d been tossed back in time. He had the oddest notion that if he looked down at himself, he would find all the bandages and wounds he’d had when he’d first come here. As if the accident had only just happened.
As if maybe they could do this over—though he shoved that thought away almost as soon as it formed.
And he knew she was thinking much the same thing from that stricken, electric look in her beautiful violet eyes.
It was those eyes he’d seen first when he’d surfaced after the surgery that had saved his life. Those eyes that had insinuated themselves somehow into the confusion of his brain in those fuzzy days, and had tempted him to make his way back to the land of the living.
And it was those eyes that slammed into him again now, making a mockery of his assertion that he was only here—and only doing this—for the boy.
But he chose not to analyze that.
“Dante is putting on a good show,” she told him after a moment, her hand tight around the mop handle. “But sooner or later this is all going to come crashing down on him. I hope you’re prepared for it. He’s a headstrong, often maddening, perfect little boy. I doubt very much that your life is set up to accommodate an active five-year-old.”
“The beauty of my life,cara, is that it is set up to accommodate me. Therefore, whatever it is I wish it to be, it becomes.”
“Spoken like a man who has no idea what I’m talking about,” she retorted. “And yes,” she continued before he could remind her yet again why it was he had no experience in this area, “I know. It’s my fault. But you’re the one issuing ultimatums, Pascal. Not me.”
He knew what she meant was, he was the one who insisted on marrying her, and was holding her child over her head to make sure she did it. Something he supposed he ought to have felt some guilt about. Oddly enough, his conscience was clear.
“The other thing I have, in abundance, is money,” Pascal said. And smiled faintly when she rolled her eyes. “I’m not bragging, Cecilia. Do you know what that money buys? Nannies. Tutors. An army of trained staff to make sure his is the best nursery in Italy. Anything and everything that can make this transition as painless as possible for Dante. And for me.”
“But not me, of course.” She eyed him as he lounged there on the narrow bed, his laptop open before him. Not in a particularly friendly manner. “Are you not concerned with my transition?”
“Not especially.”