CHAPTER NINE
PASCALKNEWTHATCecilia could ruin him, here and now.
All she would have to do was contradict him and the gauzy, romantic story he’d delivered to the papers, filled with smoke and mirrors about the two of them and their son. She could simply open up her mouth and tell the assembled men any story she liked about their marriage—and the real timeline of events. She could tell them who he had been six years ago and how he had left her to have and raise his child on her own. That truth would do the trick with this particular group of hypocrites quite nicely. It would give them all the ammunition they needed to start making noises aboutmoral questions.
Even if she didn’t wish to tell the truth—even if she decided to editorialize at will—it didn’t matter. It would do the same damage. Worse, in this room with too many eyes on them, he couldn’t stop her.
They wanted a reason to call him unfit. All she had to do was give them one.
And Pascal couldn’t think of any particular reason why she wouldn’t go ahead and do just that.
He stared at the face of the woman who had haunted him when she was not in his life, and was something far worse than a ghost now that she was. Ghosts only came out at night. But Cecilia haunted him always. Bright light of day through winter dark, then back again.
How had he imagined it would be different once he’d put his ring on her finger?
He knew why she was here, barging into his office with that furious look on her face. Oh, yes, he knew. He had told her she would beg, and he’d been arrogantly certain that all it would take was one night in his bed. Maybe two.
But he should have known better. He should have understood who Cecilia was. Not the soft, fragile girl he’d met all those years ago and had made into a monument of sweet innocence in his head, but the far tougher and more self-possessed woman who’d stared him down in a church and thrown his fatherhood in his face.
Perhaps the truth was she was both. But either way, Cecilia did not bend.
Meanwhile, Pascal felt as if he might break.
He had told himself it was time to make announcements about his marriage because it was high time he take charge of his unruly board and cut off their favorite line of dissent. It made business sense, he’d assured himself. And it was only a few days to Christmas, which meant the interest in the story would dissipate quickly as everyone turned their attention to their holidays. He’d had the distinct sensation that planting those newspaper stories had been an act of reclaiming himself somehow. Returning to form.
Or maybe, something sly suggested inside him,you knew exactly what reaction she would have.
Because despite his best efforts, Pascal was the one who was falling apart, little as he wished to admit that.
He was the one who woke again and again in the night, every time she shifted to get closer to him. She did it in her sleep. He was the one who held her, staring into the dark and wondering what the hell had happened to him. Where was the man who had built his entire life as a shrine to revenge? Where was the Pascal Furlani who would do anything at all—and had, happily—to live his lifeatthe father who had always ignored him and pretended he didn’t exist?
Most of Pascal’s adult life had been an exercise in proving that he did, in fact, exist.
In his father’s face, one way or another, in a way that could not be ignored.
And he didn’t know how to reconcile that part of him with a man who wanted nothing more than the woman who only suffered his touch while she was asleep to want him while she was awake.
As desperately as he wanted her.
“Your new husband has been telling us romantic stories about the two of you,signora,” said Pascal’s least favorite board member, Carlo Buccio, with his silver hair, fussy beard and the cane he used as a prop. Carlo was forever looking for ways to take more away from Pascal. To render him little more than a figurehead, because that was the thing about power. People always wanted more of it. And better still, they wanted others around them to have less. He and his mustachioed sidekick, Massimo Pugliese, prided themselves on being thorns in Pascal’s side.
He recalled, then, that they had also taken a field trip to the mountains. No doubt they were annoyed that their version of Pascal’s life hadn’t been splashed all over the tabloids first.
“Surely it cannot all have been fairy tales,” Massimo chimed in, right on cue.
Pascal could do nothing but watch a series of complicated emotions chase themselves across Cecilia’s face. He gritted his teeth as she shifted her condemning glare from him and looked at the rest of the assembled men.
But to his surprise, she laughed.
“Romance and fairy tales in a corporate boardroom?” Cecilia asked lightly. “How inappropriate. Why on earth would such a private matter be discussed at all?”
And something in Pascal hummed a bit at that, amusement and admiration at once, though it hardly wiped away the tension that gripped him.
Because this was no trophy wife, clearly. This was no airheaded little bimbo, whose worth was in the picture she made while hanging on a rich man’s arm. Not that Cecilia didn’t make a pretty picture, but the glory of his wife, Pascal understood then as he never had before, was that she exuded that same matter-of-fact grace that her Mother Superior did. It wasn’t holier than thou. It was the way she held herself and the frankness of her violet gaze. She didn’t simper. She didn’t avert her eyes. She didn’t shrink down with so many male gazes trained upon her.
She stood there in his glass and stone meeting room as a kind of beacon. Of what was right, no matter what.
It was subtle, but effective. There was a mass clearing of throats and shuffling feet, as a room full of powerful men readjusted themselves to what Pascal could only consider the enduring power of the nunnery.