Cecilia might not be a nun. She might not have made it through her novitiate period, thanks to him. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been convent-bred—or that she couldn’t wield it like a weapon when she chose.
He had been so focused on claiming her that he hadn’t stopped to fully appreciate what she brought to the table.
“I was under the seemingly quaint impression that one’s private life was just that.” And Cecilia might have been standing there as if she was addressing the room, but Pascal had no illusions. He knew that she was speaking directly to him when she said that. She even turned that gaze of hers on him again.“Private.”
“Privacy is for far less powerful people,signora,” Massimo said with his patented obsequiousness.
Cecilia merely turned a bland gaze his way. “How powerful is my five-year-old son?”
“Pascal has been filling us in on this…secret relationship of yours,” Carlo said, his voice ripe with insinuation.
Pascal tensed even further in his chair at the head of the long table. Because she was clearly not happy with him, and here was her chance to vent her spleen. Here was her chance to get back everything she imagined had been taken from her. All she had to do was tell the story of what had actually happened, with all the bitterness and hurt she’d shown when she’d told the same story to him. These men would twist to suit themselves—and what they wanted to believe, so long as it advanced their position at his expense—and Pascal would have no choice but to go to war. Again.
And he saw the exact moment Cecilia understood that.
She blinked, and he could see her violet gaze turn canny. Considering. She turned it on him, and not for the first time, he wondered what she saw. If he had ever haunted her the way she did him.
He couldn’t bear the tension and so he stood to break it, smoothing his hand down the front of his suit. He kept his gaze intent on Cecilia.
And then he waited for her to betray him, the way everyone who had ever vowed to love him had, sooner or later. His mother. His father. Now his wife, who had stood in a church and made her vows, though he’d told himself then that he hadn’t believed them.
Because, of course, he’d forced her to that altar. He’d made her take those vows.
But in the dark of night, with her hair a fragrant cloud across his chest and her soft curves pressed into his side, he’d wanted to believe that every word she’d uttered before the priest had been true.
He’d wanted it more than could possibly be wise. Or healthy.
And all of that led here. Where he, a man who had callously betrayed anyone who ventured close to him in turn, waited in a moment that stretched on and on into eternity, for his just deserts.
Lord knew Pascal was full up on just deserts. He’d been choking them down his whole life.
Cecilia’s lovely mouth curved, slightly. Her eyes flashed.
And Pascal was already calculating his response. Damage control. Counterattacks. The best way to undercut whatever she was about to say—
“I beg your pardon,” Cecilia said, and again her voice was mild in the same way Mother Superior’s always was. Kind, almost. And underneath it, absolute steel. It took Pascal a moment to notice she was not looking at him—she was looking at Carlo. “Something that is a secret to you,signor, is not necessarily a secret to the people involved. What a strange question. Would you like to share with the room every detail of your private relationships?”
For a moment Pascal couldn’t process that.
It wasn’t only that she’d taken aim at one of the most notorious philanderers in Rome, whose complicated series of mistresses left him eternally open to tabloid speculation. As did his wife’s equally comprehensive selection of lovers, many of whom she paraded beneath Carlo’s nose.
He supposed that it wouldn’t have mattered whom she’d asked that question. There wasn’t a man in this room whose private life could bear the scrutiny. It was only Pascal, who had lacked a wife and had insisted upon a social life over the past few years, who was subject to these patronizing reviews of his intimate relations.
It took a long moment for her question to penetrate, and for him to admire the way Cecilia had done it—so beautifully shifting the conversation away from Pascal.
It took another kick of his heart for him to understand the far more salient point.
She had not betrayed him when she’d had the chance.
She had not betrayed him.
And it was as if the floor dropped away from beneath his feet. As if the world shuddered to a halt and then stood still for a moment. Still and impossibly, confoundingly airless.
He felt tight, everywhere. As if he had exploded, and then had contained each and every shard, binding all the jagged edges inside himself.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’tthink.
Shehad notbetrayed him.