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CHAPTER TWO

CECILIA REGINALD WAS no stranger to fear or disappointment.

It was right there in the name she’d been left with all those years ago when the English lady—her mother, presumably—had stayed in the only pensione in the village for the weekend, given a fake name, and then had left her three-year-old behind when she’d run off. Never to return.

Cecilia had always known that she was disposable, though she happily remembered very little of that first, lost life. Just as she’d always known that Pascal Furlani, who had discarded her when she was fully grown and able to recall every painful second of it, would be back.

At first, she had dreamed of his return. Wished for it, fervently, as if he’d disappeared from the village by mistake somehow. Because assuming he did the right thing—and she’d assumed he would then—would have solved her problems in a neat, orderly and time-honored fashion. Because his coming back would have made sense of the wreckage that her neat, orderly life had become in the chaotic wake he’d left behind him.

And because she had imagined herself in love with him.

But of course, that was not when he had deigned to tear himself away from his meteoric rise to wealth and prominence and return at long last. Not when she would have greeted his return with nothing short of delight. Instead, he came back now, when she wanted it least. And not only because she no longer believed in such childish notions as being in love.

“Who is him?” he asked. “And why do you imagine I would wish to have him, whatever that means?”

She didn’t miss the affront in that deep, rich voice of his she’d done her best to forget. Or try to forget.

Just as she didn’t miss the crack of power in it, either. It seared through her like a lightning strike and she added the unpleasant intensity of the sensation to the list of things she blamed him for.

Cecilia knelt there on the floor, her weight back on her heels, and her hands wet from scrubbing the stones. She had to crane her neck back to look up at him. Up and up and up, for he seemed much taller than she remembered him. While she imagined she looked shriveled and ruined and infinitely hardened by the years—because that was how she felt, certainly.

Back then she’d had faith. She’d believed that people were mostly good and life was certain to work out well, one way or another, even for abandoned girls like her.

She’d learned. Oh, how she’d learned.

Cecilia was fairly certain she wore every last lesson right there on her face.

Meanwhile Pascal looked like he’d stepped straight out of the pages of one of those glossy magazines she pretended she didn’t know existed and had certainly never scoured, just to see his face. He looked like the lofty, arrogant man he’d gone off to become, leaving her here to handle the mess he’d made. And the man in those magazines bore no resemblance whatsoever to the broken, half-wild creature she’d taken far too much pleasure in nursing back to health.

If there had ever been anything broken in Pascal Furlani, she couldn’t see it now. Were it not for the scars on the left side of his jaw that she knew continued down across his chest—though in her memory, they were far more raw and angry than the silver lines she could see today—she would have been hard-pressed to imagine that anything could ever have touched this man at all.

Much less her.

A thought that made her want to throw her bucket of dirty water at him. Preferably so it could damage that overtly resplendent suit he wore with entirely too much unconscious, masculine ease.

God, how she hated him.

The trouble was, it had been easy to scoff at those pictures of him. To tell herself that she was better off without a man who would go to such places, with such people, and dress the way he did when he was photographed. So breathlessly, deliberately fancy, which even she knew cost the kind of money she would never, ever have. Or even be near. The kind of money that was so dizzying she wouldn’t want to have it. It was corrosive. Cecilia didn’t have to live the high life in Rome to understand that.

Her life here had always been simple. Things were more complicated than she’d planned six years ago, but still. Overall, life was simple.

And nothing about Pascal Furlani was simple.

Neither was her reaction to him.

Cecilia had forgotten the way he filled a room. That antiseptic chamber in the clinic. This whole church. Just by standing there in all his state, his black eyes glittering.

The problem was he was so…arresting.

He had changed since he’d left the hospital, where he’d been so rangy and wiry. He’d filled in. He looked solid. Big. Strong, everywhere, with the kind of smooth, powerful muscles that quietly boasted of the worship he paid to his own body and the kind of power he could wield.

But Cecilia did not want to think too much about his body.

His dark hair was as she remembered it, cropped close to his head. It only made those glittering black-gold eyes of his all the more mesmerizing. Electric, even, like another lightning strike she had no choice but to endure while it lit her on fire.

He looked like a Roman centurion. His aquiline nose. His sensual lips. Something impassive and stern in the stark lines of him.

And she hated the fact that she knew how he tasted.

“You’re not welcome here,” she told him as evenly as she could from where she knelt there before him. “I already made that clear to your little spies. You didn’t have to come all the way up into the mountains yourself.”

He blinked, and made a small pageant out of it.

“I do not have spies, Cecilia.”

Her name in that familiar, charged voice of his rolled through her, igniting fires she would have sworn only moments before had been doused forever.

“You can call them whatever you like.” She had the urge to get to her feet, but ignored it, because scrambling up from her knees made it far more obvious that she was discomfited by their power differential. And she did not wish to be discomfited by Pascal Furlani. Not any more than she already had been. So she stayed put, meeting his gaze with defiance as if he was the one on the ground. “They said they were on the board of your company. You will forgive me if I assumed that meant they had something to do with you. Or do you really expect me to believe that two visits from you and your minions over the course of three weeks is a random coincidence?”

He didn’t appear to move and yet it was like a storm gathered around him. Cecilia was sure that if she looked down, she would see the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.

“Members of my board were here?” His voice was…darker. Midnight thunder.

It took her a moment to process the way he’d said here. As if this village where he’d nearly died and had come back to life again was so far beneath him that the very idea that anyone he knew from his fancy boardrooms might visit it appalled him.

Cecilia tried not to grit her teeth. “I will tell you what I told them. You have nothing to do with this place. Or with me. You left. And you don’t get to swan back in here now, no matter the reason. I won’t allow it.”

His dark eyes flashed. “Will you not?”

Something about that question, too silky by half and far more dangerous than it should have been, had Cecilia tossing her sponge into her bucket. With perhaps too much force, she reflected, when water sloshed over the sides.

“What do you want, Pascal?” she demanded.

Through her gritted teeth.

He looked down at her from his irritatingly great height. “I thought I came here to expel old ghosts.”

“I don’t believe you’d know a ghost if one appeared at the foot of your bed, wreathed in chains and moaning your name.”

Again he blinked as if he expected the movement of his eyelids to bring underlings running to serve him. Something that likely occurred with depressing regularity down in Rome.

“You do not believe that you have haunted me these past years, cara?” And she couldn’t say she cared for the way he used the endearment, either. Like a sharp-edged blade, and he wasn’t afraid to cut her. “I cannot say I believe it, either. And yet here I am, when I vowed I would never return.”

“I suggest you turn around, return to wherever you came from and uphold your vow.”

He did not take her suggestion. Instead, he stayed where he was and studied her for a moment.

“I do not understand why my board would be at all interested in you,” he said after what felt like an eternity. Or three. “I’ve never kept this part of my life a secret. Everyone knows I nearly died in the mountains and it changed me profoundly. I discuss it often enough. Why would they come here now? What could they hope to find here besides an old lover?”

Cecilia could hardly breathe. She couldn’t imagine what expression she wore on her face. An old lover. Was that what she was to him? Was that all she was?

But she kept her cool, no matter what it cost her, because she had to. She had to. She would not react to the tightness in her chest. The shortness in her breath.

Or that wild, betraying tumult in her pulse.

All that she could chalk up to fear, she told herself as Pascal gazed down at her, arrogant and impatient. It was nothing but panic, surely. The strange feeling, too much like some kind of anticipation, she felt that her worst fear was being realized in the extraordinary flesh whether she liked it or not.

She could understand that. It was her other reactions that concerned her more. Most especially that melting low in her belly that told her terrible truths about her true feelings about Pascal’s return that she wanted desperately to deny.

She got to her feet then, taking her time. And as she did, she was fiercely glad that she looked like who and what she was: a woman who washed floors for a living. She was nothing like the sorts of pampered women Pascal always had on his arm in the magazine pictures that were burned into her head. Cecilia knew she bore no resemblance to them and never would. She was not elegant. Her jeans were too big, decidedly ripped and horribly stained. She wore a ratty T-shirt beneath the long-sleeve buttoned-up shirt she’d tied off at her waist. Her hair was a disaster, no matter that she’d tied it back with an old scarf.

She expected she looked more or less tragic to a man like him. He was no doubt asking himself how he’d ever lowered himself to touch one such as her. She wondered it herself.

But this was a good thing, she told herself sternly. Because he needed to go away and never come back. And if she disgusted him now, well, she was only what she’d had to become. To survive him. If that got him to leave, great. Whatever worked.

She ignored the small pang that notion gave her.

“I expected you to be wearing a nun’s habit,” he said, and she opted not to hear the wicked undertone in his voice. Much less…remember the way she’d thrilled to it, once.

“I chose not to become a nun.” She did not say, because of you.

But his eyes narrowed anyway. “I thought that was your life’s ambition. Was it not?”

“People change.”

“You seem markedly changed, in fact. One might even say, distinctly hardened.”

“I’m no longer a foolish girl easily taken advantage of by traveling soldiers, if that’s what you mean.”

His head canted to one side, and his black eyes gleamed. “Did I take advantage of you, Cecilia? That’s not how I recall it.”

She eyed him. “Whether you recall it that way or not, that’s how it was.”

“Tell me, then, how precisely did I take advantage of you? Was it when you crawled into my hospital bed, threw your leg over me and then rode us both to a mad finish?”

She remembered it as he said it. She remembered everything. The wonder of taking him inside her. The madness, the dizzy whirl. His big hands wrapped around her hips and his intent, ferociously greedy gaze.

No one had ever explained to her that the trouble with temptation was that it felt like coming home, wreathed in light and glory.

That melting sensation grew worse, but she refused to let herself squirm the way she wanted to do.

Because this wasn’t about her.

“I always wondered what it would be like to have a conversation like this with you,” Cecilia said when she was sure she could manage to sound calm. Faintly bored. And it was not untrue, though as the years passed, the content of the conversation had changed in her head. She’d asked fewer questions. At some point she’d even become magnanimous. She’d practiced it enough in mirrors. “I find it’s less productive than I might have imagined. I don’t understand why you’re here. I am not haunted.”

Only furious, still and always, but she didn’t tell him that. He didn’t deserve to know.

“Can it be as simple as catching up with an old friend?” he asked as if he was…reasonable in any way. Palatable.

She made a scoffing sound. “Please. We were never friends.”

To her surprise, his mouth curved. “Cecilia. Of course we were.”

Something in her chest seemed to stutter to a halt then. Something different from the panic, the heat.

Because she remembered other things, too. Long afternoons when she would sit by his bedside, holding his hand or mopping his brow with a cool cloth. In those early days, when no one had known if he would make it, she’d sung to him. Songs of praise and joy interspersed with silly nursery rhymes and the like, all calculated to soothe.

When he grew stronger, he would tell her stories. He couldn’t believe that she had never been to Rome. That she had never been more than a couple of hours out of this valley, for that matter. Or not that she could recall. He painted pictures for her with his words, of ancient ruins interspersed with traffic charging this way and that, sidewalk cafés, beautiful fountains. Later, when she was no longer a novitiate and often found herself up in the middle of the night—either because she was worried about her future, or because sleep was a rarity for a woman in her position—she’d looked up pictures online and found the city he described. In bright detail.

He’d made her feel as if she knew it personally. Sometimes she thought she hated him for that.

“Either way,” she said resolutely, “we’re not friends now. Do you wish to know how I know we’re not? Because friends do not disappear like smoke in the middle of the night, without a word.”

She regretted that the moment she said it. This was not about her, not anymore, and if she wanted to tell herself a harsh truth or two, it was possible it never had been. She could have been the field outside his window. The mountains looming about in every direction. She was simply here. He was the one who crashed the car, tore himself to pieces and got the luxury of telling dramatic stories about what the experience had taught him in televised interviews.

Not that she planned to admit she’d ever watched them.

Meanwhile, Cecilia was the one who could remember nothing but this valley. This village. The comfort of the abbey walls and the counsel of the women she’d believed would be her sisters one day.

It was true that he had taken all of that away from her. But another truth was that she’d given it to him. And she knew she shouldn’t have mentioned that night.

Something she was in no doubt about when his expression changed. His eyes were too hot suddenly. His mouth was too stern and yet remained entirely too sensual.

Now that she was standing up, she could better appreciate what the years had done for his form. He had always been beautiful, like something carved from soft stone and twisted into that flesh that had healed so slowly. Now he seemed made of granite. His shoulders were so wide. And the excellent tailoring of the suit he wore did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that his torso was thick with hard, solid muscle.

And somehow she’d expected that because he’d filled out he would be less tall. But he wasn’t. She still had to look up at him. And for some reason, even though she was no longer on her knees, it made her feel a little too close to powerless for comfort.

“By all means,” he said in that dark, silken way of his. “Let us discuss that night.”

And she’d already started down this road. She might as well say all the things she’d been carrying around inside her all these years, or at least the highlights, because she had no intention of having this discussion again.

“What is there to discuss?” she asked. “I fell asleep in your arms. It was the first time I had done something like that, as every other moment we’d had together had been so furtive. Stolen. But not that night. You asked me to stay and I stayed. And when I woke up in the morning, you had left the valley for good.” She made a noise that no one could mistake for a laugh. “In case you’re wondering, I woke up the way you left me. Naked. With the sun beaming in the windows and Mother Superior standing at the foot of the bed.”

Back then she could have read every expression that moved over his face. Every glint in his eye. But though she could see something shift there today, she couldn’t twist it into any kind of sense. And it was stunning, the things that could wallop a person. The ways that grief could sneak into the most surprising crevices and well up there, like tears.

“Is that why you’re not a nun?” he asked.

She wondered if he knew what a loaded question that was.

It is not for me to tell you what to do, child, Mother Superior had said when Cecilia’s condition became clear. That is between you and God. But I will tell you this. I have known you since you were delivered to our door. I watched you grow up. And I greeted, with joy, the notion that you might join the sisters here. But the truth is, the order is the only family you’ve known. I have to ask myself if you truly wish to dedicate yourself to this life, or if what you want most of all is family. And now you will have your own. Do you truly wish to give that up?

“In the end,” Cecilia said now to the man who was a catalyst for both her greatest shame and deepest joy in life, damn him, “I was not a good fit for the order.”

“Not a good fit? You’d already been living in that abbey for most of your life. How could you not be perfect for them? Why would they let you walk away?”

She glared at him. “These are all interesting questions. But not from someone who ran off in the middle of the night. If you had questions to ask me, Pascal, you could have asked them then.”

“I did not run off,” he bit out. And if she wasn’t mistaken, there was something like temper in his voice then. Sparking in that black gaze of his. “You must always have known, cara, that my destiny was never here.”

Her palms stung and she realized she’d curled her hands into fists. She forced herself to unclench her fingers, one by one.

“That became clear once you left. And then failed to return for six years.”

“I’m here now.”

“And I’m sure that any moment, the heavens will open up and hosannas will rain down upon us all,” Cecilia retorted. Archly. “But until that moment, you will forgive me if I am somewhat less enthused.”

“The Cecilia I remember would never have spoken to me this way.” One of his brows rose. Imperiously. “I remember soft, cool hands. A pretty singing voice. And cheeks that were forever pinkening.”

“That girl was an idiot.” Cecilia sniffed. “And she died six years ago, when she woke to find herself not at all the person she’d imagined herself to be.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t you? I thought that I was a moral, upstanding, pure and wholesome individual. A woman who truly wished to dedicate herself to a life of service. But it turned out that I was wicked straight through, shameless enough to flaunt it in the very abbey that raised me, and so foolish that I actually believed that the man who had engineered my fall might stick around to help with a rough landing. Alas. He did not.”

His stern mouth looked starker somehow. “I was told that all sins would be forgiven if I were to do what was inevitable, what I would do anyway, and leave.”

Cecilia opened her mouth to argue that, but something about the way he said it tugged at her. “What do you mean, you were told?”

But he didn’t answer the question. He studied her for a moment, then another, his hand on his jaw.

“You have yet to explain to me what my board members were doing here. Let me guess who it was. An older gentleman, perhaps? Silver hair and beard, a theatrical cane and a penchant for dressing like an uptight Victorian? And his trusty sidekick, the younger man, round and possessed of an overly glossy mustache?”

He had described the two men exactly.

She shrugged. “They didn’t leave their names.”

“But I can see from your expression that they were the ones who came here. Why?”

“Your story of narrowly escaping death in the Dolomites, and the recovery that allowed you ample time to shore up your scheme to take over the world, is practically a fairy tale told to small children at this point. Everyone has heard it.”

“I’m delighted that you have paid such close attention.”

“But that’s my point,” Cecilia said coolly. “No attention was required. The story was everywhere. You’re fairly ubiquitous these days, aren’t you?”

“If by ubiquitous you mean wealthy and powerful, I accept the description proudly.”

“Because that’s what matters to you.” She couldn’t seem to help herself. Because she had to keep poking and poking to make sure that he really was this stranger he’d turned into. That the man she’d thought he was had never been anything but a figment of her own imagination. She had to be certain. “Money at all costs. No matter who it hurts.”

“Who does it hurt?” His gaze was far too bright. Particularly with his mouth set in that harsh line. “There will always be rich men, Cecilia. Why shouldn’t I be one of them?”

“I think the real question is why you’re here,” she said past the lump in her throat for the man she’d nursed all those weeks. The man she’d believed was different. The man who had never existed, not really. “Because I want to be clear about something, Pascal. We like this valley quiet. Remote. The sisters spend their lives here engaged in quiet contemplation. If they want the bustle of the city, they know how to drive themselves down to Verona. What none of us need or want, villager and nun alike, is whatever scheming Roman nonsense you or your minions brought with you.”

“I told you.” And his voice was harsher then. “I came here to face a ghost, nothing more.”

“I know that ghost is not me. Perhaps the ghost is the man you were, when you were here before. Because if we’re being honest, you left him that night, too.”

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t reel away from her as if she’d hit him. And yet, somehow, Cecilia had the distinct impression that she’d landed a blow. Possibly with a very sharp knife.

And she would have to spend some time questioning herself later. She would have to try to figure out why, when she’d dreamed of landing blow after blow, each harder than the last, the doing of it made her feel shaken.

“But that is something you can sort out on your own,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as off balance as she felt. “It doesn’t involve me.”

Because if she stood here any longer, she would forget herself. And she already knew what happened when she allowed herself to forget, particularly when she was around Pascal. More to the point, her life was different now. She had no desire to change it completely. Not anymore. Not again.

She stepped around him, yanking her bucket off the floor as she went. She headed for the door at the side of the altar that led into the vestry, thinking she could bar herself in the church if necessary. There were hours yet before she was due to pick up Dante and she very much doubted that a man like Pascal would lounge around, waiting. Whatever whim had brought him here would have him bored silly and heading for home before long.