Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret

Pascal was sure he saw the hint of a smirk on his secretary’s face, though the other man knew better than to succumb in full.

“Careful, Guglielmo,” he murmured. “Or I may begin to suspect that you do not take this enterprise as seriously as you should.”

He walked back to his desk, a massive slab of granite that looked like what it was. A throne and a monument to Pascal’s hard-won power and influence. Guglielmo gestured toward the tablet computer that lay in the center, and Pascal checked a sigh as he picked it up and scrolled through the offerings.

Lady this, daughter of Somebody Pedigreed, the toast of this or that finishing school. The daughter of a Chinese philanthropist. Two French girls from separate families that were connected—somewhere back in the deep, dark, tangled roots of their family trees—to ancient kings and queens. An Argentinian heiress, raised on cattle money halfway across the world.

They were all beautiful, in their way. If not classically so, then polished to shine. They were all accomplished, in one way or another. One ran her own charity. One performed the flute with a world-renowned orchestra. Another spent the bulk of her time on humanitarian missions. And not one of them had ever been mentioned in a tabloid newspaper.

Pascal refused to consider anyone with a whiff of paparazzi interest about them or near them, like the California wine heiress who was herself marvelously spotless, but had been best friends since boarding school with a celebrity whose life played out in headlines across the globe. No, thank you. He wanted no scandals. No dark secrets, poised to emerge at the worst possible time. No secrets at all, come to that.

Pascal was a scandal. His whole life had been first a secret, then a shock, trumpeted in headlines of its own. His tawdry, illegitimate birth and his shipping magnate father’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his existence throughout his life might as well have been another set of scars on the other side of his face. He had always felt marked by the circumstances of his birth, his parents’ poor choices.

He would always be marked by these things.

His wife, accordingly, had to be without stain.

“You do not look pleased, sir,” Guglielmo said drily. “Yet again. I fear I must remind you that an unblemished heiress of reasonable social standing is, in fact, a finite resource. One we may have exhausted.” He inclined his head slightly when Pascal glared at him. “Sir.”

“I’m meeting with the last of the previous selection of possibilities tonight,” Pascal reminded him.

“I made the reservation myself, sir. Moments after you informed me that the meeting you’d had with another woman on that list was, in your words, appalling beyond reason.”

“She did not resemble her photograph,” Pascal said darkly.

“Sadly, that is part and parcel of the digital dating culture we all now—”

“Guglielmo. She was a sweet-looking, conservatively dressed blonde in the pictures you showed me. She showed up with a blue and pink Mohawk and a sleeve of tattoos. I liked her more that way, if I am honest, but I can hardly parade a punk rock princess in front of my board. If I could, I would.”

“The woman you’re meeting tonight has a robust social media presence and absolutely no hint of punk rock about her,” Guglielmo replied blandly. “I checked myself.”

Pascal found his fingers on his scars again. “Perhaps I will be swept away tonight and all of this will prove unnecessary.”

“Hope springs eternal,” Guglielmo murmured.

After Pascal dismissed him, he didn’t launch himself into one of the numerous tasks awaiting his attention. He could see his emails piling up. His message light was blinking. But instead of handling them he found himself sitting at his desk, scowling out at the physical evidence of the empire he’d built. Brick by bloody brick.

Because once again, the only thing in his head was her.

His angel of mercy. His greatest temptation.

The woman who had nearly wrecked him before he’d begun.

It is December,he reminded himself. This is always how it feels in December. Come the New Year she will fade again, the way she always does.

His phone rang, snapping him back to reality and far away from that godforsaken northern village in a forgotten valley in the Dolomites. Where he had crashed and burned—literally.

And she had nursed him back to life.

Then had haunted him ever since, for his sins.

Tonight, he vowed as he turned his attention to the tasks awaiting him, he would leave the past where it belonged, and concentrate on the next bright part of his glorious future.

“I think it’s important to set very clear boundaries from the start,” his date informed him much later that evening. She had arrived late, clearly full of herself in her role as a minor member of the Danish nobility. She had swept into one of the most exclusive restaurants in Rome with her nose in the air, as if Pascal had suggested she meet him at one of those sticky, plastic American fast food restaurants. Her expression had not improved over the course of their initial drinks. “Obviously, the point of any merger is to secure the line.”

“The line?”

“I am prepared to commit to an heir and a spare,” she told him loftily. “To be commenced and completed within a four-year period. And I think it’s best to agree, up front and in writing, that the production of any progeny should be conducted under controlled circumstances.”

Pascal was sure he’d had more romantic conversations on industrial sites.

“Is it a production line?” he asked, his voice dry. “A factory of some kind?”

“I already have an excellent fertility specialist, discreet and capable, who can ensure to everyone’s satisfaction and all legalities that the correct DNA carries on into the next generation.”

Pascal blinked at that. He had had simpering dinners. Overtly sexual ones. Direct, frank approaches. But this was new. It all seemed so…mechanical.

“You are staring at me as if I’ve said something astonishing,” his date said.

“I beg your pardon.” Pascal attempted to smile, though he wasn’t sure when or if he’d ever felt less charming. “Are you suggesting that we concoct offspring in a laboratory? Rather than go about making them in the more time-honored fashion, favored as it has been for a great many eons already?”

“This is a business arrangement,” his chilly date replied, looking, if possible, more severe than before. “I expect you will find your release elsewhere, as will I. Discreetly, of course. I do not hold with scandal.”

“Nothing is less scandalous than a sexless marriage, naturally.”

A faint suggestion of a line appeared between her perfectly shaped brows. “There’s no need to muddy a perfectly functional marriage with that sort of thing, surely.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” he replied.

And later, after he had left his date with a curt nod and an insincere promise to have his people contact her, Pascal waved off his driver and walked instead.

Because Rome was its own reward. The city of his birth and his poverty-stricken childhood. The city where he had become a man, by his own estimation, then joined the military to give himself what his mother couldn’t and his father would never. Discipline. A life. Even a career. It had seemed such an elegant solution.

Until that night six years ago when he’d followed a reckless whim, on a moody December night very much like this one. It had been raining in Rome. He’d hoped that meant it was snowing in the Dolomites, on the edge of the Alps, and had decided he might as well drive himself up north and learn how to ski.

He laughed a bit at that as he moved through Piazza Navona and its annual Christmas Market that made the crowded square even more filled and frenetic. He dodged the usual stream of tourists and his own countrymen, taking in the night air and already surrendering to the pollution of Christmas that would invade everything until the Epiphany, then thankfully disappear into the clarity of the New Year.

The night was cold and leaning toward dampness. It was the perfect sort of weather to ask himself how he’d ended up with the coldest, most clinical woman imaginable tonight. Was that really what he was reduced to? A laboratory experiment masquerading as a marriage?

He knew he needed to marry, but somehow, he had imagined it would be…less cold-blooded. Warmer. Or cordial, at the very least.

And he wanted to make his babies his own damned self. More than that, he had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps in any regard. Once he married, Pascal had no intention of cheating. He was not planning to have “arrangements” on the side. He wasn’t planning on having an on the side,for that matter.

He had no intention of creating another woman like his mother, so fragile and so lost she couldn’t take care of her own son. And he would never, ever risk the possibility that he might create an illegitimate child of his own.

The very idea made him sick.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he knew it was Guglielmo, checking in the way he always did after these excruciating “dates” that were little more than vetting sessions. Because Pascal persisted in imagining that he could cut through all the nonsense, ask for exactly what he wanted and then get it. It had worked in business, why not in marriage?