Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret

Pascal didn’t answer the call.

There were a million more things that required his attention, but he couldn’t face them just yet. Instead, he lost himself in the chaotic embrace of the Eternal City. Rome was a monument, yet Rome was ever-changing. Rome was a contradiction. Rome was where Pascal felt alive. It was the place where he had grown to understand that his very existence was an affront to some, and it was where he finally figured out how to claim that existence and make sense of it.

Walking through Rome had always soothed him. And kept him alive, some dark years. Long nights with his feet, his thoughts and the grand Roman sprawl had made him whole, time and time again.

So there was no reason at all that he should be caught up in memories of a tiny, sleepy village with steep mountains all around and very few people, where he had never been anything but broken.

He stopped by a fountain in a forgotten courtyard, steps from the roar of a busy road. The water tumbled from the pursed lips of an old god made stone, and in the dark, he almost believed he could see her reflection there in the water the way he always did in his head.

Sweet Cecilia, half nurse and half angel. A woman so lovely and so innocent that he had nearly betrayed every vow he’d ever made to himself and stayed up there in all that towering silence.

The very notion was absurd. He was Pascal Furlani. Not for him the pastoral delights, such as they were, of a remote mountain village of interest to absolutely no one unless they happened to either have been there for centuries or were a part of the quiet abbey that had also been there, in one form or another, since right about the dawn of time. Not for him a life forgotten and tucked away like that, out of sight.

She would have taken her vows by now, Pascal assumed, and become a full nun like the others in the order. Or perhaps his last, half-dreamt night there had been her fall from grace. Would she have stayed? Taken her place outside the abbey walls? Perhaps she lived in the village proper now, or off in the fields that dotted the hillsides with some or other farmer. She would be settled now, one way or the other. Committed to her Lord or married to some man, and unrecognizable.

Just as he was.

Pascal was not haunted by the specter of his childhood. He had lived through it, transcended it and moved on. He had mourned his mother’s death, then buried her with greater reverence than she had ever shown him. He rarely thought of his father these days, preferring to decimate the old man and his penny-tante shipping concern from afar.

Pascal did not look back. Ever.

Unless it was to her. Cecilia.

His personal ghost.

“Enough,” he muttered. He pulled a coin from his pocket, then flipped it to the air, watching as it tumbled into the water before him. He had made his last reckless decision the night he’d chosen to drive like a maniac up into those mountains in search of one of Italy’s many ski resorts. He had been on leave from the army and the idea—or some demon—had seized him, which in those days was all Pascal needed. That and a bottle of something strong.

He had never made it to a ski resort. He’d spun out on a mountain pass after making a wrong turn. The clunker of a car he’d been driving—good for absolutely nothing save ejecting him through the windshield with great force—was the only reason he’d lived.

The car had burst into flames, and Pascal would have burned, too, had he not been tossed off into the unforgiving wilderness.

But even the fire was a blessing in disguise. It had alerted the villagers. They’d trooped out in the middle of the dark December night, collected his broken body and had settled him into what passed for the local hospital. The clinic connected to the abbey, where slowly, carefully, the nuns had nursed him back to health.

Pascal had been torn open, broken and out of his mind for weeks. It had taken him longer than that to heal. Then painfully learn how to move again when the casts came off.

And the greatest danger of it all was not the infections he risked or the bones that healed differently than they’d been. It was not his discharge from the military, or the entirely new life he was forced to face—and figure out while lying flat on his back—thanks to the wreckage of the old.

It was the fact that life in that forgotten village felt sweet. Easy. Good.

It had been the greatest temptation of his life to simply…remain.

And his favorite nun had been a part of that.

Not quite a nun, he corrected himself now, his hands deep in his pockets as he brooded at the fountain before him. She had been a novice of the order, young and sweet and uncorrupted—until she’d met him.

But when he thought of what happened between them, her cool smiles and soft hands, blooming into that one night of almost unbearable passion that still made his body stir after all these years—he couldn’t help but think that she had been the one to do the corrupting.

He was a master of the universe by any reckoning, and yet…here he stood. In a dark, forgotten corner of the greatest city on earth, the world literally at his feet, her face in his memories making the city dim.

It was an outrage. It was unacceptable.

Pascal headed toward his home, three stories of the top of a building that he had refurbished to suit his particular taste. Distinctively modern inside and an appropriately battered, ancient-looking facade.

It was not lost on him that for all intents and purposes, that description could have been about him.

When he reached his building, he didn’t go inside. He headed to his garage instead and somehow or another, almost without conscious thought, he found himself in one of his cars. Then heading north. This time he was neither as drunk nor as reckless as he’d been six years ago, but still. A man did not possess a car as fast as his if he did not plan to use it.

He drove for six hours, through what remained of the night and into the dawn. He stopped for breakfast and strong coffee when he reached Verona. When the espresso had revived him sufficiently, he called Guglielmo to tell him where he was.

“And may I ask, sir, why you are a great many kilometers away from the office? May I assume that your meeting last night did not go as well as you hoped?”

“You may assume what you like,” Pascal replied.

And as he lingered over another espresso, Pascal had ample time to ask himself what exactly he thought he was doing. The answer came to him after he’d gotten back on the road.

The months he’d spent in the care of that abbey was the only time in his life that he could recall straying so far from who he was, and he’d resented it ever since. Bitterly. Cecilia had been a kind of enchantment. A witch in a nun’s habit.

He’d told himself he was well rid of her when he’d come back down the mountain and remembered himself at last. He’d meant it. He’d gone about creating his company and doing every last thing he’d ever dreamed.

And yet…he couldn’t seem to move on. No matter how many empires he built, no matter how much richer he made himself, he was still haunted by her face.

It was high time for an exorcism.

Two hours later he found himself on the same mountain where he’d nearly died six years ago. It was a cold, crisp morning in another December, and he treated the winding mountain road with a great deal more respect than he had back then.

And this time he pulled off to the side of the road when he reached the top, because he could see the village before him.

It looked like a storybook, which only made him more determined to scrape it off whatever passed for his battered soul. It was like a dream in the morning light. Snowcapped mountains all around, and down in the small valley, fields cut by a tumbling river. What passed for the center of town was a clump of old buildings that dated from centuries past. The church stood at one end of the village with the abbey behind it and off to one side, the hospital where he had survived his recovery. He stared at it a long while, aware that his fingers were on his scars again.

Something in him turned over, with a low hum.

He told himself it was sheer horror that a man like him, raised in the middle of one of the most frenetic and sophisticated cities in the world, not to mention the luxurious lifestyle he now enjoyed, should ever have imagined that he could stay here.

Here.

It beggared belief.

He started up the car again, following the road down and around and around, until it reached the valley floor.

Where everything was exactly as he’d left it.

There was no reason that his heart should be clattering about in his chest as he drove the familiar road to the church. He would find the old priest and ask after Cecilia. He would almost surely find such a reunion faintly horrifying, and once he did, he would leave. The truth was, he’d come a very great distance for what he expected to take all of a few moments. He could have—and should have—sent Guglielmo. Or some other underling, who could have reported back on whether Cecilia was still here. For that matter, there had been no earthly reason for him to drive through the night like a man possessed. He could have taken his helicopter and landed it in the field behind the church, the same field he’d stared at week after week after week from his hospital bed.

No wonder he’d become fixated on the novice nun who’d cared for him. There had been nothing else to do. Except, Mother Superior had told him serenely, pray.

Pascal had not prayed then. He considered a prayer for deliverance now instead. Because he had surrendered to this fantasy for absolutely no good reason. This appalling tour through his own nostalgia.

“You might as well get it over with,” he growled at himself.