Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret

He unfolded himself from the low-slung sports car and stood beside it a moment. It was midmorning now, and though it was a clear day, the wind rushed down from the mountain peaks and sliced straight through him. He was dressed for a sophisticated dinner in Rome, not a trip to the hinterland.

He adjusted the jacket of his bespoke suit with two impatient tugs of his hands, and didn’t bother looking around. The village felt deserted. If memory served, what few villagers there were rarely congregated before the afternoon, if then. The nuns had chosen this valley well. It was the perfect spot for silent contemplation.

Pascal walked up the steps to the front door of the church. The weathered door stood open a crack, and he pushed his way inside, and then paused for a moment in the vestibule as he was walloped with memories.

It smelled the same. It looked the same. And it made his head spin as if he’d overindulged again.

What year is this? he asked himself.

The church might not have changed in the past century. But Pascal had changed tremendously since he’d left here. That was what he needed to remember.

He moved into the church proper, his gaze moving from the quiet, empty pews to the candles flickering in the alcoves. He saw no hint of the old, garrulous priest who he recalled so vividly from six years ago. The place was deserted—

But then he heard a noise. He took a few more steps and saw a washer woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the floor before the altar with her back to him.

She did not look around as he started down the aisle, and that gave Pascal ample opportunity to remember all the other times he’d done this exact same walk. All the times the priest had encouraged him to look within for a change, rather than continuing to look outside himself.

What is the point of all this power you seek if your heart is empty? the old man had asked him.

What do you know of either power or a heart? Pascal had replied. And he’d laughed.

But Pascal did not think the old man had been kidding. And those sneaky words were one more ghost that he couldn’t quite get to leave him alone.

He dropped his gaze from the stained glass in the small nave, and stood there, several feet away from the woman on the floor. He expected her to stop what she was doing, for she must have heard him, but she didn’t. Not even when he cleared his throat.

“If I might have a moment of your attention, signorina,” he said, his voice echoing back at him from all around.

She moved then. She sat back on her knees, and tugged the headphones out of her ears in one smooth motion. And Pascal was caught, somehow, in the smoothness of it.

But then she shifted around to face him, still down there on the stone floor. And everything…stopped.

That face.

Her face.

He’d been seeing it for years.

He knew every millimeter of her heart-shaped face, and the rich brown hair touched with gold that surrounded it. He knew that wide, generous mouth, and the delicate nose.

Most of all, he knew those eyes. Startling violet set above cheekbones made for poetry.

He knew her, his angel of mercy and the ghost that had haunted him for years.

It was Cecilia. His Cecilia.

“My God,” he whispered. “It’s you.”

“It’s me,” she replied, her voice flat. Hard. And that was when he noticed that those violet eyes of hers were bright on his. And murderous. “And you can’t have him.”

CHAPTER TWO (#u4faa019e-8e0d-55f7-a4f0-3deaa3dd4fd1)

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.