Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret

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.