The Italian's Pregnant Cinderella

Julienne smiled, still polite and calm. “You met me here once before.”

And she knew as she said it that she was breaking all their rules. The unspoken boundaries all three of them had maintained for a decade. She and Fleurette never mentioned him or how they’d made it from a sad, half-abandoned French hill town to a lavishly appointed, semidetached townhouse in the center of Milan. He never indicated he knew either one of them. Sometimes Julienne had worried that he’d forgotten what he’d done for them—that it had meant so little to him when it had altered the whole of hers and Fleurette’s lives.

But no, she could see he hadn’t forgotten. More, she could see his astonishment, there in his eyes like a thread of gold in the brown depths. His dark brows rose, and he looked almost...arrested.

“I did.” His study of her made her want to shake. She didn’t, somehow. Not outwardly. “A meeting neither one of us has referenced in a decade. To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected trip down memory lane, Ms. Boucher?”

His voice was crisp. A distinct and deliberate slap, though as stern and controlled as everything else he did.

He meant her to wilt and she wanted to, but then, she had built herself in his image. She was made of sterner stuff because he was, and because she’d always assumed he expected it. She kept her cool smile on her face.

“In that decade, I have kept track of what you must have spent to rescue Fleurette and me. Then care for us.” She named a staggering number and saw that light in his eyes change again, to something far more sharp and assessing that she could feel like a fist in her belly. And lower, like heat. “With the latest deal we closed and the amount I have in a separate fund with your name on it, I believe I have repaid that sum. With interest.”

His eyes were dark brown, like the bittersweet chocolate his family made. And yet that could hardly begin to describe their ferocity, or the intense way they narrowed on her now.

“I do not recall asking for repayment. Or even acknowledgment.”

“Nonetheless.” She took a deep breath. “My resignation letter waits for you in Milan.”

He blinked. “I beg your pardon. You are resigning?”

“I am. I have.”

She reached out and did what she’d done ten years ago. She put her hand on his arm, but this time, she meant it.

Oh, how she meant it.

“Cristiano,” she said quietly. Invitingly, she hoped. “Would you like to buy me that drink?”

CHAPTER TWO

CRISTIANO CASSARA DID NOT care for surprises.

He had arranged his life with great precision, the better to avoid the unpleasant shock of events that went in directions he had not already foreseen. Cristiano had a deep and abiding dismay for chaos or mess of any kind, thanks to a childhood brimming over with nothing but, and had therefore dedicated himself to organizing as much of the world as possible to suit his requirements.

Something that was easier than perhaps it ought to have been when one was a Cassara.

He should have deeply disliked the fact that this woman had deliberately shifted the ground beneath their feet. That she had not stayed put in the compartment where he’d placed her years ago.

He told himself he did.

But it was too late. Something in him had shifted, too, without a care for how little he liked the sensation. And he suddenly found himself looking at Julienne Boucher as if he’d never seen her before.

As if she was a beautiful woman he’d happened to meet in a bar in Monte Carlo, instead of all the other things she’d been to him over time. His attempt at kindness, at a kind of redemption. The embodiment of his guilt. And possibly the best vice president the Cassara Corporation had ever had, save himself.

“What exactly are you offering me?” he asked, finding his gaze intent on hers. He did nothing to temper it. “And more important, why are you offering it?”

“You could have taken what I was offering ten years ago. You didn’t.”

He gazed down at the hand she’d laid on his arm as if it was a writhing, poisonous snake. When he raised his gaze to hers once more, he felt certain it was frigid.

Yet somehow, she did not retreat.

“Are you suggesting that because I did not behave like an animal then I might reverse course now?” He blinked in an astonishment that was in no way exaggerated. “I don’t know what is more offensive. That you think I require pity sex or worse, that you imagine I might accept it.”

He had meant to sound cold. Exacting. And yet somehow the word sex seemed to linger between them, making its own weather.

“That’s not what I meant to suggest at all.”

And through the kick of the temper he usually fought much harder to keep under wraps, he was aware that Julienne did not seem upset. She gazed back at him calmly, her face open and her eyes clear, and he was forced to think back to all the other times this woman had sat before him in her other role. As his employee.

Which was the only way he had thought about her since she’d joined the company as an intern approximately a thousand years ago. He had watched her meteoric rise from intern to vice president with a detached sort of interest, the way he would have noted any other rapid ascent, and he had sat in many meetings face-to-face with her coolness. Cristiano would not have had said he’d admired the way she handled herself, but he had appreciated it. On behalf of the Cassara Corporation, of course.

It occurred to him now that she was not afraid of him. Not intimidated in the least, which was unusual.

Remarkable, even.

“I have always been enormously grateful to you,” she said, leaving her viper of a hand where it was. Cristiano had the notion he could feel the heat of it through the fine wool of the suit his tailors had crafted precisely for the late October weather, when that was unlikely. As unlikely as the wholly unexpected response his body was having to her. “How could I not be? And I always planned to repay you, because that is the decent thing to do, is it not?”

His mouth was full of ice, it seemed. “It is unnecessary.”

“To you, yes. Which only makes it more necessary to me.”

Again he stared down at her hand, trying to recall the last time someone had dared place a hand upon him without an invitation and his express permission. Nothing came to mind.

Not even his father had dared, after a certain point. When Cristiano had finally grown too tall.

And the longer her hand rested there on his forearm, the less unpleasant he found it, no matter what he told himself. Quite the opposite, in fact. That heat instead seemed to wind through him, a peculiar treachery.

There were more betrayals. The longer she stood there, too close to him, he noticed things. He noticed her. Her narrow, elegant fingers. The carefully polished nails, in a quietly sophisticated shade that made him think of what her skin might look like, flushed with pleasure against smooth sheets.

Unbidden, Cristiano remembered the last time she’d put her hand on him, here in this same bar a lifetime ago. He couldn’t say he’d thought about it since—and yet now he suddenly had a perfect recollection of her same hand in the same place, though she had been altogether rougher then. Her nails had been ragged and untended, or bitten down to the quick. And her eyes had been glazed with misery and fear, not...

But he did not wish to define what it was he saw in Julienne’s gaze just then.

No matter his body’s enthusiastic response.

“The Cassara Corporation has been mother and father to me,” Julienne said, with a soft intensity that he ordered himself to ignore. But couldn’t. “A family as well as a job. But you were the one who saved me. Right here. And then again and again over the years by providing me every opportunity to save myself. So I did, but all the while, I had you there as a guide. Or a goal, maybe.”

“If you mean in a business sense, I must tell you, Ms. Boucher, that this is no way to go about—”

Her hand tightened on his arm. Cristiano felt the sensation race through him like an electric shock.

“It’s not about business. Or why would I resign?” Julienne looked far more composed than he felt, and Cristiano hardly knew how to account for such a thing. “I wanted to repay our debt to you in ten years. I’ve done that now. But as those ten years passed, I found myself wishing that I could convince you to take my initial offer, after all.”

When he glared at her, she only smiled. “Not for money, of course. I’m not in the same circumstances I was then. I’m not sixteen. I’m an adult woman, no longer your employee, and fully in control of her own faculties. I am not coerced. I am not desperate. When I found out you were going to be in Monaco again so soon after my last deal went through, it seemed the perfect bookend.”

“A ‘bookend’?” Cristiano repeated, and it was bad enough that he was looking at her now. Truly seeing her, after so long making it his business to act as if she wasn’t quite there.

It was distinctly uncomfortable.

Because Julienne might have been a scraggly, terrified teenager ten years ago, covered in too much mascara and obvious misery. But that version of her was gone. She had grown into a beautiful woman, whether he chose to admit it or not. Her hair gleamed that burnished gold and brown that made him...hungry. Her eyes were too clever by half, fixed on him with an intensity and a sincerity that made his blood heat.

And he would have to be a dead man not to notice that her body, no longer packaged in a tacky dress that had been much too old for her, was a quiet symphony of curves and grace.

Cristiano did not indulge himself with his employees, as a matter of honor and good business sense alike. Both virtues, to his mind, and both traits his own father had distinctly lacked.

But Julienne had tendered her resignation.

And enveloped as they were in the dim embrace of a quiet bar tucked away in the midst of Monte Carlo’s frenetic opulence, he could hardly remember why he should have objected to any of this in the first place.

Julienne did not know it, but she was already connected to him in ways that would have made him far more than merely uncomfortable, had he allowed the strict compartments he kept inside him to open wide at any point in the past ten years. He never had.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to now, but her hand was on his arm and there was that heat—

Cristiano had not been in this specific bar by chance ten years ago. He disliked Monaco intensely, associating it as he did with the worst of his father’s notorious excesses. It had been in this very bar that he had indulged in the last of those terrible scenes with Giacomo Cassara. His father had been cruel. Cristiano had returned the favor. And he had been sitting right here, staring at his father’s favorite drink—the demon Giacomo had carried about on his back, night and day, for as long as Cristiano could remember, wondering at his own descent into cruelty and what it might herald—when Julienne had appeared beside him.

He had been engaged in nothing less than a battle for his own soul that night. The endless war with his father was one of attrition, and any victories Cristiano scored grew more Pyrrhic by the day. He had begun to wonder if it was worth attempting to live up to his grandfather’s antiquated notions of honor when Giacomo was so busy dedicating himself to living down to every expectation.

Cristiano had been raised by two men, one a saint and one a devil, and that night he’d been wavering between them.

That was the mess that Julienne Boucher had walked in on, tottering on heels she clearly didn’t yet know how to walk in.

He had glanced up to find her there beside him, as pale as she was determined. And there had never been any question that he might help himself to her, as his tastes ran to the enthusiastic, not the unwilling. Or the transactional. He’d felt for a moment as if he had his grandfather on one shoulder and his father on the other.

And in the middle stood a girl with poverty all over her like the too-tight dress she wore and a fixed smile on her too-young face, offering herself to him.

Cristiano had not been tempted to sample her wares. He wasn’t remotely interested in teenagers, heaven forbid. And he certainly did not troll for sex from the streets. But it had taken him a beat too long to say so. To brush off the whispering devil spilling poison into his ear—the one telling him to ignore her, the one insisting she wasn’t his problem when he had enough of his own, the one who wanted him to turn his back on her and get back to his already messy evening—and do what was right.

That he had wavered at all, that he was that selfish, disgusted him.

And perhaps that was why he had not simply given her some money from his pocket and gone on his way. It was the guilt he couldn’t shake that had made him go further. It was the stain of his shame that had turned him into her benefactor.

To prove that he was nothing like his father.

Even if, later that same night, he had learned that in truth, he was worse.

But tonight, Julienne did not come to him as a desperate child determined to sell her body for survival. She came to him as a woman, and a beautiful one at that, with a body she could have shared with any man in Monaco, if she so chose.

And still she’d chosen him.

He couldn’t deny he liked the symmetry of it.

Cristiano couldn’t go back in time and change that brief, terrible moment when he’d very nearly turned his back on the girl she’d been. Very nearly abandoning her to her fate with whatever jackals populated places like this. Vile men like his own father, selfish and destructive and heedless of the damage he caused.

So easily could Cristiano have broken her and condemned her younger sister, too, simply by walking away from Julienne that night.

He carried the weight of that, two bright lives he could have extinguished in one fell swoop, around with him. They were an enduring reminder of how close he’d come to becoming more like his father, the cost of housing and educating and outfitting them negligible to a man of his wealth—and a small dent indeed next to the soul he’d nearly lost.

They had been an act of kindness to prove he had it in him. Then an act of penance for the other things he’d lost that night.

One way or another, Julienne and her sister had long been his personal cross to bear.

And it was tempting, oh, so tempting, to put them down once and for all.

“Are you going to answer me?” Julienne asked, and she tilted her head slightly to one side as she asked it, once again signaling how little she was intimidated by him. It was a novel experience. Cristiano should have been outraged at her temerity. Her lack of respect.

Instead, he found himself intrigued.

“How can I?” he replied after a moment. “I don’t know what it is you are offering.”

“Me. I’m offering me.”

“I appreciate the offer. And that you are no longer making it while barely legal.” He considered her, the light from behind the bar making her face seem very nearly luminous. “But you see, I have rules.”

“I’ve worked for you for ten years, Mr. Cassara. If, all of a sudden, you did not have rules for every given situation, that would be concerning.”

He thought of his guilt, his shame. That brief, glaring moment when he had understood himself to be no better than the father he disdained with every particle of his being. The father who had humiliated him, rampaged through his childhood and laughed in the face of his pain.

How easy would it be to wash that moment away. He had saved the girl, after all. And the result of what he’d actually done—instead of merely thought—was Julienne.

Julienne, the youngest vice president in the history of the Cassara Corporation—aside from Cristiano himself.

Julienne, who looked at him without the calculation he had grown to expect in the eyes of women who dared attempt to get close to him—or rather, to his plump bank accounts. Julienne, whose toffee-colored eyes were filled with heat. Longing, even.

He had come back to this terrible place at least once each year since that night to stand a vigil. To remember who he’d nearly become.

Maybe, a voice in him suggested, it is time to let it go.

Cristiano followed an urge he would normally have tamped down, hard, and reached across the scant inches between them. He fit his hand to the curve of her cheek, and traced his way down the delicate line of her neck to find the hollow of her throat. Then, lower, to the soft skin visible in the open neck of her silk blouse that hinted at her breasts below.

And watched in a dark delight as she flushed, bright and hot.

The precise shade of her nail polish.

“I do not do entanglements,” he told her severely. Though he was questioning himself already, as the heat in her skin shot through him, pooling in his sex. His body was tight, ready. And suddenly, it was as if he’d spent years wanting nothing more than to drive himself deep and hard inside her. “I like sex, Ms. Boucher. But I do not traffic in emotional displays.”

Her breath was choppy and her eyes were hot, but her voice was cool when she spoke. “I hope I have never given you reason to imagine that I was particularly emotional.”

“The boardroom is not the bedroom.”

“Indeed it is not. Or you would have found me distinctly indecent, long before now.”

He liked the notion of that. And suddenly there were too many images in his head of missed opportunities in the office...the kinds of images he never allowed to pollute his mind. The kinds of images he kept behind the walls of all those compartments inside him, because to lose those separations was to become too much like his father. When he wanted instead to be like his grandfather, the man who had taught him how to build partitions. And use them.

But walls were coming down all around them tonight.

“You have always struck me as a woman who likes to be in charge.” He continued to trace an absent pattern this way and that, in and around her low collar, drawing in the wild heat she generated. And far too aware of each breath she took. “But I’m afraid I am far too demanding for that.”

Julienne shivered, as if the prospect of his demands was too delicious to bear, and he thought he might actually eat her alive. Here and now. Hoist her up on the bar and indulge himself at last.

That would be a bookend, indeed.

“What sort of demands do you mean?” she asked, and her voice changed. Gone was all that coolness, lost in a husky sort of heat that he could feel like a caress, there where he hungered for her the most.

It made him think of dark rooms, deep sighs.

He shifted again, and looked around, trying his best not to surrender to that drumming thing inside him. His blood, his pulse.

His need and his hunger.

Not cut out of him, as he’d believed all this time. But waiting.

Only waiting for a woman who dared.

But despite the riot inside him and the delicious idea he’d had concerning the bar, this was not the place to indulge himself. There were too many unfriendly eyes that watched his every move, especially in the moneyed halls of Monte Carlo, where too many well-fed enemies would leap at the chance to see and exploit his weaknesses.

Or his wants.

To Cristiano’s mind, they were the same.

He took Julienne’s hand in his and then he tugged her behind him, leading her back out of the dimly lit bar and into the hotel proper. He didn’t look back at her. He didn’t need to. He could see her in the mirrors they passed, looking flushed and ready.

He felt the pulse of greed deep in his sex.

Instead of leading her out into the grand lobby that was filled with guests and tourists alike, he moved deeper into the hotel. Then branched off into one of the smaller marble halls festooned with luxury shops. He kept going until he found an alcove, tucked between a shop filled with disgracefully overpriced perfume and another stocked entirely with nonsensical shoes.

And once there, away from prying eyes if not entirely private, he backed her to the wall. Then propped himself over her there, one hand on either side of her head.

Cristiano watched, rapt, as she fought for breath.

How had he failed to truly see her all this time?

“Any and all demands,” he said, finally answering her question. What demands, indeed. He could write a book or two and it would only skim the surface of the things he wanted. Needed. And would demand of her. “I like things the way I like them. Is that a problem for you?”

“I’ve been taking your orders for ten years.”

He liked the way her eyes flashed. He liked that simmering defiance, right there beneath her cool exterior. He wanted to lick up all that elegance and see how she burned.

“One night, Julienne.”

“You say that as if you imagine I might have started making a hope chest.” She tossed her head with that same defiance and a streak of temper, too. “I assure you, Mr. Cassara, this is a sexual invitation. That’s all.”

“One night,” he said again.

“I heard you the first time.”

“It bears repeating, cara. I would hate for there to be any...confusion.”

And he watched as another streak of temper made her toffee-colored eyes darken.

“How patronizing.” And she scowled at him as if he wasn’t caging her against the wall. “I’m the one who propositioned you, in case you’re the one who’s confused. Twice, now. Perhaps that’s what bears repeating.”

“The only word I wish you to repeat is my name,” he told her, low and dark, and leaned in then to get the scent of her in his nose. Sweet and hot at once. His pulse thickened, beating hard into his sex. “No more of this Mr. Cassara when we are naked. Cristiano, please. Shout it, sob it, scream it. All are acceptable. And all bear endless repeating, as I think you’ll find soon enough.”

And he was so close he could see her delicate shiver.

“How sure you seem that you won’t be the one crying out my name.” Julienne smirked at him. She actually dared smirk at him. “Particularly when we have yet to establish if there’s the slightest bit of chemistry between us. Perhaps there will be nothing here but apologetic grimaces and embarrassment.”

“My mistake,” Cristiano said.

He didn’t argue the point.

He moved closer and took her mouth with his.

No finesse. No gentility or politeness. Simple, potent greed.

He took what he wanted, a bold mating of lips and tongues. He tasted her, he took her, providing a comprehensive example of precisely the kind of demands he meant.

He didn’t go easy on her at all.

And she met him, his Julienne. She pushed herself off the wall, twined herself around him, and the fire of it roared through him. The gut punch, hot and mad, slammed into him. It made him question the limits of his own control, when he prided himself on never, ever losing his grip—

When he pulled away, his own breath was hard to catch. Her eyes had gone dark and wide, and Cristiano wanted nothing on this earth but to bury himself inside her, again and again.

Assuming he lived through the single night he would allow her.

The single night he would allow himself.

And as he fought to find his control again, he wondered, for the first time in his life, if one night would be enough.

A sentiment that should have sent him reeling. Running for the hills, but her taste was in his mouth. Sweet and salt, all woman, and he thought it entirely possible that she might be the undoing of him, after all.

The mad part of it was, he couldn’t seem to care.

“One night,” he said again, rougher this time. Because he was talking to himself. “That’s all I have to offer.”