The Bride’s Baby Of Shame

He made a show of looking around, but there was nothing for miles but fields and hedges. No prying eyes. No concerned relatives who would claim to their dying day they only had Sophie’s best interests at heart.

The stately house where her wedding was to be held in the morning was over the next hill and Sophie, who had never sneaked anywhere in her life before that night in Monaco, had felt a sickening combination of daring and scared as she’d crept out of her room and run from the hall tonight.

It was pathetic, really.

How had she lived twenty-six long years and failed to recognize how sad and small her life really was?

Renzo wasn’t finished. “Now that we’re both caught up, perhaps you can tell me why I’ve been called upon to take part in this latest episode of what appears to be a rather melodramatic and messy life?”

Sophie swallowed. The words melodramatic and messy had never applied to her life. Not ever. Not until she’d met him. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

That was the real story of her life.

Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t understand how Renzo didn’t hear it.

His mouth moved, then, but she would never call that a smile. Then he made it worse, reaching over to take her chin in his firm hand, the buttery leather of the gloves he wore only highlighting the intensity of his grip.

And it was the same inside her as it had always been, gloves or no.

Fire.

“What lies will you tell me tonight, I wonder?” he asked, low and dark. Ominous.

“You found me,” Sophie said, trying to keep her feet solid beneath her. Trying to ignore the wildfire heat ignited in her. Again. “I... I didn’t want...”

She didn’t know how to do this.

He had texted her out of nowhere, as far as she’d known.

This is Renzo. You must want to meet.

Now, standing outside on a cool, wet night, Sophie had to ask herself what she thought he had been offering, exactly. Blackmail?

That was what she’d told herself. That was why she’d come.

But she understood, now that he was touching her again, that she’d been lying to herself.

And now she had to lie to him. Again.

The trouble was, Sophie had never told so many lies before in her life. What would be the point? Too many people knew too much about her, and everyone was more than happy to compare notes and then decide what was in her best interest without her input. Therefore, she’d always done exactly what was expected of her. She’d done well at school because her father had made it clear that she was expected to be more than simply an ornament.

“Clever conversation and sparkling wit are not something one is either born with or not, Sophie,” her father had told her when she’d been barely thirteen. “They’re weapons in an arsenal and I expect you to be an excellent shot.”

Sophie had made certain she was. After school, she’d involved herself with only carefully vetted charities, so as never to cause her father or future husband any cause for concern about what she’d done with her time.

Or more to the point, her name.

No carousing. No scandals. Nothing that could be considered a stain.

She’d even agreed to marry a man she thought of as her own, personal brick wall—though far less warm and approachable than any slab of stone—on her eighteenth birthday.

Well. Agreed was a strong word.

Randall Grant, the sixth Earl of Langston, had been her father’s choice for her since she was in the cradle. Her agreement, such as it was, had never been in doubt.

Dal, as Randall was known to friends and family and the girl he’d been given, had produced the Langston family ring and handed it to her with a few cold words about the joining of their families. Because that was all that mattered.

Not Sophie herself. Not her feelings.

Certainly not love, which Sophie thought no one in either her family or Dal’s had believed was real or of any import for at least the last few centuries.

And her reaction—her attempt at defiance—in the face of the life that had been presented to her as a fait accompli had comprised of a single deep breath, which Sophie had held for just a moment longer than she should have as Dal stood there, holding the ring before her.

Just a moment, while she’d imagined what might happen if she refused him—

But that was the thing. She couldn’t imagine it. Even thinking about defying her parents and all the plans they’d made for her had made her feel light-headed.

So she had said yes, as if Dal had asked her a question.

As if there had ever been any doubt.

She’d locked the heirloom ring away in her father’s safe, murmuring about how she didn’t dare flash it about until she was Dal’s countess.

All she’d asked for was a long engagement, so she could pretend to have what passed for a normal life for just a little while—

But she hadn’t. She hadn’t dared. She’d only been marking what time she had left.

Until Renzo.

CHAPTER TWO

“DO IT,” RENZO GROWLED, snapping Sophie back to her current peril. The dark lane. The powerful man who still held her before him, that hand on her chin. “Tell me another lie to my face. See what happens.”

Sophie didn’t know how to respond to him. She didn’t know how to respond at all. She’d been so certain that his text had been a threat. That he had planned to come here and...do something.

To her.

Did you truly believe it was a threat? asked a small voice inside of her that sounded far too much like her mother. Or did you imagine that Renzo might save you?

But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? No one could save her.

No one had ever been able to save her.

Sophie tried to pull her chin from his grip, but he didn’t let go. And for some reason, that was what got to her. One more man was standing before her, making her do things she didn’t want to do. Like the others, Renzo wasn’t forcing her into anything. He wasn’t brutish or horrible.

He was simply, quietly, unyieldingly exerting his will.

And Sophie was tired of bending, suddenly. She was tired of accepting what was handed to her and making the best of it when she’d never wanted it in the first place.

She’d made her own mistakes. Now she’d figure out how to live with them.

“Why did you come?” she demanded of Renzo then. “I doubt I’m the only woman you’ve ever spent a night with. Do you chase them all down?”

A flash of white teeth against the night. “Never. But then again, they do not typically furnish me with false names.”

“How can you possibly know that if you never seek them out again?”

The look in his eyes changed. Oh, there was still that heat. That simmering temper. But now, suddenly, there was a different kind of awareness.

As if she had challenged him.

She supposed she had.

“I can think of only one reason a woman would wish to meet me the night before her wedding to another man,” Renzo said then, his tone cold enough to do her father proud. But his gaze was pure fire. “Is that who you imagine I am? A gigolo on call? You merely lift a finger and here I am, willing and able to attend to your every desire?”

This time when she tipped her head back he released her chin.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am,” Renzo said, something blistering and lethal in his voice then. “And never let it be said that I do not know my place.”

“I don’t know what—”

“I should have known that I was mixing with someone far above my station.” His voice was scathing. The look on his face was far worse than a blow could have been, she was certain. “It is no more than we peasants are good for, is it not?”

Sophie’s heart kicked so hard she was afraid it might crack a rib. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But of course you do. You are so blue-blooded I am surprised you do not drip sapphires wherever you walk. Is that not what you summoned me here to make clear?” He looked around again, as if he could see over the hill to the grand house that had commanded the earldom for centuries. As if he could see her family’s own estates to the north. As if he knew every shameful, snobbish thing her parents had said to her over the years. “After all, what am I to you? The bastard son of a Sicilian village woman who raised me on her own, with nothing but shame and censure to ease her path. Oh, yes. And the rich men’s washing, which she counted herself lucky to have.”

“You don’t know anything about me—” she started, determined to defend herself when the truth was, she had no defense for what she’d done. She still couldn’t believe she’d actually done it.

“I knew you were a virgin, Sophie,” he cut in. She still wasn’t used to it, the dark and delicious way he said her name. As if it was a caress, when she remembered his caresses too well. A mirthless smile moved over his sensual mouth, but it failed to make him any less appealing. She doubted anything could. “I suppose I have no one to blame but myself for imagining that also made you an innocent.”

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

“Another lie.” Renzo let out a small, hard laugh that was about as amused as that smile. “You know exactly what I want from you.”

“Then I’m glad we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation at last,” Sophie said, somehow managing to sound cool despite the clambering inside of her. “I apologize for not having it with you that night.”

“Because you were too busy sneaking off, your tail between your legs, back to your earl and your engagement and your pretty little life in a high-class cage. Is that not so?”

It was such an apt description of Sophie’s furtive behavior that morning after in Monaco—filled with the terrible mix of sick shame at her actions and something proud and defiant deep inside of her that simply refused to hate the greatest night of her life, no matter what it made her—that she had to pause for a minute. She had to try to catch her breath.

And when she did, she reminded herself that it didn’t matter what he called her or what he thought about her, as painful as it might be to hear. There was a far more important issue to address.

“Renzo,” she began, because it didn’t matter how little she wanted to tell him what he needed to know. It didn’t matter that a single sentence would change both of their lives forever.

Their lives were already altered forever. He just didn’t know it yet.

But he didn’t look the slightest bit inclined to listen to her.

“What I cannot understand,” he seethed at her in that same dark, dangerous way that made the night seem very nearly transparent beside him, “is why you thought you could do nothing more than click your fingers and I would come running.”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, something she wasn’t sure she recognized stampeding through her, like fear. But much more acrid. “But here you are.”

Sophie only realized she’d backed away from him when she felt the car behind her. She reached out, flattening her hands against the car’s bonnet, sleek and low, a great deal like the only other vehicle she’d seen this man drive.

The stars had come out far above, but she didn’t need the light they threw to illuminate the man before her. He would be burned deep into her flesh forever. She saw him when she closed her eyes. He haunted her dreams. The fact that he was standing here before her now, and no matter that he seemed to hate her, was almost too much for her to take in.

She had spent far too much time staring at pictures of him on the internet in the interim, like a lovesick teen girl, but she still remembered him from that night in Monte Carlo. She had walked away from the table of her friends, all gathered together to celebrate her upcoming nuptials at what Poppy had called her proper hen do. She had needed the air. A moment to catch her breath, and to stop pretending that marrying Randall filled her with joy. Or filled her with anything at all beyond the same, low-grade dread with which she’d faced every one of her familial obligations thus far.

The good news was, once she provided Dal with the requisite heir and spare, she could look forward to a happy, solitary life of charity and good works. They could live apart, only coming together at certain events annually. Or they could work together as if the family name was a brand and the two of them its ambassadors, just like her own parents.

No one would call her parents unhappy, she’d told herself as she’d tried to find her equanimity again.

But then again, no one was likely to call them happy, either.

Sophie just needed to resign herself to what waited for her. She knew that. She didn’t understand why the closer she got to her wedding, the less resigned she felt.

But then she’d looked up, and there he’d been.

Renzo had been dressed in a dark suit, open at the neck, that seemed to do nothing but emphasize the long, sculpted ranginess of a body she knew at a glance was athletic in every sense of the term. His hair was a rich, too-long, dark brown, threaded through with gold, that called to mind the sorts of endless summers in the glorious sun that she had never experienced. He had the face of a poet, a sensual mouth below high cheekbones, and glorious eyes of dark, carnal amber—but he moved like a king.

She had known that he was coming for her from the first glance.

And when she lay awake at night and cataloged her sins, she knew that was the worst one. Because she hadn’t turned around or headed back to her friends. She hadn’t kept going, pushing her way through the crowd until she could hide herself in a bathroom somewhere. She hadn’t assumed her usual mask of careless indifference that the papers she tried her best not to appear in liked to call haughty.

Sophie had seen temptation on a collision course with her and she’d...done absolutely nothing to avoid it.

She had stood where she was, rooted to the floor, and while she would never admit this out loud—and especially not to him—the truth was that she hadn’t thought she could move.

One look at Renzo from across the crowded floor, right there in the grand casino, and her knees had threatened to give out.

And it didn’t help, here on a forgotten country lane back home in England, that she knew precisely what he was capable of. She knew that none of her oversize, almost-farcically innocent daydreams were off the mark.

She hadn’t been ready for a man of Renzo’s skill, much less his uninhibited imagination.

But Sophie had always been a quick learner.

“Why am I here?” Renzo growled again.

He moved closer to her, that same erotic threat a kind of loose promise that hovered in his bones. She could see it all over his face. Worse, she could feel it echo deep within, a kind of fist in her gut and below, nothing but that same bright fire that had already destroyed her.

“There are consequences to actions,” she said carefully, mimicking something her father might say, because she didn’t know another way into the subject. “Surely you know that.”

“Is this where the threat comes in?” Renzo’s laugh was low. And not kind. “You people are all the same. Carrot and stick until you get your way. And you always get your way, don’t you, Sophie?”

He was much too close then. Sophie expected him to stop, because she had nowhere to go, backed up into his car the way she was—but he didn’t stop.

He kept coming.

And he didn’t stop until he’d insinuated himself between her legs and bent her backward so for all intents and purposes, they were sprawled out together over the front of his car.

He was over her but not on her. If she strained to keep her legs apart, he wasn’t even touching her. And yet he might as well have scooped her up in his fists and held her fast.

“Let me up,” she whispered fiercely.

Desperately.

But if Renzo heard her, he gave no sign.

He didn’t claim her mouth in a bruising kiss, as she half expected, the way he had when he’d helped her from the car that night in Monaco. He held himself above her, sprawled over her body to keep her exactly where she was. Pinning her there. If she tried to move, she would be the one to rub her body against his.

And if she did...would she stop? She shuddered at the notion.

“Tell me about these consequences, cara,” he murmured. “Tell me how you have suffered. Tell me how brave you have been to forge ahead in your gilded, pampered circumstances, feted and celebrated wherever you go, so soon to be the countess of all you survey.”

His mouth was at her ear, then down along her neck, and she could feel the heat of him everywhere—but he still wasn’t touching her.

Not the way she wanted him to.

And he wasn’t done. “Where does your earl imagine you are tonight? Locked away in your virginal bridal suite, perhaps? Dressed in flowing white already, the living, lovely picture of the innocence he purchased?”

It was one thing for Sophie to think of herself as chattel in the privacy of her own head. It was something else entirely to hear Renzo say it, sardonic and mocking.

“He has not purchased me. I’m not a cow.”

“Nor are you the virgin he expects.”

“I would be shocked if he has any expectations at all.”

“When marriage is commerce, cara, the contract is signed and sealed in the marital bed. Shall I tell you how?”

A wave of misery threated to take her over then. Sophie fought it back as best she could. “Not everyone is as...elemental as you are.”

“Will you tell him why?” Renzo asked, unsmiling and much too close. “When he comes to claim his bride, will you tell him who else has been between the pale thighs he imagined were his alone to part?”

He shifted his position above her and she sucked in a breath in a messy combination of anticipation and desire, but he only went down on one elbow so he could get his face that much closer to hers.

It made everything that much worse.

Or better, something in her whispered.

“You’re disgusting,” she told him. “And he won’t notice either way.”

“I think you underestimate your groom considerably,” Renzo murmured. “What purpose is there in being an earl in the first place if not to plant a flag in unclaimed land and call it his?”

Her breath deserted her at that. “I’m not... There’s no flag—”

But Renzo kept right on. “Why did you bother to remain pure and untouched for so long, if not to gift it to this betrothed of yours who you clearly hold in such high esteem?”

Sophie pressed her fingers hard against the metal of the car beneath her. She tried to pretend she didn’t feel that instant wave of shame—but she did. Did it matter how distantly Dal treated her? She’d made a promise and she’d broken it.

Spectacularly.

Over and over again.

And then it had gotten even worse.

“I wanted to wait,” she said quietly, fighting to stay calm. Or at least sound calm. “Until I didn’t.”

“I’m sure that distinction will please him greatly.” Renzo’s mouth was a scant centimeter from the sweep of her neck and she was sure—she was sure—that he could taste her rapid, revealing pulse. “Make sure your confession is vivid. Paint a picture. A man likes to know how many times his woman cries out another man’s name and begs him not to stop.”

She shoved at him then, no longer caring if that meant she was forced to touch him. She ignored the feel of his broad, sculpted shoulders beneath her palms and focused on all the emotions swirling around inside her, much too close to the surface.

But it didn’t matter what she did, because Renzo was immovable. Another brick wall—except there was nothing cold about him. Nothing the least bit reserved. He blazed at her and she could feel it as if it was his hand between her legs, breaching her softness and pushing deep inside—

Her breath was ragged. Desperate. “My marriage is none of your business!”

She had the confused sense that she’d walked directly into a trap. Renzo tensed, coiled tight as if he planned to spring at her.

“And yet here I am, right in the middle of it. Where you put me, Sophie. Against my will.”

She shoved at him again and again, he didn’t move. At all.

“If I put you there then I’ll remove you. Consider yourself ejected. With prejudice.”

“Why did you order me to meet you?” he asked, and though his voice was deceptively mild, his dark amber eyes gleamed in the dark and made her think of lions. Tigers. Big cats that had no place roaming about the staid English countryside. “Surely you must know you’ve made a grievous tactical error, cara. You’ve given me the upper hand.”

“The upper hand?”

And she recognized that look on his face then. It was pure triumph, and it should have made her blood chill.

But he’d melted her in Monaco and she couldn’t seem to get her preferred veneer of ice back, no matter what. Not around him.

“I know who you are,” he told her with a certain relish that washed over her like a caress and then hit her in the gut. Hard. “And I have information I must assume your earl would no doubt prefer was not in the peasant hands of a bastard Sicilian.”

“...information?”

But Sophie already knew what he would say. And still, there was a vanishingly small part of her that hoped against hope that he was the man she’d imagined he was—

“Exactly what his fiancée got up to one fine night in Monaco, for example,” Renzo said, smashing any hopes she might have had. Of his better nature. Of what she needed to do here. Of this entire situation that seemed a bigger mistake with every passing moment. “What do you imagine he would pay to keep your indiscretions quiet? Because I already know the tabloids would throw money at me. I could name any sum I wish and humiliate two of the finest families in England with one sleazy little article. I must tell you, cara, I feel drunk with power.”

“You...” She could hardly speak. Her worst nightmare kept getting worse and she had no idea how to stop it. Or contain it. Or even get her head around it. “You are—”

“Careful,” he growled. “I would advise you not to call me names. You may find that I am far worse than any insults you throw at me.”

He pushed himself back, up and off the car and away from her body. Sophie stayed where he’d left her, uncertain what to do next. She was shaking. There was water making her eyes feel too full and too glassy. And worst of all, there was that part of her that wanted him to come back and cover her again.

She was sick. That was the only explanation.

“What I am is mercenary,” Renzo told her. He watched her pitilessly as she struggled to sit up. “You know what that word means, I presume?”

“Of course I know what it means.” She sat for a moment, more winded than she should have been, and then pushed herself off the car to get her feet back on the ground.

But it didn’t make her feel better. Maybe nothing ever would again.

“What it means to you is something derogatory, I am sure,” Renzo said, still watching her in that cold, very nearly cruel way. “Everything is mercenary to those who do not need to make their own money.”

Sophie understood that was a slap. “I don’t—”

He merely lifted a brow and she fell silent, then hated herself for her easy acquiescence.

“Everything I have, everything I am, I created out of nothing,” he told her. “I have nothing polite to say about the man who left my mother pregnant to fend for herself. I have only become a better man than he could ever dream of being. And do you know how I did that?”

“Of course I know. You raced cars for years.”

“What I did, Sophie, was take every opportunity that presented itself to me. Why should this be any different?” He watched her as she straightened from the car and took a shaky step. “What consequences would you like to speak to me about?”