The Bride’s Baby Of Shame

And she understood then.

She understood her own, treacherous heart, and why it had pushed her out here in the middle of the night to further complicate the situation she had already made untenable with what she’d done. She understood that no matter what she might have told herself about threatening texts and potential blackmail, what she’d wanted was that man she’d made up in her head in Monaco.

The man who had looked at her through a crowd and seen her. Only her. Not her family name or her father’s wealth—just her.

The man who had taken her, again and again.

The man who had learned every inch of her in the most naked, carnal, astounding way possible, there in that villa high in the hills with the glittering lights of the city so far below.

The man who had made her laugh, scream, cry, and beg him to do it all over again.

But that had just been a night. Just one night.

And he was just a man, after all. Not the savior she’d made up in her head. Not the answer to a prayer she hadn’t known she’d made.

She should never, ever have answered his text. Because this had only made everything worse.

Her hand crept over her belly, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.

“I thought...” she started, then stopped herself, blinking back the emotions she desperately wanted to conceal from him. “I wanted...”

“Your cake and to eat it, too. Yes? I’m familiar with the phrase.” The curve of his lips was like a razor. “Why give up the bastard for the earl if you can have them both?”

“That wasn’t what I wanted at all.”

“Of course it was.” The razor curl to his lips edged over into outright disgust. “Do you think I don’t know your type, Sophie? Cheating fiancées turn into lying wives in the blink of an eye. And bored housewives are all the same, whether their house is a hovel or a grand hall. Trust me when I tell you that Europe is littered with the detritus of broken vows. You are not as special as you might imagine.”

She shook at that ruthless character assassination, but the worst part was that she couldn’t manage to shove out a single word in her own defense. Of course he believed these things of her. Had she showed him anything different?

What had seemed like sunlight and glory to her had been nothing but tawdry. She had her little accident to prove it. All she had to do was imagine trying to explain her behavior to her fiancé—or worse, her father. She knew the words they would use.

And she would deserve them.

“Renzo,” she said, very carefully, lest she jog something inside and send all these terrible, unwieldy things spilling out into the dirt between them. “There’s something you need to know.”

“I know everything I need to know.” His words were terse. His judgment rendered. It only surprised her that she’d imagined he might be different. “What I cannot forgive is that you made me an unwitting part of your dishonesty. A vow means something to me, Sophie, and you made me break one.”

She smiled, though it felt brittle. “What vows did you break?”

“I made a promise to myself many years ago that I would never, ever take something that belonged to another,” he told her with a kind of arrogant outrage, as if she’d twisted his arm.

“You’re right,” she said then, because something broke inside of her. She hugged herself as she stepped back, away from him and his car and all these messy emotions she should have been smart enough to leave behind her in Monte Carlo. “I should never have come here tonight.”

“These are games children play, Sophie,” he told her, fury and condemnation and all that righteousness making his accent more pronounced.

“You’re the one making threats,” she pointed out.

“You can consider it a courtesy. One you did not extend to me when you decided to entangle me in your sick, sad little marital games.”

She could do nothing but nod her head, everything within her swollen painfully and near to bursting—but she couldn’t let herself give in. She couldn’t show him more of herself. She couldn’t allow him to hurt her any more than he already had.

Because the truth was, she didn’t think she could survive it. She had been frozen solid all her life. Renzo had melted her, it was true, but Sophie hadn’t understood until tonight that the ice had been her armor.

“Marry your earl or do not,” Renzo said with dark finality. “But leave me out of it. Or I will assume you are inviting me to share the details of our night in Monaco with the world.”

She swallowed, which was hard to do when she felt as if the tears she refused to shed were choking her. “I understand.”

He didn’t say another word. He stalked around to the driver’s side and climbed into the car with a grace that should not have been possible for a man his size.

And Sophie stood where she was for a long time after he’d gone, driving off with a muscular roar.

She wanted to cry, but didn’t allow herself the weakness.

He’d treated her like a naughty child but the truth was, Sophie thought she’d just grown up.

At last.

She already hated herself, so what was a little more fuel to that fire? She would marry Dal tomorrow, as planned. She would carry on with the life that had been so carefully plotted out for her. She would force herself to do her wifely duty and Dal would either do the math or he wouldn’t.

Babies were born early all the time.

Her stomach heaved at that, but Sophie shoved the bile back down.

She’d made her bed and now she would have to lie in it. Literally.

Something in her eased at that. There was a freedom in having no good choices, she supposed. If Dal found out, it wasn’t as if it would turn a good marriage bad. Their marriage was a business affair, cold and cruel at its best.

If she was lucky, he might even set her free.

That would have to be enough.

The child she carried might not be Dal’s. It might never know its real father. But no matter what, no matter what happened, it would be hers.

Hers.

And Sophie vowed she would love her baby enough, with all that she had, so that it would never know the difference.

CHAPTER THREE

RENZO WOKE IN the middle of the night, restless and something like agitated—when he normally slept like the dead.

He had left Sophie behind without a backward glance, roaring off in a cloud of self-righteousness and sweet revenge, delivered exactly as planned. He’d congratulated himself on the entire situation, and the way he’d handled it, all the way back to the suite of rooms he maintained in his Southwark hotel, with its views of the Thames and giddy, crowded London sprawled at his feet.

He would normally top off a satisfying and victorious day with enough strong drink to make him merry and an uninhibited woman to take the edges off. But, unaccountably, he had done neither of those things.

Not because he was mourning anything, he’d assured himself. It was nothing to him if a one-night stand who’d lied to him repeatedly was getting married. It was entirely possible every one-night stand he’d ever enjoyed had raced off to marry someone else—why should he care?

He’d sat there in the fine bar on a high floor in his hotel, surrounded by gleaming, beautiful people, none of whom likely knew the first thing about Sophie Carmichael-Jones and her wedding plans, and told himself that he felt nothing at all.

Nothing save triumph, that was.

He had been less able to lie to himself, however, when every image in his head as he’d drifted off to sleep was of Sophie and all the ways he’d had her in Monaco, each more addictive than the last. And a thousand new ways he could avail himself of her lush, remarkably acrobatic loveliness, if she’d been in the vicinity instead of off in a stately house in Hampshire, ready to wed a bloody earl in the morning.

She was a hunger that nothing else could possibly satisfy, and the fact that was so infuriated Renzo.

Still, he had been certain that come the dawn—and with it the inevitability of her high-society wedding, with all its trappings and titles and trumpeting self-regard on the pages of every tabloid rag in Europe—the raging hunger would disappear, to be replaced by his usual indifference toward anything and everything that appeared in his rearview mirror.

But here he was. Wide-awake before dawn.

His body was hot and tight and too many sensations swirled all over him, as if Sophie was beside him in this bed when he knew very well she was not.

He rolled out of the wide platform bed and refused to handle his body’s demands on his own. His lips thinned at the thought.

Renzo was not an adolescent boy, all testosterone and infatuation. He would not use his own hands and spill his own seed with the name of an unattainable female on his lips, as if he was fifteen. He hadn’t done such things when he’d actually been fifteen, for that matter, loping around the ancient cliffside town where he’d been the no-account bastard son of a shamed whore of a mother—and therefore might as well have been invisible to the village girls.

He wasn’t invisible now. The village girls who had snubbed him then were grown now. Married to the men they’d found more appropriate and settled there on the edge of the very cliff that Renzo had imagined throwing himself over, more than once, to escape the realities of a bastard’s life in that place. And these days Renzo’s illegitimacy was rarely mentioned. He was the local celebrity who had not only gone on to a glorious motor racing career, but had systematically bought and rebuilt every structure in that damned town, then opened a hotel on the next ridge, until there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the king of that tiny little village was.

That was how Renzo handled things. He waited. He bought it.

Then he made it his.

But that wasn’t possible in this situation. He padded over to the wall of windows that let in the insistent gleam of one of the world’s premiere cities, but he didn’t see London Bridge there before him. Or the Shard.

It was as if Sophie was haunting him, though Renzo had never before believed in ghosts.

There, alone in the dark with only London as witness, he no longer felt that sense of triumph.

Instead, he remembered her responses. The catch in her throat. The wonder in her gaze.

The way she’d looped her arms around his neck when he’d lifted her against the wall—directly inside the front door to his villa, because he couldn’t wait another moment—and had blushed.

From head to toe, as he’d soon discovered.

He had quickly learned that she was a virgin, and he’d reveled in that fact. That she was entirely his. That he was the only man alive to taste her, touch her, learn how she delighted in every new thing he taught her.

Renzo had never been a possessive man. But Sophie had brought it out in him.

Earlier tonight he’d accused her of being a virgin as a technicality only.

He wanted to believe that, of course. A woman who was meant to be a countess might well keep her hymen intact in preparation for her marriage while involving herself in all manner of other debaucheries. He’d met women like that before—hell, he’d happily participated in the debauchery.

He’d wanted nothing more than to make Sophie pay for thinking that she could pull one over on him. Or perhaps what he had really wanted to make her pay for was the fact that she’d succeeded.

But the truth was, he realized as he stood there and stared out at a city he completely failed to see, it didn’t make sense.

Renzo knew any number of mercenary women. They were a lot like him, each and every one of them. They knew what they wanted and they proceeded to go out there and get it. They used everything they had. Status if they had it. Wiles if they did not. Whatever it took to get what they wanted.

He had learned to recognize one of his ilk from afar. Long before they made it into his bed, Renzo knew them for that steel in their gaze and their particular brand of avid keenness. He had never been wrong.

And he’d never been caught by a grifter like himself, either.

Renzo might have convinced himself otherwise since he’d received that newspaper clipping by post, but he hadn’t read that kind of sharpness in Sophie.

Not when she’d been calling herself Elizabeth, flowing like sweet honey all over his hands, and charming him within an inch of his life.

Renzo was not easily charmed.

It occurred to him then—high over the Thames in the middle of the night with nothing in his head but the only woman who had ever deceived him—that it was possible he had been hasty.

He had been so busy scoring points, making sure he got in as many digs at her as possible, that he hadn’t allowed himself to really listen to the things she said.

And more, the things she hadn’t said.

He, of all people, should have known better. After all, he’d spent his entire childhood trying to live up to the fantasy of what he’d imagined he ought to have been and what becoming it would do for him. If he was perfectly well behaved. If he transcended the poverty in which he’d been raised. If he never, ever, allowed what others thought of him or his circumstances to hold him back. If he made his own way in the world, as best he could, whatever that looked like. If he made himself a star in his chosen field and instead of throwing his money away like so many of his peers, used it to build himself a little empire.

If he did all the right things, he’d told himself for far longer than he should have, surely that would gain his father’s notice.

But it never had.

Not in the way he wanted, anyway. And when he’d decided to force the issue, it hadn’t ended well.

Renzo’s idealism, immature and pathetic by any estimation, had been fully beaten out of him in his eighteenth year, courtesy of the very wealthy, very titled prince who had left his mother pregnant with him. Literally beaten it out of him. He’d had relapses since then, it was true, but he’d always learned the same damned lesson in the end.

Meeting his father had taught Renzo that there were no better places or people, as he’d been tempted to imagine. There were no misunderstandings that explained away eighteen years of poverty and shame. There was only reality and in it, people did what suited them with little or no thought to the effect that their actions might have on others.

If it was impossible to conceive of how a person could do something heinous to someone else, a good rule of thumb was to assume that person had been thinking only and ever of themselves.

That lesson had been pounded into Renzo’s fool head again and again and again, particularly during that one vile week when he’d been eighteen and stupid and had foolishly imagined his own father would treat him well because of their blood tie. He knew better now.

Still, he’d let this woman throw him.

He knew all about women like Sophie Carmichael-Jones. They thought themselves so high-and-mighty, so far above the peasants—but at the end of the day, they were motivated by money. The same as Renzo’s mother had been, desperate to keep a roof over her head by any means possible. The same as Renzo had learned to be, making certain he excelled at whatever he did to pay her bills. The only difference was that the Carmichael-Joneses of the world believed their own scrabbling for cash was more meaningful, somehow, because it was wrapped up in estates and titles, ancient claims and other such things.

Renzo did not share this belief.

A hustler was a hustler, in his estimation.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the signs in Sophie, his sad-eyed innocent with the prettiest smile he’d ever beheld.

She’d spoken to him of consequences and he’d thought he’d give her a few—but hours later, he couldn’t seem to get that particular word out of his head.

He crossed his arms over his chest and found himself scowling down at the Thames as it wound on, unheeding, the same as it had done for centuries.

It had taken more self-control than he’d imagined it would to be near Sophie again and not take her.

His body had reacted as if they had been lovers for decades. He had been hard and ready the instant he’d seen her come out of the shadows. Even then, when he knew who she really was and had no intention whatsoever of giving her access to him again, his body had made its own wishes known.

He wanted her despite everything. Still. Now.

He hadn’t known, from one moment to the next, which one of them he was more furious at. Her, for the lies she had told him and the way she’d made him complicit in her own betrayal of her fiancé. Or him, for wanting her with an edge that bordered on desperation, even then.

Consequences, something in him whispered.

He remembered how she’d stood there before him in the close, wet dark.

Gone was the glowing, carefree woman who’d given herself to him so freely in Monaco. In England, apparently, Sophie was drawn. Agitated.

And had kept holding a hand over her belly, as if her meal had not quite agreed with her...

Consequences, he thought again.

And found himself cursing in a fluid, filthy Sicilian dialect when another possibility altogether occurred to him.

He’d believed he was furious before.

But now...

Renzo thought a far better word to describe his feelings was volcanic.

* * *

Sophie woke in a confused, hurtling rush and her first thought was that it was much too early to be awake. The light was thin and halting, creeping in between the curtains she’d neglected to close as if uncertain of its reception.

Her second thought was that today was her wedding day.

And that unpleasant reality slapped at her, waking her up even more whether she liked it or not.

“I can see you are not asleep,” came a familiar voice from much too close. “It is best to stop pretending, Sophie.”

It was voice that should not have been anywhere near her, not here.

Not in Langston House where, in a few short hours, she would become the latest in a long line of unenthused countesses.

She told herself she was dreaming even though her eyes were wide-open.

Sophie took her time turning over in her bed, then sitting up gingerly as if she expected it to hurt, somehow. And still, no matter how long she stared or blinked, she couldn’t make Renzo disappear.

He lounged there at the foot of the four-poster bed, here in her bedroom in Langston House as if she’d conjured him up from one of the dreams that had plagued her all night.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“It turns out we have more to discuss.”

She didn’t like the way he said that, dark and something like lethal.

“How did you get in here?” Sophie looked around wildly. She didn’t know what she expected to find. Her father bursting through the door, perhaps, assuming Renzo had barged his way into Langston House like some kind of marauder? Or even Poppy, always so concerned, calling out her name?

But it really was early. If she ignored the wild pounding in her chest, there was no sound. Anywhere. No one seemed to be awake but the two of them. Langston House felt still all around.

And Renzo was here.

Right here, in this bedroom Sophie had been installed in as the future Countess of Langston. It was all tapestries, priceless art, and frothy antique chairs that looked too fragile to sit in, as befitted a room that regularly appeared in guidebooks.

“You can’t be here,” she managed to say, clutching the bedclothes to her like some kind of security blanket.

“Talk to me some more about the consequences you mentioned, if you please,” Renzo said mildly. So mildly it made every hair on her body seem to stand straight up in warning.

He was dressed the way he had been the night before. Dark trousers and boots, sleek and spare, as if to highlight his lean, brooding athleticism. That thick hair of his looked messy, as if he’d spent the hours since she’d last seen him running his fingers through it again and again. The leather jacket he’d worn in the rain last night was open now over the kind of soft, impossibly simple T-shirt that looked as if it was nothing more than a throwaway piece—and yet clung to his sculpted chest, hugging him and exalting him in turn, and likely costing more than some people’s mortgages.

If she was a better person, Sophie thought, she wouldn’t find him so attractive, even now, when she knew exactly what kind of trouble he’d brought into her life. When she knew that she should have walked away from him that night in Monte Carlo and let him remain nothing but a daydream she might have taken out and sighed over throughout the coming years of her dry, dutiful marriage.

It took a moment for his words to penetrate. And when they did, a kind of icicle formed inside of her, sharp and long and frigid.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips too dry and her throat not much better.

“I think you do.” Renzo stood at the foot of her bed, one hand looped around one of the posts in a lazy, easy sort of grip that did absolutely nothing to calm Sophie’s nerves. Not when she was sure she could feel that same hard, steady hand wrapped around her neck. Or much, much lower. “I think you came to tell me something last night but let my temper scare you off. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say you used my temper as an excuse to keep from telling me, would it not?”

Sophie found her hands covering her belly again, there beneath her comforter. Worse, Renzo’s dark gaze followed the movement, as if he could see straight through the pile of soft linen to the truth.

“What would be accurate to say is that you took the opportunity last night to make an uncomfortable situation worse,” she said, sounding more in control than she felt. She very deliberately removed her hands from her belly and set them on the top of her blankets where Renzo could see them. Where they could be inoffensive and tell him nothing. “That’s on you. It has nothing at all to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you, cara.”

“I would like you to leave,” she told him, fighting to keep her voice calm. “You’ve threatened me already. I don’t know what showing up here, hours before I’m meant to marry, could possibly accomplish. Or is this more punishment?”

Renzo’s lips quirked into something no sane person would call a smile. He didn’t move and yet he seemed to loom there, growing larger by the second and consuming all the air in the bedchamber.

He made it hard to breathe. Or see straight.

Or remember why, exactly, she’d marched back up to Langston House last night filled with new resolve about what she would do and how she would manage her marriage—no matter Dal’s reaction to her pregnancy. Assuming she even told him.

She was aware that such concerns made her a terrible person. On some level, she thought she would always hate herself for the things she’d found herself thinking in these awful days. But none of that mattered.

What mattered was keeping her baby safe, one way or another. She couldn’t afford to care too much what that looked like.

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