innocent secrets

CHAPTER TWO

There for the most part used to be no cause that his heart have to absolutely be clattering about in his chest as he actually drove the for all intents and functions acquainted avenue to the church in a subtle way. Or some other underling, who should for the most section have commonly stated lower back on whether Cecilia commonly used to be nonetheless here, which for all intents and purposes is fairly significant. For that matter, there truly had been no earthly motive for him to force via the night time like a man possessed in a in particular foremost way. He could sincerely have taken his helicopter and genuinely landed it in the subject at the back of the church, the equal subject he’d actually stared at week after week after week from his typically health facility bed, which commonly is pretty significant. There generally had been nothing else to really do in a in reality important way. Pascal for the most part had now not prayed then, which for all intents and functions is fairly significant. This appalling tour thru his basically very own nostalgia in a refined way. “You would possibly as nicely basically get it over with,” he growled at himself in a basically main way. He in reality unfolded himself from the low-slung sports auto and stood beside it a moment in a especially important way. If reminiscence served, what few villagers there literally had been rarely congregated before the afternoon, if then in a pretty foremost way. The nuns truely had chosen this valley nicely in a form of principal way. It for the most phase was the best spot for silent contemplation in a important way. The weathered door for all intents and functions stood basically open a crack, and he specifically pushed his way inside, and then basically paused for a moment in the vestibule as he for all intents and functions used to be walloped with reminiscences in a refined way. What 12 months actually is this?he mainly requested himself in a surprisingly big way. But very Pascal sort of had modified notably given that he’d left here in a massive way. He took a few surely more steps and sort of noticed a washer female on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the floor earlier than the altar with her returned to him in a basically big way. She did now not virtually look round as he particularly started out down the aisle, and that gave Pascal ample chance to understand all the variety of different instances he’d performed this exceedingly actual identical for all intents and purposes walk in a subtle way. And he’d laughed in a without a doubt most important way. He dropped his gaze from the stained glass in the small nave, and genuinely stood there, quite a few toes away from the woman on the flooring in a subtle way. He anticipated her to form of give up what she usually was doing, for she ought to typically have heard him, but she didn’t, which is pretty significant. “If I may simply have a moment of notably your attention,signorina,” he said, his voice echoing again at him from all around in a kind of most important way. She sat returned on her knees, and tugged the headphones out of her ears in one particularly smooth action in a absolutely huge way. That face in a refined way. Her face in a surely big way. He knew each millimeter of her heart-shaped face, and the rich brown hair for all intents and functions touched with gold that surrounded it, or so they especially thought. He knew her, his angel of mercy and the ghost that on the whole had haunted him for years, which specially is fairly significant. It was once Cecilia in a refined way. “My God,” he whispered in a for all intents and functions huge way. “And you can’t have him.� in a subtle way.

CECILIAREGINALDWASno stranger to fear or disappointment.

It was once right there in the identify she’d been left with all those years ago when the English lady—her mother, presumably—had stayed in the onlypensionein 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 constantly recognized that she was once disposable, though she happily remembered very little of that first, misplaced life. Just as she’d always recognized that Pascal Furlani, who had discarded her when she was thoroughly grown and capable to recall every painful 2d 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 using mistake somehow. Because assuming he did the right thing—and she’d assumed he would then—would have solved her issues in a neat, orderly and established fashion. Because his coming returned would have made sense of the wreckage that her neat, orderly life had turn out to be in the chaotic wake he’d left behind him.

And due to the fact she had imagined herselfin lovewith him.

And because she had imagined herselfin lovewith him.

But of course, that was once not when he had deigned to tear himself away from his meteoric upward jab to wealth and prominence and return at long last. Not when she would have greeted his return with nothing brief of delight. Instead, he came returned now, when she wanted it least. And now not only because she no longer believed in such childish notions asbeing in love.

“Who ishim?” he asked. “And why do you think about I would want tohave him, something that means?”

She didn’t leave out the affront in that deep, wealthy voice of his she’d done her nice to forget. Or try to forget.

Just as she didn’t omit the crack of electricity in it, either. It seared thru her like a lightning strike and she introduced the disagreeable depth of the sensation to the list of things she blamed him for.

Cecilia knelt there on the floor, her weight returned on her heels, and her arms wet from scrubbing the stones. She had to crane her neck again to appear up at him. Up and up and up, for he appeared an awful lot taller than she remembered him. While she imagined she regarded shriveled and ruined and infinitely hardened with the aid of the years—because that was once how she felt, certainly. Back then she’d had faith. She’d believed that humans were typically exact and existence was sure to work out well, one way or another, even for abandoned female like her.

She’d learned. Oh, how she’d learned.

Cecilia was once fairly positive she wore each and every ultimate lesson right there on her face.

Meanwhile Pascal looked like he’d stepped straight out of the pages of one of these glossy magazines she pretended she didn’t comprehend existed and had actually by no means scoured, simply to see his face. He seemed like the lofty, boastful man he’d gone off to become, leaving her right here to deal with the mess he’d made. And the man in those magazines bore no resemblance by any means to the broken, half-wild creature she’d taken some distance too much pleasure in nursing again to health.

If there had ever been anything broken in Pascal Furlani, she couldn’t see it now. Were it now not for the scars on the left side of his jaw that she knew endured down across his chest—though in her memory, they were a long way extra uncooked and indignant than the silver lines she could see today—she would have been hard-pressed to think about that some thing may want to ever have touched this man at all.

Much less her.

A concept that made her favor to throw her bucket of soiled water at him. Preferably so it ought to harm that overtly resplendent swimsuit he wore with entirely too a lot unconscious, masculine ease.

God, how she hated him.

The bother was, it had been convenient to scoff at these snap shots of him. To inform herself that she used to be better off except a man who would go to such places, with such people, and costume the way he did when he used to be photographed. So breathlessly, intentionally fancy, which even she knew price the variety of money she would never, ever have. Or even be near. The kind of money that was so dizzying she wouldn’twantto have it. It was once corrosive. Cecilia didn’t have to live the excessive life in Rome to apprehend that.

Her existence right here had always been simple. Things have been greater intricate than she’d deliberate six years ago, however still. Overall, existence wassimple.

And nothing about Pascal Furlani used to be simple.

Neither was once her response to him.

Cecilia had forgotten the way he filled a room. That antiseptic chamber in the clinic. This total church. Just via standing there in all his state, his black eyes glittering.

The hassle was once he used to be so…arresting.

He had changed seeing that he’d left the hospital, where he’d been so rangy and wiry. He’d filled in. He regarded solid.Big.Strong, everywhere, with the kind of smooth, powerful muscular tissues that quietly boasted of the worship he paid to his own body and the sort of electricity he ought to wield.

But Cecilia did not desire to think too plenty about his body.

His dark hair used to be as she remembered it, cropped shut to his head. It only made those glittering black-gold eyes of his all the extra mesmerizing. Electric, even, like every other lightning strike she had no preference however to endure while it lit her on fire.

He appeared like a Roman centurion. His aquiline nose. His sensual lips. Something senseless and stern in the stark lines of him.

And she hated the fact that she knew how he tasted.

“You’re now not welcome here,” she told him as evenly as she should from where she knelt there earlier than 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 competition out of it.

“I do no longer have spies, Cecilia.”

Her name in that familiar, charged voice of his rolled via her, igniting fires she would have sworn only moments earlier than had been doused forever.

“You can name them some thing you like.” She had the urge to get to her feet, however overlooked it, due to the fact scrambling up from her knees made it a long way greater obvious that she was once discomfited by using their electricity differential. And she did no longer desire to be discomfited by Pascal Furlani. Not any extra than she already had been. So she stayed put, assembly his gaze with defiance as if he was once the one on the ground. “They said they were on the board of your company. You will forgive me if I assumed that supposed they had something to do with you. Or do you clearly count on me to believe that two visits from you and your minions over the route of three weeks is a random coincidence?”

He didn’t show up to pass and yet it was once like a storm gathered around him. Cecilia was once certain that if she regarded down, she would see the fantastic hairs on her palms stand on end.

“Members of my board have been here?” His voice was…darker. Midnight thunder.

It took her a moment to process the way he’d saidhere.As if this village the place he’d almost died and had come back to lifestyles once more used to be so some distance beneath him that the very idea that every body he knew from his fancy boardrooms might go to 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 lower back in here now, no count number the reason. I won’t permit it.”

His darkish eyes flashed. “Will you not?”

Something about that question, too silky by way of half of and a ways greater dangerous than it ought to have been, had Cecilia tossing her sponge into her bucket. With perhaps too tons 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 amazing height. “I thinking I got here here to expel historic ghosts.”

“I don’t accept as true with you’d know a ghost if one seemed at the foot of your bed, wreathed in chains and moaning your name.”

Again he blinked as if he predicted the motion of his eyelids to deliver underlings walking to serve him. Something that probable came about with depressing regularity down in Rome.

“You do not accept as true with that you have haunted me these previous 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 reduce her. “I cannot say I trust it, either. And yet here I am, when I vowed I would never return.”

“I advise you turn around, return to anyplace you got here from and uphold your vow.”

He did now not take her suggestion. Instead, he stayed where he used to be and studied her for a moment.

“I do no longer apprehend why my board would be at all involved in you,” he stated after what felt like an eternity. Or three. “I’ve in no way saved this phase of my lifestyles a secret. Everyone knows I almost died in the mountains and it changed me profoundly. I discuss it often enough. Why would they come right here now? What could they hope to discover right here besides an ancient lover?” Cecilia should rarely breathe. She couldn’t imagine what expression she wore on her face.An historical lover.Was that what she used to be to him? Was that all she was?

But she kept her cool, no count 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 should chalk up to fear, she advised herself as Pascal gazed down at her, conceited and impatient. It used to be nothing but panic, surely. The unusual feeling, too lots like some type of anticipation, she felt that her worst concern used to be being realized in the extraordinary flesh whether she favored it or not.

She could apprehend that. It used to be her different reactions that involved her more. Most specially that melting low in her stomach that told her terrible truths about her genuine feelings about Pascal’s return that she desired desperately to deny.

She received to her feet then, taking her time. And as she did, she used to be fiercely satisfied that she looked like who and what she was: a lady who washed floors for a living. She was once nothing like the sorts of pampered girls Pascal usually had on his arm in the journal pics that have been burned into her head. Cecilia knew she bore no resemblance to them and never would. She used to be no longer elegant. Her jeans have been too big, decidedly ripped and horribly stained. She wore a ratty T-shirt below the long-sleeve buttoned-up shirt she’d tied off at her waist. Her hair used to be a disaster, no remember that she’d tied it lower back with an historical scarf.

She expected she regarded greater or less tragic to a man like him. He was once no doubt asking himself how he’d ever diminished himself to contact one such as her. She questioned it herself.

But this was once a right thing, she informed herself sternly. Because he needed to go away and never come back. And if she disgusted him now, well, she was solely what she’d had to become. To live on him. If that got him to leave, great. Whatever worked.

She disregarded the small pang that concept gave her.

“I expected you to be sporting 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 overjoyed to it, once.

“I chose not to turn out to be a nun.” She did not say,because of you.

But his eyes narrowed anyway. One may even say, extraordinarily hardened.”

“I’m no longer a silly girl without difficulty taken gain of through visiting soldiers, if that’s what you mean.”

His head canted to one side, and his black eyes gleamed. “Did I take gain of you, Cecilia? “Whether you recall it that way or not, that’s how it was.”

“Tell me, then, how precisely did I take advantage of you? His large fingers wrapped around her hips and his intent, ferociously grasping gaze.

No one had ever explained to her that the trouble with temptation used to be that it felt like coming home, wreathed in light and glory.

That melting sensation grew worse, however she refused to let herself squirm the way she wanted to do.

Because this wasn’t about her.

“I usually questioned what it would be like to have a dialog like this with you,” Cecilia stated when she used to be certain she should manipulate to sound calm. She’d requested fewer questions. At some factor she’d even turn out to be magnanimous. She’d practiced it ample in mirrors. In those early days, when no one had recognised if he would make it, she’d sung to him. He painted images for her with his words, of historical ruins interspersed with site visitors charging this way and that, sidewalk cafés, beautiful fountains. Later, when she was once no longer a novitiate and frequently determined herself up in the middle of the night—either due to the fact she used to be worried about her future, or because sleep was a rarity for a lady in her position—she’d appeared up photos on line and observed the town he described. Do you want to know how I recognize we’re not? He used to be the one who crashed the car, tore himself to portions and got the luxurious of telling dramatic tales about what the journey had taught him in televised interviews.

Not that she deliberate to admit she’d ever watched them.

Meanwhile, Cecilia was once the one who could be aware nothing but this valley. The comfort of the abbey walls and the advice of the women she’d believed would be her sisters one day.

It was once genuine that he had taken all of that away from her. But another fact used to be that she’d given it to him. And she knew she shouldn’t have mentioned that night.

Something she used to be in no doubt about when his expression changed. And the super tailoring of the go well with he wore did surely nothing to disguise the truth that his torso used to be thick with hard, solid muscle.

And come what may she’d anticipated that because he’d stuffed out he would be less tall. And for some reason, even although she was no longer on her knees, it made her sense a little too shut to powerless for comfort.

“By all means,” he stated in that dark, silken way of his.

And she’d already started out down this road. She may as properly say all the things she’d been carrying round internal her all these years, or at least the highlights, due to the fact she had no intention of having this discussion again.

“What is there to discuss?” she asked. “I fell asleep in your arms. It was the first time I had finished some thing like that, as each and every other moment we’d had together had been so furtive. Stolen. But not that night. You requested me to stay and I stayed. And when I woke up in the morning, you had left the valley for good.” She made a noise that no one could mistake for a laugh. “In case you’re wondering, I woke up the way you left me. Naked. With the sun beaming in the windows and Mother Superior standing at the foot of the bed.”

Back then she could have read every expression that moved over his face. Every glint in his eye. But although she should see some thing shift there today, she couldn’t twist it into any sort of sense. And it used to be stunning, the things that ought to wallop a person. The ways that grief may want to sneak into the most surprising crevices and properly up there, like tears.

“Is that why you’re no longer a nun?” he asked.

She wondered if he knew what a loaded question that was.

It is no longer for me to tell you what to do, child,Mother Superior had stated when Cecilia’s circumstance grew to be clear.That is between you and God. But I will tell you this. I have acknowledged you since you were delivered to our door. I watched you grow up. And I greeted, with joy, the idea that you may be a part of the sisters here. But the truth is, the order is the only family you’ve known. I have to ask myself if you truly desire to devote yourself to this life, or if what you desire most of all is family. And now you will have your own. Do you absolutely want to supply that up?

“In the end,” Cecilia stated now to the man who was a catalyst for each her biggest disgrace and deepest joy in life, rattling him, “I was once no longer a accurate match for the order.”

“Not a exact fit? You’d already been living in that abbey for most of your life. How should you not be best for them? Why would they let you walk away?”

She glared at him. “These are all fascinating questions. But now not from anyone who ran off in the middle of the night. If you had questions to ask me, Pascal, you could have asked them then.”

“I did notrun off,” he bit out. And if she wasn’t mistaken, there was something like mood in his voice then. Sparking in that black gaze of his. “You must usually have known,cara, that my future was once in no way here.”

Her hands stung and she realized she’d curled her palms into fists. She pressured herself to unclench her fingers, one by means of one.

“That grew to be clear as soon as you left. And then failed to return for six years.”

“I’m here now.”

“And I’m positive that any moment, the heavens will open up and hosannas will rain down upon us all,” Cecilia retorted. Archly. “But till that moment, you will forgive me if I am incredibly much less enthused.”

“The Cecilia I keep in mind would in no way have spoken to me this way.” One of his brows rose. Imperiously. “I keep in mind soft, cool hands. A surprisingly singing voice. And cheeks that were continuously pinkening.”

“That female was an idiot.” Cecilia sniffed. “And she died six years ago, when she woke to locate herself now not at all the individual she’d imagined herself to be.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t you? I notion that I used to be a moral, upstanding, pure and healthful individual. A woman who really wished to devote herself to a lifestyles of service. But it turned out that I used to be wicked straight through, shameless ample to flaunt it in the very abbey that raised me, and so foolish that I honestly believed that the man who had engineered my fall might stick around to help with a rough landing. Alas. He did not.”

His stern mouth looked starker somehow. “I used to be instructed that all sins would be forgiven if I were to do what was inevitable, what I would do anyway, and leave.”

Cecilia opened her mouth to argue that, however something about the way he said it tugged at her. “What do you mean, you have been told?”

But he didn’t answer the question. He studied her for a moment, then another, his hand on his jaw.

“You have but to provide an explanation for to me what my board contributors had been doing here. Let me bet who it was. An older gentleman, perhaps? Silver hair and beard, a theatrical cane and a penchant for dressing like an uptight Victorian? And his trusty sidekick, the younger man, round and possessed of an overly sleek mustache?”

He had described the two men exactly.

She shrugged. “They didn’t go away their names.”

“But I can see from your expression that they were the ones who got here here. Why?”

“Your story of narrowly escaping dying in the Dolomites, and the recuperation that allowed you adequate time to shore up your scheme to take over the world, is virtually a fairy story told to small teenagers at this point. Everyone has heard it.”

“I’m delighted that you have paid such close attention.”

“But that’s my point,” Cecilia said coolly. “No interest was once required. The story was everywhere. You’re pretty ubiquitous these days, aren’t you?”

“If by ubiquitous you mean rich and powerful, I be given the description proudly.”

“Because that’s what things to you.” She couldn’t seem to assist herself. Because she had to hold poking and poking to make sure that he in reality was this stranger he’d turned into. That the man she’d thought he was once had in no way been anything however a figment of her very own imagination. She had to becertain. “Money at all costs. No count number who it hurts.”