Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret / Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal. Dani Collins
in a forgotten valley in the Dolomites. Where he had crashed and burned—literally.
And she had nursed him back to life.
Then had haunted him ever since, for his sins.
Tonight, he vowed as he turned his attention to the tasks awaiting him, he would leave the past where it belonged, and concentrate on the next bright part of his glorious future.
“I think it’s important to set very clear boundaries from the start,” his date informed him much later that evening. She had arrived late, clearly full of herself in her role as a minor member of the Danish nobility. She had swept into one of the most exclusive restaurants in Rome with her nose in the air, as if Pascal had suggested she meet him at one of those sticky, plastic American fast food restaurants. Her expression had not improved over the course of their initial drinks. “Obviously, the point of any merger is to secure the line.”
“The line?”
“I am prepared to commit to an heir and a spare,” she told him loftily. “To be commenced and completed within a four-year period. And I think it’s best to agree, up front and in writing, that the production of any progeny should be conducted under controlled circumstances.”
Pascal was sure he’d had more romantic conversations on industrial sites.
“Is it a production line?” he asked, his voice dry. “A factory of some kind?”
“I already have an excellent fertility specialist, discreet and capable, who can ensure to everyone’s satisfaction and all legalities that the correct DNA carries on into the next generation.”
Pascal blinked at that. He had had simpering dinners. Overtly sexual ones. Direct, frank approaches. But this was new. It all seemed so…mechanical.
“You are staring at me as if I’ve said something astonishing,” his date said.
“I beg your pardon.” Pascal attempted to smile, though he wasn’t sure when or if he’d ever felt less charming. “Are you suggesting that we concoct offspring in a laboratory? Rather than go about making them in the more time-honored fashion, favored as it has been for a great many eons already?”
“This is a business arrangement,” his chilly date replied, looking, if possible, more severe than before. “I expect you will find your release elsewhere, as will I. Discreetly, of course. I do not hold with scandal.”
“Nothing is less scandalous than a sexless marriage, naturally.”
A faint suggestion of a line appeared between her perfectly shaped brows. “There’s no need to muddy a perfectly functional marriage with that sort of thing, surely.”
“You’ve thought of everything,” he replied.
And later, after he had left his date with a curt nod and an insincere promise to have his people contact her, Pascal waved off his driver and walked instead.
Because Rome was its own reward. The city of his birth and his poverty-stricken childhood. The city where he had become a man, by his own estimation, then joined the military to give himself what his mother couldn’t and his father would never. Discipline. A life. Even a career. It had seemed such an elegant solution.
Until that night six years ago when he’d followed a reckless whim, on a moody December night very much like this one. It had been raining in Rome. He’d hoped that meant it was snowing in the Dolomites, on the edge of the Alps, and had decided he might as well drive himself up north and learn how to ski.
He laughed a bit at that as he moved through Piazza Navona and its annual Christmas Market that made the crowded square even more filled and frenetic. He dodged the usual stream of tourists and his own countrymen, taking in the night air and already surrendering to the pollution of Christmas that would invade everything until the Epiphany, then thankfully disappear into the clarity of the New Year.
The night was cold and leaning toward dampness. It was the perfect sort of weather to ask himself how he’d ended up with the coldest, most clinical woman imaginable tonight. Was that really what he was reduced to? A laboratory experiment masquerading as a marriage?
He knew he needed to marry, but somehow, he had imagined it would be…less cold-blooded. Warmer. Or cordial, at the very least.
And he wanted to make his babies his own damned self. More than that, he had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps in any regard. Once he married, Pascal had no intention of cheating. He was not planning to have “arrangements” on the side. He wasn’t planning on having an on the side, for that matter.
He had no intention of creating another woman like his mother, so fragile and so lost she couldn’t take care of her own son. And he would never, ever risk the possibility that he might create an illegitimate child of his own.
The very idea made him sick.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he knew it was Guglielmo, checking in the way he always did after these excruciating “dates” that were little more than vetting sessions. Because Pascal persisted in imagining that he could cut through all the nonsense, ask for exactly what he wanted and then get it. It had worked in business, why not in marriage?
Pascal didn’t answer the call.
There were a million more things that required his attention, but he couldn’t face them just yet. Instead, he lost himself in the chaotic embrace of the Eternal City. Rome was a monument, yet Rome was ever-changing. Rome was a contradiction. Rome was where Pascal felt alive. It was the place where he had grown to understand that his very existence was an affront to some, and it was where he finally figured out how to claim that existence and make sense of it.
Walking through Rome had always soothed him. And kept him alive, some dark years. Long nights with his feet, his thoughts and the grand Roman sprawl had made him whole, time and time again.
So there was no reason at all that he should be caught up in memories of a tiny, sleepy village with steep mountains all around and very few people, where he had never been anything but broken.
He stopped by a fountain in a forgotten courtyard, steps from the roar of a busy road. The water tumbled from the pursed lips of an old god made stone, and in the dark, he almost believed he could see her reflection there in the water the way he always did in his head.
Sweet Cecilia, half nurse and half angel. A woman so lovely and so innocent that he had nearly betrayed every vow he’d ever made to himself and stayed up there in all that towering silence.
The very notion was absurd. He was Pascal Furlani. Not for him the pastoral delights, such as they were, of a remote mountain village of interest to absolutely no one unless they happened to either have been there for centuries or were a part of the quiet abbey that had also been there, in one form or another, since right about the dawn of time. Not for him a life forgotten and tucked away like that, out of sight.
She would have taken her vows by now, Pascal assumed, and become a full nun like the others in the order. Or perhaps his last, half-dreamt night there had been her fall from grace. Would she have stayed? Taken her place outside the abbey walls? Perhaps she lived in the village proper now, or off in the fields that dotted the hillsides with some or other farmer. She would be settled now, one way or the other. Committed to her Lord or married to some man, and unrecognizable.
Just as he was.
Pascal was not haunted by the specter of his childhood. He had lived through it, transcended it and moved on. He had mourned his mother’s death, then buried her with greater reverence than she had ever shown him. He rarely thought of his father these days, preferring to decimate the old man and his penny-tante shipping concern from afar.
Pascal did not look back. Ever.
Unless it was to her. Cecilia.
His personal ghost.
“Enough,” he muttered. He pulled a coin from his pocket, then flipped it to the air, watching as it tumbled into the water before him. He had