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.
“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