Caitlin Crews - Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret

Cecilia could hardly breathe. She couldn’t imagine what expression she wore on her face. An old lover. Was that what she was to him? Was that all she was?

But she kept her cool, no matter 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 could chalk up to fear, she told herself as Pascal gazed down at her, arrogant and impatient. It was nothing but panic, surely. The strange feeling, too much like some kind of anticipation, she felt that her worst fear was being realized in the extraordinary flesh whether she liked it or not.

She could understand that. It was her other reactions that concerned her more. Most especially that melting low in her belly that told her terrible truths about her true feelings about Pascal’s return that she wanted desperately to deny.

She got to her feet then, taking her time. And as she did, she was fiercely glad that she looked like who and what she was: a woman who washed floors for a living. She was nothing like the sorts of pampered women Pascal always had on his arm in the magazine pictures that were burned into her head. Cecilia knew she bore no resemblance to them and never would. She was not elegant. Her jeans were too big, decidedly ripped and horribly stained. She wore a ratty T-shirt beneath the long-sleeve buttoned-up shirt she’d tied off at her waist. Her hair was a disaster, no matter that she’d tied it back with an old scarf.

She expected she looked more or less tragic to a man like him. He was no doubt asking himself how he’d ever lowered himself to touch one such as her. She wondered it herself.

But this was a good thing, she told herself sternly. Because he needed to go away and never come back. And if she disgusted him now, well, she was only what she’d had to become. To survive him. If that got him to leave, great. Whatever worked.

She ignored the small pang that notion gave her.

“I expected you to be wearing 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 thrilled to it, once.

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

But his eyes narrowed anyway. “I thought that was your life’s ambition. Was it not?”

“People change.”

“You seem markedly changed, in fact. One might even say, distinctly hardened.”

“I’m no longer a foolish girl easily taken advantage of by traveling soldiers, if that’s what you mean.”

His head canted to one side, and his black eyes gleamed. “Did I take advantage of you, Cecilia? That’s not how I recall it.”

She eyed him. “Whether you recall it that way or not, that’s how it was.”

“Tell me, then, how precisely did I take advantage of you? Was it when you crawled into my hospital bed, threw your leg over me and then rode us both to a mad finish?”

She remembered it as he said it. She remembered everything. The wonder of taking him inside her. The madness, the dizzy whirl. His big hands wrapped around her hips and his intent, ferociously greedy gaze.

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

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

Because this wasn’t about her.

“I always wondered what it would be like to have a conversation like this with you,” Cecilia said when she was sure she could manage to sound calm. Faintly bored. And it was not untrue, though as the years passed, the content of the conversation had changed in her head. She’d asked fewer questions. At some point she’d even become magnanimous. She’d practiced it enough in mirrors. “I find it’s less productive than I might have imagined. I don’t understand why you’re here. I am not haunted.”

Only furious, still and always, but she didn’t tell him that. He didn’t deserve to know.

“Can it be as simple as catching up with an old friend?” he asked as if he was…reasonable in any way. Palatable.

She made a scoffing sound. “Please. We were never friends.”

To her surprise, his mouth curved. “Cecilia. Of course we were.”

Something in her chest seemed to stutter to a halt then. Something different from the panic, the heat.

Because she remembered other things, too. Long afternoons when she would sit by his bedside, holding his hand or mopping his brow with a cool cloth. In those early days, when no one had known if he would make it, she’d sung to him. Songs of praise and joy interspersed with silly nursery rhymes and the like, all calculated to soothe.

When he grew stronger, he would tell her stories. He couldn’t believe that she had never been to Rome. That she had never been more than a couple of hours out of this valley, for that matter. Or not that she could recall. He painted pictures for her with his words, of ancient ruins interspersed with traffic charging this way and that, sidewalk cafés, beautiful fountains. Later, when she was no longer a novitiate and often found herself up in the middle of the night—either because she was worried about her future, or because sleep was a rarity for a woman in her position—she’d looked up pictures online and found the city he described. In bright detail.

He’d made her feel as if she knew it personally. Sometimes she thought she hated him for that.

“Either way,” she said resolutely, “we’re not friends now. Do you wish to know how I know we’re not? Because friends do not disappear like smoke in the middle of the night, without a word.”

She regretted that the moment she said it. This was not about her, not anymore, and if she wanted to tell herself a harsh truth or two, it was possible it never had been. She could have been the field outside his window. The mountains looming about in every direction. She was simply here . He was the one who crashed the car, tore himself to pieces and got the luxury of telling dramatic stories about what the experience had taught him in televised interviews.

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

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

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

Something she was in no doubt about when his expression changed. His eyes were too hot suddenly. His mouth was too stern and yet remained entirely too sensual.

Now that she was standing up, she could better appreciate what the years had done for his form. He had always been beautiful, like something carved from soft stone and twisted into that flesh that had healed so slowly. Now he seemed made of granite. His shoulders were so wide. And the excellent tailoring of the suit he wore did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that his torso was thick with hard, solid muscle.

And somehow she’d expected that because he’d filled out he would be less tall. But he wasn’t. She still had to look up at him. And for some reason, even though she was no longer on her knees, it made her feel a little too close to powerless for comfort.

“By all means,” he said in that dark, silken way of his. “Let us discuss that night.”

And she’d already started down this road. She might as well say all the things she’d been carrying around inside her all these years, or at least the highlights, because she had no intention of having this discussion again.