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“They pushed her into a breakdown and I swear they caused my father’s death. He might have withstood nearly losing his child, but trying to keep us out of that microscope? There was no pity for the pressure he was under! If he showed signs of cracking, they turned it higher. I know.” He smacked his hand into his chest. “I stepped into his shoes. The corporation is enough for any man and then to be worried sick for the rest of your life that another attempt would be made? All because those vipers insist on making us into demigods?”
He threw an accusatory point at the closed curtain, vainly wishing, yearning, for the ability to incinerate every camera on earth.
“I hate them. I bloody well hate them. They’re vile and they set us up to be victimized in every way—by trolls, by opportunists, by criminals who want to steal a child for profit.”
He ran his hand down his face, trying not to think of such a thing happening to his child. He pointed a railing finger at her.
“You have no idea what they’re really capable of. And you definitely don’t have the resources to hold them at a decent distance. So, no. Do not think for a minute that I will leave it to you to ‘handle’ security. I can’t even say I will take the babies and let you live your life away from us because you are part of this now, like it or not. So you will come to Paris with me and I will handle security.”
At some point she had pulled a cushion across her chest and had drawn her knees up, buffering herself against his outburst.
He pushed his fingers through his hair, scratching at his tight scalp, feeling like a bully now that the worst of his temper was spent, but—
“This was why I didn’t want children. This is how I knew it would be.” He was defeated by circumstance. “But we’re here now, so we’ll do what we must. You’ll marry me.”
“No,” she said in a husk of a voice, lips white.
He drew in a tested breath, frustration returning in a flood of heat. “Did you hear what I just said? You can’t stay here.”
“Yes, I heard you. Fine. I’ll live behind your iron curtain, but—” She swallowed. “But I won’t marry you.” Her chin came up in what he knew was her stand-ground face.
His ears buzzed as he sifted through her words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll live with you, but I won’t live with you.” She flushed and pulled her shoulders up defensively around her ears.
“You don’t want to sleep with me?” His heart bottomed out. She couldn’t mean that.
She flinched and looked away, blinking hard. “No. I don’t.”
“Liar.” It came out of him as a breath of absolute truth. A dying wish.
She made a face that held shame and guilt and self-contempt, but when she brought her gaze back to his, she didn’t try to convince him she was being honest. She couldn’t.
The naked vulnerability in her expression caught at something inside him, though. It was out of character and gut-wrenching, making him tamp it down with resistance. Cinnia was tough. He had always liked that about her. He needed her to be resilient and as impermeable as he was. It was too much on him if she was fragile.
Despite the revelation of weakness, however, she was resolved.
“We can carry on pretty much as we did before.” Her voice was a tangle of conflicted emotions. “I’ll work remotely around your schedule and go into my office when I can. I’ll have to see what my doctor says about travel, but I’m not up for a lot. I was planning to take a few months off work when the babies come, but I don’t care where we are when that happens. We can figure that out as we go along, but I’m not going to take up with you again.”
“It’s not ‘taking up.’ It’s marriage.” Did she realize how deeply she was insulting him? “Are you trying to make some kind of point? Damn it, Cinnia, are you still trying to prove something to a man in your past who has nothing to do with me?” He wanted to physically hunt down the jerk and shake him.
Her stare flattened to a tundra wasteland of blue that chilled him to the marrow.
“Do you want to marry me, Henri? If I wasn’t pregnant, would you even be here right now? If I had ended things purely because I wanted to marry and have children, would you have crossed a street to even say, ‘Nice to see you’? No. So, no, I’m not being perverse. Yes, this has everything to do with you. If you want to marry me, you can damn well get down on one knee, ask nicely and mean it.”
Cinnia went upstairs to pack.
Henri forced himself to sit and drink his cold tea while he ate a sandwich, determined to regain his composure after his flare-up.
He hadn’t meant to ignite like that, but Ramon was the only one who really understood how dark that time had been after their father’s death. Grief had crippled all of them, but a fresh round of attention had fallen on them with the funeral—the girls especially. At fifteen, they’d been long-legged fillies, striking in their youthful blossom of womanhood, hauntingly beautiful in their sorrow.
He and Ramon were used to being sexually objectified by then, but nothing had prepared any of them for the reprehensible, predatory way strange men had begun stalking the girls once the photos were published. For Trella, it had been particularly insidious, sparking panic attacks that had been debilitating.
While other young men his age were drinking themselves stupid, hooking up and partying, he and Ramon had been forced to a level of maturity that exceeded any geezer on the board.
In some ways, combating those dinosaurs for control of Sauveterre International had been a much-appreciated outlet. Ramon was the verbal one, passionately arguing their case and hotly quitting a tense meeting to let off steam by racing cars.
Henri had retreated to spreadsheets and numbers, facts and figures that fueled his ruthless pushback against attempts to sideline him.
He couldn’t count the nights he’d sat in a room lit only by the screen of his laptop, angry with his father for abandoning him to this, but sorry for him. Empathizing with him while silently begging for advice on how best to protect his mother and sisters.
Things had grown easier as the girls had matured and taken more responsibility for their own safety. Hell, Trella’s self-imposed seclusion had been a relief when it came to how vigilant they all had to be, not that Henri would have ever asked her to go to those lengths.
But he’d never forgotten those first years of wearing his father’s mantle, wondering how he would withstand the next day or the one after that. The pressure was too much to expect of anyone. It had hardened his resolve against ever having children and being charged with their safety.
Yet here he was. With Cinnia.
Leaning on his elbows, he rested his tight lips against his linked fingers, examining the assumption he had made before he’d even confirmed her pregnancy. Of course they would marry. For all his reluctance to become a family man, he was the product of one. He and Cinnia were compatible in many ways. It was a natural conclusion.
But she didn’t want to rekindle their physical relationship. If the reason was medical, she would have said, “I can’t,” but her words had been “I won’t.”
Because she wanted more than sex?
Do you love me?
He jerked to his feet as though he could escape his own ruminations by physically running from them. Now, more than ever, he couldn’t afford such distractions. Look at him, dwelling on things that couldn’t be changed when he should be putting wheels into motion for all that had changed.
He shook off his introspection, decided to tell his mother when Cinnia was with him, and video-called Ramon.
When he and his brother had been children, his mother had always spoken Spanish while their father had used his native French. They had wanted their boys to be fluent in both. Before he and Ramon went to school and learned otherwise, they had thought that if someone spoke to them in Spanish, they had to reply in French. It had amused Ramon to no end when the girls had come along and done the same thing. They were all still guilty of reverting to the habit in private conversations with each other.
“Cinnia is pregnant,” Henri announced in French.
Ramon visibly flinched. “Es lamentable. Who is the father?”
“Me. I am the father,” Henri said through his teeth, offended his brother would think otherwise. “The babies are mine.” He was still assimilating that outlandish fact. Saying it aloud made it real and all the more heart-stopping.
“‘Babies?’ Twins?” Ramon choked out with disbelief. He swore. Let out a laugh, then swore and laughed again. “Es verdad?”
“So real.” Henri wiped his hand down his face, trying to keep it from melting off. “You and I need to talk. She has four months to go, but they’ll probably come early. I’ll have to curtail most of my travel this year. We’ll station in Paris, but you and I must discuss how we’ll restructure. The press will be a nightmare.” His knee-jerk response when thinking about their name in the press was to worry about how it affected Trella, which reminded him… “Trella knew. Did she say anything to you?”
“Knew that Cinnia was pregnant? No dijo nada.”
“She’s still in Paris?”
“España. But go easy.” Ramon held up his hand in caution. “She’s doing so well. Don’t give her a setback.”
Henri took that with a grain of salt. His sisters often accused him of smothering, but he still tried to head off potential problems before they triggered one of Trella’s attacks. Given how agonizing the episodes were for her, he would never forgive himself if he caused one.
He didn’t bother defending himself to his brother, though. The warning was pure hypocrisy, coming from Ramon. Ramon and Trella had the most volatile relationship among the four of them. Where Angelique was so sensitive she had always cried if her sister said one cross word in her direction, and Henri was so pragmatic and coolheaded he refused to engage when Trella was in a snit, Ramon had always been more than eager to give her a fight if she wanted one.
But Ramon and only Ramon was allowed to get into a yelling match with their baby sister. Somehow it never caused an attack and sometimes, they all suspected, it had been the only way for Trella to release her pent-up frustrations in a way that didn’t leave her fetal and shattered.
Nevertheless, Ramon would not stand between Henri and Trella on this.
“There is no good explanation for leaving me in ignorance.” If something had happened before he’d been able to set precautions in place… He refused to even consider it. “It was cavalier and reckless.”
“I’ll speak to her about it,” Ramon said.
Henri made a mental note to be in another country when that happened, saying only, “Meet me in Paris. I’m taking Cinnia there as soon as she packs.”
He ended the call and tried Trella. After a few rings, she came on the screen shoulder-to-shoulder with Angelique, both of them wearing a look of apprehension.
“I forgot you were home, too, Gili,” he said as he recognized the lounge at Sus Brazos. “Is Mama there?”
“Siesta,” they said in unison.
He nodded. Seeing them side-by-side like that, he was struck by Trella’s very slight weight gain. It allowed him to get a firmer grasp on the temper he was already holding on a tight leash. After the kidnapping, she’d gone through a heavy period. Comfort eating, her therapist had called it. Insulating. The press had labeled her The Fat One and that had been only the tip of the iceberg with the ugly things printed and said about her.
By the time their father had died, her eating habits had gone the other way and she’d been starving herself. They’d worried about how underweight she was and then the panic attacks had arrived, carrying on for years. After a lengthy bout of trying different medications, which had amounted to drug dependency more than once, she had removed herself from the public eye. Eventually her moods had stabilized, then her weight and overall health had, too.
Things had been going so well that, when Sadiq had announced he was marrying last year, Trella had insisted on coming out of isolation to attend his wedding a few weeks ago. The event had forced her back into the public eye and he and his siblings had been walking on eggshells since, holding their breaths in fear she’d backslide.
Henri wanted her to live as normal a life as their family was capable of, but that fullness in her cheeks and the trepidation in her eyes made him worry that she was not coping as well as they all hoped. He was angry, but forced himself to tread gently.
“I’m at Cinnia’s mother’s,” he began.
“I know. Cin texted me.”
That was a surprise. He hadn’t seen Cinnia fetch her phone. “Am I to understand you knew about this, too, Gili?”
“Not about Cinnia, no. Trella just explained that bit after she got the text that you were there. Congratulations.” Her smile grew to such bright warmth and sincere joy he wanted to groan. Leave it to Gili to undermine his bad mood with her soft heart and warm enthusiasm. “Twins?” She patted her hands together in a little clap of excitement. “We each get one! Merci, Henri!”
He and Ramon had thought the same thing when their mother had produced a pair of girls when they were six, one for each of them. He might have rolled his eyes, but something in what she’d said niggled.
“What do you mean, you didn’t know about Cinnia? What did you know that I don’t?”
Angelique looked at their sister.
“Um.” Trella’s mouth twisted as she bit the corner of her lip. She held Gili’s gaze with a pleading one of her own.
Gili put her arm around her, bolstering her. “Ça va, Bella. Just tell him.”
“Cinnia didn’t tell you where we bumped into each other?” Trella asked, catching his gaze in the screen, then flicking hers away.
“Here in London, I presume. You’ve been coming to see a client the last few weeks, haven’t you?”
“Sort of. Cinnia is a client, right? She couldn’t buy maternity wear from anyone else without risking a tip-off to the press.”
“Bella,” he said in his most carefully modulated tone. “I’m trying very hard not to be angry with you, but I have every right to be. Don’t make it worse. Whatever you need to tell me, spit it out.”
Her eyelashes lifted and she finally looked at him, speaking swiftly and sharply. “We saw each other at the clinic. The prenatal one. I’m pregnant.”
He sat back, absorbing that along with the three dependents he’d just picked up—six, actually, because Cinnia’s family would be under his protection, as well. Now, his vulnerable, fragile baby sister was…
He closed his eyes, unable to take it in.
“How…?”
“I was blessed by God, obviously. Same as Cinnia,” Trella said with a bite in her tone. Then she picked at a nail and mumbled, “It wasn’t anything bad. I had a chance to be with someone—”
“The prince. The one you were photographed with a few months ago?” His sisters were even more difficult to tell apart than he and Ramon, especially in photos, but he’d known at the first glance that Trella had been the one caught kissing the Prince of Elazar. Since he’d helped her impersonate Gili himself as part of her process of moving in public again, he hadn’t been too hard on her for going rogue.
Now, however…
“You didn’t even know him.”
“I won’t confirm or deny until I’ve figured out what I’m going to do,” Trella mumbled.
“Speaking as a man who just missed several weeks of impending fatherhood, don’t do that, Trella. It’s bad form.”
“I’m the one who told her to hire guards and I offered to pay if she couldn’t. And speaking as a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, this isn’t about you. I will handle this, Henri. But I have enough on my plate worrying about myself and my baby without bringing the father into the mix. So does Cinnia, by the way, except she has two babies to worry about. Plus, you were the idiot who didn’t ask her to stay when you had the chance. That’s why you missed those weeks, so don’t throw that on me. Ugh. I have to go to the bathroom.” She pushed to her feet.
As Trella stormed off, Gili gave him a sympathetic look. “Pregnant women are moody.” She skipped her gaze in the direction Trella had gone. “Don’t tell her I said that. But, you know, keep it in mind with Cinnia.”
“How is she, really?” he asked.
Gili’s brow pulled with worry, but there was a wistful, pained quality to it. “She’s trying so hard not to lean on anyone, especially me. Obviously it’s a lot to deal with, but I think that’s why she’s refusing to, you know, tell the father. She doesn’t want to feel like a burden again. Give her some time, okay?”
“Oh, I have quite enough to keep me busy here. But you’ll tell me if she needs me.”
“I will,” she promised.
“And how are you?” Had it really only been yesterday that she’d sent him that beaming photo of her with Kasim? She had captioned it “this time we’re serious.”
He expected a joyful response to his question, but she pulled a sad face.
“Kasim had to go back to Zhamair. I won’t see him again until the end of the month. But we want to have a little engagement party.” Now came the smile and she was incandescent. “That will take a few weeks to organize, given all our schedules, but I’d like to do it here. Now I’m wondering about Cinnia traveling?”
“We’ll have to check with her doctor.”
“Please do. If we have to go to London, we will, but I’d rather stay here.”
“Agreed.” They all relaxed at their childhood home in a way they never could anywhere else.
Besides, he anticipated making his home there with Cinnia, at least at first. His mother still lived there, but she would be thrilled to have them while they worked out exactly where they wanted to live and built their own heavily guarded accommodation. She had despaired for years at having no grandchildren and had been fond of Cinnia. She would express only delight when she heard they were reunited and expecting.
He ended his call with Gili and took the tray to the kitchen, checking in with Milly.
