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Pascal was sure he saw the hint of a smirk on his secretary’s face, though the other man knew better than to succumb in full.
“Careful, Guglielmo,” he murmured. “Or I may begin to suspect that you do not take this enterprise as seriously as you should.”
He walked back to his desk, a massive slab of granite that looked like what it was. A throne and a monument to Pascal’s hard-won power and influence. Guglielmo gestured toward the tablet computer that lay in the center, and Pascal checked a sigh as he picked it up and scrolled through the offerings.
Lady this, daughter of Somebody Pedigreed, the toast of this or that finishing school. The daughter of a Chinese philanthropist. Two French girls from separate families that were connected—somewhere back in the deep, dark, tangled roots of their family trees—to ancient kings and queens. An Argentinian heiress, raised on cattle money halfway across the world.
They were all beautiful, in their way. If not classically so, then polished to shine. They were all accomplished, in one way or another. One ran her own charity. One performed the flute with a world-renowned orchestra. Another spent the bulk of her time on humanitarian missions. And not one of them had ever been mentioned in a tabloid newspaper.
Pascal refused to consider anyone with a whiff of paparazzi interest about them or near them, like the California wine heiress who was herself marvelously spotless, but had been best friends since boarding school with a celebrity whose life played out in headlines across the globe. No, thank you. He wanted no scandals. No dark secrets, poised to emerge at the worst possible time. No secrets at all, come to that.
Pascal was a scandal. His whole life had been first a secret, then a shock, trumpeted in headlines of its own. His tawdry, illegitimate birth and his shipping magnate father’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his existence throughout his life might as well have been another set of scars on the other side of his face. He had always felt marked by the circumstances of his birth, his parents’ poor choices.
He would always be marked by these things.
His wife, accordingly, had to be without stain.
“You do not look pleased, sir,” Guglielmo said drily. “Yet again. I fear I must remind you that an unblemished heiress of reasonable social standing is, in fact, a finite resource. One we may have exhausted.” He inclined his head slightly when Pascal glared at him. “Sir.”
“I’m meeting with the last of the previous selection of possibilities tonight,” Pascal reminded him.
“I made the reservation myself, sir. Moments after you informed me that the meeting you’d had with another woman on that list was, in your words, appalling beyond reason.”
“She did not resemble her photograph,” Pascal said darkly.
“Sadly, that is part and parcel of the digital dating culture we all now—”
“Guglielmo. She was a sweet-looking, conservatively dressed blonde in the pictures you showed me. She showed up with a blue and pink Mohawk and a sleeve of tattoos. I liked her more that way, if I am honest, but I can hardly parade a punk rock princess in front of my board. If I could, I would.”
“The woman you’re meeting tonight has a robust social media presence and absolutely no hint of punk rock about her,” Guglielmo replied blandly. “I checked myself.”
Pascal found his fingers on his scars again. “Perhaps I will be swept away tonight and all of this will prove unnecessary.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Guglielmo murmured.
After Pascal dismissed him, he didn’t launch himself into one of the numerous tasks awaiting his attention. He could see his emails piling up. His message light was blinking. But instead of handling them he found himself sitting at his desk, scowling out at the physical evidence of the empire he’d built. Brick by bloody brick.
Because once again, the only thing in his head was her.
His angel of mercy. His greatest temptation.
The woman who had nearly wrecked him before he’d begun.
It is December,he reminded himself. This is always how it feels in December. Come the New Year she will fade again, the way she always does.
His phone rang, snapping him back to reality and far away from that godforsaken northern village 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 made his last reckless decision the night he’d chosen to drive like a maniac up into those mountains in search of one of Italy’s many ski resorts. He had been on leave from the army and the idea—or some demon—had seized him, which in those days was all Pascal needed. That and a bottle of something strong.
He had never made it to a ski resort. He’d spun out on a mountain pass after making a wrong turn. The clunker of a car he’d been driving—good for absolutely nothing save ejecting him through the windshield with great force—was the only reason he’d lived.
The car had burst into flames, and Pascal would have burned, too, had he not been tossed off into the unforgiving wilderness.
But even the fire was a blessing in disguise. It had alerted the villagers. They’d trooped out in the middle of the dark December night, collected his broken body and had settled him into what passed for the local hospital. The clinic connected to the abbey, where slowly, carefully, the nuns had nursed him back to health.
Pascal had been torn open, broken and out of his mind for weeks. It had taken him longer than that to heal. Then painfully learn how to move again when the casts came off.
And the greatest danger of it all was not the infections he risked or the bones that healed differently than they’d been. It was not his discharge from the military, or the entirely new life he was forced to face—and figure out while lying flat on his back—thanks to the wreckage of the old.
It was the fact that life in that forgotten village felt sweet. Easy. Good.
It had been the greatest temptation of his life to simply…remain.
And his favorite nun had been a part of that.
Not quite a nun, he corrected himself now, his hands deep in his pockets as he brooded at the fountain before him. She had been a novice of the order, young and sweet and uncorrupted—until she’d met him.
But when he thought of what happened between them, her cool smiles and soft hands, blooming into that one night of almost unbearable passion that still made his body stir after all these years—he couldn’t help but think that she had been the one to do the corrupting.
He was a master of the universe by any reckoning, and yet…here he stood. In a dark, forgotten corner of the greatest city on earth, the world literally at his feet, her face in his memories making the city dim.
It was an outrage. It was unacceptable.
Pascal headed toward his home, three stories of the top of a building that he had refurbished to suit his particular taste. Distinctively modern inside and an appropriately battered, ancient-looking facade.
It was not lost on him that for all intents and purposes, that description could have been about him.
When he reached his building, he didn’t go inside. He headed to his garage instead and somehow or another, almost without conscious thought, he found himself in one of his cars. Then heading north. This time he was neither as drunk nor as reckless as he’d been six years ago, but still. A man did not possess a car as fast as his if he did not plan to use it.
He drove for six hours, through what remained of the night and into the dawn. He stopped for breakfast and strong coffee when he reached Verona. When the espresso had revived him sufficiently, he called Guglielmo to tell him where he was.
“And may I ask, sir, why you are a great many kilometers away from the office? May I assume that your meeting last night did not go as well as you hoped?”
“You may assume what you like,” Pascal replied.
And as he lingered over another espresso, Pascal had ample time to ask himself what exactly he thought he was doing. The answer came to him after he’d gotten back on the road.
The months he’d spent in the care of that abbey was the only time in his life that he could recall straying so far from who he was, and he’d resented it ever since. Bitterly. Cecilia had been a kind of enchantment. A witch in a nun’s habit.
He’d told himself he was well rid of her when he’d come back down the mountain and remembered himself at last. He’d meant it. He’d gone about creating his company and doing every last thing he’d ever dreamed.
And yet…he couldn’t seem to move on. No matter how many empires he built, no matter how much richer he made himself, he was still haunted by her face.
It was high time for an exorcism.
Two hours later he found himself on the same mountain where he’d nearly died six years ago. It was a cold, crisp morning in another December, and he treated the winding mountain road with a great deal more respect than he had back then.
And this time he pulled off to the side of the road when he reached the top, because he could see the village before him.
It looked like a storybook, which only made him more determined to scrape it off whatever passed for his battered soul. It was like a dream in the morning light. Snowcapped mountains all around, and down in the small valley, fields cut by a tumbling river. What passed for the center of town was a clump of old buildings that dated from centuries past. The church stood at one end of the village with the abbey behind it and off to one side, the hospital where he had survived his recovery. He stared at it a long while, aware that his fingers were on his scars again.
Something in him turned over, with a low hum.
He told himself it was sheer horror that a man like him, raised in the middle of one of the most frenetic and sophisticated cities in the world, not to mention the luxurious lifestyle he now enjoyed, should ever have imagined that he could stay here.
Here.
It beggared belief.
He started up the car again, following the road down and around and around, until it reached the valley floor.
Where everything was exactly as he’d left it.
There was no reason that his heart should be clattering about in his chest as he drove the familiar road to the church. He would find the old priest and ask after Cecilia. He would almost surely find such a reunion faintly horrifying, and once he did, he would leave. The truth was, he’d come a very great distance for what he expected to take all of a few moments. He could have—and should have—sent Guglielmo. Or some other underling, who could have reported back on whether Cecilia was still here. For that matter, there had been no earthly reason for him to drive through the night like a man possessed. He could have taken his helicopter and landed it in the field behind the church, the same field he’d stared at week after week after week from his hospital bed.
No wonder he’d become fixated on the novice nun who’d cared for him. There had been nothing else to do. Except, Mother Superior had told him serenely, pray.
Pascal had not prayed then. He considered a prayer for deliverance now instead. Because he had surrendered to this fantasy for absolutely no good reason. This appalling tour through his own nostalgia.
“You might as well get it over with,” he growled at himself.
