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“Almost everyone,” he said dryly. “Presidents. Kings. Why do you bring that up?”
“Because I... I just was curious. There was a man at the party.”
“You should not be inquiring about men, Allegra,” he said, his tone warning. “Especially since I believe you are already engaged.”
“Sure. Technically. But I’m just curious about this one.”
“And that is enough for me to know that if I tell you anything our father may well separate my head from my body.”
“You don’t care about that,” she said. “I know you don’t. You don’t go to great lengths to please them. In fact, you don’t try to please them at all. Stop pretending that you care when you don’t.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “All right. Ask away.”
“He arrived late. He was wearing a mask that looked like a skull, dressed all in black.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Renzo’s lips. And then, he did something that Allegra rarely saw him do: he laughed.
“What?” she asked, fury rioting through her. She was having a crisis and he was laughing at her. “What’s so funny about that?”
“I’m very sorry to tell you that I believe your head was turned by Cristian. I know you will loathe that. As I know you loathe him.”
Ice slipped down through her, chilling her, making her feel ill. “No,” she said. “That was not Cristian.”
“Protest all you like, but it was. Perhaps it’s for the best that Mother and Father have arranged your marriage? It seems that left to your own devices you have terrible taste.”
“No,” she said, getting more furious. “There is no way that that was Cristian Acosta. I would have... I would have... Turned to stone.”
“Just by looking at him?” Something strange crossed over her brother’s face.
“Yes,” she said.
Obviously he would find out eventually. They all would. Unless... They didn’t. Perhaps, Cristian did not have to know.
Raphael would have to know, there was no way around that. Their engagement was off. And her life would be all the better for it. But, if the man she had been with was truly Cristian, then he would no more believe it than she did.
He saw her as a spoiled, selfish child, and nothing more. If she turned up pregnant, he would never connect the woman he’d had up against the wall with Allegra.
Her stomach turned. Cristian. It didn’t seem possible. How could she... How could she have ever...
A question she had asked herself over and over again, even before she had discovered the identity of the man she had been with.
And so she made a decision then. She was not going to tell him. What good would come of it? He would either want nothing to do with her and the baby, or he would want everything to do with them. Frankly, she preferred the former, but feared the latter.
“Never mind,” she said. “Clearly I was being silly.”
“Clearly,” Renzo said, going back to his work.
Allegra’s mind was made up. She would break off her engagement, and seeing as she was already going to be disgraced, she would embrace it fully. She would raise her child alone.
She would ask nothing of Cristian.
* * *
“Your sister’s broken engagement seems to be making headlines.” Cristian poured himself a drink and turned to face his friend.
Anger that was somewhat unequal to the situation rioted through his blood. He had put his own reputation on the line, introducing Raphael to the Valentis. Vouching for Allegra as a future spouse.
He and Raphael were not really friends, more acquaintances. A hazard of being nobility, especially in these times when titles and the like were sinking into obscurity and obsolescence. But still, he had been the one to make the introduction. The one to suggest the union.
Out of respect and gratitude for the support the Valenti family had always shown him, more than anything else. He should have known she would ruin it.
It had only been a matter of time before Allegra had blown her life up completely. She had always seemed on the verge of it. A shimmering flame even while she sat, trying to look serene at parties and family meals.
He had always seen it. That restlessness. That dissatisfaction. But he’d hoped she’d find herself safely married to a prince and not...well, headline news.
A woman with her temperament was always in danger of being tabloid fodder, and he’d tried to warn her. She was too headstrong to listen.
He had hoped the promise of Raphael would keep her in line. Had hoped it would keep her secure.
It apparently had not.
“The cancellation of a royal wedding is always going to be a major deal,” Renzo said.
“I suppose that’s true.”
Cristian remembered, clearly, her behavior the one time he had been at dinner when Raphael was in attendance. The one time he had seen the two of them together. She hadn’t had a clue what to do with him, and he clearly hadn’t the inclination to handle her.
Raphael was a prince, and accustomed to deference. Allegra didn’t seem to know how to give it and had remained sulky and silent throughout the meal.
She’d been very young then. He’d hoped she might mature.
Perhaps it’s for the best.
He knew all too well how marriages made for political gain could end up. And how unhappy a young bride who wished to have some freedom might crumple beneath the weight of expectation.
But she is not Sylvia. And he isn’t you.
Yes, undoubtedly Allegra could have made good on this marriage. Had she any notion of just how good she had it.
“Thank God the reasoning behind the breakup has not come forward yet. But it will,” Renzo said, standing and making his way across the office, helping himself to the alcohol as well.
He frowned. “What’s the reason?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Something about that hit him hard and low. The image of her growing round...of her holding a baby in her arms...he despised it.
Which was ridiculous. She’d been set to marry Raphael in a few months’ time, and she would have been pregnant by him soon enough. Why it should feel such an assault now, he didn’t know.
He gritted his teeth, fighting against the rising tension in his body. “Not with her prince’s child, I take it?”
“No. She refuses to tell our parents, or me, who the father is. I have never even seen her with anyone. I don’t even have a guess.” He frowned. “I worry about the circumstances behind it, frankly. Unlike me, Allegra has never been particularly wild. I have concerns she was taken advantage of.”
It was strange to hear Renzo’s assessment of his sister. Cristian had always sensed wildness in her. And he wouldn’t be surprised if she had been conducting something of a double life behind the backs of her family members all this time.
The idea made his skin feel too tight for his body. That all the time she’d sat there at the dinner table during evenings he’d spent with her family, pretending to go along with her parents’ plans, she was going out. Letting men touch her. Kiss her.
Have her.
“Has she not?” he asked, attempting to keep his tone innocuous.
“No. She has no experience with men, as far as I know. As far as I knew,” he corrected. “In fact only recently she was asking me quite breathlessly about a man she saw at the masked ball we went to a month or so ago.”
Cristian gritted his teeth, a strange tension taking him over. “Was she?”
Flashes of the ball played back in his mind. A beautiful, lush figure. Tight, wet heat. A kind of indulgence he had not had in years.
“Yes. She was chagrined to discover that the man who’d caught her eye was you.”
Cristian set his glass down, his pulse thundering in his temples. It was not possible. But he had to ask. He had to know.
“What was she wearing?” His heart was thundering hard now, his blood roaring through his veins.
“A mask the same as all the other women. She had some purple in her hair and a purple dress. A dress our parents absolutely did not approve of.”
Cojeme.
It could not be. The first woman he had touched in years... And it was Allegra Valenti. And she was... Well, she was pregnant with the Acosta heir.
While the concept of a dukedom was somewhat outmoded, his own was still functioning. With whole swaths of property and farmland left to his management, and hundreds of families dependent on his continuing bloodline.
He was the last, and he’d known he could not let that stand. Now, he didn’t have to.
Apart from that, he was part of Allegra Valenti’s double life. Part of her sin. And such sin it had been. The kind that haunted his sleep with flashes of memory so erotic and sweet he woke up on the verge of release every night.
“Where is she?” he asked, an edge of desperation in his voice.
Renzo frowned, realization dawning slowly over his friend’s face. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No more than I like it,” he said his tone hard. “Where is she?”
“Holed up in one of my apartments in Rome.”
“I need to speak to her. Now.” He had no time for subtlety. If his suspicions were correct, there would be no keeping secrets anyway.
Damn. They could not be correct.
Renzo’s expression turned suspicious. Dark. “I assume that afterward you will be speaking to me.”
“We can only hope not.” Then Cristian turned and walked out of his friend’s office.
He had to see her and put all of this to rest. It cannot be. He refused to believe it. But he would have to see her, so that he could know.
He had to prove to himself, once and for all, that Allegra was not his mysterious lover from the masked ball. It could not be her. That little brat could not be the woman who had touched him, who had aroused such heat and fire in his blood.
Impossible.
He refused to believe it was true. And he would prove that it was not.
* * *
Allegra was doing her best to avoid the media. But sometimes she would forget. And then she would turn on the TV and be assaulted by the news, or open up her computer and go to the wrong webpage and see yet more headlines.
It was horrible. Seeing her painted as the person she simply wasn’t. Bold enough to call off the engagement to the prince at the eleventh hour, without a care for his feelings or for the future of his country.
She wasn’t very bold at all. And she really did care about leaving everything in the lurch. And if Raphael had feelings, she’d never seen them. Not that that excused her.
When she’d given in to her fantasy and taken a lover at the ball, it hadn’t been with the mind that she would abandon her upcoming marriage. It had been with the idea that at least one thing would be her choice. A stolen moment that would always be hers, and hers alone.
Well, now it was everyone’s.
The world knew she’d broken off the wedding. Her family knew she was pregnant. It was only a matter of time before speculation began flying about that too.
Strangely though, as ownership of her and her mistakes became the world’s, she felt more and more like her life belonged to her. She had decided, firmly, to keep the paternity of the child a secret.
It was her key. Yes, she had let everyone down. Yes, her parents may well cut her off—they seemed to be making a decision on that score still. But apart from all that...her life was suddenly filled with possibilities it hadn’t been before.
She had always known she would be a mother. But part and parcel to that had been being a royal wife. As a princess, her life would never truly be hers.
But now for the first time, it just might be. At least she had choices. Even if they weren’t infinite. At least she would only have to answer to herself. To her own mistakes.
Even her relationship with her child...it would be her own. And maybe it wasn’t the most ideal thing to try to find yourself as a person while you were finding yourself as a mother, but it was still better—more—than she would have had as Raphael’s wife.
A knock on her apartment door sent her scrambling out of her seat on the couch. No one had rung in downstairs, requesting permission for entrance. Which meant it must be an employee of her brother’s building.
God bless Renzo for allowing her to hole up here. He might be angry with her for her choices, but at least he understood, in some ways.
He had never been very well behaved, after all.
She walked over to the door and opened it, then her heart fell into her feet. “Renzo isn’t here, if you’re looking for him.” She tried to keep her face straight as she stared into the dark, uncompromising gaze of Cristian Acosta.
He couldn’t know. He couldn’t. She refused to believe it.
Though, standing there, looking up at him, and those coal-black eyes, she wondered how she hadn’t known it was him the moment he’d walked into that ballroom.
He’d looked like Death come to collect then. And he looked like it now.
His black brows were locked together, as was his hard, square jaw. His lips, usually the softest-looking thing about him, were pressed into a grim line.
