Renzo was immovable. Another brick wall—except there was nothing cold about him. Nothing the least bit reserved. He blazed at her and she could feel it as if it was his hand between her legs, breaching her softness and pushing deep inside—
Her breath was ragged. Desperate. “My marriage is none of your business!”
She had the confused sense that she’d walked directly into a trap. Renzo tensed, coiled tight as if he planned to spring at her.
“And yet here I am, right in the middle of it. Where you put me, Sophie. Against my will.”
She shoved at him again and again, he didn’t move. At all.
“If I put you there then I’ll remove you. Consider yourself ejected. With prejudice.”
“Why did you order me to meet you?” he asked, and though his voice was deceptively mild, his dark amber eyes gleamed in the dark and made her think of lions. Tigers. Big cats that had no place roaming about the staid English countryside. “Surely you must know you’ve made a grievous tactical error, cara. You’ve given me the upper hand.”
“The upper hand?”
And she recognized that look on his face then. It was pure triumph, and it should have made her blood chill.
But he’d melted her in Monaco and she couldn’t seem to get her preferred veneer of ice back, no matter what. Not around him.
“I know who you are,” he told her with a certain relish that washed over her like a caress and then hit her in the gut. Hard. “And I have information I must assume your earl would no doubt prefer was not in the peasant hands of a bastard Sicilian.”
“...information?”
But Sophie already knew what he would say. And still, there was a vanishingly small part of her that hoped against hope that he was the man she’d imagined he was—
“Exactly what his fiancée got up to one fine night in Monaco, for example,” Renzo said, smashing any hopes she might have had. Of his better nature. Of what she needed to do here. Of this entire situation that seemed a bigger mistake with every passing moment. “What do you imagine he would pay to keep your indiscretions quiet? Because I already know the tabloids would throw money at me. I could name any sum I wish and humiliate two of the finest families in England with one sleazy little article. I must tell you, cara, I feel drunk with power.”
“You...” She could hardly speak. Her worst nightmare kept getting worse and she had no idea how to stop it. Or contain it. Or even get her head around it. “You are—”
“Careful,” he growled. “I would advise you not to call me names. You may find that I am far worse than any insults you throw at me.”
He pushed himself back, up and off the car and away from her body. Sophie stayed where he’d left her, uncertain what to do next. She was shaking. There was water making her eyes feel too full and too glassy. And worst of all, there was that part of her that wanted him to come back and cover her again.
She was sick. That was the only explanation.
“What I am is mercenary,” Renzo told her. He watched her pitilessly as she struggled to sit up. “You know what that word means, I presume?”
“Of course I know what it means.” She sat for a moment, more winded than she should have been, and then pushed herself off the car to get her feet back on the ground.
But it didn’t make her feel better. Maybe nothing ever would again.
“What it means to you is something derogatory, I am sure,” Renzo said, still watching her in that cold, very nearly cruel way. “Everything is mercenary to those who do not need to make their own money.”
Sophie understood that was a slap. “I don’t—”
He merely lifted a brow and she fell silent, then hated herself for her easy acquiescence.
“Everything I have, everything I am, I created out of nothing,” he told her. “I have nothing polite to say about the man who left my mother pregnant to fend for herself. I have only become a better man than he could ever dream of being. And do you know how I did that?”
“Of course I know. You raced cars for years.”
“What I did, Sophie, was take every opportunity that presented itself to me. Why should this be any different?” He watched her as she straightened from the car and took a shaky step. “What consequences would you like to speak to me about?”
And she understood then.
She understood her own, treacherous heart, and why it had pushed her out here in the middle of the night to further complicate the situation she had already made untenable with what she’d done. She understood that no matter what she might have told herself about threatening texts and potential blackmail, what she’d wanted was that man she’d made up in her head in Monaco.
The man who had looked at her through a crowd and seen her. Only her. Not her family name or her father’s wealth—just her.
The man who had taken her, again and again.
The man who had learned every inch of her in the most naked, carnal, astounding way possible, there in that villa high in the hills with the glittering lights of the city so far below.
The man who had made her laugh, scream, cry, and beg him to do it all over again.
But that had just been a night. Just one night.
And he was just a man, after all. Not the savior she’d made up in her head. Not the answer to a prayer she hadn’t known she’d made.
She should never, ever have answered his text. Because this had only made everything worse.
Her hand crept over her belly, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“I thought...” she started, then stopped herself, blinking back the emotions she desperately wanted to conceal from him. “I wanted...”
“Your cake and to eat it, too. Yes? I’m familiar with the phrase.” The curve of his lips was like a razor. “Why give up the bastard for the earl if you can have them both?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted at all.”
“Of course it was.” The razor curl to his lips edged over into outright disgust. “Do you think I don’t know your type, Sophie? Cheating fiancées turn into lying wives in the blink of an eye. And bored housewives are all the same, whether their house is a hovel or a grand hall. Trust me when I tell you that Europe is littered with the detritus of broken vows. You are not as special as you might imagine.”
She shook at that ruthless character assassination, but the worst part was that she couldn’t manage to shove out a single word in her own defense. Of course he believed these things of her. Had she showed him anything different?
What had seemed like sunlight and glory to her had been nothing but tawdry. She had her little accident to prove it. All she had to do was imagine trying to explain her behavior to her fiancé—or worse, her father. She knew the words they would use.
And she would deserve them.
“Renzo,” she said, very carefully, lest she jog something inside and send all these terrible, unwieldy things spilling out into the dirt between them. “There’s something you need to know.”
“I know everything I need to know.” His words were terse. His judgment rendered. It only surprised her that she’d imagined he might be different. “What I cannot forgive is that you made me an unwitting part of your dishonesty. A vow means something to me, Sophie, and you made me break one.”
She smiled, though it felt brittle. “What vows did you break?”
“I made a promise to myself many years ago that I would never, ever take something that belonged to another,” he told her with a kind of arrogant outrage, as if she’d