she’d spent at his bedside, talking as well as tending to him. All the things he’d told her in return, because his bed in that clinic had felt disconnected to the world. Why not tell a kind stranger every feeling that had ever moved in him? Why not share every story he had inside him? He’d done that and more. How could she imagine that the man who had done so would turn around and leave now? “I told you how I was raised. What it meant to me to be a bastard son to a cruel, unfeeling man… Have you forgotten?”
Her eyes seemed nearly purple then, with what he only hoped was distress. “I didn’t forget. But people say all kinds of things when they think their lives might end, then turn around and live very differently, when given the chance.”
“I told you,” Pascal growled. “And you decided to do this to me anyway. To my child. When you had to know it was the last thing I would ever have allowed.”
Whatever distress might have been lurking in her, it disappeared in a flush of temper as her chin tipped up again.
“I stopped caring about what you might or might not allow,” she said with a distinct calm that felt like yet another slap when he could barely keep himself together. “Right about the time it became clear to me that you weren’t coming back, and that I was really, truly going to have to have our baby all on my own. And then carry on raising him. I considered adoption, you know. Because my plan was to be a nun, not a mother.” Her tone was bitter then. “Never a mother.”
Something tickled at the back of his mind, about Cecilia’s stories about her own childhood, but he thrust it aside. Because she’d actually wanted to…
“You wanted to give up your child—my child?”
Once again Pascal couldn’t force his mind to process that. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. It was bad enough that he’d come here on a whim to discover that all this time, the woman who’d haunted him through his life in Rome had kept his child a secret from him. But that he could have come back here today, just like this, and never know? Never have the slightest notion what he’d lost?
That fissure inside him widened. And grew teeth.
“Yes, Pascal,” she said. Because she had teeth, too. And they seemed to sharpen by the second. “It was never my intention to have a child on my own. Why wouldn’t I consider adoption?”
Again Pascal ran a hand over his jaw, his scars. Reminding himself that he had survived the impossible before. Surely he would again.
One way or another.
“I suppose you would like me to thank you for choosing motherhood,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “I find I cannot quite get there. I want to see him.”
He wasn’t looking at her as he said that, and it took him a moment to realize she hadn’t responded. When he slid his gaze back to hers, she had a considering sort of look on her face. As if she was mulling over a decision as she looked at him.
For the first time it occurred to Pascal that she might very well bar him from seeing the child. His child.
How could he be outraged at being denied something he hadn’t known he had when he’d driven into this valley? How could he know himself so little?
“I’ll show you a photograph,” Cecilia replied, her violet eyes glittering with more of that same consideration. “I’m certainly not introducing you to him. He’s five. As far as he’s aware, he doesn’t have a father.”
Pascal blinked, but once more couldn’t really take that in. He felt drunk again, as reckless and out of control as he’d been when he’d driven that car over the side of a mountain. This was like living through that crash again and again. And more, he felt broken into a thousand pieces, the way he had then.
He reminded himself that he was the president and CEO of an international corporation that had made him a billionaire. He laughed off deals that would make other men sweat. He could surely handle one parochial woman and the rest of this…situation.
All he needed to do was stop letting his damned feelings dictate his reactions.
Something he’d thought he’d stamped out years ago. Six years ago, in fact, when he’d received the ultimate wake-up call, had remembered himself and had left.
Cut his own feelings about his father out of this and it was a fairly simple thing. She hadn’t been able to track him down. He hadn’t looked back. It wasn’t even a saga—it was depressingly common.
He cleared his throat. “So you…live here. With him. At the abbey?”
“We have our own cottage,” she said. Grudgingly, he thought.
And Pascal felt better now that he’d allowed a bit of reason back into the mix. More like himself and less like the broken man she’d known.
He looked at the bucket beside her. “If you do not live in the abbey, and you are not a nun or even a novitiate any longer, why on earth are you cleaning this church?”
“I clean,” she said. And when he stared back at her without comprehension, she lifted her pugilistic little chin again. The expression on her face was challenging, which he should probably stop finding so surprising. “That’s what I do. For a living.”
“You…clean. For a living. This is how you support yourself?”
“That’s what I said.”
This time he understood her completely. The words did not bloom into that same dull roar in his head. He felt like himself again, and that allowed him the comfort of the sort of temper he recognized. Not the volcanic, tectonic shift of before—but the sort of laser focus he usually saved for creatures like his father.
Fewer feelings. More fury.
He liked this version of himself much better.
“Are you truly this vindictive?” he asked her, his voice soft with menace and the power he’d fought for—and had no intention of ceding to a fallen nun, thank you. He shifted his position to shove his hands into his pockets and kept his gaze trained on her. “You say you read about me. You knew about the company and claim you called. So there can be no debate about the fact that you know perfectly well that I’m not a poor man. That no matter what else happened, I would never willingly consign my child to be raised in poverty.”
Color bloomed in her cheeks, and he had the sense it was the first honest response he’d seen from her. Maybe that was why he reveled in it, like a thirsty man faced with a mountain spring.
Surely there could be no other reason.
“Your child is not being raised in poverty,” she snapped. “He doesn’t take a private jet to get his shopping done, I grant you, but his life is full. He wants for nothing. And I’m sorry that you think cleaning is beneath you, but luckily, I don’t. I make a good living. I take care of myself and my son. Not everybody needs to be rich.”
“Not everyone can be rich, it is true. But you happen to be raising the son and heir of a man who is. Several times over.”
“Money only buys things, Pascal,” she said with the dismissiveness of someone who had never lived more or less by their wits in the worst parts of a major city. “It certainly doesn’t make a person happy. As anyone who looks at you can tell quite clearly.”
“How would you know?” he asked, his tone deadly.
She flushed again. “I make Dante perfectly happy. That’s what matters.”
“You live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but cows and nuns. What kind of life is this for a boy?”
“There was a time when you thought this valley was paradise,” she threw at him. “It hasn’t changed any. But if you have, there is no need for you to suffer the cows and the nuns a moment more. You can turn around and leave right now.”
“I don’t think you’re understanding