The Bride’s Baby Of Shame

Sophie took her time turning over in her bed, then sitting up gingerly as if she expected it to hurt, somehow. And still, no matter how long she stared or blinked, she couldn’t make Renzo disappear.

He lounged there at the foot of the four-poster bed, here in her bedroom in Langston House as if she’d conjured him up from one of the dreams that had plagued her all night.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“It turns out we have more to discuss.”

She didn’t like the way he said that, dark and something like lethal.

“How did you get in here?” Sophie looked around wildly. She didn’t know what she expected to find. Her father bursting through the door, perhaps, assuming Renzo had barged his way into Langston House like some kind of marauder? Or even Poppy, always so concerned, calling out her name?

But it really was early. If she ignored the wild pounding in her chest, there was no sound. Anywhere. No one seemed to be awake but the two of them. Langston House felt still all around.

And Renzo was here.

Right here, in this bedroom Sophie had been installed in as the future Countess of Langston. It was all tapestries, priceless art, and frothy antique chairs that looked too fragile to sit in, as befitted a room that regularly appeared in guidebooks.

“You can’t be here,” she managed to say, clutching the bedclothes to her like some kind of security blanket.

“Talk to me some more about the consequences you mentioned, if you please,” Renzo said mildly. So mildly it made every hair on her body seem to stand straight up in warning.

He was dressed the way he had been the night before. Dark trousers and boots, sleek and spare, as if to highlight his lean, brooding athleticism. That thick hair of his looked messy, as if he’d spent the hours since she’d last seen him running his fingers through it again and again. The leather jacket he’d worn in the rain last night was open now over the kind of soft, impossibly simple T-shirt that looked as if it was nothing more than a throwaway piece—and yet clung to his sculpted chest, hugging him and exalting him in turn, and likely costing more than some people’s mortgages.

If she was a better person, Sophie thought, she wouldn’t find him so attractive, even now, when she knew exactly what kind of trouble he’d brought into her life. When she knew that she should have walked away from him that night in Monte Carlo and let him remain nothing but a daydream she might have taken out and sighed over throughout the coming years of her dry, dutiful marriage.

It took a moment for his words to penetrate. And when they did, a kind of icicle formed inside of her, sharp and long and frigid.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips too dry and her throat not much better.

“I think you do.” Renzo stood at the foot of her bed, one hand looped around one of the posts in a lazy, easy sort of grip that did absolutely nothing to calm Sophie’s nerves. Not when she was sure she could feel that same hard, steady hand wrapped around her neck. Or much, much lower. “I think you came to tell me something last night but let my temper scare you off. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say you used my temper as an excuse to keep from telling me, would it not?”

Sophie found her hands covering her belly again, there beneath her comforter. Worse, Renzo’s dark gaze followed the movement, as if he could see straight through the pile of soft linen to the truth.

“What would be accurate to say is that you took the opportunity last night to make an uncomfortable situation worse,” she said, sounding more in control than she felt. She very deliberately removed her hands from her belly and set them on the top of her blankets where Renzo could see them. Where they could be inoffensive and tell him nothing. “That’s on you. It has nothing at all to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you, cara.”

“I would like you to leave,” she told him, fighting to keep her voice calm. “You’ve threatened me already. I don’t know what showing up here, hours before I’m meant to marry, could possibly accomplish. Or is this more punishment?”

Renzo’s lips quirked into something no sane person would call a smile. He didn’t move and yet he seemed to loom there, growing larger by the second and consuming all the air in the bedchamber.

He made it hard to breathe. Or see straight.

Or remember why, exactly, she’d marched back up to Langston House last night filled with new resolve about what she would do and how she would manage her marriage—no matter Dal’s reaction to her pregnancy. Assuming she even told him.

She was aware that such concerns made her a terrible person. On some level, she thought she would always hate herself for the things she’d found herself thinking in these awful days. But none of that mattered.

What mattered was keeping her baby safe, one way or another. She couldn’t afford to care too much what that looked like.