Secrets Of His Forbidden Cinderella

“Let this go?” he repeated. And then he actually laughed. “Miss Ransom. Do you have any idea how many enterprising women, whether they have enjoyed access to my charms or not, take it upon themselves to claim that I have somehow fathered their child?”

“You’re welcome to treat me like one of them. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy if you thought I was lying.”

Teo hadn’t really made a determination, not yet. He hadn’t let himself connect his mysterious redhead to this…disaster. Or he hadn’t wanted to let himself. But there was something about the way she said that that kicked at him. As if she really, truly wanted him to dismiss her. And that was so different from the other women who had turned up over the course of his life to make their outlandish claims that it made something deep inside him…slide to the left. A simple, subtle shift.

But it changed everything.

“We will determine if you are lying the same way we determine any other claim,” he managed to say despite that…shift.

“What does that mean? Ritual sacrifices? Forced marches? The dungeons?”

He lifted a brow. “A simple paternity test, Miss Ransom. The dungeons haven’t been functional for at least a hundred years.”

“I can take any test you like,” she said after a moment. “Though that seems like a waste.”

“Funnily enough, to me it doesn’t seem like a waste at all. It seems critical.”

She shrugged. “We can prove that you’re the father if you like, but I’m only going to want you to sign documentation giving up your parental rights.”

And something in him stuttered, then slammed down. Like the weight of the whole of this monstrous house he called his home, loved unreservedly and sometimes thought might well be the death of him.

“Miss Ransom,” he said, making her name yet another icy weapon. “You cannot possibly believe that if you are indeed carrying my child—the firstborn child of the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli—that I would abdicate my responsibilities. Perhaps your time here as a child—”

“Hardly a child. I was a teenager.”

But Teo did not want to think about the teenager she’d been, too curvy and unconsciously ripe.

Had he noticed her then? He didn’t think he had, but it was all muddled now. The girl he’d tried to ignore and the redheaded witch who had beguiled him into losing his head were tangled around each other and thrust, somehow, into this pale woman who stood before him with her blond hair flowing about her shoulders, not the faintest trace of makeup on her hauntingly pretty face, and eyes the color of bougainvillea.

He was forced to accept that it was not merely his temper that seethed in him.

But he kept speaking, as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Whatever age you were, we clearly failed to impress upon you the simple fact that the members of my family take their bloodlines very seriously indeed.”

“I’m well aware.” And there was something in her gaze then, and in the twist of her lips. It dawned on him, though he could hardly credit it, that the august lineage of his family was not, in fact, impressive to her. “But if I recall correctly, you’re the person who, upon the occasion of our parents’ wedding, loudly proclaimed your deep and abiding joy that my mother was too old to—how did you put it?—oh, yes. ‘Pollute the blood with her spawn.’ I can only assume that any child of mine would be similarly polluted at birth. You should disavow us both now, while you can still remain pristine.”

It took Teo a long moment to identify the hot, distinctly uncomfortable sensation that rolled in him then. At twenty-six he’d had a sense of his own importance, but had imagined his own father would be immortal. His recollection of their parents’ wedding—evidence that his once irreproachable father had lost it completely, a deep betrayal of everything Teo had ever been taught, and a slap against his mother’s memory—was that he had been quietly disapproving. Not that he had actually said the things he’d thought out loud.

“I don’t recall making such a toast,” he said now. Stiffly. “Not because such sentiments are anathema to me, of course. But because it would be impolite.”

“You didn’t make a toast. Heaven forbid. But you did make sure I heard you say it to one of the other guests.” And he might have thought that it hurt her feelings, but she disabused him of that notion in the next moment by aiming that edgy smile of hers at him. “In any case, I thought it would be impolite not to tell you about this pregnancy.”

Teo didn’t care for the way she emphasized that word.

“But it can end here,” Amelia said, merrily. “No legal pollutants to the grand Marinceli line. I’m sure that in time, you’ll find an appropriately inbred, blue-blooded heiress to pop out some overly titled and commensurately entitled heirs who will suit your high opinion of yourself much better.”

Teo had never heard his duties to his title and his family’s history broken down quite so disrespectfully before. It was…bracing, really. Like a blast of cleansing winter air after too long cooped up in an overheated room.

She claimed she was pregnant, and he couldn’t dismiss the claim, because it seemed likely—however impossible and no matter how he wished it untrue—that she really had been the redheaded woman he had sampled the night of the Marinceli Masquerade.

More than sampled. He had been deep inside her, sunk to the hilt, and had woken the following morning wanting much, much more—another unusual sensation.

But this was not the time to lapse off into that cloud of lust—a cloud he now knew was deeply inappropriate and, if she was telling the truth about her pregnancy and his paternity, might well have already changed the course of his meticulously plotted life. It didn’t matter why she’d come here or what game she was playing.

Teo wanted answers.

He prowled away from the desk, moving toward the chairs that sat before the fire. “Come in. Remove your coat. Sit, for a moment, as you deliver these little atom bombs of yours.”

He made that sound like an invitation. A request. It was neither.

Amelia did not move. She stood where she was, still just inside the door, and…scowled at him.

Teo was certainly not used to people contorting their face into any but the most obsequious and servile expressions, but that, too, was not the issue here. He reached one of the chairs, and waved his hand at it.

“Sit, please,” he said, and this time, it sounded far more like the order it was.

Amelia continued to scowl at him in obvious suspicion. But despite that, she moved closer. With obvious reluctance. In itself another insult.

“Most people consider it an honor to be in my presence,” he told her drily.

She sniffed. “They must not know you.”

And Teo’s memory was returning to him, slowly but surely. He normally preferred to pretend those years hadn’t happened. Those embarrassing, American years, when Marie French had draped herself over the priceless furniture, and laughed in that common, coarse way of hers. But now he had the faintest inklings of recollection where the daughter was concerned, and not only about those problematic curves.

Amelia had not faded quietly into the background, as would have been expected of any other girl her age. Not Marie French’s daughter. He had the sudden, surprisingly uncomfortable memory of the uppity little chit mouthing off. Not only to him, which was unaccountable, but on occasion to his father, as well.

Which was unacceptable.

He couldn’t say he much cared for either the recollection or a repeat of it now.

Amelia took her time moving across the floor, and then even more time shrugging out of her coat. Then, not to be outdone—and not to obey him totally under any circumstances—she then held it to her as if it was a shield as she sat down in the armchair Teo had indicated.

He took his time seating himself opposite her, putting together the pieces. If he squinted, he could see the pieces of the wild redhead who had made the tedious Masquerade that tradition insisted he throw far more entertaining than usual. He wished his body wasn’t so delighted at her return. It could only cloud the issue all over again.