The Italian's Pregnant Prisoner Read online

  She lowered her head, resting her cheek on the cool surface, trying to cool her heated skin. She waited for him to reprimand her, but it didn’t come.

  She moaned as he claimed her, over and over. The wood bit into her skin, and her scalp prickled. He pulled her hair hard, forcing her to look back up at her reflection in the mirror. She probably would have looked like an angel falling from grace to anyone who saw her now.

  But she thought it looked a lot more like finding salvation. Finding freedom. There was nothing here to be ashamed of. Nothing here to hide.

  When she made helpless sounds of pleasure, she wasn’t ashamed. When the furniture hit the wall as he thrust home, she only wanted more. Wanted the whole room to fall apart around them. A testament to the changing landscape inside of her.

  To them changing their surroundings, rather than being changed by them.

  They had been locked up for too long.

  “Take me,” she whispered. “Please. Harder. I need you.”

  He growled, complying, his movements becoming uncontrolled. Almost violent. And she reveled in it. In the shades that came with making love. The uncivilized. The base and raw. The soft and beautiful. Gentle and rough. Pleasurable and painful.

  He stopped, suddenly, withdrawing from her body and turning her, then picking her up. “Direct me to the bed,” he growled.

  “Straight behind you,” she said, breathless, her legs like jelly.

  Without Rafe holding her she would have melted completely to the floor.

  He crossed the room slowly, and she told him when he’d reached the edge of the bed. He laid them both down, brought her down on top of him, her hair shielding them both, falling down over his chest.

  He reached up, stroking her hair, threading it through his fingers. “My whole world is darkness,” he rasped. “But when you’re with me. When I’m in you, I see light again. And it doesn’t matter that it’s not out here. It doesn’t matter that it’s only in my mind. It’s the only light I have.”

  A tear slid down her cheek, and she was grateful that he couldn’t see it. Because he wouldn’t like her crying for him. Not even a little. Not at all. He would get angry and tell her that he wasn’t fragile. And he wasn’t. She knew.

  Charlotte rocked up and down on his body, driving them both wild. Taking them closer to the edge of madness. Tears flowed freely from her eyes as pleasure twisted inside her stomach, unleashing a tidal wave inside of her.

  His hold on her hips was nearly painful, but she didn’t mind. She welcomed it. Welcomed the lack of control. Welcomed the way that he growled as he thrust deep inside. Welcomed the swear words in both English and Italian that fell from his lips as easily and readily as endearments and encouragements.

  Her world was shrunk down once again. And the only people in it were Rafe and herself. That should frighten her. Because she had lived in a shrunken world before. But it wasn’t full like this one. And it wasn’t her choice. This was a world of her own making.

  A world of their making.

  And it wasn’t about control. It wasn’t about stifling, limiting or oppressing. It was about love. At least for her, it was about love.

  Her release shuttered over her like a pane of glass, the glitter dust shimmering all around her, through her, cutting deep into her skin, and her soul, with the brilliant kind of terrible beauty that went on and on as she pulsed around his hardness.

  His own release came on a feral growl as he slammed her body down on his while thrusting up, spending himself deep within her.

  She collapsed over him, going limp against his chest, her hair a tangled cloud of silk around them. He stroked it, sliding his fingers through the golden strands. She closed her eyes, reveling in the feeling. The way that he touched her made her feel precious. It didn’t make her feel owned. Didn’t make her feel as if she were a thing.

  In his arms, with an uncertain future and a pain in her chest, she felt more herself than she ever had.

  Back when she had been eighteen, when she and Rafe had been little more than children, at least emotionally, she had been lost and saw what it meant to be in love from her point of view alone. The excitement, the danger. It had been real, but it had been one-dimensional.

  He had also been the only man in the vicinity. That was not the case now. She had spent five years traveling all around, and in that time she’d found no one that appealed to her in the same way that Rafe did. She had gone to London to seek him out. She had made her choice. He might have kidnapped her and taken her to a castle; pregnancy might have, from certain points of view, forced them together.

  Except, there was no force involved. Not really.

  She had chosen Rafe a long time ago. And the way things had played out over the past few months had only confirmed that.

  Another tear fell from her eyes, landing on his chest, and this time she knew he would be aware of it. But that was okay. It might make him angry, but then she would simply deal with his anger. Because she wasn’t here for happiness alone. She wasn’t here simply to please him. That wasn’t love.

  Love was all of it. All of him, and all of her. Yes, certain parts of him were jagged and rough, and bits of her were cynical, while some remained woefully inexperienced. But together, she was confident that they could find a way to fit.

  That they could find a way to be everything. For each other. And for themselves.

  “Rafe,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his chest. “I love you.”

  * * *

  Rafe felt as if the world was crashing down around him. Breaking off into tiny pieces that he could not collect as quickly as they were undoing themselves. He felt as if the very walls around them were caving in.

  He moved away from Charlotte, jackknifing into a sitting position, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might explode.

  “You do not love me,” he said, the denial ripped from him.

  “Oh, really? I don’t? Why do you suppose I’m here with you, Rafe? Do you think it’s just because I like castles? Or have I not made my position on those things clear?”

  “You have. But what you feel isn’t love.”

  “Oh, really?” She sounded angry now, and he supposed he couldn’t blame her. But there was a desperate beast roaming through his chest, and he could not control it or stop it. He hated that. Hated that this made him feel not only out of control but utterly and completely at the mercy of something that he could not see or touch with his hands.

  Vision would not have helped in this moment. Even with his sight he could not have dealt with this any easier.

  Love. Love was pain. It was only ever that. It was only ever false hope.

  A beautiful glass figurine held up in front of you and then smashed onto the floor just as it was being placed in your hands.

  A body that functioned just fine until it was pushed over the edge of the balcony and smashed on the ground below. As if it was glass, just like that long-ago statue.

  He was far too familiar with this brand of pain. Far too familiar with the ultimate end.

  How many times did a man have to be shown the fate of love before he began to believe it?

  The end of love—and there was always an end—was pain. Always. And forever.

  “I do not love you,” he said, his voice hard. “So you can call it whatever you wish, and you can demand whatever you want, but you will not get those words from me, Charlotte Adair.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. Of course, his Charlotte would not let this go easily. She never did. She was inquisitive, and she poked at him. She always had.

  She had no sense. Any other woman who had spent her life under the autocratic rule of a madman would be much more afraid of him; that was certain. She would be much less likely to speak her mind, much less likely to risk herself, and yet Charlotte seemed to have never taken on board the fact that her spirit should be dented, if not crushed after her experiences.

  The foolish woman.

  She had no sense to p
rotect herself.

  And it made no sense to him. None at all.

  “It doesn’t need to make sense to you in order for it to be,” he said. “What is love, Charlotte? When has it ever served either of us?”

  “Will you not love your children, Rafe? And if not, then what is the point of laying claim to them? What was the point of laying claim to me? Just to keep us as possessions? In that case, how are you different from my father? You profess that you’re not like him. You swear it to me. And yet, if all you want to do is have me so that you can control me, have your children so that you can control them, how does that not become the same twisted thing that my father had. At the end of all the years, how do you keep it from turning into something sadistic?” She moved away from him, and he felt the bed shift, assumed that she had gotten out of it. He heard bare feet on the stone floor, and it confirmed his suspicions. “I have come to the conclusion that love is the thing that keeps us all human. It is the thing that makes us free. Brave. Good. Otherwise we turn inward. If we cannot love, we become small, selfish things who look out only for our self-interest.”

  “Self-interest is important,” he said. “Without it, God knows I would be dead.”

  “But it can’t be the only thing. Self-interest is the kind of thing that spurs men to build empires that do nothing but wound and oppress. Self-interest is what creates men like my father. Love is what destroys them.”

  “Then perhaps I am more like your father than we think, because all love has ever done is destroy me.”

  “Rafe...”

  “I loved my father. I loved our life. I loved our home. And yet, in the end it netted me nothing except pain. I loved you. And what did it get me?” He laughed, a short, humorless sound. “You say that love gives, but in my experience it only takes. I nearly died for our love, and what did it get me? Where were you in the end? You believed in my defection so easily.”

  “And you believed in mine. But you have such a convenient out here, Rafe, that I can have this argument with you. I was hiding. Afraid for my life. You were physically wounded and absolutely unable to come for me. And I understand that. But the minute...the minute I was no longer afraid for my life I came for you. It was the first thing that I did.”

  He gritted his teeth, shame lashing at him. To accuse Charlotte of abandoning him was unfair all things considered. But he did not feel fair. He felt...broken and raging, and utterly helpless to do anything to stop it.

  “What does love matter, Charlotte? In the end, what does it matter?”

  There was a pause, and then she made a small, choked sound. “It’s everything. Don’t you understand that? It’s absolutely everything.”

  “I understand that it was the key component in the most terrible losses I have suffered. Me believing myself to be loved. Trusting in that. Trusting anyone but myself. I believe in money. I believe in things I can create. Things I can control. Nothing else.”

  “Can you believe in me, Rafe?”

  And he knew. That in many ways he was standing on the edge of that balcony again. Teetering on the edge. That this was one of those moments that would either build something or destroy it. And he had a choice to make.

  But he had been bruised. He had been abandoned. And he had fallen.

  He could not submit himself to that again.

  “I can’t,” he said, his voice rough.

  He heard the soft rustle of fabric, and he knew that she was getting dressed. Knew that she was getting ready to leave him. And it enraged him.

  “So,” he said, his voice hard, “you love me, and yet you’re going to leave me. Abandon me, because I cannot give you exactly what you’ve asked for. How is that love, Charlotte? It seems a weak and selfish thing.”

  He heard shoes on the floor, and he knew that she was ready to leave. That no amount of striking out at her now was going to stop her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it is. All I know is that I have lived in the tower before, Rafe. Alone. Isolated. I have shrunk myself down, hidden my heart. And I just don’t want to do it anymore. I do love you. But I don’t think staying with you and pretending that I don’t is going to do either of us any favors. And I think right now loving you has to mean walking away. Because in order to love you the way that I want to, the way that I need to, I need to take care of myself. My own heart. I need to do that for our children too. I will never block you from seeing them—you have to understand that. I am not taking them from you. But I am taking myself away. Because I can’t...”

  She took a deep breath, and he imagined what she must look like standing there. Frail but strong. And it broke him.

  “I can’t hide anymore,” she continued. “I can’t go back. Having now opened myself up I can’t close myself off again. And I won’t. This world is so cruel. It’s hard and it isn’t fair. But I...I’m brave enough to love you knowing that. I feel very much like I deserve the same. Like I shouldn’t have to accept something less.”

  And then, she was gone. He heard her footsteps carrying her farther and farther away. And he sat there for a moment, unable to decide what to do.

  Then he stood, righting his clothes, hastily making it so that everything important was covered before flinging the door open and tearing off down the hall.

  He didn’t have his cane. He didn’t know which direction she had gone. He strained his ears listening for the sound of her footsteps, but he could hear nothing. Nothing.

  And the darkness closed in around him. Charlotte had been his light, and now she was gone. He had no idea what in hell he was supposed to do now. How he was going to survive. How he was going to move on.

  The simple fact of the matter was he didn’t want to. He wanted to have her with him. Wanted to have her love him without having to give anything up in return. Because that’s all love could ever be to him. Loss.

  But this loss was one far beyond any of the others he had experienced. When he had fallen from the tower, he had been left broken and bleeding, in very much the literal sense. But he felt it just as keenly now. Like he was going to bleed out onto the stone floor of the castle, his heart a ravaged, damaged thing that was hemorrhaging with every beat.

  He heard movement, and he began to run. But he did not realize there was a staircase until he was falling.

  He struck his temple on the edge of something hard, and a blast of pain shot through his skull, down his spine. And for a moment, he knew nothing. Felt nothing.

  And when he came back to himself and opened his eyes, a shaft of light broke the darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHARLOTTE WASN’T HIDING from him. And thankfully, he hadn’t come after her. Or, she tried to tell herself that she was thankful about that. Really. It kind of hurt.

  Because of course initially he had kidnapped her and dragged her to a castle in Germany. Now she was just sitting at her flat in London, right where Rafe could easily find her if he wanted to, and he hadn’t.

  Her love really was repellent, apparently.

  At least her morning sickness was starting to abate a tiny bit. So, there was that. Of course, she still didn’t want to get out of bed.

  She had been heartbroken by Rafe before. But this was different. Because this had been her choice.

  She could have stayed with him forever. She could have stayed with him, and she could have tried to make herself be all right with the fact that he didn’t love her back. She could have kept her love hidden. Could have kept it quiet, never spoken of it. She could have made it the nonissue that it was.

  But she hadn’t done that.

  She had demanded love. Had demanded it, insisted upon it, and had refused to hide the love she felt for him.

  It hurt so badly that convincing herself it was a good thing was difficult, but in her heart, she knew it was right.

  She took a deep breath and opened up her laptop. She had been looking into some things. Enrolling in classes.

  It would be difficult with the twins; she knew it would be. But sh
e wasn’t destitute, and she needed to figure some things out.

  She couldn’t sit around and do nothing.

  Well, she supposed she could, but she would go insane. She needed to have some focus, a goal. She needed to at least figure out what she was interested in. Because she had spent so much of her life unable to do that.

  Perhaps she could do some online schooling while the twins were little. It would give her a chance to find out about what she might want, and that would be helpful. And her education had been so tightly controlled by her father, it would be good for her to expand her horizons.

  She wanted to stay in London, of course, because no matter that Rafe had broken her heart, she needed to be in proximity for the sake of the children.

  She felt a stab in her chest. She was going to be a mother, but she was not going to have a husband. And actually, the husband part didn’t really matter. She didn’t want some generic groom that could be any old cake topper. She wanted Rafe. As her husband, as her boyfriend, as her captor. Pretty much any way she could get him.

  But she had walked away from him.

  She had demanded love, in spite of the fact that part of her wasn’t even certain yet she deserved it. She had certainly never been given it freely in her life.

  Rafe, in fact, had been the only person to give it to her easily. But that had been five years ago, and when her stepmother had killed the dream of the two of them being together, when she had taken his sight from him, she had apparently stolen that last bit of his ability to love, as well.

  She hated her for that. Hated her and hated her father. And hated Rafe’s father for good measure. For throwing him out. For breaking a beautiful thing Rafe loved out of spite. But all of that hate didn’t fix it.

  But then, her love didn’t either, so she felt that reserving a small corner of her heart for anger at those particular people was fair enough.

  She took a deep breath, and looked out the window. She still had seven and a half months before the babies would be born. And she really did need to find something to occupy herself.