Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret / Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal. Dani Collins

had always imagined, before then, that a kiss would take something from her. And over the past six years she’d told herself rather darkly that she’d been all too right about that. But the truth she’d forgotten—or she’d made herself forget—was that his kiss had made her feel…bigger. Better. Brighter and more powerful than she had ever been before. Like some kind of shooting star.

      Here, now, was no different.

      She could feel herself shooting wild across a dark night sky, lighting up the world with the force of her longing.

      He kissed her, and she kissed him back as if she’d been waiting all this time for him to come back. As if she’d wanted this. And with every scrape of his tongue against hers, she felt that same light. That heat.

      Cecilia did the only thing she could. She poured all her lost hope, all her misery and worry, anxiety and loneliness, into the way she kissed him back. She kissed him with all the pride she’d stored up inside her for the little boy he’d never known. The love and the odd moments of gratitude that Pascal had come into her life and left her the greatest gift, no matter the cost.

      Everything he’d missed. Everything she’d wished for. She kissed him and she kissed him; she poured it all into him, and got passion in return.

      Passion and intensity. Greed and delight.

      His hands moved, tracing their way down her back as if he was reacquainting himself with her shape. Her strength.

      She shifted, her palms moving down the front of his shirt to find him harder. More solid. And even hotter than she’d let herself recall. It wasn’t until she found her way to his belt buckle that she remembered where they were.

      Not just in this valley, not far from the abbey that had been her childhood home and where she would never, now, be the nun she’d always imagined she would.

      More than that, they were standing in the church where she’d learned how to pray.

      She was defiling herself all over again.

      Cecilia wrenched herself back, tearing her mouth from his and pushing against his wall of a chest with her hands. But he was so much bigger and tougher than he had been six years ago, and she only managed to create about a centimeter of space between them.

      Still, it was enough for reality to charge in and horrify her.

      “That will never happen again,” she managed to say.

      She thought he would laugh, or say something arrogant and cutting. But all Pascal did was gaze down at her, an odd expression on his starkly beautiful face.

      “I’m not so certain,” he said after a moment.

      She pushed against him again, and this time he let her go. And she didn’t have it in her to explore the reasons why that made her heart clench. She felt the end of the pew behind her and gripped it. As if anchoring herself here could save her. As if she hadn’t blasphemed in every possible way.

      Again.

      When she knew better.

      “Thank you for reminding me that the chemistry between us is dangerous and upsetting,” she said, and she made herself meet his gaze when it was the last thing she wanted to do. “It leads nowhere I want to go.”

      “I had convinced myself I’d imagined it,” he said. And she might have taken offense at that if he hadn’t sounded so…disgruntled. “I told myself I was weak. Out of my head with pain and recovery and healing. That was the only explanation that made sense.”

      He lifted his hand to his face, but this time, instead of running his fingers over his scars, he ran them over his mouth. Which reminded Cecilia that she could taste him on her tongue.

      Damn him. And damn her for surrendering so easily once more.

      Pascal was still studying her as if she’d turned into a creature he couldn’t name, right there before his eyes. “But it turns out you’re more potent than I gave you credit for.”

      “I do not wish to be potent,” Cecilia managed to get out. “And I do not want any credit. What I want is for you to forget me. The way you already have, for years, before you came back here.”

      That mouth of his twisted. “But that’s the trouble, cara. I did not forget.”

      Cecilia hated this. Him. And most of all, herself.

      Because she should have been better prepared for something like this. She’d been on edge when those other men had come and sniffed around the abbey asking questions about Pascal Furlani’s famous car accident, but she hadn’t really believed that Pascal himself would follow. She’d assumed that if he sent anyone else, it would be more emissaries of the officious variety. Attorneys, she’d supposed, to make her sign documents that would renounce any claim to him she might have had. She’d been ready for that. She prepared stinging speeches that she could deliver to his men, making it clear that she wanted nothing from him and never had and never would.

      She hadn’t expected him.

      And she certainly hadn’t expected that he would kiss her again.

      Because it cut the knees straight out of her argument, not to mention all her prepared rebukes. It reminded her too well of the reasons she’d given up everything she knew for him.

      The truth was, it had been years since she could even imagine how it was that she’d allowed a torn-up soldier to turn her from her chosen path so easily. Sometimes she would sit up at night, when Dante was sound asleep and looked angelic, instead of the whirl of holy terror and inexhaustible energy he could be when he was awake. She would gaze at him, allowing herself to feel that flood of maternal love—but still completely unable to understand how it all happened.

      How had a person as quiet and contained as she was…do what she did?

      Her life had been divided into before Pascal and after him, and the further she got away from those stolen months, the less he seemed real in her memories. There were a thousand stories about the fecklessness of youth, after all. Everyone knew that young girls were easy pickings, and as embarrassing as it might have been for Cecilia to think of herself in that way, that was the story she’d accepted about herself. That was the story she told, when it was necessary to tell it at all, here in a small valley filled with people who had known her since the day she’d arrived here and could tell her story for her. And often did.

      It was a hard shock to discover that all she’d done was mute the man.

      Because the reality of Pascal was in full, living color. And his kiss was electrifying.

      And Cecilia understood that she’d been lying to herself for a long, long time.

      She found she didn’t know quite how to process any of that.

      “This is all irrelevant,” she said now. She moved away from him, aware that her body no longer felt like her own. That irritated her almost more than the rest, because it had taken her so long to get it back. There had been Pascal, then Dante, and years before she’d become simply Cecilia again. “Feel free to send your lawyers. Do your worst. I can’t say I care.”

      “Lawyers?” He sounded mystified, though she didn’t look back at him to see. “What do my lawyers have to do with anything?”

      “Rich men are renowned for going to great lengths to make sure they don’t have to give away any of their money, for any reason. Call it what you like. I’m not going to fight you.”

      “I’m not following you.” And his voice changed as he said that. Less the man as surprised as she was at the way that kiss had exploded between them and more…dangerous. It sent a shiver down her spine. Because suddenly, she had no trouble imagining him as a leader of men. A captain of his industry in every regard. “Was I planning to give away my money in some capacity?”

      “I’m sure you’ll have a battalion of documents for me to sign. So you don’t have to claim Dante. And so I will never make any