LITMIR.BIZ

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dessert she’d refused, lest her figure be seen as anything but perfectly trim while clad in the finest couture, the better to reflect both wealthy families of which she was the unwilling emblem.

      Renzo had been lazy laughter and impossible fire, intense and overwhelming, vast and uncontainable and so much more than she’d been ready for that she still woke in the night in a rush, her heart pounding, as if he was touching her again—

      “Why am I here?”

      He sounded impatient. Bored, even. Something in her recoiled instantly, because she knew that particular tone of voice. Her father used it. So did her fiancé. They were busy, serious men with no time for the frothy, insubstantial concerns of the woman they traded between them like so much chattel.

      She wasn’t a person, that tone of voice told her. She was made of contracts and property, the distribution of wealth and the expectations of others. Hers wasn’t a life, it was a list of obligations and hefty consequences if she failed to meet each one.

      The old Sophie would have slunk off, duly chastened. She would never have come out here in the first place.

      But that Sophie was gone, burned to a crisp in Monaco. Forever ruined, in every sense of the term.

      This Sophie tried to find her spine, and then straightened it.

      “You contacted me.”

      “Is that the game you wish to play, cara?” Renzo lifted an indolent shoulder, then dropped it. “You sent me newspaper clippings of your engagement. The wedding of the year, I am to understand. A thousand felicitations, of course. Your fiancé is a lucky man indeed.”

      Sophie didn’t particularly care for the way he looked at her as he said that, but she was too busy reeling to respond to it.

      “Newspaper clippings...?”

      But even as she asked the question, she knew.

      She hadn’t sent Renzo anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to her, no matter how many times she woke in the night with his taste in her mouth. But she knew someone who would have.

      Poppy.

      Dear, darling Poppy, Sophie’s best friend from their school days. Romantic, dreamy Poppy, who wanted nothing but happiness for Sophie.

      And who had never seemed to understand that for all Sophie’s advantages, and she knew they were many, happiness was never on offer.

      “Don’t be tiresome, my dear,” her mother had sighed years ago, when Sophie, trembling, had dared to ask why her own choices were never given the slightest bit of consideration. “Choice is a word that poor people use because they have nothing else. You do. Try being grateful, not greedy.”

      Sophie had tried. And over the years she’d stopped longing for things she knew she could never have.

      That wasn’t Poppy’s way.

      “You demanded I meet you here,” Renzo was saying, a different sort of laziness in his voice then. This one had an edge. “And so, naturally, I placed my entire life on hold at such a summons and raced to your side like a well-trained hound.”

      He made a show of looking around, but there was nothing for miles but fields and hedges. No prying eyes. No concerned relatives who would claim to their dying day they only had Sophie’s best interests at heart.

      The stately house where her wedding was to be held in the morning was over the next hill and Sophie, who had never sneaked anywhere in her life before that night in Monaco, had felt a sickening combination of daring and scared as she’d crept out of her room and run from the hall tonight.

      It was pathetic, really.

      How had she lived twenty-six long years and failed to recognize how sad and small her life really was?

      Renzo wasn’t finished. “Now that we’re both caught up, perhaps you can tell me why I’ve been called upon to take part in this latest episode of what appears to be a rather melodramatic and messy life?”

      Sophie swallowed. The words melodramatic and messy had never applied to her life. Not ever. Not until she’d met him. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

      That was the real story of her life.

      Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t understand how Renzo didn’t hear it.

      His mouth moved, then, but she would never call that a smile. Then he made it worse, reaching over to take her chin in his firm hand, the buttery leather of the gloves he wore only highlighting the intensity of his grip.

      And it was the same inside her as it had always been, gloves or no.

       Fire.

      “What lies will you tell me tonight, I wonder?” he asked, low and dark. Ominous.

      “You found me,” Sophie said, trying to keep her feet solid beneath her. Trying to ignore the wildfire heat ignited in her. Again. “I... I didn’t want...”

      She didn’t know how to do this.

      He had texted her out of nowhere, as far as she’d known.

      This is Renzo. You must want to meet.

      Now, standing outside on a cool, wet night, Sophie had to ask herself what she thought he had been offering, exactly. Blackmail?

      That was what she’d told herself. That was why she’d come.

      But she understood, now that he was touching her again, that she’d been lying to herself.

      And now she had to lie to him. Again.

      The trouble was, Sophie had never told so many lies before in her life. What would be the point? Too many people knew too much about her, and everyone was more than happy to compare notes and then decide what was in her best interest without her input. Therefore, she’d always done exactly what was expected of her. She’d done well at school because her father had made it clear that she was expected to be more than simply an ornament.

      “Clever conversation and sparkling wit are not something one is either born with or not, Sophie,” her father had told her when she’d been barely thirteen. “They’re weapons in an arsenal and I expect you to be an excellent shot.”

      Sophie had made certain she was. After school, she’d involved herself with only carefully vetted charities, so as never to cause her father or future husband any cause for concern about what she’d done with her time.

      Or more to the point, her name.

      No carousing. No scandals. Nothing that could be considered a stain.

      She’d even agreed to marry a man she thought of as her own, personal brick wall—though far less warm and approachable than any slab of stone—on her eighteenth birthday.

      Well. Agreed was a strong word.

      Randall Grant, the sixth Earl of Langston, had been her father’s choice for her since she was in the cradle. Her agreement, such as it was, had never been in doubt.

      Dal, as Randall was known to friends and family and the girl he’d been given, had produced the Langston family ring and handed it to her with a few cold words about the joining of their families. Because that was all that mattered.

      Not Sophie herself. Not her feelings.

      Certainly not love, which Sophie thought no one in either her family or Dal’s had believed was real or of any import for at least the last few centuries.

      And her reaction—her attempt at defiance—in the face of the life that had been presented to her as a fait accompli had comprised of a single deep breath, which Sophie had held for just a moment longer than she should have as Dal stood there, holding the ring before her.

      Just a moment, while she’d imagined what might happen if she refused him—

      But

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