Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2016 Books 1-4 - Линн Грэхем, Cathy Williams - Страница 17

CHAPTER SEVEN

WILLOW FELT RESTLESS after Dante had left, unable to settle to anything. Distractedly, she wandered around her apartment—except that never had it felt more like living in someone else’s space than it did right then. It seemed as if the charismatic American had invaded the quiet rooms and left something of himself behind. She couldn’t seem to stop thinking about his bright blue eyes and hard body and the plummeting of her heart as he’d said goodbye.

She slipped on a pair of sneakers and let herself outside, but for once the bright colours of the immaculate flower beds in the nearby park were wasted on her. It was funny how your thoughts could keep buzzing and buzzing around your head, just like the pollen-laden bees which were clinging like crazy to stop themselves from toppling off the delicate blooms.

She thought about the chaste night she’d spent with Dante. She thought about the way he’d kissed her and the way she’d been kissed in the past. But up until now she’d always clammed up whenever a man touched her. She’d started to believe that she wasn’t capable of real passion. That maybe she was incapable of reacting like a normal woman. But Dante Di Sione had awoken something in her the moment he’d touched her. And then walked away just because she’d been ill as a kid.

She bought a pint of milk on her way home from the park and was in the kitchen making coffee when the loud shrill of the doorbell penetrated the uncomfortable swirl of her thoughts. She wasn’t really concentrating when she went into the hall to see who it was, startled to see Dante standing on her doorstep with a look on his face she couldn’t quite work out.

She blinked at him, aware of the thunder of her heart and the need to keep her reaction hidden. To try to hide the sudden flash of hope inside her. Had he changed his mind? Did he realise that he only had to say the word and she would be sliding between the sheets with him—right now, if he wanted her?

‘Did you forget something?’ she said, but the dark expression on his face quickly put paid to any lingering hope. And then he was brushing past her, that brief contact only adding to her sense of disorientation. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Shut the door,’ he said tersely.

‘You can’t just walk in here and start telling me what to do.’

‘Shut the door, Willow,’ he repeated grimly. ‘Unless you want your neighbours to hear what I have to say.’

Part of her wanted to challenge him. To tell him to go right ahead and that she didn’t care what her neighbours thought. Because he didn’t want her, did he? He’d rejected her—so what right did he have to start throwing his weight around like this?

Yet he looked so golden and gorgeous as he towered over her, dominating the shaded entrance hall of the basement apartment, that it was difficult for her to think straight. And suddenly she couldn’t bear to be this close without wanting to reach out and touch him. To trace her finger along the dark graze of his jaw and drift it upwards to his lips. So start taking control, she told herself fiercely. This is your home and he’s the trespasser. Don’t let him tell you what you should or shouldn’t do.

‘I was just making coffee,’ she said with an airiness which belied her pounding heart as she headed off towards the kitchen, aware that he was very close behind her. She willed her hand to stay steady as she poured herself a mug and then flicked him an enquiring gaze. ‘Would you like one?’

‘I haven’t come for coffee.’

‘Then why have you come here, with a look on your face which would turn the milk sour?’

His fists clenched by the faded denim of his powerful thighs and his features darkened. ‘What did you hope to achieve by this, Willow?’ he hissed. ‘Did you imagine that your petulant display would be enough to get you what you wanted, and that I’d take you to bed despite my better judgement?’

She stared at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes. Really.’

‘So you have no idea why it’s all over the internet that you and I are engaged to be married?’

Willow could feel all the blood drain from her face. ‘No, of course I didn’t!’ And then her hand flew to her lips. ‘Unless...’

‘So you do know?’ he demanded, firing the words at her like bullets.

Please let me wake up, Willow thought. Let me close my eyes, and when I open them again he will have disappeared and this will have been nothing but a bad dream.

But it wasn’t and he hadn’t. He was still standing there glaring at her, only now his expression had changed from being a potential milk-curdler, to looking as if he would like to put his hands on her shoulders and throttle her.

‘I may have...’ She took a deep breath. ‘I was talking to my sister about you—or rather, she was interrogating me about you. She asked if we were serious and I tried to be vague—and my aunt overheard us, and started getting carried away with talking about weddings and I didn’t...well, I didn’t bother to correct her.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘And why would you do something like that?’ he questioned dangerously.

Why?

Willow met his accusing gaze and something inside her flared like a small and painful flame. Couldn’t he see? Didn’t he realise that the reasons were heartbreakingly simple. Because for once she’d felt like she was part of the real world, instead of someone just watching from the sidelines. Because she’d allowed herself to start believing in her own fantasy.

‘I didn’t realise it was going to get out of hand like this,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘You think a couple of mumbled words of apology and everything’s going to go back to normal?’ His face darkened again. ‘My assistant has been fielding phone calls all morning and my Paris office has been inundated with reporters asking for a comment. I’m in the process of brokering a deal with a man who is fiercely private and yet it seems as if I am about to be surrounded by my own personal press pack. How do you think that’s going to look?’

‘Can’t you just...issue a denial?’

Dante stared into her soft grey eyes and felt close to exploding. ‘You think it’s that simple?’

‘We could say that I was... I don’t know...’ Helplessly, Willow shrugged. ‘Joking?’

His mouth hardened, and now there was something new in his eyes. Something dark. Something bleak.

‘A denial might have worked, were it not for the fact that some enterprising journalist was alerted to the Di Sione name and decided to telephone my grandfather’s house on Long Island to ask him for his reaction.’ His blue eyes sparked with fury as they captured hers with their shuttered gaze. ‘And despite the time difference between here and New York, it just so happened that my grandfather was suffering from insomnia and boredom and pain, and was more than willing to accept the call. Which is why...’

He paused, as if he was only just hanging on to his temper by a shred.

‘Why I received a call from the old man, telling me how pleased he is that I’m settling down at last. Telling me how lovely you are—and what a good family you come from. I was trying to find the right moment to tell him that there is nothing going on between us, only the right moment didn’t seem to come—or rather, my grandfather didn’t give me a chance to say what I wanted to.’

‘Dante...’

‘Don’t you dare interrupt me when I haven’t finished,’ he ground out. ‘Because using the kind of shameless emotional blackmail he has always used to ensure he gets his own way, my grandfather then told me how much better he’d felt when he heard the news. He said he hadn’t felt this good in a long time and that it was high time I took myself a wife.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She gave him a beseeching look. ‘What else can I say?’

Dante felt a feeling of pure rage flood through him and wondered how he could have been stupid enough to take his eye off the ball. Or had he forgotten what women were really like—had he completely wiped Lucy from his memory? Had it conveniently slipped his mind that the so-called fairer sex were manipulative and devious and would stop at nothing to get what it was they wanted? How easy it was to forget the past when you had been bewitched by a supposedly shy blonde and a sob story about needing a temporary date which had convinced him to go to the damned wedding in the first place.

He stared at the slight quiver of Willow’s lips and at that moment he understood for the first time in his life the meaning of the term a punishing kiss, because that was what he wanted to do to her right now. He wanted to punish her for screwing up his plans with her thoughtlessness and her careless tongue. He watched as a slow colour crept up to inject her creamy skin with a faint blush, and felt his body harden. Come to think of it, he’d like to punish her every which way. He’d like to lay her down and flatten her against the floor and...and...

‘Are you one of those habitual fantasists?’ he demanded hotly. ‘One of those women who goes around pretending to be something she isn’t, to make herself seem more interesting?’

She put her coffee cup down so suddenly that some of it slopped over the side, but she didn’t even seem to notice. Her hands gripped the edge of the table, as if she needed its weathered wooden surface for support.

‘That’s an unfair thing to say,’ she breathed.

‘Why? Because you’re so delicate and precious that I’m not allowed to tell the truth?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I thought you despised being given special treatment just because you’d been ill. Well, you can’t have it both ways, Willow. You can’t play the shrinking violet whenever it suits you—and a feisty modern woman the next. You need to decide who you really are.’

She met his eyes in the silence which followed. ‘You certainly don’t pull your punches, do you?’

‘I’m treating you the same as I would any other woman.’

‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, because you’re not!’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘If I was any other woman, you would have had sex with me last night. You know you would.’

Dante felt the heavy beat of a pulse at his temple and silently cursed her for bringing that up again. Did she think she would wear him down with her persistence? That what Willow wanted, Willow would get. His mouth hardened, but unfortunately, so did his groin. ‘Like I told you. I don’t sleep with virgins.’

She turned away, but not before he noticed the dark flare of colour which washed over her cheekbones and he felt his anger morph inconveniently into lust. How easy it would be to vent his feelings by giving her what she wanted. What he wanted. Even now. Despite the accusations he’d hurled at her and the still-unsettled question of how her indiscretion was going to be resolved, it was sexual tension which dominated the air so powerfully that he couldn’t hardly breathe without choking on it. He couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from her. She looked as brittle as glass as she held her shoulders stiffly, and although she was staring out of the small basement window, he was willing to lay a bet she didn’t see a thing.

But he did. He saw plenty. He could see the slender swell of her bottom beneath the dark denim. He could see the silken cascade of her blond hair as it spilled down her back. Would it make him feel better if he went right over there and slid down her jeans, and laid her down on the kitchen table and straddled her, before feasting on her?

He swallowed as an aching image of her pale, parted thighs flashed vividly into his mind and he felt another powerful tug of desire. On one level, of course it would make them both feel better, but on another—what? He would be stirring up yet more consequences, and weren’t there more than enough to be going on with?

She turned back again to face him and he saw that the flush had gone, as if her pale skin had absorbed it, like blotting paper. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.’

He shook his head. ‘But that’s where you’re wrong, little Miss Hamilton. There is.’

Did something alert her to the determination which had hardened his voice? Was that why her eyes had grown so wary?

‘What? You want me to write to your grandfather and apologise? And then to give some kind of statement to the press, telling them that it was all a misunderstanding? I’ll do all that, if that’s what it takes.’

‘No. That’s not what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that. My grandfather wants to meet the woman he thinks I’m going to marry. And you, my dear Willow, are going to embrace that role.’

The grey of her eyes was darker now, as if someone had smudged them with charcoal and a faint frown was criss-crossing over her brow. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Then let me explain it clearly, so there can be no mistake,’ he said. ‘My grandfather is a sick man and anything which makes him feel better is fine with me. He wants me to bring you to the family home to meet him and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. You can play the fantasist for a little while longer because you are coming with me to Long Island. As my fiancée.’