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“Make love to you until your legs won’t hold you up.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Is that a yes?”
As he asked the question, Dante dropped kisses on her brow, her eyelids, her mouth, before gently brushed his sharp black stubble against her ridiculously sensitive neck. “That’s cheating,” she gasped.
“I play to win,” he reminded her.
She looked up. “I love you with all my heart.”
“Marriage to the Romani chieftain could be quite demanding,” Dante warned.
“I’m counting on it,” she assured him. “What if I need more time to think?”
“Pretending reluctance doesn’t suit you—but if you do need more time…” He shrugged. “We’ll just have to work out how to fill that time.”
“Is that so?” Rose whispered.
“Yes, that’s so,” Dante said as he wrapped his arms around her, making further discussion impossible. Teasing her with brushes of his firm, sexy lips against her kiss-bruised mouth, he nuzzled her face while his hands worked some magic that had her knees buckling beneath her so he had to support her as she sank onto the soft, mossy ground. Tongues touched, tangled, retreated, and this play led to deeper kisses, and when Dante’s hands were more demanding, she was too. Dante had only to nudge his way between her thighs for her to lose control.
“Do I take Yes! Yes! Yes! as your answer?” he suggested dryly.
It was a good few moments before she could respond to that. “You’ve got your answer. I want to be your wife…though I might need more convincing…”
Positioning her to his liking, Dante began to convince.
“You are a very bad man,” she said when he pinned her wrists above her head so he could suckle and thrust at the same time.
“That I am,” he agreed, sinking deep.
Epilogue
Six crazy brothers arrived from Ireland, each one better looking and more outrageous than the next, though it was Niall, the roughest of the six, who brought tears to Rose’s eyes when he produced the photograph of her mother and told her that she looked just like her in her wedding dress. “You clean up well,” he observed, holding the photograph up so he could compare his mother and Rose. “She’d be proud of you today, Rose.”
“Thank you,” she managed, biting her lip hard. Her bridesmaids would not be pleased if she cried after they’d expended so much effort on turning her from a stable lad into a Romani queen, as they called her. “You’d better go and look after Pa. He’s already into the whisky, and he’s supposed to be supporting me up the aisle, not the other way around.”
With a last fond grin, Niall left Rose to continue getting ready for her wedding. She laughed as she closed the door on her suite of rooms at the hacienda. It sounded as if the entire village of Crackallen was holding a party downstairs ahead of the marriage celebrations. “I hope there’ll be someone left standing by the time I arrive at the ceremony.”
“There will be,” Celina, one of the bridesmaids, assured her. “Dante wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“They’ll soon sober up when they see you,” Rose’s friend Amber added, exchanging an appreciative glance with Celina. “You look beautiful.”
“I feel odd in a floaty dress, and Niall didn’t even laugh.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?” Celina insisted as she and Amber helped to adjust Rose’s veil.
“If I leave you to your own devices, you’ll turn up to our wedding in breeches and a pair of filthy muckers,” Dante had teased Rose before piloting one of his smaller jets to the romance capital of the world for a whirlwind tour of all the top designers.
Proving, Rose remembered, smiling a secret smile, that it was perfectly possible to make love on the Eiffel Tower, providing you chose the moment well.
She could hardly believe the finished effect when she stared at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She was transformed, from tomboy and homespun Irish horse whisperer, into—well, if not quite a queen, as her friends would have her believe, then at least into something approaching a discreetly made-up woman with shining hair in a fabulous dress. A woman with very glamorous underwear she had completely forgotten to put on, Rose realized when she spotted the pink-and-white-striped box, packed to the brim with the most exotic flimsies made of silk and lace in the whole wide world—courtesy of the Romani chieftain, who would expect a fashion show on their wedding night, Dante had informed her.
Hmm, Rose mused. That might have to wait. She had other plans—and they didn’t include putting on clothes.
“I’ve never seen such a beautiful dress,” Celina commented as she reverently traced the glittering embroidery on Rose’s wedding gown. “Tell us the story of where you found it again,” she begged.
Rose grinned. “We’d wandered off the beaten track one starlit evening in Paris and found ourselves in Montparnasse, one of the more bohemian quarters of the city. I was drawn to this tiny boutique because there was an old lady sewing on an ancient
