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He had gone there knowing he would not leave without searching for, and finding, her.
When he fell silent, Gabriella smiled, though her cheeks were damp with tears.
“Dante,” she whispered, “Dante, meu querido…”
He drew her into his lap. They kissed. And touched. And when that was no longer enough, he took her to his bedroom, undressed her as slowly as if he were unwrapping a perfect gift.
An eternity later, with her lover still deep inside her as she lay sated in his arms in the afterglow of their passion, Gabriella finally faced the truth.
No matter what happened, she would always be in love with Dante Orsini.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WAS decades since Dante had played hooky.
He’d done it a lot in high school. Got into trouble for it, ended up on suspension once but school was dull and the world was exciting and, besides, even the principal had to admit he was too smart a kid to dump.
Or maybe the influence on the principal was fear of his old man.
Either way, he’d cut classes years back then and, yeah, at NYU, but ditching university classes wasn’t the same thing, especially when you could ace the coursework without half trying.
But once he’d had his seemingly useless economics degree in hand and headed for Alaska, those easy days ended. He’d not only shown up at his job each day, he’d worked his ass off, too.
The idea had been to test himself. Get the wild streak that had driven him north out of his system. And to make a lot of money. He’d done that, too, though he’d never been quite sure why it had seemed so important except to know it represented freedom. Total and complete independence, even more so after he’d come home, invested what he’d saved along with his brothers in the company they’d started.
So, eventually, he had it all.
Freedom. Independence. And a lot of money. More money than he’d ever imagined, enough to buy pretty much anything the world had that he might possibly want.
And yet, Dante thought as he drew Gabriella into his arms on the dance floor of a tiny club in the East Village, and yet he had never truly realized that what a man most wanted carried no price tag at all.
Not just a man.
Him.
How could life change so fast? Ten days ago, ask him what made him happy and he’d have said, well, his work. His family. The call last night telling him there was a ’58 Ferrari Berlinetta coming on the market in Palm Beach. And women, of course. An entire BlackBerry of them.
Redheads, blondes, brunettes, all beautiful, all fun, all exciting.
For a little while, anyway.
The music went from fast to slow and easy. Not that it mattered. From the second they’d hit the dance floor, he’d held Gabriella close, his arms tightly around her, her arms around his neck, her face buried against his throat.
The truth was, nothing was as exciting as this. Gabriella, in his arms. In his life.
How could he ever have been foolish enough to have let her go?
She made him happy. And he made her happy. She’d gone from fragile and looking as if she were made of glass that might shatter, as she had in Brazil, to the woman she had been in the past. Smiling. Full of life. More beautiful than seemed possible.
She was her own woman.
And she was his.
He awoke to her softly whispered “Good morning,” fell asleep with her in his arms. He was never without her. They talked about everything under the sun, agreed on some things, agreed to disagree on others. They read the papers over breakfast, drove out to Long Island and walked the beach at Fire Island, empty and beautiful on a cool fall day.
At first Gabriella would remind him that they’d hired Stacia so she could get in touch with her agent, have him line up some interviews…
“Could that be better than this?” he’d ask her softly, and her answer was always in her kiss.
Sometimes they didn’t talk at all. They just were together. He’d never before been with a woman and found the silence between them comfortable and easy.
And then there was Daniel.
He still didn’t know much about kids, but even he could tell that the little guy was, well, one fine-looking baby. And, better still, brilliant. Those ba-ba-ba’s had grown to include ga-ga-ga’s.
The kid would probably talk before he was a year old. Plus, the way he reached for that mobile above his crib, watched it with such obvious curiosity…Oh, yeah. Daniel was smart, and not only because he was his.
Which he was. Absolutely. How could he have ever doubted it?
“Dante?”
This had been the best week of his life. He was happy. Such a simple word, especially from a man who’d never thought much about his feelings, but—
“Dante!”
He blinked, looked down into Gabriella’s smiling face. “What?” he said, and she gave a soft little laugh.
