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“I hate you, Dante Russo. Hate you. Hate you. Hate—”
He took her mouth in a hard, deep kiss, one that demanded acquiescence. Tally fought it. Fought him as he cupped her face, held her prisoner to his plundering mouth until she knew she would kill him when he turned her free, kill him…
And then, slowly, his kiss changed. His lips softened on hers. His tongue teased. His hands slid into her hair and she felt it again, after all these years, all this anguish and pain. The slow, dangerous heat low in her belly. The thickening of her blood. The need for him, only him…
Dante pushed her away.
“You belonged to me,” he said roughly. “Only to me. I could have you again if I wished.” His mouth twisted. “But why would I want another man’s leavings?”
Then he put up his collar, opened the door and strode into the teeth of the storm.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW MANY TIMES could a man be subjected to the saccharine nonsense of Christmas before he lost what remained of his sanity?
The holiday was still three weeks away and Dante was already tired of the music pouring out of shops and car radios. He’d seen enough artificial evergreens to last a lifetime, and he was damned close to telling the next sidewalk Santa exactly what he could do with his cheery ho-ho-ho.
New York, his city, belonged to tourists from Thanksgiving through the New Year. They descended on the Big Apple like fruit flies, choking the streets with their numbers, unaware or uncaring of one of the basic rules of Manhattan survival.
Pedestrians were not supposed to dawdle. And they were expected to ignore Walk and Don’t Walk signs.
New Yorkers moved briskly from point A to point B and when they reached a street corner, they took one quick look and kept going. It was up to the trucks and taxis that hurtled down the streets to avoid them.
Tourists from Nebraska or Indiana and only-God-knew-where stopped and stared at the displays in department store windows in such numbers that they blocked the sidewalk. They formed a snaking queue around Radio City Music Hall, standing in the cold with the patience of dim-witted cattle. They clustered around the railing in Rockefeller Center, sighing over the too big, too gaudy, too everything Christmas tree that was the center’s focal point.
As far as Dante was concerned, Scrooge had it right.
Bah, humbug, indeed, he thought as his chauffeur edged the big Mercedes through traffic.
The strange thing was, he’d never really noticed the inconvenience of the holiday until now. Basically, he’d never really noticed the holiday at all.
It was just another day.
As a child, Christmas had meant—if he were lucky—another third-hand winter jacket from the Jesuits that, you hoped, was warmer than the last. By the time he’d talked, connived and generally wheedled his way into a management job at a construction company where he’d spent a couple of years wielding a jackhammer, he was too busy to pay attention to the nonsense of canned carols and phony good cheer. And after he arrived in New York, earning the small fortune he’d needed to start building his own empire had taken all his concentration.
The last dozen years, of course, he’d had to notice Christmas. Not for himself but for others. Those with whom he did business and the ones who worked for him—the doormen, the elevator operators, the porters at the building in which he lived, all expected certain things of the holiday.
So Dante put in the requisite appearance at the annual office party his P.A. organized. He authorized bonuses for his employees. He wrote checks for the doormen, the elevator operators and the porters. He thanked his P.A. for the bottle of Courvoisier she inevitably gave him and gave her, in return, a gift certificate to Saks.
Somehow, he’d never observed the larger picture.
Had tourists always descended on the city, inconveniencing everything and everyone? They must have.
Then, how could he not have noticed?
He was noticing now, all right. Dio, it was infuriating.
The Mercedes crept forward, then stopped. Crept forward, then stopped. Dante checked his watch, muttered a well-chosen bit of gutter Sicilian and decided he was better off walking.
“Carlo? I’m getting out. I’ll call when I need you.”
He opened the door to a dissonant blast of horns, as if a man leaving an already-stopped automobile might somehow impede the nonexistent flow of traffic. He slipped between a double-parked truck and a van, stepped onto the sidewalk and headed briskly toward the Fifth Avenue hotel where he was lunching with the owner of a private bank Russo International had just absorbed.
He’d be late. He hated that. Lateness was a sign of weakness.
Everything he did lately was a sign of weakness.
He was short-tempered. Impatient. Hell, there were times he was downright rude. And he was never that. Demanding, yes, but he asked as much of himself as he did of those who reported to him, but the past couple of weeks…
