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The tidal wave of longing hit me hard, spreading heat throughout my body. The desire to lean in to the caress, to accept his praise, his protection, almost more than I could bear. Hadn’t I dreamt about this happening every night since I’d left La Villa Paradis? That he would come back, that he would claim me, that he would tell me he still cared about me, that one day he might take me back. That he hadn’t meant to destroy me the way he had.
But what hit me harder was the tidal wave of fury. The fury I’d tried so hard to locate three weeks ago when he’d dumped me—because his behaviour then hadn’t been a mistake. It had been callous and deliberate and unnecessarily brutal.
Fury spread through my body like wildfire, torching everything in its wake—the yearning, the confusion, the anguish, the hollow empty loneliness, the weeks of soul-searching and recriminations—until all that was left was the burning desire to hurt him the way he’d hurt me.
I slapped at his hand, hard enough to make him grunt.
‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ I yelled. ‘How dare you ask me about my sex life...? You...’ I was so furious I could barely speak. ‘You have no right.’
‘I have every right,’ he barked back, but I could see my outburst had shocked him—almost as much as it had shocked me. ‘You’re my employee,’ he said, but for once he didn’t sound sure or indomitable. Instead he sounded tense and wary. ‘And I was your first lover. I’m trying to protect you. Alexi is a notorious playboy. He uses women and then he discards them, he...’
‘This has nothing to do with Mr Galanti,’ I interrupted him, finally finding the words I should have found three weeks ago. ‘And don’t you dare throw my virginity back in my face again. If I was ever innocent I’m certainly not any more. And if you wanted to protect me, why didn’t you protect me from you, Dante?’ I pointed out, just in case he’d forgotten that salient point.
Tears rolled down my cheeks and I scrubbed them away, but I wasn’t ashamed of them any more and I wasn’t afraid to let him see them.
‘Bella, please don’t cry,’ he said in an agonised whisper and reached for me again. But I stepped back.
‘No,’ I said, firmly and succinctly, even though my heart was ripping open inside my chest. ‘You left me, Dante. Which means you don’t get to come storming back into my life three weeks later, telling me who I can and cannot sleep with. You don’t get to call me bella, or touch me as if you own me, or look at me as if you care about me when we both know you don’t. You hurt me,’ I said, my breath shuddering out as the tears mercifully stopped. ‘I know it was only five days. I know I overreacted, probably romanticised it too much. That it was too soon. But those feelings were still real. I was falling in love with you and you knew... And still you treated me like nothing.’
‘You were an innocent. I only discarded you to protect you,’ he said, his voice raw with emotion now too, and I could see he actually believed it—which only made the heartache worse.
‘No, you didn’t,’ I said, the tears still lodged in my throat as I realised how hopeless this situation was and had always been. He still wanted me and I still wanted him—we could have had so much, could have built on those five glorious days together—but it wasn’t my insecurities that had held us back, as a part of me had always believed—it was his. ‘You did it to protect yourself,’ I said.
I clasped my arms around my waist to control the trembles threatening to tear me apart.
‘I don’t know what your mother did to you, Dante,’ I said and he stiffened, his eyes becoming shadowed and distant, as I hit the raw nerve I knew would always lie between us. ‘But, whatever it is,’ I said, ‘I hope one day you can get over it.’
I walked past him. I had to get out of here, to get away from him. It had been a mistake taking this job. I’d done it for all the wrong reasons. I’d wanted to be able to see him again, to be near him, even if he didn’t want me any more. I’d wanted the chance to impress him, to soak up his approval. I had convinced myself in the last three weeks my susceptibility to Dante’s charms had been a result of the skewed legacy of being my mother’s daughter, being fatherless—that I had an unconscious need for male attention I had never acknowledged before. But I realised now it was more personal than that... And the mistakes made had been his as much as mine. He was right, I had been innocent and naïve and maybe too gullible. He’d been my first lover and my first love—and he was an overpowering man. But he had used me, and it was way past time I protected myself against him and the overwhelming effect he had on me.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded. ‘You’re still my employee.’
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘I quit.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘YOU NEED TO go get her back, Dante. Apologise, grovel, do whatever you have to do, but we need her here.’
‘No,’ I said calmly to Joe, even though calm was the last thing I felt.
‘Why not?’ My casino manager leaned forward in the chair on the other side of my desk, about to launch into the diatribe I’d been hearing for three days now, ever since Edie had walked out of the casino, still wearing the dress I’d bought her. The dress had been returned a day later, along with the rest of the wardrobe I’d ordered from Nina Saint Jus—but she hadn’t.
The grinding pain in the pit of my stomach, that deep well of emptiness and guilt which had only got bigger since our showdown in the booth, grew another few centimetres.
‘Because there’s no point in apologising,’ I said.
‘Of course there is,’ Joe said. ‘You behaved like a dick. If you...’
‘It’s not that I won’t apologise; it’s that it would do no good,’ I clarified, feeling unbearably weary. I’d had three more sleepless nights since Edie had walked away from me. But this time, instead of hot, sweaty dreams of Edie, my nights had been filled with cold, rain-spattered nightmares—the same nightmares that had haunted me throughout my childhood. My mother’s face, sad and pleading. My childish terror as it had dawned on me that she was never coming back.
The questions that had tormented me then had woken me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
Why wasn’t I enough? Why hadn’t she loved me? Why had she abandoned me?
But this time the answer had been all too obvious.
Edie had abandoned me because I was a selfish coward. I’d been too scared to reach for the golden ring, had refused to trust my feelings and hers, because of something that had happened over twenty years ago. Edie had called it exactly right. I had discarded her to protect myself and this was the inevitable result. I’d destroyed what we might have had, only to realise what it was I’d lost when it was way too late to get it back.
‘That’s nuts!’ Joe said. ‘She needs this job—she’s got a mortgage to pay. And she’s brilliant at it. If you just tell her you’ll never behave like a dick again she...’
