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But then, he thought that she was not a virgin. Thought that she might know something about how to please a man, and on that score he was going to be very disappointed.
“Do you really want me?” Her voice was small, and she despised it.
“Minerva,” he said, his voice rough and hard. “Of all the things to come out of this ridiculous ruse of yours, the most disturbing is that I cannot look at you as I once did. I was content to leave you in the category of child. My friend’s younger sister, the daughter of my mentor, but you insist on making yourself unique and singular. A woman who belongs only to yourself, and now, to me. I don’t have a choice.”
“You don’t have a choice in what?”
“Wanting you. It is damned inconvenient, and I was content to stay immune to you. How... How have you made it so that I’m not? It makes no sense.”
“Because I’m not your type,” she said, feeling breathless.
“Not at all,” he said, advancing on her. “I like women with dramatic curves, who wear makeup and style their hair.” He reached out and took a lock of her own hair between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing it absently.
“I like women who respond to my touch with enthusiasm and not trepidation. I definitely don’t like women who tell the world I have fathered their children and force me into a fait accompli. And yet somehow... Here we are.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her against his chest.
And they were right back where they’d been on the beach.
He wasn’t just kissing her, he was consuming her. And she didn’t know where she began and he ended. Didn’t know what she wanted from all of this. Except that all she wanted was for it to keep going. For it to never stop.
No, kissing wasn’t what she had imagined it might be. It was more. It was everything. It was physical. It consumed her. It made her doubt everything she had ever believed about herself and gave birth to entirely new ideas there on the spot.
It was magic. Dark, chaotic magic that she didn’t know how to contend with. His hands didn’t stay still. They roamed over her body, exploring dips and hollows in her spine, her waist, beneath her breasts.
He wasn’t touching her anywhere outrageously intimate, and yet it almost seemed more scandalous for it.
She had been held in a man’s embrace only one other time. And he had gone straight for the obvious places, his hand beginning to move to her breast even as his other hand had already moved down to grab her bottom.
She knew all about those obvious things, and she had found them so base and obvious they had contributed to the utter turnoff of the entire situation.
But Dante managed to take something base and elevate it. To make it feel like high art rather than simple pornography. It bewitched her. Mesmerized her. Made her into something she didn’t recognize. But maybe that was a good thing.
Because she had never been all that entranced by what she did recognize inside herself. But he made her feel new.
He made her feel beautiful. And perhaps this would make it so.
He continued to kiss her, continued to explore her in that innocuous way that didn’t feel innocuous at all.
She breathed in deep, inhaling the scent of him, the sensation of him as his mouth continued to move over hers.
Were they really going to have sex?
Was she really going to lose her virginity to Dante Fiori?
Her husband.
For a moment she was convinced that she had escaped the real world and slipped in between the pages of a book.
Because this was something that would happen to one of her heroines, but not something that would happen to her. This deep, rich, exciting experience that was all tongue and teeth and glory.
The hands of the man whom she cherished most, no matter that she had tried to pretend she didn’t.
The kiss was all fraught, endless glory, and she reveled in it.
Then, he picked her up, cradling her against him as he carried her past her bedroom and toward his.
She hadn’t set foot in Dante’s bedroom.
