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She dared not turn. In fact, she went to swish open the thin curtains under the drapes.
‘Leave them,’ Dante said. ‘I don’t want anyone seeing in.’
‘Fine,’ Alicia croaked, and dropped her hand to her side. Even with her back to him she could feel his eyes upon her. She tensed, as if an ice cube had been dropped down the back of her uniform and melted on contact.
‘Just whatareyou doing here, Alicia?’
Was it Dante or a VIP guest asking her this very direct question? Because if it was the latter then he had every right to be furious at her scheming ways. And if it was the former...
She should go now—give him a polite smile, leave that damn tip he had tossed on the bed and walk out. Yet it felt as if it were Dante asking the question...
Her legs would not move and she dared not turn, because that switch had been tripped again—only Alicia was struggling to locate the ‘off’ button now!Help, she silently begged the Duomo again. Only it was a rather different request now—Please don’t let me fall back under his spell.
‘Alicia...’
Dante’s low drawling of her name felt like a feather brushing from the nape of her neck right down to the very base of her spine. And further down. Alicia could actually feel a pulse throbbing between her legs.
‘What?’ she asked, still staring out at the view, because it was so much easier than turning around. For she knew that voice—it called to her in a place that only he knew.
‘Any minute now I’ll wake up and it will be that doddery old butler in here and this strange coincidence won’t have occurred.’
Dante’s voice filled the strange silence that hovered between them.
‘Perhaps.’ She attempted to shrug, saw the cathedral blurring before her eyes.
And then thesciroccomight well have just arrived in this suite, for it felt as if she were breathing those hot African winds that swept across Sicily at times...the same hot air that had wrapped around them a decade ago.
‘It is strange...’ Alicia attempted vainly, still clinging on to her lie, for it was the only thing she had to hold on to as the pull of Dante lured her.
‘Tell me what you’re doing,’ he said.
She did not know how to. And when hate should surely be dominating, desire overrode it. The woman he had made her—the woman only Dante knew—was frantic to see again the navy of his eyes, her senses flooded with the master’s return.
The realisation should make her want to weep—finding out, a decade on, that her buried feelings had not diminished one iota, had merely been hibernating, and now they’d awoken, blinking at the sun after the bleakest of winters.
Alicia stood frozen, not knowing quite what to do with the surge in sensation. She looked out at the new morning as she relived a day of old, caught in a time warp between past and present. The future rendered irrelevant.
It was the oddest moment in her life as a decade of anger was displaced by the hot rise of passion. Every thought, every practised moment evaporated, and all that remained was the blissful recall of naked, heated, slippery bodies entwined, taking shelter from the storm and creating their own...
‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing,’ Dante prompted, but she gave him no response.
She could feel his eyes roaming her body, as if he was aware of the tumult within her despite her still stance.
Walk away, Alicia, she told herself.Get out now.
He wasn’t going to enquire further about her, nor was he going to ask about Beatrice. Certainly he wasn’t going to invite her for a drink...
This was the very end of them.
Only this time it would be on her terms, Alicia decided. She would be the one to walk away, as he had so easily done, without so much as a backward glance.
‘I think about that day sometimes,’ Dante said.
And even with her back to him she heard the edge of surprise in his voice and knew that he was frowning, as if the information he’d just imparted had surprised him.
Indeed, it probably had, for Dante was not one for sharing his thoughts. Nor was he one to be lied to...nor swayed by feminine wiles.
‘So do I,’ Alicia responded, her voice the husky one only he had ever heard.
