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‘Meaning?’
‘You’d have let me take you bare. You didn’t want me to wear one last time either.’
She refused to examine that memory now, but she understood his implication. ‘Damn you!’ she swore. ‘The very last thing I want is your baby.’
‘I know a set-up when I see one,’ Dante told her.
Alicia was too embarrassed to admit he was right, and as she did up the final poppers on her uniform she lied again, to her own detriment. ‘Well, you’re wrong.’
He was angry.
Very.
And that feeling of sick disappointment was back.
Alicia—or at least the Alicia he had grown up with—had been the only person who had smiled when she saw him. The only person who had never made him feel filthy or an unpleasant burden the way his teachers or the locals had.
As his own mother had.
She had taught him that it was possible to trust—perhaps a little too well. Because when his father had reappeared in his life—well, Alicia had made him believe in the power of family.
What a let-downthathad been.
Though it had hurt less than this.
He thought of their games. How she would demand to know how he would react in certain extreme scenarios. And, how if a gun were to be held to his head, if he were forced to come up with one person in this world he trusted, Alicia Domenica would have been the name he’d have given.
Not now.
He was angry. Not just with Alicia, but at how far it had gone. His intention had been to confront her by the bed, catch her wrist in his hand and look right into her lying eyes.
Instead, he had sought the skin of her stomach, her hand, her arm...
‘Dante,’ she said, ‘you and I go way back—’
By way of interruption he made a scoffing noise. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many exes message me. The richer I get, the more they seem to recall the good times we had.’ He looked right at her then. ‘The trouble is they weren’t all that good.’
It was a cheap shot, but he was more hurt than he cared to admit.
‘Wewerethat good Dante...’
Her voice was thick with unshed tears, and her certainty when many might crumble gave him such a blinding flash of days of old that for a second he closed his eyes, the glare of memories too bright.
‘You accuse me of a set-up,’ Alicia added as she pointed to the window where she’d stood, ‘but just who was seducing whom back there, Dante?’
He said nothing.
Alicia said it for him. ‘It felt very mutual to me.’
It had been—although he refused to concede that point. So what if the attraction was still there between them? Alicia Domenica was here with an agenda. Of that he was certain.
‘Is it money you want?’ he asked again.
‘I told you—no.’
‘Revenge?’
Her jaw tightened for a moment, but then she visibly steeled herself. ‘Nothing like that.’
