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But he didn’t sound like...him. Or not like any version of him she’d heard before. His voice was too rough. An edgy velvet that made her nipples nearly hurt.
“I expect to wake up every day and find myself the Queen of England,” Annika replied, and she supposed she didn’t sound any better. His eyes seemed to darken when he heard her. She promptly cleared her throat. “It looks like neither one of us is going to get what we want.”
“On the contrary.”
And Annika had been looking at Ranieri Furlan for years. She had cataloged him as if he were an artifact in her museum. She’d made no secret of the fact that she’d studied him thoroughly. And still, it was as if she’d never seen him before tonight.
Because now she knew how he tasted.
Now she knew what it was like to have passion punch through her in an instant, igniting...everything.
Now she knew.
“What a surprise you would find a way to be contrary in all things,” she said, fighting hard to make herself sound dry and amused, because surely that was safer than all thisaching.
“I intend to get exactly what I want, Annika,” he said, his voice clipped. “I always do. You would do well to remember that.”
And she wanted to offer some smart remark in return. Something quippy at the very least. She wanted to stand her ground and show that she was tougher than him.
But she didn’t feel tough at the moment. She felt...slippery. Everywhere. And the gold of his eyes was like a molten hot liquid and she was filled with it. Near to bursting, she was very much afraid.
Worse, she suspected he knew it.
His mouth moved into something just this side of grim, but it was all the more sensual because she knew how deliciously hard that mouth felt against her lips. And, God help her, she would have done almost anything for more just then.
When he turned and slammed his way out of the bathhouse, she told herself that she should have been grateful.
She really should have been.
But gratitude didn’t really top her list as she stayed there, sinking down onto the couch again, her fingers to her lips. Even though she pressed hard, to remind herself.
Or maybe to relive it.
Annika stayed there well into the night, her body still wild and her head still spinning.
She expected Ranieri to greet her the following morning with more grim demands, or lists of tasks he wanted her to perform, but he was nowhere to be found. She found the staff guiltily removing the last of the unicorn figurines from the common areas, though they had left several in her room. As if they were concerned that she really might love them as much as she’d said she did.
Or as if he was concerned.
But she couldn’t let herself think things like that. It made everything inside her feel...delicate. Instead, she decided to take the absence of the figurines as a sign she needed to come up with something better to break him.
Because surely that was what she’d seen in him last night. That he wasthat closeto breaking. And if he broke, she won.
Annika assured herself, repeatedly, that she wanted that more than anything.
A few nights later, she thought she had her chance.
Fall had come in hard over the past few days, with blustery weather and the kind of wind that got into her bones. Marissa dressed her for the night’s benefit gala, going for a gown in a deep, lustrous jewel-toned velvet, accessorizing everything with the soft gleam of rose gold.
“We’ll stay away from extraneous jewels,” the stylist told her briskly. “Your engagement is so new and your wedding is so soon. Best to highlight the ring. It’s all anyone is looking at anyway.”
And because Ranieri wasn’t waiting for her out in the loft’s main living space the way he normally was when she was finally ready, Annika had the opportunity to study that ring herself.
It was an eyesore, there was no getting around it, but it was also outrageously beautiful. And oddly enough, it sat easily on her hand. She wanted to complain about it. She wanted to pretend it dragged her hand down and was giving her some kind of ostentation-caused arthritis, but it wasn’t. When she studied the ring in the light, it was hard to pretend she didn’t find herself seduced by it. She gazed into it and disappeared there, as one facet after the next seemed to draw her deep into the heart of the stone—
“Everyone falls under the spell of that ring eventually,” came Ranieri’s dark, forbidding voice. “Even you, it seems. Careful, Annika. It might well enchant you.”
She looked up to find him wearing formal attire, which instantly made her mouth go dry. Dressed all in black, his gold eyes seemed to glow. With malice, she tried to tell herself. Or maybe it was mockery. Whatever it was, it seemed to hum inside her.
