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He did not think he could bear it.
“You’re never in here,” came her happy voice from behind him, and when he turned, she was smiling at him.
So artlessly. So easily. The wedding at her museum had changed everything. Before that, he knew she’d been desperate to embarrass him enough that he’d break it off. After that, she’d been his.
Maybe that museum of hers was enchanted after all.
But the trouble was, Ranieri did not believe in enchantments. He believed in evidence. And he had a preponderance of that, all of it pointing in the same direction.
That still didn’t mean he wanted to do this.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Annika asked, her voice soft even as a frown gathered between her eyes.
He waited. She blinked, then looked around the sitting room. And he knew the precise moment she saw her own bags, packed and waiting. She sucked in a breath.
“Are we going on a trip?” she asked.
Ranieri was known for never hesitating. For always shooting to kill, never waiting to see what might happen first. But he knew that there would always be abeforeandafterthis moment. And he wasn’t ready to be done with the before.
If he’d known that this morning would be the end this thing between them, he wouldn’t have changed a thing. But perhaps he would have savored it even more.
“I’m going to Shanghai,” he told her, sounding too dark. Too stiff. “You’re going to New York.”
Her frowned deepened. She threaded her fingers together before her and he knew, by now, how that little gesture betrayed her unease. A month ago, he wouldn’t have cared. Tonight, it moved in him like anguish. But it changed nothing.
“I always knew this couldn’t last forever, Ranieri.” Her voice was calm. Smooth. It was precisely why he had to do this now, before she couldn’t maintain her composure in his presence. Before they were no better than Giuseppe and Paola, so committed to their own misery they didn’t care who witnessed it. “But why are you announcing the end of our honeymoon like this?”
“It has been nearly three weeks. I think we both know that there was only so long I can continue to ignore my responsibilities.”
That furrow between her brows deepened. “I have responsibilities, too. Not that it’s a competition. But the point of a honeymoon is to take a break from them.”
“You leave within the hour,” he told her shortly. “I will have a driver take you to the airfield. You’ll be back in New York before you know it.”
Her green eyes narrowed slightly. “You say that as if more than our honeymoon is ending.”
And he’d known she wouldn’t be satisfied. He’d known she would ask. There was no possibility that she was ever going to get on that plane without demanding to know his feelings—even if she would never ask about his feelings directly.
Ranieri had come to know this woman entirely too well. That was part of the problem.
“We’ve already stayed here too long,” he said, in forbidding tones. “My parents have little to recommend them, but neither one of them has ever cared much for this house. I understand them completely. It seeps into the bones and slows you down. Stay here too long and you will almost certainly lose your edge.”
“Indeed,” Annika said dryly. “I believe that’s calledrelaxing.”
And he was not accustomed to acting against his own self-interest. He could not recall the last time he had wanted something and denied himself.
Only this woman could have inspired such a choice.
He tried to concentrate on that. “You were a virgin, Annika, were you not.”
It wasn’t a question. And he didn’t need an answer. He already knew, but even if he hadn’t, he would have gotten the truth from the scalding-hot flush that took over her face. It wouldn’t stop there. It would be all over her now, that bright heat sweeping down between her breasts—
She stood taller, as if she wasn’t overheating right in front of him. “I feel certain that cannot possibly be relevant to this conversation.”
“But you did not tell me, which suggests it was meaningful to you.”
“What it was or wasn’t hardly matters now.”
“You asked me if I could tell.” His voice was quiet.
