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HERWORDSWENTthrough him like a thunderclap.
Ranieri jerked back, and only some distant hint of self-preservation kept him from leaping out of his chair and doing something he would never have forgiven himself for—like plastering himself to the far wall.
As if he was some kind of excitable feline.
His heart careened about inside his chest anyway. Surely he didn’t have toshowit.
He regarded her for a long, tense moment.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he gritted out.
But Annika didn’t look as if she was trying to fight with him. It was far worse than that. She looked...compassionate.
It was unbearable.
“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” he seethed at her. “This indiscriminate emotion just flung about. This is a conference room. We are in an office building. This is no place—”
“I love you,” Annika said, and could not have silenced him in any more effective manner. And then she made it worse by smiling. “Though I think you know that. Or you wouldn’t be reacting this way.”
This time, Ranieri did push back from the table. He stood, though he still did not cling to the wall. He stalked to the bank of windows and tried to orient himself in the ever-shifting, ever-changing city at his feet.
Manhattan seemed infinitely easier to take on than the woman behind him.
The woman he couldn’t seem to escape—even when she wasn’t in the same room. She had haunted him across the planet. Even now, he was sure he could catch the hint of her scent in the air, that perfect vanilla, yet better.
Much better.
“But it’s even worse than that, isn’t it?” she asked from behind him. “It’s far worse.”
And how could he have guessed, all those years ago, that this woman would be the end of him? That the daughter of a business associate he had only ever noticed to criticize could wreck him so easily?
Because he knew what she was going to say. Every muscle in his body tensed.
“You love me, too, Ranieri.”
He turned back around to face her then, everything inside him a frenzy of heat and need and feeling andher.
“And what a gift that will be for you,” he all but snarled at her. “The love of a Furlan. Where would you like to isolate yourself,amore? Tell me, where do you think you would most like to hide away your broken heart while I betray you again and again and again? Because I will. We always do.”
“I’m not your grandmother,” she replied.
She stood up from the table then, coming around the end of it and heading straight for him.
Ranieri could not imagine how he had ever thought that this woman was plain. That she was anything but what he saw before him now.
Fierce and glorious with it. Carelessly sophisticated.
So beautiful it hurt.
That was the trouble. That was what he couldn’t seem to get around. This womanhurthim. He looked at her and he hurt. He touched her and he hurt.
He had built himself an entire life to avoid hurt. He had walled himself off in a fortress of money and power. And none of that had mattered at all.
Annika Schuyler had walked right past his defenses and insinuated herself so deep inside him that now when he was without her, that hurt, too.
Ranieri didn’t know what todoabout her—and that was a new sensation for him. He always knew what to do.
“Not only am I not your grandmother,” she was saying as she came toward him, “you’ll notice that I haven’t given you any ultimatums. I haven’t asked you to give up anything at all. That must be very frustrating for you, Ranieri. Because that was clearly your brilliant plan.”
