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“Get away from me,” she pushed him on his solid muscles that didn’t even move, glaring at him through her tears, her body shaking. Fuck, she was having an emotional breakdown.
“Amara,” he said softly, taking a hold of her wrists in his hands, his fingers going right over her bracelets that covered her scars.
“You didn’t fight for me,” her mouth trembled as she pulled but his grip didn’t loosen. “You didn’t fight for me, Dante!”
He tugged her close, until she tipped into his chest, holding both her wrists with one hand while cupping her face with the other, his eyes wild on hers. “I fight for you every fucking day, Amara.”
God, she hated him for meaning it. She loved him too, even after all this time.
A tear escaped her eye and Dante leaned in, kissing it from her cheek like he still had the right.
“You need to let me go,” she told him, her voice breaking, meaning more than her hands. “I can still feel you haunting me here. I can feel you and I can’t live like that. You need to stop. Please. Let me go. Please, let me go,” she started sobbing against him, not realizing when his arms came around her, holding her tight. “Let me go. Let me go. Please. Please,” she hiccupped.
He pressed his forehead against hers. “You’re in my blood, beating in my fucking heart. The only way you go is when the heart stops.”
God, he couldn’t say shit like that to her. Falling with him was so easy, so exhilarating. It was the crash that scared her.
Wiping her cheeks, Amara straightened, looking at his tie slightly askew because of her shoving. Taking hold of it, she set it straight, putting her hand over his heart, and looked him in the eyes. “I’m in love with you, Dante,” she confessed to him, a
lthough they both knew. “But I won’t let you waltz in and out of my life as you please. You say you’re fighting for me, and you might even win the battle, but you will lose me. End our suffering right now.”
Dante clenched his jaw. “Go to your apartment. I’ll come to talk in a few days.”
Amara nodded, took a deep breath, and stepped back from him, turning to go up the stairs.
A hand suddenly spun her around and his mouth lingering close to hers, inches from her, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath over her lips, the air between them hard, intense, electric, making her tingle from the root of her hair to the tips of her curling toes. She leaned into him, soaking up the tension, the magnetism, the physicality she had missed so much, a hello and a goodbye all at once, before pulling back and walking away.
He needed to make his choice.
Dante Maroni was an idiot and she was an even bigger idiot for goading him.
A week later, Amara opened the door to her little studio apartment, getting in and locking it behind her, throwing her wedges to the side.
“Is he a good kisser?” the voice from the darkness of her living room area startled her.
Amara shrieked, spinning on the spot to see the man she hadn’t seen in a week, the man who owned her every waking thought, sitting casually on her couch, sipping from the wine bottle she kept in her cabinet, Lulu curled around his feet.
Lulu, slightly bigger than when Amara had found her and even more adorable with the softest cream fur and the prettiest green eyes. She was also a traitor, napping against the man she had no idea what to do with.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him quietly, turning on the lights in her small but cozy apartment, putting her clutch on the side table. She threw off her keys to the side, and padded barefoot to her bedroom, taking her earrings off, appearing casual even as her heart thundered in her chest. After a few days of waiting for Dante and him not showing up, Amara had gone out on another date with a guy from her Psychology of Art class. Had she half-hoped it would make him react? Yes, yes she had.
Lulu lifted her head at the sound of her voice, her flat face perking up at seeing her, and she prodded up to rub against her legs before going on her merry way. Lulu was a stray like her, alone in the big city, her baby now.
Amara dropped her earrings in the bowl on the dresser, her neck prickling with the presence that came to her back. She looked up at the mirror, seeing him behind her, his jaw clean-shaven, a bruise on his temple that hadn’t been there before, his tall, wide form eclipsing her own.
The butterflies that had been dead in her belly during her entire date fluttered to life just at the presence of this man who didn’t feel for her as she did for him.
“You didn’t answer me, Amara,” he murmured softly, his dark, chocolate eyes tracking her own body, from the red dress she’d worn to the little denim jacket and the scarf she’d paired it with. His eyes took in every inch of her, as though they had missed roving over her skin, and goosebumps broke out over her arms.
“It’s none of your business, Dante,” she rasped out quietly, watching as his eyes darkened in the reflection. He was at her back and while it usually triggered her, being able to see him in the mirror had her mind pausing from the knee-jerk reaction.
She saw his hand rise up in the reflection, coming around to her neck, a finger looping into the silk scarf, tugging it down. Her breathing hitched as she watched him expose her scar to their reflection slowly, his thumb brushing the horizontal mark, his face leaning down to brush his lips against her ear.
“Did he kiss you, Amara?”
Her nipples pebbled. Breathing heavily, her chest heaving, their gazes locked, something heady pulsing between them, Amara shook her head. Dante pressed his lips to her lobe again, the possessive fire in his eyes so familiar yet so foreign.
“Ask me to kiss you.”
