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‘If you wore heels you’d know they are not a subject for jokes.’
‘You don’t need heels, and I already struggle with door frames,’ he said, watching her wriggle her toes as she stretched out her legs towards the coffee table. He registered the tiny smile playing around the corners of her mouth before, tongue between her teeth, she nudged the neatly arranged books with her outstretched foot, spoiling their geometrical precision.
With effort he prised his eyes from the long length of her endless smooth legs. It did nothing to ease the pulsing need that had settled like a hot stone in his groin.
‘Feel better now?’
‘A little.’
‘Sometimes saying what you want to is a luxury.’
His voice held no discernible inflection but something in his expression made her wonder if they were still talking book clubs. She somehow doubted it; the gleam she could see through the dark mesh of his lashes confirmed it.
The slow, heavy pump of her heart got louder in her ears. It was something that would be reckless to pursue, better leave it be.
Sound advice.
‘What do you want to say?’
Playing with fire, Bea.
For a long moment he said nothing. ‘Do you really want to know?’
She swallowed, frustrated at having the ball thrown back in her court. If she wanted this to go to the next level, he was saying she had to take the conscious step to make it happen… She’d have no one to blame but herself.
This was exactly the sort of situation she had sworn to avoid and here she was virtually running after it, running after him. She could feel that reckless let tomorrow take care of itself feeling creeping up on her. Even from this distance she could hear him breathing like someone who had just crossed the marathon finish line, or was that her?
Without taking his eyes off her, he levered himself into a sitting position, leaned across the table that separated them and ran a hand down the instep of one of her bare feet.
She sucked in a fractured breath, opened her mouth to say—She would never know what, because the phone that lay in the small beaded evening bag she had dumped on the table rang.
‘Leave it!’ he growled out as the noise shattered the moment.
Yanked back to reality and her senses and not nearly as grateful as she ought to be for the fact, Beatrice shook her head, pulled her feet back, tucking them under her as she delved into the bag. Pulling her phone out, she glanced at the screen.
‘It’s Maya. I have to take it.’
Dante’s jaw clenched, all of him clenched as frustration pumped through his veins in a steady stream. ‘Of course you do.’ He doubted Beatrice heard him as she was already sweeping into the direction of the bedroom, her phone pressed to her ear.
When she returned a few minutes later Beatrice wasn’t sure if Dante would still be there, then she saw him looking tall and dangerous, prowling up and down the room like a caged tiger, glass of something amber in his hand and the lamplight shading his impossibly high carved cheekbones.
‘Maya says hello.’
He flashed her a look. ‘I’m quite sure that’s not what she said, but hello, Maya.’ He raised his glass in a salute.
Beatrice’s lips compressed as she glared at him. His continued pacing was really beginning to wind her up. As if she weren’t already tense enough, and guilty.
Maya had to have picked up that she couldn’t wait to get off the phone. Her concerned sister, whose only crime was to have bad or good timing, depending on how you looked at it.
She winced as she replayed the short conversation in her head. The gratitude she ought to have felt for being saved from basically herself was absent. The problem being she wasn’t sure that she’d wanted to be saved.
Who was she kidding? She definitely hadn’t wanted to be saved.
He halted his relentless pacing, drained his glass and set it down. It didn’t take the taint of guilt and regret from his mouth. It seemed insane now that he had ever thought he could handle the scent of her perfume, the sound of her voice. It was all part of his personal agony. Wanting her was driving him out of his mind; the lust was all-consuming—it wiped out every other consideration.
He was still the same person; his own needs always would take priority.
‘I can’t say I blame her.’
