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It was his conscience’s good fortune that she held a genuine attraction to him and that she was happy here in her new life. God knew she’d not had much in the way of happiness before she’d come here.
‘I will keep him away from you,’ he vowed.
Taking his hand in hers, she squeezed it and said softly, ‘Truly, there’s no need. Dominic’s never hurt me before, not like the others, and, even if he had, he’s not stupid enough to try anything with an audience of hundreds. Don’t ruin everything you and Marcelo and Alessia have achieved through your marriages out of anger. He’s not worth it.’
And then her gaze lowered to their joined hands and, a hint of colour staining her cheeks, she let go and took a step back, her fingers grabbing at the skirt of her long, pretty, modest dress.
His fingers still burned from her touch.
Her eyes lifted back to his. Her chest made the tiniest, almost imperceptible hitch.
The strangest, tensest silence swirled and grew. The urge to push her against the nearest wall and work off the anger infecting him in the sweetness of her kisses grew with it.Dio, look at those lips. Did anything on this earth taste as sweet?
He closed the space she’d made.
Her chest hitched again, her graceful neck elongating then moving as if she were swallowing. Her eyes darkened, the colour on her cheeks deepening.
He leaned in, unable to look at anything now but those divine lips, moisture filling his mouth in anticipation of his hunger being sated...
The office door opened and a press secretary walked in. ‘My apologies,’ he said, clearly startled at who he’d found hiding there.
Amadeo took a step back and resisted the urge to throw the man out of his own office. ‘No need for apologies,’ he said with all the smoothness he could muster.
Holding the door open for Elsbeth, she walked past him, causing another waft of her beautiful perfume to envelop him like a cloud.
The urge to snatch her hand into his and drag her straight to the nearest bed was strong. Too strong.
Everything he was feeling at that moment was too strong.
‘I’m going to the gym,’ he told her in as even a voice as he could manage when they reached their shared reception room.
There were agreed rules about their marriage. Good rules. Sensible rules. He should know—he’d imposed them. He would not break them for something as fleeting as lust. Their marriage was working perfectly well. Better than he could have hoped. They had achieved a cordiality he’d never believed he would find with a Fernandez.
But the dazed sheen he found in her eyes when she looked back at him made him come within a whisker of saying to hell with those rules and to hell with doing something as insipid as snatching her hand, and just throwing her over his shoulder, kicking her front door down and carrying her off to bed.
It was also that dazed sheen that stopped him following his baser instincts.
Elsbeth’s heart was tender, that was becoming clearer the more time they spent together. He would do whatever he could to make her life here a happy one, and the state trip to the Caribbean was only the start. But what he would not do was let her believe their marriage could be anything more than what came within the bounds of the rules they’d agreed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELSBETHHADNEVERknown time to pass as slowly as it did over the next few days.
Two days of engagements crawled at the rate of a lethargic snail. All she could think of was Amadeo. Spending hours with him, much of that time in a car, didn’t help. It didn’t matter how hard she tried to maintain her composure and indifference, the burn of his eyes on her skin was too much. And the burn was constant. Every time she caught his stare, he stripped her naked with his eyes. Every time she caught his stare, her bones melted.
Amadeo had lit something within her during their last night together, stoked it in those mad moments in the secretary’s office when she’d been socertainhe was going to kiss her, and she didn’t have a clue how to extinguish it or control it.
Who cared about protecting her heart when she could barely walk for desire? She wished he had kissed her and whisked her off somewhere to make love to her again. Maybe then the heat that had bubbled incessantly since would have been sated instead of being allowed to simmer. And it had simmered every second of every minute of every hour.
Now it was two a.m. and she was wide awake, her heart still refusing to settle and her pelvis feeling as if it was on fire.
Saturday had finally come.
Tonight he would make love to her again.
She willed time to speed up.
By the time Saturday finally dawned, Amadeo felt like a tinderbox with a lit taper slowly crawling towards it.
