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‘I’vechanged.’ She placed a hand on her chest. ‘Inside.’
‘We did as you suggested. We burnt out the fire. We know one another. Know why we’re entering this marriage.’
‘I don’t understand what’s happened...’
He tilted her chin between his thumb and forefinger, bringing their gazes in line with one another. ‘I can touch you with control.’
But he couldn’t. He might be desperate to believe that he could, but he hadn’t been quick enough to conceal the flash of heat in his eyes.
‘Lying again, Raffaele?’ she challenged him, feeling her body instantly responding tothisman. The truth in his eyes. The heat in them. The longing she recognised in him because it weighed down in her own stomach, pushing the heat lower.
‘And what if I can’t touch you the same way?’ she asked.
‘You must,’ he insisted.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because you don’t want me? Don’t want the woman you told me I could be—shouldbe?’ she corrected.
She saw his eyes glued to her lips, to the words spilling out of her because she couldn’t stop them. Didn’t want to stop them.
‘Ifeel, Raffaele. Iwant. I’m a woman who needsyou. Needs the man who collected me from the farm. The man I met in London. The man on the yacht.’
The grip on her chin tightened. ‘This last week,’ he said quietly—roughly. ‘The storm...the explosions of emotion from you.’ His nostrils flared. ‘And from me,’ he admitted. ‘The turbulence of it—of us—has made me want...’
She saw that the admission had cost him. It was written on every granite line etched into his beautiful face.
‘You want the exact opposite of what we could be?’
‘And what do youthinkwe could be, Flora?’
‘Happy.’
‘What happened on the boat wasn’t happiness,’ he snarled. ‘It was sex.’
‘And you’ve gone full circle back to being afraid of having sex with me?’
‘It’s not about fear. It’s not about sex.’
‘Whatisit about?’ But just like that the penny dropped, and she answered for him, without pause. ‘The baby.’
‘It was only ever about the baby.’ He released her chin. ‘Our time on the yacht was a mistake. Now we move past it.’
‘How?’ she asked huskily.
‘We go inside,’ he said. ‘We follow the list. We do the right thing for our child, the way our parents did not do it for us.’
She reached into her pocket. Let the crisp lines of the folded square of paper slip and slide in her grasp. She pulled it out and handed it to him. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it. You don’t need to pay people to look after me, Raffaele. I can look after myself.’
A pulse hammered in his naked jaw. Realisation punched her in the sternum. Trapping her breath into her lungs. Filling every sense with a feeling she recognised. Had lived with her entire life.
Fear.
She sucked in a breath and allowed herself to process her own wants, her own needs, and saw his. The needs he was trying to hide so desperately behind his suit. His billions. Behind the group of people he paid to take care of the things he didn’t want to face in case he got it wrong.
But that was life. Getting it wrong and still choosing to live.
Now Flora saw this moment for what it was. What it meant to him. A man who hadn’t been home since he was a boy to a house without his mother. He had left behind a village that he had lifted up. He had become vulnerable in the beginning of a storm because of his memories.
She dropped the list on the floor. His gaze lingered it on it. Her hand rose and she gripped his chin between her thumb and forefinger, as he’d done to her.
