“Yes.”
“Then you’ve achieved your dream. Is a temporary engagement to me so high a price to pay for that dream?”
“No.” She touched her engagement ring in an increasingly familiar gesture. “But what I’ve done to the Fontaines is far too high a price for any dream.”
“You need to trust me. It’s all going to work out. It may not be a perfect solution. Compromise will be involved. But it’s going to work out.”
“Because you say so?”
“Because I intend to make it so.”
He cupped her face and drew her close. At the first brush of his mouth against hers, every thought evaporated from her head. The Fontaines. The Dante clan. Work pressures. They all slipped away beneath the heat of his taking. He played with her mouth, offering light, teasing kisses. But it only took her tiny moan of pleasure for it to transform into something more. Something deep and sensual and unbearably desperate. Passion exploded, fogging the windows and ripping apart both intent and intention. It needed to stop before stopping became an impossibility.
“You don’t play fair,” she protested, struggling to draw breath.
“It doesn’t pay to play fair.” He eyed her in open amusement. “What it does is give me what I want most.”
“And what’s that?” she couldn’t resist asking.
“You.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Invite me in and put us both out of our misery.”
Did he think it would be that easy to recover the ground they’d lost? She swallowed a groan. Maybe if their embrace had continued for another few minutes, though she’d never admit as much to Sev. But it hadn’t, and she still found enough self-possession—somewhere,if she looked around hard enough—to stand firm in her resolve not to tumble back into hisbed.
“No, I’m not inviting you in.” She gave him her sweetest smile. “I don’t play fair, either. As far as I’m concerned, you can sit here and suffer for your sins.”
“But not for much longer,” hesaid.
Or was it a warning?
Chapter Nine
Francesca flipped through her sketchpad and experienced a sense of accomplishment unlike anything she’d ever felt before. She’d worked on the creations contained on these pages for most of herlife.
It hadn’t been her first glimpse of the sparkle and glitter of gemstones that had drawn her to jewelry design. Sure, she loved the beauty of them. And she loved the endless ideas that danced through her imagination, ideas for how to combine the different gemstones into stunning patterns. But that hadn’t been what snagged her heart.
From the moment she’d understood the true symbolism of a wedding ring and what it stood for... From the instant she realized what her mother never experienced, and no doubt longed to share with the man she loved, Francesca had been drawn to create the dream. And now shehad.
She studied her designs one last time, thrilled that she’d completed what she’d set outto achieve all those years ago. She’d given birth to something beyond her wildest expectations and, ironically, she owed it all to Severo Dante. Somehow, at some point, he’d crept into her heart and given her the final spark of inspiration she’d needed to bring her designs tolife.
Tears filled her eyes and she shook her head with a smile. How ridiculous to get all weepy over a bunch of drawings. She hadn’t even completed a mockup of them, yet. Not that it mattered. She knew how the finished product would look. She even knew how they could market the collection. An entire campaign existed between the covers of her sketchpad, acampaign that would relaunch Dantes into a full line of women’s jewelry, should that possibility interestthem.
Flipping her pad closed, she locked it away just as her studio door banged open. Tina stood there, looking more devastated than Francesca had ever seenher.
“Tina? What’s wrong?” Francesca asked, half-rising. “What’s happened?”
“Is it true?” Tina slammed the door closed behind her, closeting them together in the room. “All this time I thought you were the innocent in all this. That Dante had you completely snowed. Iactually thought maybe we could work things out between us. But now I’m not so sure.”
A sick suspicion clawed at Francesca’s stomach. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my husband.” Tina’s mouth twisted. “Or should I say... your father.”
Francesca felt every scrap of color drain from her face and she sank back into her chair. “You can’t be serious. I’m not—”
Tina cut her off with a swipe of her hand. “Don’t. At least have the decency not to lie to me.” Her heels pounded out a succession of hard staccato raps as she crossed the room. “I have the evidence.”
“How?”
“That’s not important.” She reached the edge of the desk and Francesca could see the wild pain lurking in the older woman’s eyes. “You lied to me. To Kurt.”
