“Meaning there will be a more lavish wedding that befits past and present status. The kind with a string quartet and an aisle and a press pen and a fuck off cake that looks like an architectural folly. Because Vasso Dillinger—the housekeeper’s boy who was deemed little more than trash—gets to prove them all wrong by landing the girl they swore was out of his league, and making her his wife. And because the world prefers its narratives dressed properly, and the trust board, the fund, the banks, and the roadshow all like their stories with proofs.” His mouth ticks, wicked and wounded at once. “I would’ve told you all of that if you hadn’t thrown a tantrum and left me to eat my dinner alone.”
I glare because he deserves it and because the wordalonefinds a soft place in me and presses. And because this picture he’s so laconically painting, of impossibly breathtaking gowns and waltzes across ballroom floors, is prying open dreams Ithrew into a vault when he walked away. “A proper wedding, Vasso? Really? Aren’t you taking this too far?” I snap.
He merely smiles, then slowly raises his hand until the tips of his fingers hover an inch from my face. “You said no touching,” he murmurs then, eyes fixed on my mouth like a sexy atrocity he plans to commit slowly,thoroughly, “but did you truly mean it, wife?”
“Yes. I did.” Too fast. Too breathless. Too defensive.
“Then why,” he asks, and his fingers drifts down by body, then he strokes a forefinger over the tie of my robe, not touching, only ghosting the air where cotton clings, “are you shaking?”
“I’m not.”You are,my body replies, treacherous, fluent, alive in ways I don’t want him to remember.
“Are you sure?” he rasps softly. “Look down, Naomi,” he invites.
I should throw him out.
He may have changed almost beyond recognition but the Vasso I remember wouldn’t impose himself on a woman.
Hell, how silver-spoon sirens who visited Kane’s Reach in the summers pretended they didn’t notice the housekeeper’s but secretly yearned to fuck Vasso? God, didn’t the Goldstein sisters try to sneak into his room when we were seventeen and get lost in the maze when they were thrown out by Mrs Dillinger?
My heart never roused the courage to ask if he’d slept with any of the girls who blatantly announced their availability.
“Be brave, princess.”
I snap into focus, and my head is dropping before I can stop it.
And I see what he sees.
My nipples at blatant attention, straining against the cotton. The quick rise and fall of my chest. And worst of all, the steep angle of my straining body, a hairsbreadth from him.
Everything in my posture screamstake me, I’m yours. Take me, give me a taste of what I foolishly dared to call forever the night of my eighteenth birthday before it all turned to ash.
The reminder sears.
I reach for his wrist to push him away, to end a scene, but when my fingers close on his skin the contact sizzles through me like salt on a wound.
He freezes, eyes darkening, and for a suspended second neither of us moves because moving would be confession and stillness is only denial if someone names it.
Memory invades, of a younger and reckless me, behind the greenhouse, dirt under my nails and laughter on my tongue, his hands on my hips like he couldn’t believe the luck of being allowed to hold me, our mouths colliding like the world will end and we insist on meeting it properly.
One stolen moment turned into a dozen.
Until Vasso Dillinger was inside me, making me scream. Making me dream. Making me?—
“Let me go,” I whisper, but my grip doesn’t loosen because I am not a liar in the ways that count.
“I would,” he says roughly, and the roughness is a bruise I will check in the mirror later, “if you weren’t the one holding me, baby.”
A sound gurgles from my throat as I force my fingers to release him.
He smiles, then his thumb brushes my wrist, barely there, and yet my knees consider weakening in betrayal. “You keep saying you hate me, Naomi,” he says, close enough now that the shape of my name is almost a kiss, “but your body remembers me.”
I suck in a breath, will the renounced Kane stubbornness into my body. “You caught me off guard. This doesn’t change anything.”
“No,” he disagrees, leaning until his mouth hovers beside my ear and the room shrinks to the precise distance between wanting and wreckage. “The way your body reacts to mine, darling princess. That changeseverything.”
He steps back, turns around.
Just like that.
