I flinch, and he sees it. Sees the weakness I try to hide. Pounces on it. “You don’t love me, Dante. You’re mistaking lust for love.”
His eyes burn as he moves into me until our bodies are pressed together. “Believe me,” he breathes. “That is impossible. Because you make it so damn fuckingdifficultto love you, Caterina Corvo, that I couldn’t possibly mistake it for anything else.”
Our mouths brush, just barely.
“So fucking difficult,” he whispers against my lips. “But so fucking easy, too.”
There is no thunderbolt clap, no lightning bolt. His lips do not crash into mine. We have always been fire and lightning, he and I – as though putting us together is akin to lighting a match and stepping back to watch us burn.
Not this time.
His hands rise up to cradle my face, his lips sinking into mine as though he’s found his fucking home, tasting me softly with a reverence that makes the air catch in my throat, as though he owns my oxygen, controls the breath in my lungs.
He captures the soft moan as it escapes, captures it and breathes it in, his mouth nudging at mine as my lips open andhis tongue traces the seam, tasting. As though this is the first time, and we have no history of anger between us.
He kisses me like I hold all of his hopes and dreams in my hand, and when he pulls back, his eyes widen at the look on my face. As his finger reaches out to capture a tear. “Tentazione. Why are you crying,amore?”
My whole body hurts, but my mouth refuses to say the four words. The words that would undoubtedly condemn me in his eyes.
He would never forgive me.
And I will never forgive myself.
Even as I brace myself to lie to him once again. “It’s been a long day. We… we should go. You can drive.”
His face drops in concern, his hand stroking across my cheek as I close my eyes and let it happen, even as I despise myself. As I hold his hand in place with my own for a second, drinking in his touch. Stealing a single, precious moment more before I pull his hand back and press a soft kiss to the pulse in his wrist.
And then I drop the keys into his hand, clearing my throat of memories and regret. “Drive carefully, V’Arezzo. I like my car.”
Chapter thirty-four Dante
Iwatch her closely from where I’m leaning against the bland gray wall of the hospital room.
Mainly, I watch the way she watches him. It’s as though nobody else exists for her in this moment, only Domenico Rossi. Her hand squeezes his, time and time again, as it lies limp in her grasp.
He will survive. I made damn sure of it. I wasn’t going to stop until that asshole’s heart was beating again.
Perhaps it would have been easier, to not try quite as hard. Nobody would have expected anything else. I could feel Rocco’s stare on my back, feel the questioning glances from my own men as I bent over the Corvo enforcer, forcing the fucking air back into his lungs over and over again until they could do it by themselves.
It would have been one less piece of competition. One less battle for her heart.
But she would never have been the same.
I knew it, instinctively, saw it in the way she curled herself over him, the way she broke in front of everybody. Caterina Corvo never lets herself break, refuses to let the cracks show, but for him, forhim, she would have snapped, there and then, if I had let him slip away.
And that, I will not allow.
I want her whole. hole and unbroken, vibrant and passionate, the Caterina who throws punches and passion as easily as she melts in my arms. And she would never have been that Caterina again, without him.
Which poses another question. One I keep turning over and over in my head, trying to solve.
I have no doubt that she belongs to me. She belongs to me in the same vein that I belong to her. In the way that I have always been hers.
I push away the words of my father. It will not come to that. I will make sure of it, make sure that I am never standing across from her as her enemy. I would drop to my knees and let her slit my throat before I ever raised a weapon to her.
But then, there is Domenico Rossi.
How can she ever be truly mine… when she is so clearlyhis, too?
