After a few minutes of silence, I decided to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. His voice stopped me before I made it to the bathroom.
“Do not change out of that dress,” he said in Italian, not turning to face me.
That was odd. Usually, he wanted me naked, nothing between us. Layers, as he called them.
Again, I took my time getting ready to face him, but I was starting to get irritated by the idea of keeping the dress on. It kind of smelled like a mixture of the restaurant we had eaten at earlier and the tea I’d spilled on myself.
My arms were bare of jewelry. My hair still in the messy bun. My face felt clean and moisturized. My breath fresh. The dress? It clung to me like dirt.
When I came back into the room, his dress shirt was off, socks and shoes, too, but he had kept his black pants on—they hung from his waist, giving me a glimpse of the deep V indentation between lower abs and hip flexors. His jaw was tense, and his veins rose above the skin—all that hot blood pumping and making the roots to his heart swell.
His hair hung around his face, almost framing it on each side. The intensity of his dark eyes had changed. They had become even more heated, as though a fire lit them from behind. A sweet, musky smell infiltrated the air, coming off him in waves.
We stood staring at each other until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I feel dirty,” I murmured. “I want to change.”
He grinned, so wicked that my breath caught in my throat. “You feel dirty, my wife?” he said in Italian. It was posed as a question, but it wasn’t.
“You know what I mean,” I barely got out. I had meant to snap, but the thick cloud of air in my throat restricted the bite of the words. Then I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Am I still your wife?”
He couldn’t hide the shock of my words. The hurt flashed across his face before he masked it. “You tell me.”
Those words shocked me. He would have never said such a thing before…given me an out. His eyes took in the truth of my face, but it didn’t lessen the tension.
I held back the thoughts of the woman’s voice in the background, her laughter, hoping he couldn’t detect the insane amount of jealousy that forked through me like lightning, the beat of my heart thunder.
“If I say no?”
“That’s your right.”
Sometime during our intense stare down, he had won by default —because I knew he could see the jealousy in my eyes—and my eyes had hit the floor. At this, they snapped up, meeting his, two strikes from opposite sides of the sky, and I bit my lip, hard, to soften the impact.
I nodded, went to lift my hands, but he had moved as quickly as a strike of lightning, acting on the impulse instead of keeping it trapped inside.
His body pressed into mine as he pinned me against the wall. His breath came out in pants, his chest heaving, his heart beating out a frantic tattoo.
“That’s your right,” he said, words clipped, his body pressing even harder into mine. “That’s your right to decide if we both die or not.”
I went to shove at him, but he refused to budge. I took a handful of his hair and tried to pull his mouth close to mine, but he refused that too.
“What the fuck do you want from me, Brando Fausti?” I snapped, shoving at his rock-solid chest again. When I touched him, his skin seemed to tremble. A stone thrown in still water.
He pressed even harder into me, forcing me to lift my leg and hook it around his hip. His skin was hot, almost radiating, giving his rage another way to escape.
If I wouldn’t have moved, I would’ve become part of the sheetrock—I had to release some of the tension too. The emotional push and pull had me lightheaded.
“What the fuck do I want, Scarlett. Tell me.”
I shook my head, went to look away from him, but he refused me that escape too. One of his hands came up, took my face, and forced me to meet his eyes.
His hands were big, fingers long, and suddenly I felt so small.
“Yes or no,” his voice was low, but sounded much louder than a roar. “Tell me.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice matching his. It was the one word he always wanted when it came to me accepting him. “Yes.”
His free hand snaked underneath the dress, sliding up the length of my leg, over my hip, until he came to the fabric of my underwear. I closed my eyes for a moment, shivered, and then made a noise deep in my throat when he cupped one of my cheeks, squeezing, making me want to squirm.
