“Why didn’t you tell me you were engaged to him?”
“It never came up in conversation. And besides, I didn’t think I would ever see you again… up until that time I saw you in my hallway.”
“Our hallway,” I correct her. “We are neighbors now.”
She bites down on her lip. The shine in her eyes is mesmerizing, and I have to remind myself to move my feet. The music plays on, the chatter continues, but my focus remains only on her.
“Matteo, we need to stay away from each other. What happened that day after the coffee shop?—”
“It wasn’t a mistake, bella.”
My voice drops,low and deliberate, slicing clean through the space between us. “You and I both know it. And we didn’t even kiss.”
I lean in, my breath grazing the shell of her ear—close enough to make her shiver. “But if we had…” My mouth hovers there, a whisper from her skin. “…I wouldn’t have stopped at a kiss.”
She trembles—so subtly no one else would notice, but I feel it.
Every inchof her pressed to me tells the truth she won’t say.
“…and there wouldn’t be a single regret on my side.”
I shove the memory of that dream—her lips, her sounds—into the back of my mind before it drags me under.
Her breath stutters against my chest. She’s reacting, even if she tries like hell not to.
“What I don’t understand,” I say quietly, “is why you’d tie yourself to a man like him.”
She goes rigid, her spine snapping straight in my hands.
“It’s… complicated,” she manages.
My jaw clenches. “Is he blackmailing you?”
Her lips flatten—tight, silent, refusing me answers.
“Beatrice?”
She opens her mouth to answer—then she goes still, her eyes locking on something behind me.
The music comes to a soft, final halt, dancers breaking apart around us.
But she’s already pulling back,breath catching.
“I… I need to go.”
She removes herself from my arms and shakes her head, as if she’s trying to rid her mind of something. Maybe me? Maybe our almost-kiss? Or is it something else?
“Excuse me,” she says stoically. “I need a moment.”
She pivots sharply and strides away, her heels striking the marble with a clipped, furious rhythm, but she doesn’t head for the exit like any sane person trying to escape this circus would. Instead, she slips into the dim corridor behind the ballroom—the one reserved for powder rooms and whispered secrets—and just before she disappears, I catch the fleeting image of her pressing a trembling hand to her chest like she’s holding herself together by a thread.
Shit.
And then Giacomo moves. He follows her with that cold, calculating purpose I know all too well, and something tightens so violently in my chest it feels like a fist closing around my ribs.
Double shit.
My body moves before my mind even agrees to join the conversation; I’m already crossing the ballroom, already slipping into the shadowed hallway, driven by an instinct older and deeper than reason. Everything in me warns that this isn’t a harmless exchange, and the look Giacomo gave her—sharp, territorial, almost hungry—confirms it. There is nothing friendly waiting for her at the end of that corridor.
