He rolled onto his side, bringing her with him, and she held on to him with an intensity that was almost too much to bear. The small gasps of her breaths echoed through the quiet room, in this house so far away from the ceaseless demands of his life. But for once, he just let the weight of history and the future be. He stayed inside her as the sharp ecstasy of pleasure turned into something warmer, something fuller. She was his now in a way that reached beyond business deals and marriage contracts. The thought gave him a surge of visceral satisfaction. Because he was closing in on his goal, he told himself. Though he would rarely indulge himself like this in the future, he would do so enough to ensure that she was his forever.
Catarina stirred. She opened her eyes and looked at him, the wonder in them still laced with pleasure. Her hair was mussed, her lips swollen. An echo of the wordminereverberated through him.
She smiled at him, and the smile was not a mask for polite company. This one was full of intimate pleasure. Before he could stop the thought, a future played out in front of him, a possibility of having something far more than he had ever imagined. It was a future where she smiled at him like this across the breakfast table, even when there was no paparazzi there to watch. It was a dangerous thought, so he pushed it away.
“I hope you are feeling all right,” he said gruffly.
“Much better than all right.” Her voice sang with humor and a touch of wonder that swelled inside him.
He should move. He should take care of her somehow. He was not in the habit of deflowering virgins and, frankly, knew little about what she might want next. Gently, reluctantly, he slid out from her, and it was then that he felt something was wrong. He froze as an icy chill ran through his veins. The condom had broken. He had spilled his seed inside her.
He stared down at the condom, then looked up at Catarina. The smile on her face faded into confusion, her eyes searching his. Then she looked down, too.
“Oh.” It was just one word, so soft he almost didn’t hear it. But he could feel the shift in her, and this shift sent another cold shock wave through his veins.
“We must get married immediately,” he bit out instinctively. Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew they weren’t the right ones, and yet he couldn’t stop them because all he could think wasscandal. Her father had alluded to this kind of scandal on the first day when discussing a well-timed wedding, but that concern paled in comparison to the threat that filled him. The Carandini family could not have a child born out of wedlock. It was one thing for him to weather a scandal alone but quite another for him to subject the next generation to one before the child was even born. He would never allow that. Never.
But children were supposed to be an issue they’d sort out far in the future, long after this electric connection had died out. Not now, when everything inside him felt so…volatile.
By the time Catarina’s gaze met his again, there was an unreadable mask across her face, and a cold politeness rang in her lovely voice. It did something strange to him when she spoke. “We absolutely do not have to marry.”
“I will not allow my child to grow up under scandalous conditions,” he snapped, louder than he meant to.
“We don’t even know if I’m pregnant.” There was an incredulity in her voice that almost covered the shakiness. Almost.
A feeling was rising in him, a souring brew of all the emotions that the past hour had stirred in him. This recent turn of events bound them together in the most disturbing way. Massimo rolled off the bed and reached for the clothes he had tossed aside. His thoughts were too…tumultuous to continue this conversation, too chaotic to even hear one more word of protest out of her mouth, so he headed for the door. When he reached it, he turned around. Catarina hadn’t moved. She was on her side, her hair cascading over her shoulder, half covering the breasts he still longed to take in his mouth. Still, despite everything. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring out the window with an expression that looked too much like resolve for him to contemplate further.
“We will get married,” he said, his voice steady despite the tremor that resonated deep inside. “I will do everything in my power to make sure of it.”
Chapter Nine
CATARINA WAS ASstill as death as Massimo’s footsteps disappeared down the hallway. She didn’t move as she heard the creak of his door. But when the door slammed shut, she rolled onto her back on the bed, a place that was supposed to be her own. This room had always been a refuge, but as she took a deep breath, his intoxicating scent still lingered everywhere. Catarina wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Most of all, she wanted to run far away from this man who made her weak.
I’ll take care of you. Massimo’s words had taunted her with a promise she so dearly wanted, and now they haunted her. It had taken her a moment before she realized that he was simply referring to sex, nothing more. He seemed completely unaware that they were the words that her father had used in their marriage discussion. He was simply clarifying that he would make sure this first time would hurt as little as possible, and he had shown her a tenderness that had evoked that stubborn hope that she couldn’t seem to shake, the hope formore.
Catarina balled her fists in frustration. Even if his promise had only been for this one act of intimacy, it was still a lie because right now, everything hurt worse than she ever dreamed it could. Worse than it should have. Massimo had shown an unexpected passion, and somehow it made this ending even more heartbreaking. She had been so very right to be wary of his autocratic statements because the moment the evening took an unexpected turn, the tenderness disappeared, and the cold demands returned.
But his demands weren’t the most disturbing part of the awful ending of their encounter. The hardest part to digest was the fact that, as he walked away, she’d had to bite her lip to stop herself from calling out to him, begging him to come back. Her body craved his. She craved his touch, his warm, hard chest against her, his big hands splayed across her back, holding her close, and the long, hard length of him deep inside her. Sheneededhim again. There must be something wrong with her, she decided, to want someone who had completely and treacherously turned on her.
Because the last thing she wanted was to start a family with a man who clearly could not—no, would not—love her. Who would not give her the respect she deserved.
Catarina blinked up at the ceiling as outrage competed with the intoxicating memory of his mouth everywhere. She needed to sleep. Everything would look better in the morning. She pried herself out of bed to wash the tears from her face, then returned to bed, burying herself under the covers until somehow she fell asleep.
Her sleep was fitful, her dreams, vivid, erotic and haunting, but when she awoke in the morning, the music returned. It was playing through her head with the clear ring that she used to awaken to every day. But the tune that played was one that had captured her imagination in her teens and then haunted her dreams in the days after her mother’s passing, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor. Now it called to her with an intensity she could not ignore.
Yesterday she had sat on the piano bench, the familiar cool wood under her welcoming her back as the music filled her, but she had not been ready to let it out, to reveal the emotions that brimmed inside her. Today was different. Today they would not be contained. They seeped through her defenses, through her carefully constructed facade and made her vulnerable.
And in the same way Massimo’s kiss had taken over yesterday, consuming her, she felt consumed by the need to play. Something deep inside ached, something that, if she was honest, had ached for years, begging to be free. She had been an obedient daughter and ignored this wild intensity inside, but last night something had shifted. She might carry a child of her own. She could no longer sail through her life, allowing the winds around her to guide her course. Catarina owed this child her protection, the protection her father had not given her, despite his good intentions.
Catarina didn’t bother to dress or wash her face or do any of the things that she was taught to do to make herself presentable. She simply rose from her bed, brushed her hair from her eyes and descended the stairs, her gaze fixed on the piano.
Outside the window, the wind had let up, and the fjord was just visible through the fat flakes of snow that fell like feathers, drifting back and forth in the gray morning. A soft, diffuse light lit the piano as she approached it, as if it were calling to her.
Catarina opened the bench and rustled through the music until she found the right piece. Her heart pounded as she propped it on the music stand, took a deep breath and played the first notes of the Prelude that had haunted her. The music seemed to swell inside her. She began with the heavy chords, feeling the foreboding that echoed in each one. When the chords changed into arpeggios, picking up speed and turmoil, all in that haunting minor key, she was swept away into the turbulent progressions up and down the keyboard until they came to the end in a clatter of chords. She entered the final lines, heavy and absolute. Breathless, her hands hovered over the keyboard. She expected to find herself crying. That had been her worry the previous morning, that her music and her sorrow were inextricably intertwined. But what she felt was more complicated than sorrow.
The room came back into focus, and Catarina was suddenly aware that she was not alone. She looked over her shoulder and saw Massimo, standing at the base of the staircase, his expression inscrutable.
Awareness shuddered through her, that now-familiar lick of hot desire, along with the protective urge to suppress all signs of it. The best course of action was to put all of these thoughts aside and examine them later when they had returned to Milan and she was in the safety of her room. She could sort them out the way she always had, alone. But even the thought of returning to her father’s house, back to safety, was no relief.
