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Eat.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He tugged it out, then frowned.

He walked away from me, talking into the phone in rapid Italian. I had to bite down on the ridiculous urge to cry, the feeling of abandonment real, because I had been dismissed so easily—even though I didn’t want any more of his attention, did I?

He didn’t raise his voice, but the razor-sharp tone made his displeasure with his caller obvious.

Ignoring the throbbing ache in my sex and my burning cheeks, I grabbed a pastry and bit into it. The buttery confection melted on my tongue, and I realised not only was the seasickness gone but I was ravenous.

I fed myself, then crawled onto the bed to hide under the covers, my heart still hammering my ribs. I watched Dante as he barked orders into the phone. He stood with his back to me, his legs braced to accommodate the roll of the boat, staring out at the stormy sea. His shoulders looked so broad in the casually draped shirt, his legs impossibly strong in the tailored trousers, his skin even darker against the white linen. He raked impatient fingers through the waves of black hair that gleamed in the dull light.

So many questions crashed around my head, like Dodg’em cars on a manic funfair ride.

Was he planning to join me in the bed? Was he going to make love to me? Or rather have sex with me? He was still semi-erect, the outline of his cock prominent in his pants, even though he appeared to have forgotten I was even in the room… My swollen sex was still clenching and releasing with the desire to feel that stiff length inside me. And if I gave myself to him fully, how would I ever face Mia and Vito again? After all, I’d already betrayed them by literally begging the man who had tried to kill them both to give me an orgasm.

But the frantic thoughts, the humiliation, even the aching emptiness in my sex finally began to fade into exhaustion. My eyelids drifted shut with the sound of his voice—husky, commanding, and ruthless but also scarily hot—drawing me into fitful and disturbing dreams.

CHAPTER SIX

Dante

I ended the call with my cousin Antonio Malvini, who had taken command of Cala Verde while I was held captive on Isla Donna. And cursed. I was furious about how much the business had been allowed to decline in a few short months. I stared at the Tyrrhenian Sea, its choppy waters not unlike my mood.

I threw the phone onto the table next to the plate of pastries, then thrust my fingers through my hair. But it wasn’t my fury and frustration with Antonio and the rest of the Malvini clan that made my pulse thunder as I turned to see the girl curled on my bed.

Hot blood surged back into my cock as I recalled the sultry sound of her broken sobs—as she pleaded with me in English and eventually Italian to give her what she needed.

Had I ever met a woman who responded to my touch so instinctively?

When she had asked that I leave the room, like some untried virgin, I had been determined to show her I took orders from no one, least of all her. But she had not pressed the point and I’d found myself laughing—for the first time in a very long time—when she had got caught fast.

But as soon as my hand had touched her breast, her volatile, visceral response had intoxicated me. Then the scent of her arousal, the feel of her body—slender, seductive, vibrating with need—had driven me wild within seconds. And suddenly I had been coaxing, teasing, tormenting her… While she made me ache in a way I had never ached before.

I enjoyed foreplay as much as any man, especially as it was a luxury I had not been afforded as a teenager, when sex had been swift and furtive, the only respite from the violence and poverty I lived in. But until now, foreplay had always been a prelude to more. I did not seek intimacy through sex, or anything else.

But as she had writhed in my arms, her pleas had captivated me, the ability to control her passion like a gift to be unwrapped. The memory of her bottom cradling the brutal erection made me harden again, eager to feel her clamped around my cock. But hearing my name on her lips, those words in Italian as she pleaded for release, had almost shattered my control. Her artless, elemental response had given her a power over me I had never ceded to anyone. Not since I was a boy, desperate for my father’s approval.

Seeing the shame in her eyes afterwards had only angered me more. Did she think me unworthy of her?

I shook my head, the echoes of that rejected boy infuriating me all over again.

Her opinion did not matter.

She had seen me at my most vulnerable this morning. Something no other women, not even the girls I had been with as a boy, had ever witnessed. And she’d responded to me with such fervour, my touch like a lightning rod. But my desperation to have her was merely the result of being months without sex—while being beaten and abused by Vito’s men.

I inhaled that delicate scent of roses and desire which still hung heavy in the room. I left the stateroom and entered the cabin next door, ruthlessly resisting the urge to climb into the bed with her.

I needed sleep, to be ready for tonight’s homecoming.

As I lay on the bed, I willed my body to relax into the gentler motion as the superyacht hugged the coastline. The drugging effect of the painkillers eventually numbed my body and banished the unnecessary thoughts crowding my tired brain and complicating a simple situation.

If I wanted her, I would take her at a time and place of my choosing… She would be mine, until Vito made me an offer I could not refuse. Then I would discard her as easily as I had discarded every other woman before her.

But even though she meant nothing to me, my restless slumber was disturbed by lurid dreams… Only of her. Damn her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Evie