The moment stretched out between them, threatening to snap.
Belong to him?
She couldn’t belong to him.
Not when he didn’t belong to her. He didn’t love her, and she didn’t know if he ever would.
Panic rose from her heart to her throat. “No—”
Ripping the towel from his grasp, she turned and fled, practically slamming the door behind her.
In the bedroom, she beat the world record for finding her oversize T-shirt and cotton panties in a drawer. Within thirty seconds, she was tucked into the enormous bed, the heavy bedcovers pulled tightly to her neck.
The bedroom was dark. Her heartbeat drummed in her throat as she waited for Vin to come out of the bathroom. What did she hope to achieve by hiding in this bed? They were sharing the room. He’d just have to sleep on the sofa by the window, she thought.
But Vin Borgia didn’t seem like the kind of man who would politely take himself off to sleep on the sofa. Not when he’d made such a ruthless declaration.
You’ve in my blood, Scarlett. You belong to me, and I intend to have you.
She jolted when she heard the door abruptly open, causing a trickle of light across the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut as she heard him blow out the candles in the bathroom, one by one. Then silence.
“Go sleep on the sofa!” she tried to say, but her voice wouldn’t work. She heard the echo of heavy footsteps coming toward her. They stopped.
The mattress beneath her swayed. She felt his warmth, breathed in the scent of sandalwood. Nervously, she scooted to the other side of the enormous king-size bed. Her heart was pounding. Part of her yearned desperately for him to reach out and pull her into his arms—but she was oh, so afraid of giving him complete power over her!
He reached for her in the darkness, and without a word, slowly, he turned her to face him. She felt his fingertips tantalizingly trail the edge of her hair, her shoulder, her hip.
His hand cupped her full breast, his palm moving against her aching nipple through her thin white cotton T-shirt. His other hand moved lingeringly over the curve of her belly, moving lower, and lower still. She felt something pressing hard against her and realized he was naked.
Tension coiled deep inside her, a sweet ache of need that was starting to build beyond her control.
She’d thought she knew desire from their first night together, their night of escape and exploration and discovery. But this was something else. Something else entirely.
Pregnancy hormones had given a fierce edge to her sexual need that she’d never experienced before. Or maybe it was because she now wore his ring on her finger, she was sleeping in his bed, she was pregnant with his child and soon would be his wife.
She wanted him. She wanted this. All of it. A home with warmth and comfort. A family. But most of all she wanted something impossible: she wanted him to love her...
She pulled back, struggling to see his face in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted, and the scattered moonlight from behind the window blinds silhouetted the hard edges of his cheekbones and jawline with silver.
Could he ever love her? Or was he just seducing her into marriage, for the sake of their baby?
She yearned to ask but didn’t have the courage. Instead, she whispered, “Kiss me.”
She heard his intake of breath, then felt the hard, sweet taste of his mouth on hers.
He kissed her for minutes—or hours—until her cheeks felt abraded from the roughness of the dark bristles on his jawline. His mouth was hungry and hard, pushing her lips apart as he teased her with his tongue. She clutched his shoulders, electrified by the heat of his hard naked body, the strength and size of him against her. She gripped him tight as his hands roamed possessively over the curves of her breasts and thighs.
Breaking the kiss, he pushed her back against the bed and slowly kissed down her body, stroking her full breasts and the mound of her belly and her voluptuous hips through her thin cotton T-shirt until he knelt at the foot of the bed. Spreading her feet apart, he caressed the hollows of her feet, the tender skin of her ankle.
Then he started moving upward. He kissed and caressed her calves. He kissed her knees, and the hollows beneath them, with a sensual flick of his tongue. Moving inexorably toward her thighs, he pushed her T-shirt up to her hips, leaving her cotton panties exposed.