“I am listening,” he said roughly, “not to your words but to what you tell me when you kiss me.” And when her lips parted in protest, he used it as a chance to kiss her one last time before he let her go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BACK in the guest suite, Nick tried to get a handle on what in hell was happening.
He was in a baffling situation, one he didn’t entirely control, and it made him angry.
Angry at the prince for creating a financial disaster that had opened the door to Cesare’s intervention. At Cesare for dumping the problem on him. At Alessia, who behaved as if she were as confused by her reaction to him as he was by his reaction to her.
Or was she?
Maybe that second of insight he’d had during the meeting a little while ago was right on the money. Maybe she was playing a game as old as time and as dangerous as anything he’d ever faced, even in combat.
He tore off his jacket and the rest of his Wall Street attire because a man this enraged shouldn’t be wearing the trappings of civilization.
Damn them all. His father. Her father. The Ice Princess.
“Hell,” Nick swore, and, naked, he stalked into the bathroom, slapped his hands on the marble vanity and glared at his reflection in the mirror.
Why lie about it?
The person he was furious with was himself.
He was letting a woman make a fool of him.
Yes, he’d let his father use a despicable trick to get him to come here. If his mother really wanted a bit of Tuscany, why would Cesare have waited all these years to buy it for her? And why this place, this vineyard owned by a family whose roots were probably entwined not just with the Medicis but with the double-dealing and conspiracy of the Borgias?
Nick didn’t give a damn. Not about Cesare’s real motives or the prince screwing up an enterprise his family had owned for five hundred years. What mattered was that he was being used. By his old man, whose entire life was given over to conspiracy. By a prince who didn’t know the meaning of honor.
And by a woman.
A woman who was manipulating him.
And he—dammit, he had allowed it to happen. He’d let her draw him deeper and deeper into a dark whirlpool of desire more intense than any he’d ever known.
There could only be two explanations for her behavior.
Either she was willing to do anything to make sure he invested in the vineyard.
Or she was taking a walk on the wild side.
Not that it mattered.
He’d had enough of her games, one minute treating him as if he were lower than a snake and the next going crazy in his arms. If it was deliberate, if it was real…
The Ice Princess had perfected teasing to an art. And he’d been performing like a trained seal.
A trite metaphor but there it was.
Okay. Enough was enough. He was tired of being played with. It was time to put an end to it and he knew exactly how he’d do it.
Take her to his bed. Nothing soft and gentle. He’d take her with brutal force, again and again, until she sobbed his name, until she clung to him, until whatever she’d really wanted was meaningless because by then, all she would want was him
and everything he could do to her.
And when she finally lay spent beneath him, he’d get up, dress, toss a note for ten million euros on the dresser as if she were the world’s most expensive whore because it was what she deserved for reducing him to this…
“Merda!”