But last night, like a miracle, she’d woken to find Stefano’s arms around her. She’d felt safe. Comforted. With him beside her, she’d fallen back asleep, knowing nothing bad could happen when he was keeping watch over her.
Then she’d woken up and he was gone. Her embarrassment that he’d seen her in a vulnerable state was bad enough. Then she’d wondered if he’d seen the scar on her bare skin in the morning light, and it had been her ugly face that drove him away.
You’re ugly beneath that makeup, Annabelle. A hideous monster.
Rising from her bed, she had showered and dressed. She’d pulled back her hair and applied her makeup with a trembling hand. Then, not wanting to face Stefano at breakfast, she’d gone straight outside. She’d tried to focus on taking pictures, but amid the silence of the morning, his low, husky voice invaded her soul.
I want you, Annabelle. And I intend to have you. I will seduce you slowly, bit by bit, until you cannot resist me. Until you are mine. In my bed. At my pleasure.
When she’d found him in the stables, when he’d challenged her after everything that had happened between them, she’d been overwhelmed. Blood rushed through her veins as she’d tried to hold her ground. She’d clung to her pride.
Then he’d taken off his shirt.
She’d seen a man’s bare chest before. But looking at his tanned t
orso, taut and lean with muscle, with a scattering of dark hair pointed downward like an arrow, she hadn’t been able to look away.
Stefano had taken that single step toward her, and a surge of fear had ricocheted down her body. She couldn’t explain what happened next. She’d just bolted. Her feet had scrambled back, nearly tripping as she fled. She hadn’t stopped running until she was across the farthest field and gasping for air.
Now, as Annabelle finally caught her breath, she became slowly aware of the morning songs of birds, the noisy rippling of the stream. She was alone in the forest, standing by a stream of water on a rocky hillside. She looked up at the beams of morning light shimmering through the dark, shadowy trees.
She blinked. How far and fast had she run?
Breathing in the fresh, cool air, she knelt by the stream and splashed cold water on her face. Gradually the rapid pounding of her heart slowed. As she rose from the rocky banks, she looked around the forest.
No doubt Stefano was still laughing himself silly back at the stables.
Why did he have this effect on her? Even now, she craved his touch. It frightened her.
She couldn’t allow herself to be vulnerable to any man—but especially not Stefano! As protective and kind as he’d been last night, a playboy had only one objective. To bed a woman
… and forget her.
Annabelle’s cheeks became hot as she recalled the look in Stefano’s dark eyes as he’d taken that single step toward her in the stables … and how, in spite of all her defiance, she’d fled from him like a coward. Like a pathetic virgin.
But a virgin was exactly what she was. She closed her eyes. A pathetic virgin.
“C’mon, don’t act like some pathetic virgin,” the older boy had said, leering at Annabelle’s low-cut lace top. She was just fourteen, and she’d snuck out of Wolfe Manor to follow her twin brother Alex to a party in the village with his older friends. Then her brother had seen her.
“Damn it, this is no place for you, Annabelle!” Alex had marched her straight to the door. “Go home, where it’s safe!”
Her brother hadn’t known she would go home and walk smack bang into their father, who’d just returned drunk from a frustrating day of hunting. Alex hadn’t realized that their father would take one look at Annabelle all tarted up and explode into murderous rage at his daughter for the first time—and the last.
Annabelle’s hand went unwillingly up to her forehead and cheek, feeling the hard ridge of the scar beneath her makeup, the scar that had never completely faded.
Go home. Where it’s safe.
Her lips twisted with bitterness. No place was ever safe. Especially not home.
And no person was safe, either. People died, like her mother. People turned on her, like her father. People left, like her assistant. Or they betrayed her, like Patrick.
Better to just be alone.
Closing her eyes, Annabelle took a breath of the fresh mountain air. She heard the ragged sound of her breath over the birds of the forest and stream.
“There you are,” a deep voice growled behind her.
She whirled around. The cold feeling in her heart exploded into heat that almost brought her to her knees.