She cried out as he captured one breast in his hand and rubbed his thumb across the nipple, his cold eyes locked to hers.
“Was it the way he touched your breasts?”
Tears were streaming down her face. Good, he thought. Let her weep. It wouldn’t stop him. He would do this. Pierce her flesh with his and banish her from his life, forever.
“Was it the way he touched you here?”
He thrust his hand between her thighs, searching, even in his madness, for the welcoming heat, the sweet moisture he had never forgotten…
And found, instead, the cold, dry flesh of a woman who was unready and unwilling. A woman who was sobbing as if her heart were breaking…
As she had broken his.
Dante went still. He looked at Tally’s face and felt the coldness inside him melting.
“Tally.”
His arms went around her; he gathered her to him, his hands stroking her back, her hair. He kissed her forehead, her wet eyes, and as she wept he whispered to her, soft words in his native language, but she stood rigid within his embrace, still quietly crying as if the world were about to end.
“Tally.” Dante framed her face between his hands. “Inamorata. Forgive me. Please. Don’t cry. I won’t hurt you. I could never hurt you.” He raised her chin, looked into her eyes and saw a darkness and despair that chilled his soul.
He dragged in a deep breath, hating himself, hating what he had almost done, knowing that what was driving him was not hate or anger but something else. Something foreign to his life and to him.
A fear he’d never known gripped him.
He’d fought toughs on the streets of Palermo. Faced down CEOs in hostile boardrooms. Made believers of financial analysts who’d looked him in the eye and assured him he couldn’t do any of the things he’d ended up doing.
He was a warrior. Each battle he survived made him stronger.
But he wasn’t a warrior now. He was a man, holding in his arms a woman he’d already lost once before. She had run from him and he knew, in his heart of hearts, that she’d run because he had somehow failed her.
She’d turned to another man for the same reason.
If she ran again, if he lost her again…
“Tally.”
He held her closer. Rained kisses over her hair. Said her name over and over, and finally, finally when he’d almost given up hope, she lifted her face to his.
“I wasn’t with anyone,” she whispered. “I never wanted anyone but you, Dante. Never. Never. Nev—”
He kissed her. With all his heart, his soul, with all he had ever been or ever hoped to be, and Tally wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back. They had kissed a thousand times. A million times…but never like this, as if their lives hung in the balance.
Mouths fused, Dante swept Tally into his arms and carried her to the bed.
At first, it was enough. The taste of her mouth. The warmth of his breath. Her sighs. His whispers. The stroke of her hand on his face, of his hand on her throat…
It was enough.
Inevitably, it changed.
Dante could feel the tension growing inside him. The need to take more. To give more. To suck Tally’s nipples, put his mouth between her thighs and inhale her exquisite scent.
It was the same for Tally. She needed Dante’s mouth on her flesh. His hands on her breasts. Needed to lift her hips to him, impale herself on his rock-hard erection so that she could fly with him to the stars.
“Dante,” she whispered.
Everything a man could dream was in the way she spoke his name.