‘I want you, Dante.’
‘I know you do.’
She was still clinging to the sheet, but he understood her modesty. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, and he found her vulnerability endearing.
She writhed with pleasure on the cool, crisp sheets, while Dante’s hands worked their magic on her body. She was gaining in confidence every moment as he intensified her pleasure. There were no doubts left. She was as normal as any other woman. Dante had led her to a place of exquisite pleasure, and everything he did proved his care for her.
Throwing back her arms in an attitude of absolute trust, she held his stare as he moved over her. She sucked in one sharp breath when he teased her with the tip or his arousal, but then he did no more than draw it back and forth, which felt so incredible. She wanted him so badly she was aching for him and, acting on instinct, she arched up to claim him, but the instant he dipped inside her she pulled back.
‘Karina?’
‘I can’t! Stop! Please... Stop!’
Tears of shame and failure sprang to her eyes as she pressed her hands against his chest in an attempt to push him away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS A reflex action. She couldn’t have stopped herself pushing Dante away if she’d tried. She had thought she was cured, that Dante had cured her, but her fear of lovemaking was instinctive. She had failed. She was broken. There was no cure.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected from him, but it wasn’t this. Dante had caught her tightly in his arms and he was holding her as if he had pulled her back from an abyss. Softening his grip, he brought her close and held her like a baby, but when he spoke his voice was firm. ‘No more lies, Karina. I know I haven’t done this to you, so who has?’
There was no going back now. Even if the truth drove him away, she had no option but to tell him. Sucking in a shuddering breath, she picked through her mangled thoughts in an attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible. Her fear was real, but irrational, and she had never spoken of it out loud before. ‘After I lost—’
‘I know that part,’ Dante whispered, as he stroked her hair. ‘Take your time.’
She did as he said and took longer to pull herself together. ‘I had to rebuild my life,’ she said then. ‘A life I believed you were no longer part of.’
‘And with good reason,’ he agreed.
‘While I was recovering, I knew I could do one of two things. I could retreat from the world or I could get back in the saddle and take another tilt at it.’
‘And you decided to get back in the saddle.’
‘Yes, I did. But then I discovered that moving too fast is not a good thing when your life is in turmoil. My judgement was off. Going away to college was the right thing to do. I made some good friends, and I found something I had a flair for. If I’d left it there and come home after my course, everything would have been okay, but I was too needy—’
‘You were vulnerable,’ Dante argued.
‘Don’t make excuses for me.’ She pulled the sheet tight. ‘I stayed on, and then there were complications...’ She stopped and frowned.
‘Go on,’ Dante prompted.
‘There was a man—one of my college tutors.’
‘Older than you?’
‘Much older,’ she confirmed. ‘But I was mature enough to know what I was doing.’
‘You’d lost a baby. You were alone.’
‘My head was all over the place, but because things had gone so well with the course and my friends it was easy to persuade myself I was ready for everything else—a new relationship, for example... Someone to help me get over you.’
‘You were looking for reassurance, which is hardly surprising,’ Dante agreed.
‘Don’t try to make me feel better. Everything that happened was my fault.’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t comment. You haven’t told me what happened yet.’
‘I’m not going to pretend to you. I was like a ship without an anchor and for a short time this man made me feel safe.’
Now she saw the expression she had expected to see on Dante’s face: the face from the posters, a face turned grim; a man no one crossed, unless they had a death wish.
‘He made you feel safe because you had no one else to confide in, and he took advantage of that fact. This happened, not because of something you did.’ Dante’s face blackened. ‘It happened because I wasn’t there for you when you lost the baby.’