‘Belle...?’ he breathed silkily before she could rush up the stone steps ahead of him, a newly released Charlie dancing at her heels.
And she turned back to him, wide violet eyes bright below the tangle of red-gold curls on her pale brow. Dark eyes dazzlingly gilded by sunlight, he stared down at her and the hunger she incited surged up inside him with volcanic force. He pulled her into his arms, one hand locking to the back of her head, his fingers meshing into her curls, and he devoured her soft, smiling mouth with his own. Taken by complete surprise, Belle stiffened and then leant into the solid heat of him, the wild, ferociously sweet taste of his hunger melting her deep down inside to create a blossoming ache of need.
Distinctly dazed by that embrace, she stumbled when he set her free and it was all the encouragement he needed to sweep her up into his arms and carry her up the steps with Charlie racing in their wake and barking to indicate his enthusiasm. Belle started to laugh. To say that they made an entrance to the palazzo would have been to understate the case, for a group of goggle-eyed staff awaited them there.
Belle slid down out of Dante’s arms, flushed and embarrassed by his hot-headed behaviour but immediately soothed by the huge smiles that greeted their arrival. Their luggage was being brought in and she accompanied Dante upstairs. Only belatedly did it dawn on her that that seemingly spontaneous kiss had most probably been driven by Dante’s desire to make them seem more like a loving couple. It had been a public statement, nothing more. At that acknowledgement, the bounce dropped straight out of her step again and she scolded herself for believing for one minute that he had simply succumbed to an overwhelming passion.
The first-floor landing was open-plan to the piano nobile, the main reception room according to the usual Palladian floor plan. It was certainly a very grand and richly furnished space. Indeed, her brain was already whirling with images of colourful frescoes, classic statues and more architectural detail than she could comfortably absorb in a short space of time. ‘Do you use this as the main reception area?’ she enquired.
‘Only if I throw a party but that isn’t very often. I converted rooms on the ground floor for normal life. It’s a challenge because Jacopo left me a treasure house and I don’t like making changes but, at the same time, I have to actually live here, so it has to be made fit for purpose,’ he pointed out, following the luggage through a classical double doorway into a simply vast bedroom.
It was only then that Belle realised that naturally they would be sharing a room and that her nights of solo privacy were at an end, but when she laid eyes on the huge canopied bed with its incredibly opulent crimson-and-gold brocaded drapes, she burst out laughing. As if it were not imposing enough, the bed sat on a dais. ‘Please tell me I don’t have to sleep in that monstrosity...’
‘I’ll have you know that that is a genuine Louis XIV bed,’ Dante informed her with amusement lighting up his lean dark features. ‘And it is very comfortable... Look, even Charlie thinks so.’
Belle exclaimed in dismay, ‘Charlie! No!’
The terrier had searched out the most comfortable place in the room and had had no problem leaping up onto the bed and making himself at home there. She scooped him up and set him down on the floor again.
‘So, you live inside a history book. I would never have guessed that about you,’ she admitted truthfully.
‘My parents’ home is only a few miles away and I’ve been visiting this house since I was a little boy. I was grateful for my uncle’s interest in me because I got very little attention at home,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘I was brought up by nannies, some better than others, and few of them lasted long because my mother is a demanding employer. Cristiano and I went to boarding school and Jacopo used to come and take us out for the day. He was a very kind man and I think he felt sorry for us.’
‘Was he close to your parents?’
‘No, and when he left me all his worldly goods, they were outraged because they had always assumed they would inherit his estate and to leave it to me, the younger, more rebellious son, was even worse in their eyes.’
‘What age were you when he died?’
‘Twenty-one.’
Belle shook her head, unable to even imagine inheriting the splendour of such a residence and all that went with it at such a young age. ‘You have already lived a most extraordinary life, Dante, and you’re not even thirty yet. You may not have been blessed in the parent department, but you were blessed in other ways,’ she told him quietly.
‘Do you want the official tour now or later?’ Dante enquired.
‘Later would be fine,’ she said. ‘I’m a little tired. I’d like a shower and a nap.’
‘Dinner’s at eight,’ he told her casually.
In truth, Belle was thinking that she needed to pull back and wise up fast. She was at the Palazzo Rosario purely to play a role: that of official girlfriend. Dante had reminded her of that harsh fact when he’d kissed her and carried her in like a bride, for goodness’ sake! Such a public and exaggerated display of affection would not have occurred to Dante if he hadn’t been faking it to make them seem more like a real couple. Real couples kissed and laughed and fooled around like that, but she had to remember that they were not a real couple.
She opened a connecting door and found a bathroom, a gorgeous creation in Carrera marble with a copper bath catching the fading sunlight by the window. Dreamy, she thought, but she was too tired for a bath and would savour its delights some other time.
All her troubled thoughts were concentrated on Dante. The act of sex had plunged their arrangement into a no man’s land of confusion, she acknowledged ruefully in the shower. All of a sudden she didn’t know how to behave, what was acceptable, what was not. Was he expecting her to be all over him like a rash when anyone else was around? Or did the staff not really matter? Probably not, she decided, not after he had staged that big entrance for them. Now he was probably just expecting her to blend into the woodwork while he got on with his normal life. Her true moment of importance wouldn’t arrive for ten days when his guests would arrive...at about the same time as she would be finding out whether or not she was pregnant.
But what were the odds? She winced. She told herself it wasn’t likely but she had already calculated that that accident had happened during her most fertile phase, which wasn’t good.
The door opened and she froze, telling herself off for not locking the door and ready to curl up in a heap on the shower floor. But it was Dante and he gave her a slow smile over the wall that separated the shower from the rest of the room.
‘I decided that I needed a nap as well,’ he husked, reaching down to pull up his T-shirt and haul it over his head, a truly spectacular network of muscles flexing to make that movement possible. Her mouth went dry and she knew that he had only been joking about the nap, her colour heightening.
She had assumed he wouldn’t come near her again until they were in that big bed later that evening. She was learning that it didn’t pay to make assumptions with Dante. He had told her that he was a passionate guy. He liked sex. He liked sex a lot...and he wanted her, had wanted her from the first moment he saw her, and nobody had ever wanted Belle with such immediacy or such passionate intensity. She could live in the moment, couldn’t she? She watched the jeans drop, the classic V shape above his hip bones tightening as he got naked in record time. Sensation clenched low and tight in her pelvis and she was literally holding her breath, seeing Dante naked and aroused for the first time. And yes, he definitely had more than a nap in mind.
He stepped in with her, crowding her back against the tiled wall, hunger smouldering in his dark golden eyes, his body taut against her stomach, and she literally stopped breathing. A wild heat gripped her feminine core but that out-of-her-depth feeling was claiming her again. Only the night before she had still been a virgin, still shy, still ignorant of all sorts of things and, while she was no longer that naïve and unprepared, six feet two inches of Dante, naked and bronzed and wet and ready in the shower, was almost too much to handle.