The Prodigal Prince's Seduction (Castaldini Crown 2)

Gabrielle spluttered with laughter. “You say that as if you’re asking me ‘How’s your steak.’”

Jade grinned, her beauty blazing a few notches higher with the unbridled expression. “They are far more edible than the juiciest steak, aren’t they? Not that I think Durante could be anywhere near Eduardo in tastiness. Eduardo is pure ambrosia.”

Gabrielle laughed again. “Fair enough. To me Durante is on a celestial menu of his own.”

“You love him.”

The statement hit Gabrielle between the eyes.

She struggled not to lurch with its power, its certainty, murmured, “It’s too early for anything like that.”

“Uh-uh, it isn’t. Not with these men.”

And “these men” were heading toward them now. Eduardo was a gorgeous male, Gabrielle acknowledged, but in her eyes, Durante was far beyond that. He was above comparison.

“Durante seems…younger,” Jade said as the men progressed slowly across the room, still talking but with their eyes on the women. “I haven’t seen him laughing—hell, I haven’t even seen him smile—since I first met him six months ago. And because of Eduardo’s friendship and business with him, I’ve seen him a lot. I didn’t know he could laugh. I thought he came without the laughter software.” She turned to Gabrielle. “But you reformatted him.”

Gabrielle chuckled again. Almost everything Jade said tickled her. “Ah, Jade, isn’t reformatting reserved for the hard drive?”

“What’s this about reformatting and hard drives?” Durante came to Gabrielle’s side, sat on the couch’s armrest, pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head, her temple, her jaw. Then he murmured in her ear so softly he almost didn’t produce sound. “Look at me like that and I’ll haul you to bed and hard drive your software and to hell with them.”

She looked up at him. Yes, like that. She pulled him down, whispered in his mouth. “You didn’t need a bed, or much time, for that in extremely fresh memory. I’m sure you can manage with them here and not in hell.”

He bit down on one of her tormenting lips. “When we serve dessert, you’ll skip it. You’re having me.”

Eduardo had mirrored Durante’s actions with Jade, as if they’d agreed to. After he let her up from a clinging kiss he belatedly answered Durante’s question. “That’s mia bella Giada, always talking computers. Watch that you don’t get her started on programming, though.”

“You’re the only one who makes me blurt out code, amore.” She beamed at him, then turned to Durante. “We were talking about you.”

Gabrielle held her breath. Jade was clearly even more outspoken than Durante had complained. Would she blurt out that she believed Gabrielle loved him?

She almost deflated to the floor when Jade related only the part about his missing laughter software and the subsequent comments.

Durante laughed, demonstrating his newly restored sense of humor. “That’s one of many things Gabrielle reformatted about me.”

Jade’s grin grew devilish. “I saw her reformatting your arrogance, in public. On YouTube.”

Eduardo grinned at his bride conspiratorially. “Sì, and from the marks on your cheek, I’d say that in a previous scene, she reformatted it, too.”

Durante looked at Gabrielle. After a moment of stunned silence, they burst into howls of laughter.

Raucous ribbing was exchanged in the aftermath of their fit, and from then on, the evening flowed with the harmony of the men’s deep friendship and the women’s instant rapport.

All through, each man pampered his woman with every gesture and word and touch. Jade reciprocated her demonstrative husband’s affection with gusto. Gabrielle, feeling the odd man out, the one who didn’t share the same status as them, reciprocated Durante’s doting but wasn’t as spontaneous. Not as she longed to be.

For Jade had been right.

She might not have let herself say the words, even to herself, but she’d fallen flat on her face in love with him from that first night. She’d been stumbling deeper with each breath ever since. She didn’t see an end to her plummet.

But she’d effectively been lying to him.

She didn’t know how to come clean about how this had started without implicating his father per her promise.

It was so unfair. Why should she risk spoiling what they had now, when it had never been her fault, this inadvertent deception? It didn’t matter how it had all started, as he’d said. It had ceased to be a mission on his father’s behalf, or on her company’s, the moment she’d laid eyes on him.

At the evening’s end, something disturbing nagged at her.

The difference. Between “stay” and “live.”

“Stay” might mean that he didn’t feel the same about her as she did for him. That he’d sooner or later have enough of her. And there would be no point in confessing anything, anyway.

She tried not to hear the voices that said if he ended it, she’d be far worse off than she’d been before she’d met him. That this time, there would be no hope of finding a point to anything ever again.

Chapter Twelve

Gabrielle was balancing on the edge of the springboard.

She flashed Durante a grin that turned the night into day, one all but yelling “Look, look.”

As if he could do anything else. His gaze clung to her every move, as it always did, his heart in a state of constant expansion.

Once she was certain she had his full attention, she looked ahead, concentration settling over her face, showing him another side of her, the determined woman who could and did succeed in anything she endeavored. She tensed her body so that every muscle in her toned firmness was on alert, stood on her tiptoes, raised her arms. Then she dipped her weight, jumped once, twice, launching higher in the air with the elastic recoil of the board, then on the third launch, she catapulted into a backward somersault, tucking her whole body in a ball, revolving in two full turns before unfolding fully, her whole body stretched and straight like a human missile, entered the water fingertips first, cutting the surface like a laser beam. She didn’t splash a drop.

He sprang to his feet the second she was submerged, ran to the edge of the pool, clapping and hooting, elation tumbling in his blood. She broke the surface with a smile as huge as his, swept around and around in the water like a giddy mermaid, reveling in his adulation, taking her bows.