‘Did you take a lover after you lost the baby?’
Dante’s question was like a slap in the face. Her mind blanked for a moment. She was still taking tiny steps. They had warned her in the hospital that it would take a long time to recover fully, and that in the meantime she would find coping strategies, but that no stage of her recovery could be rushed.
She had rushed. She would have done anything to ease the pain. At the time her actions had seemed to be the one thing that might help her to forget Dante. It had turned out to be her worst mistake, and had left her feeling more of a failure than ever.
‘Well?’ Dante pressed now, staring fiercely into her eyes. ‘Are you going to answer my question?’
Desperate to close down this line of questioning, she shook her head. ‘You can’t ask me that.’
‘I am asking,’ he insisted grimly. ‘I’ve listened carefully to everything you’ve said. I haven’t missed a single nuance or hesitation in your speech, which is why I know there’s more, and if it’s something you can’t talk about after what you’ve told me—if someone’s hurt you physically, mentally, I want to know. And if you expect me to accept some lame excuse, you’re dealing with the wrong man.’
‘I’ve told you everything,’ she insisted in a shaking voice. ‘You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything in my life. And you don’t have a hold on me, so let me go.’
Breath gushed from her lungs as Dante dragged her close. ‘If I live ten lives and devote them all to you, I will never make up for what happened to you, so if you think I’m going to let you go, let this go, you’re mistaken.’
Guilt was careering through her when he dragged her close. She was shocked by his passion and should have remembered Dante had always channelled his emotion into action. A few blank seconds passed and then, like a dam breaking, her emotions flooded in as he drove his mouth down on hers. His kiss was like oxygen to her starved senses. The reassurance of his arms was like water in the desert to a dying man. It was too precious to squander, too welcome to ignore. For everything that had gone before and couldn’t be changed, Dante was so instantly familiar. All fear of kissing him, of becoming close to him again seemed irrelevant suddenly. She was close to him. She had always been close to him—always would be close to him.
Lifting his head, he stared down. His black eyes were ablaze with inner torment as he grated out, ‘I should have been there for you.’
Lifting herself up on her toes, she laced her fingers through his hair, and then she cupped his face, loving the scratch of his sharp black stubble against her palms. She wasn’t a teenage temptress without a care in the world now, but a woman who knew her own mind. ‘You’re here now,’ she whispered.
Dante’s kisses changed and became lighter and more reassuring, and then he did something that only he could. He started whispering things that no one else knew about them—small things, confidences they’d shared when they’d been younger, personal moments of triumph and defeat, times that hadn’t been so good, and those that had been better, and times when a look between them had been enough to share the burden of what they had both been experiencing at home.
What he was trying to tell her was that nothing had changed between them, not really. He was reminding her of what they’d shared in the past, and reminding her that she’d never had cause to doubt him before that night when passion had run so high between them that neither of them had been thinking clearly.
She smiled into his eyes. She loved everything about him. She loved the way he made her feel, and the way he made her remember. She loved the way he soothed her, and the way he reminded her that they had faced tough times before and had always come through them. She loved the way he could make her smile when her heart was breaking, and she loved knowing that there was nowhere else on earth she wanted to be than here, with him.
The need to be closer still overwhelmed her and, tugging his top from his jeans, she exclaimed with pleasure when her hands found his hot skin. Dante had started work on the buttons of her shirt, but he soon lost patience and ripped it off her, scattering buttons everywhere.
‘What is this?’
Dante frowned as he stared at the scar on her shoulder.
‘It’s nothing.’ Her head had cleared immediately as she shrugged it off.
Dante wasn’t convinced. ‘You didn’t have a scar on your shoulder when you were eighteen. I would have remembered something like that.’