an unholy grin. ‘Your hair looks like I electrified it, amante mia.’
He had electrified her. Belle gave him a drowsy smile. ‘It’s called bed hair and it’s like that every morning when I wake up.’
‘I love your hair,’ Dante told her carelessly as he rolled off the bed and headed for the bathroom.
‘Where do we go from here?’ Belle asked abruptly before she could think better of it.
Dante froze and suppressed a groan, knowing that he should have foreseen that question and should not have overlooked her inexperience. She wanted to know what came next when nobody got to know what came next, he reasoned in frustration. Even so, with him what came next after bedding a woman was usually predictable. He would get bored and move on and she would go home.
‘We go on as we have begun,’ Dante responded gruffly. ‘I’ll run you another bath.’
Belle was bewildered. We go on as we have begun. What was that supposed to mean? After all, they had begun as strangers agreeing to a platonic arrangement. Was he suggesting that they now return to that? And how was she supposed to ask him for further clarification? That would make her look a little desperate for reassurance and probably potentially clingy to a man already wary of clingy women. Furthermore, what was the protocol after such an encounter? Should she get up and return to her own room? If he expected that, he wouldn’t be running a bath for her, she told herself irritably and smothered a yawn, too sleepy and comfortable to want to move.
‘We have a problem,’ Dante informed her from the bathroom doorway, something in his voice, something spooked, cutting through her relaxation to make her take notice and push herself up on one elbow.
‘The condom tore,’ Dante completed grimly.
Belle pushed an uncertain hand through the tousled strands of red and copper spilling across her white brow, her violet eyes stricken, her freckles standing out in contrast to her pallor. ‘Tore?’ she repeated shakily.
‘It can happen,’ Dante breathed tautly, his strong bone structure taut below his bronzed skin. ‘But it’s never happened to me before. Possibly I was a little too passionate. Are you on any form of contraception?’
Belle went pink. ‘Why would I have been?’
Dante shrugged. ‘I had to ask. Sometimes women use birth control for other reasons,’ he pointed out without any expression at all, and then he turned on his heel and vanished back into the bathroom.
Belle was frozen where she sat and then, in an abrupt movement, she slid out of the bed, wincing at the ache between her thighs, her newly extreme awareness that she had had sex for the first time... And what a disastrous mistake that impulsive and seemingly daring decision was now starting to seem, she reflected wretchedly. It had not even occurred to her that she could use birth control simply to be prepared for such an event. But naturally she had never dreamt that she would end up just falling into bed with someone like Dante. She had assumed that she would be in a serious relationship before she had sex and that there would be time and space to consider such precautions. And why was that?
Because nobody knew better than Belle, who was illegitimate and the supposed result of a contraceptive accident, that chance pregnancies should be carefully guarded against and that even the possibility of a child should always be planned to the nth degree.
Belle’s father, Alastair Stevenson, hadn’t wanted her... For goodness’ sake, neither of her parents had wanted her! Alastair had had a brief affair with her mother and they had broken up by the time Tracy approached her former lover to tell him that she had conceived. Tracy had sworn that she was pregnant due to a contraceptive failure, but Belle’s father had made it painfully obvious to Belle, aged a mere thirteen at their only meeting, that he suspected her mother’s pregnancy had been no accident. And in all fairness to Alastair, Belle, knowing Tracy as she did, would have been suspicious too, because it was perfectly possible that, having set her sights on him, her scheming mother had deliberately conceived in an attempt to entrap a well-heeled husband.
Pale as milk, Belle wrapped her clammy body in the discarded towel and dropped down on the foot of the disordered bed, deeply shaken at the mere idea that she had run the risk of falling pregnant. And the last thing she wanted to do was raise a child alone with the father having absolutely no interest in his child. It had done nothing for her self-respect to be confronted by a father who couldn’t care less about her, and who indeed seemed to resent her for the simple fact that she had even been born, costing him a small fortune in child-support payments...not that her rich father, a highly successful banker by all accounts, could have found it that much of a challenge to make those payments.
* * *
Dante was grateful for the distraction of running the bath. He had never done such a thing for a woman before but felt the effort was required after his less-than-stellar taking of her virginity, which he had hoped to accomplish without hurting her. He was tense and distracted though, already asking himself why he hadn’t gone ahead and had a vasectomy when the idea had first occurred to him some years earlier. Cristiano had talked him out of that idea. But Dante absolutely refused to give his parents the heir they craved to ensure the next generation of their precious dynasty. And they had been such dreadful parents that he was convinced he would be equally hopeless in the same role. That was why he had never wanted a child. He lacked heart and affection.
But what if he had got Belle pregnant? What would she want to do in such circumstances? If she was even half as fond of children as she was of that scruffy little dog she would want to go ahead and have the child. And then, whether he liked it or not, he would be a father with all a father’s responsibilities.
‘Your bath’s ready,’ Dante murmured from the doorway. ‘I’m going for a shower.’
Belle stood up. ‘What will we do if—’
‘We’ll deal with it...if it happens,’ Dante countered levelly, his dark golden eyes veiled. ‘There’s no point fretting about it right now.’
* * *
There was a lot of sense in that wait-and-see attitude, Belle told herself as she settled down into the bath, unable to relax into its warmth because she was too tense and far too busy watching Dante’s arrogant dark head shift behind the marble wall that closed off the shower. She supposed she might have considered the morning-after pill had she not been so aware that, had such an option been available to her mother, Tracy, she herself would never have been born at all. And that was a very sobering thought. When Alastair Stevenson had refused to marry Tracy as she had hoped, any interest her mother had had in her unborn child had vanished. Indeed, Tracy had resented being left as an unwed mother and had resented even more the damage pregnancy had done to her previously perfect figure, and she had taken that bitterness out on her daughter.
Belle didn’t stay long in the bath. In fact, she crept out of the bathroom like a cat burglar, dropped her towel and donned her pyjamas in frantic haste to get back to her own bedroom as quickly as she possibly could. After all, if there had been an ambience between them, it had died after the mishap. His shuttered face had told her all she would ever need to know about Dante’s opinion of her having his child. He didn’t want it to happen. He didn’t even want to think about such a possibility. And in that, she supposed, he wasn’t much different from any other young single guy put in the same position. How else could she expect him to feel? It wasn’t as if he were in love with her. It wasn’t as if he even knew her that well.
Her dispirited eyes took in the opulence of her bedroom and she
