she gasped again, and mumbled something else, but he didn’t know what it was, and frankly, he didn’t care. Because he’d been holding off for so long that he couldn’t endure it for a second longer, so that when eventually his orgasm came, he felt the rush of blood and pleasure as his senses began to dissolve—and he felt like he was floating.
TO WILLOW, IT felt like living in a dream.
Dante Di Sione was her lover and he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. And the feeling was mutual.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. She needed to remember that. To remind herself that this was temporary. That it meant nothing. It meant nothing but sex. He’d told her that himself.
She pulled the rumpled sheet over her and listened to the sound of running water coming from the en-suite bathroom.
The trouble was that when you really wanted something it was easy to start constructing fantasies—the kind of fantasies which had got her into trouble in the first place. She started thinking about Dante’s lifestyle. About his dislike of weddings and expressed distaste of settling down and doing the ‘normal’ stuff. What would he say if she told him she didn’t care about all that stuff either? And that they might actually be a lot more compatible than he thought.
But thinking that way could lead to madness. It could make you start hoping for the impossible—and hope was such a random and unfair emotion. Hadn’t she watched her young friends die in hospital and vowed that she would never waste her time on useless hope?
So just enjoy what you have, she told herself fiercely. Store it all up in your mind and your heart—so that you can pull it out and remember it when you’re back in England and Dante Di Sione is nothing but a fast-fading memory.
It started to feel like a real holiday as he showed her around his home territory and introduced her to places he’d grown up with. He took her to tiny restaurants in New York’s Little Italy, where the maître d’ would enquire after his grandfather’s health and where Willow ate the best pasta of her life. They spent a day at a gorgeous place in Suffolk County called Water Mill, where a friend of Dante’s had the most beautiful house, surrounded by trees. They visited Sag Harbor and spent the night having sex in a stunning hotel overlooking the water, and the following day took a trip out on the Di Sione boat, which was anchored offshore. But when she told him she wanted to see the guidebook stuff as well, he took her to Manhattan and Staten Island, to Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park—where the beautiful gardens reminded her of England. And when he teased her about being such a tourist, he couldn’t seem to stop kissing her, even though the wind blowing off the Hudson River had felt icy cold that day.
‘What are you smiling about?’ questioned Dante as he came in from the shower, rubbing his hair dry.
Willow shifted a little on the bed. It was weird how your life could change so suddenly. One minute she’d been someone who knew practically nothing about men—and the next she was someone watching as one headed towards her, completely naked.
Don’t get used to it, she thought. Don’t ever get used to it.
‘My thoughts are my own,’ she said primly.
‘I suspect you were thinking about me,’ he drawled. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘That’s a very...’ His shadow fell over the bed and she looked up into the glint of his blue eyes. ‘A very arrogant assumption to make.’
He bent to trace a light fingertip from nipple to belly button, weaving a sensual path which made her shiver. ‘But you like my arrogance,’ he observed.
Willow shrugged as guilty pleasure washed over her. ‘Sometimes,’ she murmured. ‘I know I shouldn’t, but I do.’
I like pretty much everything about you.
He smiled as he sat down on the edge of the bed and slid his hand between her legs.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘I think you know the answer to that question very well, Willow Hamilton.’
She tried telling herself not to succumb as he began to move his fingers against her, because surely it would be good to turn him down once in a while? But she was fighting a losing battle. She couldn’t resist him when he started to touch her like that. Or when he brushed his lips against her neck. And suddenly it was not enough. It was never enough. ‘Come back to bed,’ she whispered.
‘I can’t. I’m expecting a call from Paris. There isn’t time.’
‘Then make time.’
‘And if I say no?’
‘You’ll say yes in the end, you know you will.’
Dante laughed softly as he lay down beside her, smoothing his hands over her body as he drew her close. He stroked her breasts and her belly. He brushed his lips over her thrusting nipples and the soft pelt of hair between her thighs. For a while the room was filled with the sounds of breathing and kissing and those disbelieving little gasps she always gave when she came and then in the background the sound of his work phone ringing.
‘I’ll call them back later,’ he murmured.
Afterwards he fought sleep and dressed, though he had to resolutely turn his back on her, for fear she would delay him further. He pulled on a shirt and began to button it, but his thoughts were full of her and he didn’t want them to be. He’d told himself time and time again that now Talia’s show was over, he needed to finish this. To let Willow go as gently as possible and to move on. It would be better for her. Better for both of them. He frowned. So what was stopping him?
He kept trying to work out what her particular magic was, and suddenly the answer came to him. Why he couldn’t seem to get enough of her.
It was because she made him feel special.
And he was not.
He was not the man she thought him to be.
He stared out of the window at the lake and felt the swell of something unfamiliar in his heart. Was this how his twin had felt when he’d met Anais—the sense of being poised on the brink of something significant, something so big that it threatened to take over your whole life?
‘Dante, what is it?’ Willow was whispering from over on the bed, her brow creased. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
He turned around to face her. Perhaps he had. The ghost of his stupid mistake, which had led to the severing of relations with his twin brother.
He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing.’
But she was rising from the rumpled sheets like a very slender Venus, her blond hair tumbling all the way down her back as she walked unselfconsciously across the room and looped her arms around his neck.
‘It’s clearly something,’ she said.
And although she was naked and perfectly poised for kissing, in that moment all Dante could see was compassion in her eyes and his instinct was to turn away from her.
