for the fifth time while his mother had done nothing, passed out from another of her drunken binges. He’d decided that night that he was sick of being the neighbourhood punching bag and so had gone out to find someone to teach him how to defend himself. That was the last time anyone had laid a punch on him.
The teenagers, making the right choice in deciding they didn’t want to take him on, didn’t say anything else, leaving him to enter the building.
It was dark and dingy inside, the lift out of order, half the lights in the lobby out.
He ended up walking all the way to the fifteenth floor, grimacing at the dirty floors, stained walls and huddled shapes of people in the doorways and clustered in the stairwells. It was all too familiar to him. It was the ‘new life’ his mother had promised him when she’d taken him away. Only it had ended up with her dead a few years later, and him alone to fend for himself at sixteen.
An old anger twisted inside him, but he ignored it, as he’d been ignoring it for years.
There was nothing to be angry about, not now. Things had turned out well despite that. Enzo had come for him four years later, and together they’d eventually claimed that new life for both of them. His mother would have been proud.
On the fifteenth floor Dante scanned the hallway for the number the investigator had given him and eventually found it right down the end. He paused outside the door, aware that there was some kind of complicated emotion burning in his veins. However, since he didn’t care to examine his more complicated emotions, he ignored it, lifting his hand to knock hard on the door instead.
There was silence.
‘I know you’re in there, Stella Montefiore,’ he said without raising his voice. ‘So you’d better open up, darling. Or, if you prefer, I can get the police involved. I’m sure your father would love that.’
There was another brief moment of silence and Dante found his heart rate accelerating for no good reason that he could see.
He had his hand in his pocket ready to pull out his phone and call the police when the door suddenly opened, a small, fragile-looking woman in jeans and a faded red T-shirt standing in the doorway. Her golden hair was in a messy ponytail, loose strands hanging around her lovely, if rather pale, face. Familiar cool blue eyes fractured through with silver met his.
And desire hit him in the gut like a freight train.
‘There’s no need for that,’ Stella Montefiore said calmly, looking for all the world like she’d been waiting all day for him to show up at her door unannounced. ‘Though, if you’re afraid to be in a room alone with me, then by all means call the police.’
* * *
Stella’s heart was racing, fear coiling tightly in her gut. The hard edges of the door handle were digging into her palm, but she didn’t want to let go. Given the weak state of her knees, she’d probably collapse onto the floor without support, and there was no way in hell she was doing that. And definitely not right in front of him.
He’d found her. Somehow, he’d damn well found her.
Dante Cardinali stood in the doorway of her grotty apartment, blazing like an angel sent straight from God, the reality of his physical presence hitting her like a blow.
In the past five weeks, when she’d gone over that night in her memory—and she went over it a lot—she’d told herself that what had happened between them was an aberration. A momentary weakness on her part, brought on by inexperience and a failure to prepare herself properly for what she’d had to do. She’d also told herself that she’d overestimated the intensity of his personal magnetism. But all it took was one look to know that, if anything, she’d underestimated it.
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