ask for help.
Or think she couldn’t do it for herself.
She forced a mocking smile now, even as she smashed the pain down inside of her. She wouldn’t be hurt by him anymore. She’d never again allow him that kind of power over her, never let him close.
“I knew who you were,” she continued, “and what you did, but I never met your friends, or your family. I was never included in your real world, and it was the real world I wanted, not just the bedroom.”
“And Emilio gives you the real world?”
“Oh, that and much much more.”
His jaw thickened and he made a hoarse sound of disgust. “When did you start seeing him?”
Her brow creased as she pretended to try to remember. “February? March?”
His expression grew blacker. “We were still seeing each other in February. I took you to Paris for Valentine’s Day.”
“Then March.”
“You didn’t waste any time,” he answered brutally, his fiercely beautiful features so hard they could have been carved from stone. He’d never seemed as Sicilian as he did now, his intimidating expression, his harsh beauty reminding her of the rocky Mediterranean island his family had called home for hundreds of years.
Waste any time? She silently repeated, thinking about what had really happened, recalling the stunning grief, and the discovery that she was pregnant. Maximos had left her abruptly in the middle of the night, left her, leaving her bed and walking out of her apartment, and three weeks later when her period didn’t come she’d taken a pregnancy test. And then another. And another.
It had been so shocking, all of it, and the long, difficult months dealing with the pregnancy, and then the discovery that the baby wasn’t healthy, had changed her. There had been no one to lean on, no one to go to for comfort or advice. She’d had to deal with it all on her own.
She blinked, shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “You weren’t coming back, and Emilio treated me well…” She let her voice drift off, letting Maximos fill in the missing pieces. “Anyway, I do hope you can be happy for us.”
“Happy.”
“We both do so want you to attend the wedding—”
Maximos was big, fast, and his arm reached out, his hand encircling her upper arm before she knew he’d moved.
His hand felt hard on her arm, his fingers tighter than they’d ever been, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d felt many emotions around Maximos, felt so much sometimes she didn’t know if there was anything left to her, but the one emotion she’d never felt was fear.
Love, lust, hurt, need, agony, grief, despair, hatred.
But fear? Never.
Maximos was huge, thickly muscled, a hundred times stronger than her but he wasn’t violent, didn’t need to resort to violence. Not when his touch had been so effective—enslaving. He’d owned her, controlled her just by knowing her body, knowing her response. One touch on her breast, one kiss on the side of her neck, one leg between her own and she was gone. Lost. His.
Now with his hand wrapped around her arm he was dragging her out of the room, dragging her like a madman down the narrow corridor to an even narrower, darker hall at the back.
They turned a corner, and then another and they were alone, very alone, in a very dim corridor.
Maximos pressed her against the wall, pressed his body into hers, his knee parting her legs so wide she felt splayed, exposed. “He’s the wrong man for you, Cass. The absolute wrong man.”
“No,” she flung back even as his body covered hers. “You were the wrong man. But this time I have it right.”
Maximos leaned hard against her, his chest roughly crushing her breasts, his shoulders pinning her to the wall. “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.”
“And you do?”
“A hell of a lot better, yes!”
She laughed out loud, and her laughter was like pouring gas oline on a fire. His eyes blazed, his body seething with rage. He was too angry. She’d never seen him like this. Never seen him anything close to this but she wasn’t afraid, just defiant. “He warned me about you. Emilio said you’d say horrible things.”
“He’s playing you, Cass. Playing you just to get back at me.”
“Or maybe I’m playing him, because I love being alone with him…naked with him.”
Maximos’s control shattered. His hand snaked into her hair, grabbing thick strands close to her scalp. “How is he in bed?”
“Fantastic. The most selfless, devoted lover you could ask for.”
“I hear a challenge in there.”
His hand wrapped tighter, twisting the long strands between his fingers. This was war. Out-and-out war. “You hear right.”
“There’s no way you could have with him what you had with me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. As you love reminding me, what we had was just sex, and I can get great sex from many different men.”
“Wrong. What we had was different.”
“Not that different.”
“Emilio couldn’t possibly give you what you really need.”
“Odd, because I’ve become his slave in the bedroom.”
She was dousing the fire with more and more gasoline, and Maximos’s anger scorched her, stunning in its strength and fury. He leaned into her, not with the shoulder bone but the muscle, and suddenly his hand covered her breast. “This was mine,” he said.
“Not anymore,” she retorted.
His hand slid down to cover her belly. “And this, this was mine.”
“It’s his now.”
“He doesn’t know how to touch you.”
“You’d be surprised,” she answered, tensing as he leisurely stroked her hip, then boldly put his hand between her legs, touching her intimately, possessively, his palm covering the apex of her thighs.
Maximos leaned closer still, his mouth near her ear. His deep voice rumbled suggestively through her. “And this was mine, most definitely all mine. Mine to do with as I pleased. However I pleased.”
The heat of his hand against the warm core of her sent shock waves through her. Her legs trembled. “No.”
But he didn’t remove his hand. He pressed his palm up, rocking the pad of his palm against her softness, against the growing dampness, rocking against the sensitive, small ridge where every nerve ending seemed to ache. “Say what you want,
