counted to ten. She couldn’t even blame him because back then she’d been a little devil all right.
She’d lit sparklers in his room one Diwali night that had put holes in the new suit her papa had bought him. And that had almost lit the entire house on fire.
She’d taken a hammer to his new cuff links—Vikram’s present—and minced them to so much dust.
Oh, and let’s not forget the documents for an important merger she’d taken from his room and shredded.
When he’d brought his girlfriend to meet her papa... Ali groaned at the memory. And those weren’t the half of all the destructive things she’d done to show how much she hated him.
She cleared her throat. “I told you. I’ve changed.” When he raised a brow, she sighed. “I didn’t know where we were dining. How could I arrange anything? I was just surprised to see no other patrons, that’s all.”
“I had my secretary book the entire restaurant for us.” When her mouth fell open, he shrugged. “If you were going to cause a public scene—which given my knowledge of your character seemed like a high probability—I wanted to minimize the public part.”
“Fair enough,” she replied back with all the sass she could manage. Other people would have been a buffer, other people would have distracted her from this...whatever made her skin prickle with awareness.
Luckily, before her sudden awkwardness could betray her, the maître d’ arrived.
“A bottle of your best white wine and the shrimp salad for both of us.”
Ali lifted her chin. “I don’t want shrimp.”
“No?”
His fingers touched her wrist, and again, Ali pulled back as if he were a live current.
His jaw tightened, a flare of heat in his eyes. “Even though it’s what this restaurant is famous for and you made that soft moan when your eyes came to that item on the menu?”
Her cheeks aflame, her heart pounding, Ali stared down at the menu. The words blurred, the tension between them winding round and round.
“Madam?” His expression set into a pleasing smile, the maître d’ spoke up. “If you don’t want the seafood that Mr. Vittori has ordered,” he said, “might I suggest something else?”
“No.” Ali took a deep breath. It wasn’t the poor man’s fault that Dante was playing with her. And she had played into his hands like she was still that irrational, impulsive hothead who wanted to hurt him for everything that was wrong in her world. “I’ll have the shrimp, thanks.”
“Don’t,” she simply said, once the man left.
Don’t manipulate me. Don’t rub me the wrong way. Just don’t...be in my life.
Dante leaned back, his stare intense. “Don’t make it so easy.”
Before Ali could launch into another argument, he placed a rectangular velvet case on the table. Ten minutes into the dinner and she felt like she was already emotionally wound up. She fell back against her seat. Of course, he was the master manipulator, playing on weaknesses, while he had remained untouchable.
“What now?”
“Open it.”
Just get it over with. Just get it over with. And walk away.
Ali opened the clasp. She caught sight of the tiny, exquisitely cut diamonds set into flowers with such delicate white gold that it always took her breath away, as it glittered under the soft lights. She rubbed the necklace back and forth with the pads of her fingers, compulsively, a balloon of ache in her chest. As if the gentle love of the woman who had worn them might have rubbed off on the stones.
It had taken everything she’d had in her to sell her mother’s precious piece.
She pulled the box to her and clasped it so tightly that her knuckles showed white.
First, he had dropped the word about her mother’s charity, now the necklace. Dante never did anything without some kind of payoff. He hated her just as much as she did him, and still he had sought her out. The hair on the nape of her neck prickled while her belly went on a swan dive.
“Why do you have this? What do you want, Dante?”
* * *
What do you want, Dante?
Dante stared at the tears shimmering in Alisha’s large brown eyes, his breath punching into his throat.
It was the equivalent of a punch to his gut. He had borne enough of those in Sicily in his teenage years. Boys he’d known all his life had turned against Dante overnight; calling him names, roughing him up.
All thanks to his father’s crime.
Those boys’ punches had lit a fire in him back then, fueling his ambition to build a name for himself, separate from his father’s. They had turned his young heart into a stone that never felt hurt again.
He had craved a fortune and a name all of his own. He had decided never to be weak like that again; never to be at anyone’s mercy, least of all be controlled by a woman’s love. And he had turned it into reality.
But the candid emotion in Alisha’s face as she touched her mother’s necklace, the havoc it wreaked on him, was a thousand times worse than any harm that had been inflicted on his teenage self.
When he’d delved into those reports on Alisha, he’d been shocked to find that Alisha had visited London several times over the last five years.
She’d had to go to London to deal with problems concerning her mother’s charity. She had even spearheaded a charity gala to raise money. He’d been looking for leverage and he had found it.
He wasn’t cheating Alisha out of anything she wanted. He was, in fact, proposing he give her what she wanted out of it, the one thing she held precious in return for what he wanted.
No, what threw him into the kind of emotional turmoil that he’d always avoided like the plague was that he was involving her in this play.
Alisha, who was a mass of contradictions, who he’d never quite figured out, who’d been the kind of flighty, selfish, uncaring kind of woman he loathed, was an unknown.
From the moment she’d come to live with her father, Neel, she’d hated Dante with an intensity that he’d first found amusing and then dangerous. Even worse, she’d always incited a reaction in him that no one else provoked.
But all this was before the changes in her the last six years had wrought.
Cristo, the sight of her walking into the back alley a few hours ago—the white spaghetti top plastered to her breasts, her shorts showing off miles and miles of toned legs, the utter sensuality of her movements as she pushed away tendrils of hair falling on her face, the sparkle of the fading sun on her brown skin...
The shock in her face, the greedy, hungry
