And it really wasn’t his business, she reasoned resentfully, for Dante was merely the man who had hired her to play a masquerade for a weekend, not her husband, not her boyfriend, not anything really. She needed to keep that truth in mind and stop endowing him with an importance he neither deserved nor wanted.
Dante breathed in deep and slow to master his temper. He could never recall being forced to work through so many different emotions in so short a space of time. There had been the concern and then the rage, the amazement and incredulity at her behaviour, followed by the anger that she could have omitted to tell him something so crucial about herself, and then a sick kind of relief he had yet to get his head around.
Some guests were already beginning to leave, and Dante seized on that excuse with alacrity, returning to their table only to say goodnight to Steve and Sancha. Stony silence fell in the limousine and Belle bridled. ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry.’
‘Don’t you indeed?’ Dante scoffed.
‘It makes me want to thump you!’ Belle told him truthfully.
‘It made me want to thump your father. You’re lucky that he identified himself before I got the chance,’ Dante countered between gritted teeth.
Belle studied him in astonishment. ‘And why on earth would you have wanted to do that?’
Dante sent her a look of raw disbelief. ‘You were holding his hand.’
‘So?’ Belle prodded with a toss of her head and raised brows of enquiry. ‘What’s that to you?’
And that was when Dante lost control for the first time ever with a woman. ‘Because no other man should be touching what’s mine!’ he virtually snarled back at her.
‘But I’m not yours. I’m the woman you hired to pretend to be yours.’
‘Well, you weren’t doing a very good job of it tonight, were you?’ Dante raked back at her, startling her.
‘I’m sorry if you feel that my behaviour embarrassed you,’ Belle fibbed, because she was so annoyed with him that she wasn’t one bit sorry and a band of tension was tightening round her temples, warning of the headache to come.
Dante looked heavenward in search of the cool and calm he needed, but instead the limo drew up outside the palazzo and Belle leapt out, smoother and even faster than Charlie in pursuit of a biscuit. Dante stalked up the front steps of his home, barely pausing in his haste to follow Belle upstairs and finally find the privacy he craved with her. Somewhere there were no listening ears, no snide remarks from his vindictive mother, somewhere he could talk to Belle and where hopefully she would return to being the Belle he was accustomed to dealing with.
‘Did you tell Alastair about our arrangement?’ Dante demanded.
Belle whirled round, her shoes already kicked off to soothe her sore toes and increasing the height differential between her and Dante, who was towering over her like a solid column of granite. ‘No, of course I didn’t!’ she snapped back in wonderment that he could even ask. ‘You can’t seriously think I would tell my father that sort of thing...what would he think of me?’
‘I don’t care what he thinks of you.’
‘Well, I do.’
‘There is nothing sleazy about our arrangement!’ Dante declared in outrage.
‘I’m not sure he would agree if he knew the facts, so I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with him believing that we’re a real couple!’ Belle fielded tartly.
‘We might as well be. We’re arguing like a real couple and I’m hoping the angry make-up sex is just round the corner,’ Dante confided, watching her rounded bottom wriggle enticingly as she strove to reach the zip at the back of her neck. ‘Here, allow me...’
After he had unzipped her, Belle snaked crossly out of the dress and draped it over a chair, mortified to be posing in flimsy lingerie in front of him now that that aspect of their relationship was over. ‘There is no prospect of make-up sex,’ she told him curtly.
Dante stalked forward, all silken predatory grace. His lean, darkly handsome features were taut, his high cheekbones slightly flushed. He stared down at her, stunning dark golden eyes like smouldering honey in the lamplight. ‘Even though I want you more at this minute than I have ever wanted a woman in my life?’
Involuntarily, Belle faltered. ‘Ever? Seriously?’
‘Seriously,’ Dante intoned, framing her hectically flushed face with both hands. ‘And I wanted to peel your father limb from limb because I was jealous and that was another first for me.’
And once he had explained that, all the turmoil inside her stopped churning and the oddest sense of peace enclosed her. ‘Jealous?’ she echoed in surprise and tickled pink by the idea. ‘I didn’t realise.’
‘You must’ve been the only person in our radius that didn’t realise. I almost made a complete idiot of myself assaulting your father,’ Dante pointed out grittily. ‘You were smiling at him.’
‘Was I?’ she muttered blankly, quivering as the heat of his big powerful body brushed against her lightly clad frame and his hands slid down from her face to her hips to tug her against him, the fabric tented at his groin, telegraphing his arousal as he ground against her with a low roughened moan that was compellingly sexy.
‘Where were you last night?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Were you with a woman?’
‘I got drunk and spent the night in a hotel. No woman. I wanted you but I couldn’t have you,’ he reminded her darkly.
What remained of her tension drained away.
‘Later you’re going to explain why you didn’t tell me about your father.’
‘Later?’
‘Right now, we have much more pressing stuff on our agenda,’ Dante husked as her bra drifted down to the floor and his hands swept up her ribcage to cup her full breasts, his thumbs teasing at the taut rosy buds that crowned them.
‘But we aren’t supposed to...’
‘No rules any more, no boundaries.’ Dante claimed her anxiously parted lips in fervent persuasion and a little moan escaped low in Belle’s throat as she shivered helplessly against him. ‘I can’t tell you where this is going, but I can tell you that we’re not going to stop before we’ve fully explored it because that would be crazy,’ he reasoned thickly.
And in the back of her mind she knew he had a point because she had stopped them dead, believing that that was the right thing to do to protect herself. But possibly that decision of hers had come too late in the day to be of any real use and the chemistry and the feelings he ignited were still racing through her like wildfire to wreak havoc with her control. And how could she be anything but secretly flattered when Dante confessed that he had been jealous? Surely that suggested that she meant more to him than a casual lover?
He backed her down on the bed, parting her from her panties simultaneously, backing away a step to strip with an impatience and a burning brilliance in his possessive gaze that could only thrill her. She lay back watching him, wanting him so powerfully that she felt light-headed and almost drunk even though she hadn’t had a single sip of alcohol. But then that was what Dante did to her, winding her up so tight with longing that she could barely function. The throbbing ache of need between her thighs was unbearable.