While he caustically wondered how she imagined it could be otherwise.
For five years she’d been tossing shimmering ropes of curiosity at him even as she attached herself to Ryan. When he’d met her, he’d been days away from his own marriage, but unable to let the wolves prowling the bar they’d been in to consume her. He’d pulled her and her cousin into his booth while he waited for Ryan, entranced by Lauren’s shy, understated wit and killer legs. When Ryan had arrived, Paolo had expected his friend to remove with her cousin to Ryan’s hotel room, but no. His friend had turned his good-ol’-boy charm on Lauren and she had blushed under the attention of two men.
Engaged, there was nothing Paolo could do but warn his friend against being cavalier with an obvious virgin. He’d been shocked six months later when Ryan had announced he was marrying her, partly because Paolo hadn’t realized they’d kept in touch. By then he’d been so deeply entrenched in the loss of his father and minimizing the damage of his marriage imploding, he’d convinced himself that whatever attraction he’d felt toward Lauren had been a bachelor’s last hurrah.
Then he’d glimpsed her arriving at the church and the magnetism had been even stronger than he’d remembered. Unbalanced by it, he’d blurted out a hasty are-you-sure lecture to Ryan that had gone nowhere. Inexplicably, Paolo had been filled with rage as the vows were spoken. The entire ceremony had become a living hell, his abominable desire for Lauren growing like a snowball careening down a hill. He’d tried to drink it away, unable to make sense of his reaction while longing for the evening to be over.#p#????#e#
Then Lauren had followed him outside, looking like the most delectable innocent ever sacrificed to a man’s basest hunger. Ryan’s hunger. Paolo had kissed her. The hard, passionate kiss they’d shared burned on his lips and conscience to this day.
If she hadn’t returned his ardor all of this would be different, but she’d kissed him as though he was the only man she would ever want, and that had made everything worse. He hated her for letting the kiss go on too long, for escalating behavior he’d put down to intoxication and grief into something unforgettable. He inwardly cringed from the weakness it represented and the hurt he—they—had caused people he cared about.
The degradation never left him. Best man. To this day, no one else had asked him to hold the position, always joking it wasn’t in the groom’s interest. Of course he hated her for that. Charleston was merely fuel to the fire while this fiasco with a baby made it impossible for him to feel anything toward her but animosity and suspicion.
“Your silence says everything, doesn’t it?” she said with a little quaver in her voice. “That’s fine. As I said, the baby is my only vulnerability so unless you decide it’s yours, you’re completely powerless to touch me.” Setting aside her napkin with a hand that shook, she secured her dress with crossed arms and stood to turn her back. “Could you close the hooks so I can go to my room?”
He didn’t move, eyeing that slender back where the punishing marks were fading. Her shoulders seemed to have fallen a notch and that made something teeter in his chest before he quickly closed off to anything like mercy or regret. Focus.
Nevertheless, he tasted a hint of self-contempt that he had it in him to be cruel to a woman, even one who wasn’t as defenseless as she looked, but he had a lot to safeguard.
“My family is in government, cara,” he reminded gently. “I’m hardly powerless. I’d hate for you to endure a long flight only to be turned away by customs.”
She spun slowly, her spine stretching as she lengthened it with umbrage. “You wouldn’t.”
Try me, he dared with an unflinching gaze, feeling a catch of the old, reckless Paolo who had gambled too often in too many ways. It filled him with elation.
“Be a good girl and go back to Quebec,” he cajoled, adding a smile of condescension for good measure.
Her nostrils flared as she drew in a breath like a cloud gathering volume. Her fists closed into angry knots of white against her bare, upper chest as she kept her dress pinned to her front.
“Don’t you dare,” she said from between clenched teeth, “tell me to rattle around that empty mansion again. That’s all I’ve done for months and I’m sick of it!”
Her quiet ferocity should have warned him off, but it stoked his inward excitement, priming him for a badly needed contest of wills.
“I’ll do what I please,” he stated with quiet brutality.