He extended his hand to her and she slowly reached her hand out to accept it. Lighting streaked through her, from her fingertips, spreading to every other part of her, the shock and electricity curling her toes in her pumps.
She stood, her eyes level with his thanks to her shoes. “Thank you.”
A member of the hotel staff came to where they were and had a brief exchange with Matteo before getting into the car and driving it off to the parking lot. Alessia wandered to the steps of the hotel, taking two of them before pausing to wait for her husband.
Matteo turned back to her, his dark eyes glittering in the streetlamps. He moved to the stairs, and she advanced up one more, just to keep her height advantage. But Matteo wasn’t having it. He got onto her stair, meeting her eyes straight on.
“There are rules tonight, Alessia, and you will play by them.”
“Will I?” she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was goading him. Maybe because it was the only way in all the world she could feel like she had some power. Or maybe it was because if she wasn’t trying to goad him, she was longing for him. And the longing was just unacceptable.
A smile curved his lips and she couldn’t help but wonder if he needed this, too. This edge of hostility, the bite of anger between them.
Although why Matteo would need anything to hold her at a distance when he’d already made his feelings quite clear was a mystery to her.
“Yes, my darling wife, you will.” He put his hand on her chin, drawing close to her, his heat making her shiver deep inside. It brought her right back to that night.
To the aching, heart-rending desperation she’d felt when his lips had finally touched hers. To the moment they’d closed his hotel room door and he’d pressed her against the wall, devouring, taking, giving.
He drew his thumb across her lower lip and she snapped back to the present. “You must stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re frightened of me.” There was an underlying note to his voice that she couldn’t guess at, a frayed edge to his control that made his words gritty.
“I’m not.”
“You look at me like I’m the very devil sometimes.”
“You act like the very devil sometimes.”
“True enough. But there are other times …”
“What other times?”
“You didn’t used to look at me that way.”
“How did I look at you?” she asked, her chest tightening, her stomach pulling in on itself.
“When you were a girl? With curiosity. At the hotel? Like you were hungry.”
“You looked at me the same way.”
“And how do you think I look at you now?”
“You don’t,” she whispered. “When you can help it, you don’t look at me at all.”
He moved his other hand up to cup her cheek, his thumb still stroking her lower lip. “I’m looking at you now.”
And there was heat in his eyes. Heat like there had been their night together, the night that had started all of this. The night that had changed the course of her life.
“Because you have to,” she said. “For the guests.”
“Oh, yes, the guests,” he said.
Suddenly, a flash pierced the dim light, interrupting their moment. They both looked in the direction of the photographer, who was still snapping pictures in spite of the fact that the moment was completely broken.
“Shall we go in?” he asked. Any evidence of frayed control was gone now, the rawness, the intensity, covered by a mask. And now her husband was replaced with a smooth, cool stranger.
She’d love to say it wasn’t the man she’d married, but this was exactly the man she’d married. This guarded man with more layers of artifice than anyone she’d ever met. She had been so convinced she’d seen the man behind the fiction, that the night in the hotel she’d seen the real Matteo. That in those stolen glances they’d shared when they were young, she’d seen the truth.
That in the moment of unrestrained violence, when he’d put himself in harm’s way to keep her from getting hurt, she’d seen the real man.
Now she realized what small moments those were in the entirety of Matteo’s life. And for the first time, she wondered if she was simply wrong about him.
A feeling that settled sickly in her stomach, a leaden weight, as they continued up the stairs and into the entrance to the hotel’s main ballroom.
There were more photographers inside, capturing photographs of the well-dressed crème de la crème of Sicilian society. And Alessia did her best to keep a smile on her face. This was her strength, being happy no matter what was going on. Keeping a smile glued to her face at whatever event she was at on behalf of her father, making sure she showed her brothers and sisters she was okay even if she’d just taken a slap to the face from their father.
But this wasn’t so simple. She was having a harder time finding a place to go to inside of herself. Having a harder time finding that false feeling of hope that she’d become so good at creating for herself to help preserve her sanity.
No one could live in total hopelessness, so she’d spent her life creating hope inside of herself. She’d managed to do it through so many difficult scenarios. Why was it so hard now? So hard with Matteo?
She knew she’d already answered that question. It was too hard to retreat to a much-loved fantasy when that much-loved fantasy was standing beside you, the source of most of your angst.
Though she couldn’t blame it all on Matteo. The night of her bachelorette party was the first night she’d stopped trying to find solace in herself, had stopped just trying to be happy no matter what, and had gone for what she wanted, in spite of possible consequences.
She spent the night with Matteo’s arm wrapped around her waist, his touch keeping her entire body strung tight, on a slow burn. She also turned down champagne more times than she could count. Was she normally offered alcohol so much at a party? She’d never been conscious of it when she was allowed to drink it. Right now it just seemed a cruelty, since she could use the haze, but couldn’t take the chance with her baby’s health.
Anyway, for some reason it all smelled sour and spoiled to her now. The pregnancy was making her nose do weird things.
Although Matteo smelled just as good as he ever had. The thought made her draw a little closer to him, breathe in the scent of him, some sort of spicy cologne mingling with the scent of his skin. She was especially tuned into the scent of his skin now, the scent of his sweat.
Dio, even his sweat turned her on. Because it reminded her of his bare skin, slick from exertion, her hands roaming over his back as he thrust hard into her, his dark eyes intent on hers. And there were no walls. Not then.
She blinked and came back to the present. She really had to stop with the sexual fantasies, they did her no good.
A photographer approached them. “Smile for me?” he asked.
Matteo drew her in close to his body, and she put her hand on his chest. She knew her smile looked perfect. She had perfected her picture smile for events such as these, to put on a good front for the Battaglia family. She was an expert.
Matteo should have been, as well, but he looked like he was trying to smile around a rock in his mouth, his expression strained and unnatural.
“A dance for the new bride and groom?” the photographer asked while taking their picture, and she was sure that in that moment her smile faltered a bit.
“Of course,” Matteo said, his grin widening. Was she the only one who could see the totally feral light in his eyes, who could see that none of this was real?
The photographer was smiling back, as were some of the guests standing in their immediate area, so they must not be able to tell. Must not be able to see how completely disingenuous the expression of warmth was.
“Come. Dance with me.”
And so she followed him out onto the glossy marble dance floor, where other couples were holding each other close, slow dancing to a piece of piano music.
It was different from when they’d danced in New York. The ballroom was bright, crystal chandeliers hanging overhead, casting shimmering light onto caramel-colored walls and floors. The music was as bright as the lighting, nothing darkly sensual or seductive.
And yet when Matteo drew her into his hold, his arms tight, strong around her, they might as well have been the only two people in the room. Back again, shrouded in darkness in the corner of a club, stealing whatever moments together they could have before fate would force them to part forever.
Except fate had had other ideas.
She’d spent a lot of her life believing in fate, believing that the right thing would happen in the end. She questioned that now. Now she just wondered if she’d let her body lead her into an impossible situation all for the sake of assuaging rioting hormones.
“This will make a nice headline, don’t you think?”
he asked, swirling her around before drawing her back in tight against him.
“I imagine it will. You’re a great dancer, by the way. I don’t know if I mentioned that … last time.”
“You didn’t, but your mouth was otherwise occupied.”
Her cheeks heated. “Yes, I suppose it was.”
“My mother made sure I had dance lessons starting at an early age. All a part of grooming me to take my place at the helm of Benito’s empire.”