But instead, and in an indecently short span of time that suggested his mind was not similarly preoccupied, she heard his breath go even.
He had fallen asleep.
Leaving her there with her fingers gripping the edge of the bed as if she’d expected to be dragged off somewhere at any moment. Long into the night.
The next morning she’d woken up because she was so deliciously warm she’d thought she might find herself curled up on the surface of the sun.
But it was much worse than that.
She was sprawled out all over Pascal, her legs tangled with his. Her hair all over his chest. Her mouth there against his hard muscles.
Cecilia had sucked in a breath of pure horror, then threw herself to the side, hoping against hope that he was still—
“You still feel like silk and longing,” he told her, his voice rich with sleep, amusement and something far darker that pulsed inside her. “When you beg me,cara, I will make you sob. Over and over and over again.”
“In your dreams,” she’d hissed at him, already scrambling out of the bed and heading for the bathroom suite.
“Please,cara.” And his gaze was so hungry she nearly tripped. It made her heart pound even as she felt herself melt, then ache low in her belly and between her legs. “My dreams are far more demanding.”
Every night since had been the same thing.
If Pascal was home when Cecilia went to bed, he stayed far off on his side. He made no move toward her. And they still ended up in that breathless tangle each morning. If he was out when she went to bed, she would always wake up with a start when he climbed in, sure thatthis timehe would trespass over that invisible line that ran down the center of the bed…but he never did.
And it made no difference. They still woke up in a knot.
Cecilia was beginning to understand that her body simply wanted him. And didn’t much care how she got him.
Standing there in one of his many salons tricked out in priceless objects, nothing but glass at her back and her uncertain future before her, the last thing Cecilia wanted to feel was breathless. She glared at him.
“No clever response to that?” Pascal asked almost idly. “I’m disappointed.”
“Is that part of my punishment? It’s not enough that you force me to sleep in the same bed with you, you must also taunt me about it?”
“I’m not punishing you,cara. You would know.”
“I can’t imagine how an actual punishment would differ from this,” she threw back at him.
“For one thing,” he replied, too easily, “it will be public as well as private.”
But she had been a nun who turned up pregnant. What could he possibly do to her that she hadn’t already lived through, more or less happily?
“Public humiliation is hardly good for Dante. Who is supposed to be the point of all this, isn’t he? How quickly you forget.”
“I forget nothing,” he said, and there was a note in his voice that made her neck prickle in warning.
She didn’t pretend to understand this man she’d married. There was something about the way he watched her, hungry and angry at once, that unsettled her too deeply. She hurried from the room, determined to reclaim at least some part of Dante’s evening routine after all.
Because she needed a touchstone. She neededsomething.
She dismissed his staff, then read him a story, and kissed him as he drifted off to sleep. As if nothing had changed but the size of his bedroom.
And it was then, in the darkness while her little boy dreamed, that she had to accept the truth she’d been wrestling with. Her heart was not the least bit worried about Dante. Not only would he thrive here, and was—there was no doubt in her mind that Pascal loved him.
With the same reckless, heedless and instantaneous devotion that she herself had felt when he’d been tucked there inside her.
Seeing them together…did things to her. Watching the man who so overwhelmed her squat down to talk seriously, yet kindly, with her child—withtheirchild—made her feel something like giddy.
And she might have told herself that she had come to Rome to save Dante from him, but she knew tonight that wasn’t true. She wasn’t afraid, on any level, that Pascal would harm her son.