His mouth came down over hers, hard and hungry and she could have cried for how good it felt. It stirred up emotions that she’d foolishly thought had been locked away, and when Dante’s arms slid to her waist and curved around her back to pull her tighter against his body, it opened a floodgate of feelings and sensations and a yearning for things that could never be hers. He was like a drug, as potent as any narcotic and just as addictive. If the sound of children laughing hadn’t penetrated the hazy fog clouding her mind, Paige probably would have gone on kissing him for as long as he’d let her.
Tearing her mouth away from his only solved half the problem because she couldn’t seem to catch her breath and her heart was thundering so loud it made her head spin. That and the fact her knees had turned into rubber kept Paige from trying to escape the strong arms that held her so snuggly to his chest. It didn’t help that his lips were still dangerously close to hers or that the flame of desire burned like molten lava in his eyes.
“I have to go,” she rasped out.
Dante’s voice was as thick as hers. “Not until you promise to have dinner with me, cara.”
Desire warred with common sense but the need to protect Daniella overrode her own need to be with him. “I can’t,” Paige said in strangled whisper. “There’s no going back, Dante. Too much time has passed…”
“Would you change it if you could?”
Paige stared blankly at him. “Would I change it?”
“Time,” Dante said. “If you could turn back time and change whatever it was that made you leave, would you?”
“Yes,” Paige said without hesitation, then twisted away from him and all but ran back the way she’d come.
Dante didn’t try to stop her. “Flee while you can, my angel,” he said as she disappeared around a bend in the path. “Soon I will clip your wings and you will not be able to fly away from me again.”
****
Kelly was conducting a game of Simon Says when she rejoined them. Once she was sure Dante wasn’t following her, Paige had slowed her pace so she could talk herself down off the precarious ledge she’d stepped out on when she’d let him kiss her. She was still feeling a little intoxicated and her insides had turned to mush but at least she hadn’t folded and agreed to have dinner with him. It hadn’t taken Dante two minutes to get her in his arms. At that rate, she’d last ten minutes tops before toppling into bed with him!
When the game finally ended, Paige had the children pair up for the walk back across the park. One of the first rules of an outing was that each child had to hold hands with a buddy anytime they moved from one location to another. If their partner let go before they reached their destination, they’d been taught to stop and alert either Paige or one of the assistants. She was terrified by the idea that a child would get lost on her watch so her safety rules were strictly enforced.
There were almost fifty children enrolled in her daycare center and the number was quickly growing. Ideally, she liked to have no more than twelve children to one assistant, that way she could organize an outing to the park four days a week, taking a different group each day. It was just her luck to have opened the daycare center across from the same park Dante used for his afternoon walk. She could only hope it wasn’t something he did on a regular basis because her nerves couldn’t take another encounter like the one they’d had today.
As it was, Paige was jittery for the rest of the afternoon because she couldn’t seem to drive him from her mind. Not that Dante was ever far from her thoughts, but now his image was much sharper. Her lips were still tender from his amorous kiss and as crazy as it sounded, she’d skipped dinner because the taste of him lingered in her mouth and in some small way it allowed her to hang onto him for just a little while longer. It was stupid, dangerous even, to keep reliving those few precious minutes when she’d belonged to him again.
Paige leaned over the guard rail of the bed and brushed a light kiss to her sleeping daughter’s forehead. She had to think of Daniella now because nothing mattered more than her little girl’s happiness. Dante would disrupt both their lives if he demanded visitation rights, and she couldn’t allow that to happen no matter how much she ached to be with him. Daniella wasn’t a shy child by any means, but she wasn’t any more prepared to spend the weekends with a virtual stranger than Paige was to let her go for that long.
The solution was as simple as it was heartbreaking. She could never see Dante again.
***
Dante drummed his fingers on the desk, grim determination lining his face. It had taken precisely one phone call and an agonizing two hour wait to find out where Paige was living and the current state of her financial status. Now all he had to do was figure out how to use that information to his advantage.
The modest sized house she rented was located in a decent enough neighborhood, but he couldn’t help thinking that a woman like Paige Spencer should be living in a mansion and wearing designer originals with jewel encrusted accessories instead. Dante could have given her that, but she’d run out on him because she thought it would take him years to amass the kind of wealth necessary to provide those things.
He still had the brief note she’d left him tucked away in the top drawer of his desk though he didn’t have to pull it out to know what she’d written. God knew he’d read it enough times over the years that it was permanently etched in his head.
I apologize for taking the coward’s way out and writing this instead of telling you face to face, but it’s the only way I can do what needs to be done. You’re strong and determined, Dante, and I know that one day you’ll be a huge success in the business world. I’ve carefully considered the kind of life you could have if you weren’t being held back by a woman whose only aspirations are to finish college and become a teacher, and I care too much for you to keep you from realizing your own dreams. That is why I am leaving…
Dante’s eyes narrowed into slits. Paige had cleverly disguised the real reason she’d deserted him by attempting to make him believe it was an act of selflessness, but he knew better. No doubt she’d found run off with the first man who’d offered to take care of her in style while she got her degree. Had she dumped the poor sot after milking all she could from him or had he gotten wise to it and sent her packing?
A cruel smile tipped the corners of his mouth. It was time to make Paige pay for the arctic wasteland she’d made of his heart four years ago, and Dante knew exactly how he was going to extract it from her.
Chapter 2
She shouldn’t have been so surprised to see Dante casually leaning against the trunk of a tree not far from where the children had been seated while she read to them the day before, not after he’d been so insistent that she have dinner with him. Maybe it was because she’d been so resolute in her own mind about not seeing him again, but Paige had been genuinely shocked when she’d glanced over and found him watching her intently.
Like all the Vittorio men in his family, Dante was tall and muscular with broad shoulders and impossibly long legs. At six foot four, he was a good seven inches taller than she was and Paige always felt small and feminine when she was with him. His dark hair gleamed like the shiny black feathers of a raven and if she hadn’t already been in love with him, Paige was certain her heart would have galloped away and followed Dante where ever he went.
She forced herself to turn back to the children and focus on the story she was reading. It was both a relief and disappointment to see that he was gone by the time she closed the book and let her assistant take over. Paige stood up, hoping for one last glimpse of him as her eyes scanned the park but he’d obviously had more important things to do than wait around for her to finish. She was just turning around to put the book back in her bag when a shadow fell over her.
“Looking for me?” Dante drawled with a knowing smile.
Paige blushed at having been caught. “Well, I…I saw you by the tree and was just…uh…”
“Looking for me,” he grinned.
“You’re
much more self-centered than I remember,” Paige replied crisply.
“And you, carissima, are extremely pretty when you blush.”
She glanced back at Daniella, thankful that her daughter had never had a problem distinguishing between the loving affection she got at home and the way she was treated just like all the other children when she was at the daycare center. She was chatting away with a few other little girls while they ate their snack and didn’t even notice Dante.
Under normal circumstances, Daniella wouldn’t have come with them today since she’d been part of the group that got to go the day before but Kelly had called in sick so they’d divided her children among the other assistants. When she turned her attention back to Dante, he was eying her curiously which nearly sent Paige into a panic.
Dante arched an amused brow. “Are you worried the children will report to their parents that you were flirting with a man in the park today?”
“I am not flirting,” she hissed under her breath.
Dante shrugged. “Children have a way of embellishing the stories they tell, but if it does not bother you…”
“Maybe you should leave,” she suggested, a little nervous that he might be right.
“I have a better idea. Take a walk with me, Paige.”
“Dante, I can’t…”
“You can and you will,” he leaned closer, “because if you do not, I will have no choice but to kiss you right here in front of all those innocent eyes.”
“Y-you wouldn’t dare,” Paige said feebly.
“Are you confident enough to test me, mia bella?”
A tremor raced up her spine when he lifted his hand and lightly trailed one long finger along the line of her jaw to her lips. Paige gasped and drew her head back, as annoyed by his mocking smile as she was by her own raging hormones. No man had ever affected her the way Dante did and it was disconcerting as hell to discover that he still had the power to reduce her to a quivering mass of jelly in a matter of seconds.
“Fine,” she gritted, “I have twenty minutes before I need to come back, but we walk and talk and that’s all.”
Dante crooked his arm, laughing softly when she gave an indignant huff and blatantly ignored it as she started across the park. He caught up with her in three long strides, just as blatantly ignoring the way her spine stiffened when he looped his arm around her waist. They walked in silence until he steered her towards the path to the duck pond.
“We can talk here,” she said, attempting to slow her steps.
“Talk, yes,” Dante replied, keeping a firm hold on Paige as he propelled her forward, “but that is not all I wish to do.”
****
It felt as if she’d been caught up in a whirlwind with no way to stop herself from being tossed in the air, twisting and turning until she didn’t know which end was up and which end was down. She tried to protest again when they got halfway down the path then veered off into the woods but he was moving so fast it was all she could do to keep her footing. They hadn’t gone more than twenty feet but it might as well have been the middle of the Amazon jungle because they were completely obscured from view if anyone happened down the path.
“Dante, I think we should go back.”
He stopped then, but just long enough to give her a rakish grin before whipping her around and pressing her back up against the trunk of a tree. Pinned as she was between the tree and his body there was little she could do when Dante slanted his mouth across hers and stole what little breath was left in her lungs. Paige threaded her fingers through his hair, ignoring the voice in her head that told her to stop being so reckless before she got in too deep to save herself.
Paige let out a soft moan when Dante’s hand slipped beneath her blouse to cup her breast. She should have told him to stop instead of squirming against him and driving them both half crazy with sexual desire, but what little control she’d had was lost the moment he’d kissed her. Dante’s response to her gyrating hips was immediate; she could feel how aroused he was, which only made her own body throb with the need to take him inside of her.
Dante knew he could have taken Paige right there and she would have loved every minute of it just as he would have. But he also knew she would have regretted it later and he wasn’t about to do anything that might spoil his plans for her. No, it wasn’t enough to have sex with her, though God knew he ached to bury himself between her silky thighs. He wanted Paige to feel more than regret when he was done with her, Dante wanted her to feel the same gut-wrenching pain that had consumed him when he realized the woman he loved didn’t even cared enough about him to tell him to his face it was over.
Whatever emotions she’d once stirred in his heart had nothing to do with how desperate he was to get her into his bed right now. At least that’s what Dante told himself as he trailed kisses down her elegant neck and back up again. He’d stopped loving Paige a long time ago and if he found himself thinking about her when he was at work or at home or when he was slaking his sexual needs on some other woman it was only because he resented the hell out of her for putting one over on him.
Paige closed her eyes, her voice little more than a whisper. “Dante, you have to stop. Please…”
He nipped the sensitive spot between her neck and shoulder at the same time he shoved her bra up and raked his thumb across the taut peak. A harsh sob tore from her throat as he continued to torture her until she was so close to climaxing it would have taken nothing more than the lightest of touches in the right spot to set her off. That was the moment he chose to draw her bra back down and deprive her of his touch. He lifted his head, smiling with satisfaction when he saw the glazed look in her eyes.
“Have dinner with me tonight,” Dante said huskily. “Let me take you to the finest restaurant in town, and afterwards…” he pressed a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth, “we will finish what we started.”
Paige’s lips trembled. “I can’t. Please, Dante, you have to stop…doing this.”
“Doing what, carissima?”
“This. Kissing me, touching me, making me want you so bad I can’t think of anything else.”
“Give in to it, Paige. What is so wrong with letting me make love to you when it is something we both want?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Paige replied with a heaviness in her heart.
“There is nothing to understand. It is as simple as me wanting you and you wanting me.”
“No…no, it’s not.” She drew in a stilted breath. “I have to be responsible, and giving in to impulses like this can only lead to disaster. I have more than myself to consider now and…” Paige cut herself off. She’d already said too much. “Please, Dante, just…let me go. Forget we ever met, it will save us both from having regrets later.”
Dante studied her face for a moment. She was hiding something, he was sure of it. “You said you had more than yourself to consider, and I do not believe you meant me. Is there someone else in your life now, Paige?”
She thought of Daniella and nodded. “Yes, there is.”
“Do you…love them?”
“Yes,” she said in a hoarse whisper. Be strong, Paige told herself. End it now while you still can. “There is someone else. That’s why I can’t do this, Dante.”
Dante dropped his hold on her and took a step back, his expression as cold as ice. “Your heart cannot be that committed if you can admit that you want to make love with me. I wonder how special this relationship is when you can kiss another man as if there was no tomorrow.”
“Dante…”
“Admit it, Paige,” he said with derisive sneer. “If I had run my hand up your skirt and yanked your panties off, you would have begged me to take you right here and to hell with anyone else you supposedly have feelings for.”
“All that means is that I’m weak, but then I always have been when it comes to you, haven’t I?” She pushed herself away from the tree and straightened her rumpled blouse. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t speak to me again if you happ
en to see me in the park.”
“You mean you only wish to kiss from now on?”
Paige shot him what she hoped was a scathing look. “You know what I mean. I do have a reputation to maintain even if you don’t. What if someone had seen us and word got back to the parents? I’ve worked too hard to get the daycare center up and running, I can’t risk losing it all just because I can’t seem to control myself around you.”
“You are right,” Dante said agreeably. “I would not want you to risk your reputation or your business either. So I will honor your wish not to approach you at the park again if you honor my wish to have dinner with me tonight.”
“Dante, I told you…”
“I know what you told me, but I am a stubborn man and will not give up until you agree to go out with me.”
“I could have you arrested for stalking me,” Paige threatened.
Dante laughed as he drew her back into his arms. “It can hardly be considered stalking if we just happen to be in the same park at the same time. And how would you explain why you willingly came with me or why, by your own admission, you cannot control yourself when you are with me.”
VITTORIO'S MISTRESS Page 2