by Dani Collins
“Dante!”
They came into the clearing of lights, and people stopped packing up water bottles and notebooks to greet him. He introduced Cami to the director and his cast. They were kind enough to move back onto the stage and perform part of a scene for her, much to her astonishment and delight.
“I’m sorry I won’t see the actual performance,” she said as they were walking back up the hill toward the villa. “That was amazing.”
“Why won’t you?”
“They said it opens in a month. I can’t imagine I’ll be here more than a couple of weeks.”
He snorted at her naïveté. “You’ll be able to see as many performances as you like. You live here now.”
She halted in the middle of the darkened vineyard and flung around to face him.
“We’re getting married, Cami. You had to know that.”
* * *
Maybe she had given up the fantasy of being swept off her feet long ago, but seriously? That was his proposal? All her girlhood dreams went down the toilet in a single flush.
“Be still my heart,” she muttered.
“Neither of us has a choice,” he added, making her want to bark out a laugh at how brutal he was being.
“You’re out of your mind.” She started toward the villa again, but he caught her arm.
“Stay here. The windows are open. She might wake up and hear us if we get any closer.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
“Are you? Duty to family is everything to me.” His grip firmed as he impressed the words through her. “You are family now.” He drew her forward a step and set his free hand on her stomach, splaying his fingers and drawing a deep breath, as if he was overcome by the magnitude of her pregnancy.
The world stilled, and she imagined she could feel their baby’s heartbeat rocking through both of them, hammering them together in indelible little pulses.
“Our baby might be, but I’m not.” She said it to remind herself as much as him. “What are you going to do about the rest of your family? Abandon the cousin who is like a brother to you?”
Dante’s breath hissed through his teeth. He dropped his hands from her, bunching them into fists. “He could have destroyed all of this.” He jerked his head at their surroundings. “He abandoned me first. All of us.”
“Has he confessed?”
“No.”
“So things could still change. I want to believe Arturo is behind the theft. You have no idea how badly I need that to be the truth, but this nightmare never lets me wake up. And quite frankly—” she looked to the house, throat tight “—I can’t help thinking you might wish my father was the real culprit. That way you wouldn’t have to dredge this up again. If you don’t already resent me for not being to blame, you soon will. Everyone in your family will.”
“That’s not true. My grandmother doesn’t.”
“This is going to drag on for years, Dante. It will be awful and expensive and draining. I know how awful it will be. You’re going to want to point fingers. I don’t want to be married to you when you decide you hate me—more than you already do.”
She had to quit talking then. Her throat became too small.
“And now we come to the truth of the matter. I’m not the one filled with hate, am I?”
A ferocious ball of heat rose in her. “Okay, fine, yes. I hate you.” She spat in a hiss, trying to keep her voice down. “Whether it was Arturo or Benito didn’t matter. The person pressing like a heel onto my life all this time was you. I am brimming with resentment toward you, and I hate myself for being so weak as to sleep with you and get pregnant. There is no way on this earth that I want to be chained to you for a lifetime.”
“Yet here we are,” he bit out with a similar crack of frustration in his tone as he took her by the upper arms and pulled her close. “Bound by the child we conceived. But if you think that’s all that chains us, you weren’t paying attention when we made that baby.” He covered her mouth with his own, kissing her with such ferocity, he burned away everything except the searing passion that had existed between them from the moment they’d met.
It was exactly as it had been so many times between them, running quickly beyond their control. She twined her arms around his neck and dug her fingers into his hair, pressing him down to deepen the pressure of the kiss, opening her mouth wide beneath his and meeting his tongue with her own.
It was struggle and reunion. Anger and anguish. Clash and fury and a clawing desperate heartache that made her pull at him, rather than push him away.
His natural need to dominate had him trying to take control, but she wouldn’t have it. Not this time. She was too furious. He had used her, and this time she used him. She scraped his bottom lip with her teeth and arched herself to wriggle against him.
Excitement expanded his chest in a hissing breath. He skimmed the dress from her shoulders in one abrupt move that had her pulling back, eyes widening with shock as the air touched her naked torso. They were outside, in the vineyard.
“You’re right,” he growled. “Not here.”
As he seemed to grapple himself back under control, something defiant and angry and incredibly hurt moved in her. She needed his passion to heal it. She needed to know she was stronger than him in this moment. That her will could prevail. She needed him to be as overcome as she was.
He started to turn her toward the house, and she flung herself into him.
“Yes, here.” She leaped, opening her legs and forcing him to catch her with a grunt, then twined her legs around his waist.
They kissed again, but he swore against her lips as he took her to the ground beneath him. Cool grass tickled her shoulder blades and her sandal fell off.
His hot mouth slid down her neck, and she opened her eyes to the stars. “I can’t bear how easily you do this to me, Dante. Even when I win, you win. You own me.”
He set his forehead against her jawbone. “It’s the same for me, damn you. How do you not know that? You’re all I can see right now. All that exists in my world. Do you think I’m proud of this reaction?”
The weight of his hips sat heavily between her thighs, pressing his hardness where she was aching with anticipation. That, coupled with his words, were all she needed to sink back into the throes. Her thighs shifted to better hug him, and her fingers began pulling at the top button on his shirt.
Even as she warned herself to cling to some sense, Dante was dipping his head to steal a taste of her nipple. Every other thought died then, lost beyond how good he made her feel.
She knew she ought to feel used by him. Manipulated even. But the care he took, and the way he seemed to shudder with restraint as he tasted her with such a sense of worship, was badly needed reassurance of his desire for her. Of this mad connection that shouldn’t exist, but did.
She pressed his shoulder so she could get at the rest of his buttons, then didn’t bother with opening them. She pulled his shirt apart so the buttons gave way until finally the heat of his chest settled over hers. They both groaned. His mouth climbed and paused as it often did on her collarbone, where the tiny raised white line always seemed to need a lick of his attention. Then his teeth scraped her nape and finally he kissed her again.
A moment later, he dispatched her panties into the weeds. She lay beneath him in the soil while he lifted on an elbow enough to open his pants. She guided him with her own hand, taking his damp crest into her core with a sob of relief.
He entered with a fierce thrust and a carnal groan. They were barely human in that moment. All civilization gone as they mated.
She scraped her hands down his back beneath his shirt, encouraging his hard thrusts as she raced toward the crisis. Her climax was so quick and shattering, she cried out with loss. He smothered her muted scream with his mouth and didn’t stop moving. The rhythms of his thrusts kept her in that glittering plane of orgasm, not allowing her to descend. Within moments, she was overcome and sobbing out her ecstasy again, but still he didn�
�t relent.
Over and over the waves of pleasure ground through her, until she was unable to tell where she ended and he began. All she knew was that he was the instrument of her ecstasy and she would never let him go.
Only then, as she accepted that he was a part of her, did she feel the muscles of his back tighten. He lifted his head and tilted it back, howling at the sky as he finally joined her in supreme joy.
* * *
She was softness and light, her hair silken against his nose, her scent clean and familiar and now carrying the aromas of his home. Latent orange blossoms and fertile volcanic ash.
The civilized man in him wanted to apologize for having her in the dirt like this, but there was no room in him for groveling. Possessiveness engulfed him. She was his. If he had to prove it again, he would. Every remaining hour of their lives, if necessary.
He couldn’t drink in enough of her. Her throat, her still racing pulse beneath his lips, her sweet cry of surrender still ringing in his ears. The warm roundness of her perspiration-dampened breast hot in his palm.
As afterglow went, this was more like survival of a shipwreck. They were washed ashore, lucky to be alive.
“I didn’t use a condom.” He hadn’t even thought of it.
“The damage has been done.”
True, but he still should have at least thought about it. Conscious decision-making had abandoned him, however.
“Here I was afraid that you didn’t want me anymore. Or wouldn’t,” she murmured.
“I don’t see this wearing off.”
“But it doesn’t solve anything, Dante.” She pressed his shoulder, urging him to gently extricate and roll away, allowing her to sit up. “It changes nothing.”
Bits of grass stuck to her ivory skin. He brushed at her back and shoulders. She was like a goddess in the moonlight, casting a spell with her iridescent beauty. Her narrow spine broke something inside him that had hardened over the years and threatened to solidify again, every time he thought of his cousin’s betrayal.
“In fact, if anything proves how disastrous our marriage would be, this is it. We’re each other’s downfall.”
“Did you feel belittled by our affair?” He feared it was too late to ask that, having taken her on the hard-packed soil of the vineyard. “Because it was always just this for me. Madness, yes. A compulsion, but not something I was using to hurt you.”
He heard her swallow, then she said, “I feel small. Made to feel small, because your feelings weren’t involved.”
“Were yours?”
* * *
Cami couldn’t bear how vulnerable that question made her feel. She was peeled right down to the core by their lovemaking and had to dig deep for a deflection. “I was a virgin. Of course I built it into something bigger than it was.”
“It was big, Cami. It meant something to me, too.”
She couldn’t look at him for fear he would somehow trick her into giving up her autonomy all over again. “That doesn’t mean we should continue doing this. Or make it worse by getting married.”
“‘Worse?’ What kind of a husband do you think I would be?”
“You don’t want to marry anyone,” she reminded him. “Certainly not me.”
“That was true when I said it.” His hot hand returned to splay across her lower back. “But I want to be married to the mother of my child. Maybe I didn’t see myself marrying you when we were having our affair, but I’ve since seen enough passion, and enough compatibility in other areas, that I think we could build something.”
“You said this was a compulsion. I don’t want to be your drug addiction.”
“You called us toxic. Let’s both find a kinder vocabulary.”
He sounded short, and she felt as though she hovered on a tightrope, carefully inching along into an abyss, in danger of falling at any moment, not even able to look up to the other side for fear it wasn’t even there.
“You’ve been living in squalor, Cami.” He sat up beside her, and his profile was jagged shadows and brutal angles. “I can’t expect you to forgive me for that. Marriage is the best compensation I can offer. You’ll be entitled to half my wealth, and our child inherits all of it.”
“I don’t want your money, Dante.” She sighed with a pang.
“What do you want? To live alone in Canada, denying me access to my child and denying our child all of this? You’re right. I won’t let you have that.”
She wanted his heart, but she never got what she wanted anyway. She threaded her arms into her dress and found her feet. “Can we just get through the investigation and figure out the next steps after that?”
He hitched his pants into place as he stood, then brushed his knees and looked to button his shirt before shaking his head at finding all of them gone.
“The effect you have on me,” he muttered. “If you need time to get used to the idea, fine.”
She snorted and walked away.
* * *
After breakfast the next morning, Bernadetta showed Cami around the gallery of family photos with great pride, offering up dozens of names and relationships. Cami would never remember all of them, but she was particularly taken by Bernadette’s wedding photo. The young Bernadetta looked overwhelmed, but her husband was so handsome and powerful looking, Cami knew exactly how she’d been drawn into marrying him.
“Dante really takes after him. You must have loved him very much.”
Bernadetta hesitated, which made Cami snap a startled look at her.
“Oh, I did. Very deeply.” Bernadetta smiled at Cami’s reaction, then a wistfulness passed over her expression as she looked back at the photo. “But it took some time. Ours was a marriage of convenience. It was a work-around for some red tape he was trying to avoid. I wanted out from under my father’s thumb—he was a lovely man, but very strict. I somehow thought I’d have better chances with Leo. Dante takes after him in temperament, too.”
“Oh. Poor you,” she teased.
“Yes. They’re a dominant force, the Gallo men.” She looked at Cami as though she could see right through her. “And they don’t love easily, but when they do give their heart, it is forever.”
Cami was trying really hard not to wish for something so impossible. Nevertheless, yearning colored her voice when she asked, “What about you? Did it take a long time?”
“I resisted as long as I could. I wasn’t even planning to sleep with him, expecting to save myself for my ‘real’ husband. That didn’t last a day.” Bernadetta gave her a wink. “He was very persuasive.”
Cami couldn’t help laughing. It was too astonishing for this old woman to be making jokes about sex.
“If I hadn’t had a stubborn streak of my own, those first years might have been easier, but I needed some backbone to stand up to him. We found our way, though. So will you and Dante.”
Cami’s pulse skipped. Her first thought was that somehow Bernadetta had heard them in the vineyard last night, which was deathly mortifying.
“You didn’t drink any of our excellent wine last night,” the old woman said, her gaze sliding from her young husband to offer a soft look up at Cami. “If you think photos of you with Dante at the Tabor gala failed to catch my attention, you underestimate my desire to follow the antics of my very active family. My boys may have a few secrets from me, but I don’t make it easy for them to keep them.”
“I...” Cami’s voice dwindled to a congestion she had to clear from her throat. “I don’t want you to think I planned any of this.” She liked Bernadetta. A lot. She didn’t know how she would handle it if what seemed like her only ally turned her back on her. “It’s... I’m still in shock.” She wrung her hands.
“Oh, my dear, no one takes advantage of Dante. The only reason Arturo was able to was because he was that close to him all his life.” Grief washed over her face as she mentioned her other grandson. “In fact, I fear Dante could be destroyed by what has occurred between them. The only thing that could save him is your forgiveness.”
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“Please don’t put that on me, Bernadetta.”
“If you reject him, if you deny him a place in his child’s life, he will blame himself and sink into even more cynicism than he already possesses. I understand these last years better now, that it was more than Leo’s passing and Dante’s having to take up the mantle that made him so hard. But that’s also how I know he’s in danger of letting bitterness destroy him. It could close him off to me and everyone else who cares about him. The only thing that could counter that is love.”
“No pressure,” Cami muttered, tucking her hair off her face with a slide of her finger. “He doesn’t love me.” It was so painful, it came out as a whisper.
“Not yet, but there is only one way to keep a man that strong, strong. By giving him a weakness who is equally strong. I’m speaking from experience.”
“I’m not you, Bernadetta.”
“No, you’re far braver than I ever was. Do you think I tried to break land speed records down an icy slope? Pshhh.”
“Here you are,” Dante said, coming into the lounge. “We should leave soon.” He was taking her to the first meeting with investigators today.
Bernadetta grasped Cami’s hand and beamed a smile at him. “You’ve made me the happiest woman, Dante. I don’t know how I could get through all that we face without something as wonderful as a wedding and grandchildren to look forward to.”
Cami choked.
Dante shot her a look, but it was the flinty one he’d sent her when Bernadetta offered to send them skiing. Let her have this.
He leaned to kiss his grandmother’s cheek, saying, “I’m glad you’re pleased.”
“She guessed and I didn’t know what to say,” Cami grumbled when they were in the car a few minutes later. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” he said dryly. “Now we can sleep together.”
“You—” She rolled her eyes. “You’re really not angry?”
“I told you last night I wanted to marry you. You came around a lot sooner than I expected. Grazij, Noni.”
“I still think it’s a terrible idea.”
And yet, as the days passed, he made it easy for her to think otherwise. Despite how difficult their meetings were, or how short his temper became in some of them, he was extremely protective and solicitous toward her. Between the appointments, he showed her his island home, spoiled her with impulsive purchases and pestered her to eat properly and mind her leg and wear sunscreen. They were back to their camaraderie in Whistler, but without the clock ticking down. It was poignantly sweet, building up her hopes.