“What if I said it’s too late and that I’m no longer in love with you?”
She quickly turned her face away, as if his words had been a slap in the face, and a part of him immediately regretted saying them, because he of all people knew he might be upset with her, angry as hell, but he still loved her.
She turned back to him, met his gaze. “If you were to say that, Angelo,” she said softly, interrupting his thoughts, “the first thing I would think is that in that case, you never loved me at all if you could so easily fall out of love with me. But then I think I know better. You love me. I might have had my doubts at first, but that weekend after spending time with you in Oklahoma, I believed you. You said it often, and you said it each and every time with conviction and purpose, with meaning. I began believing you. But then I was afraid because I knew you were the one man who I could and would lose my heart to. And I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that.”
“And you think you are now?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes. I’m not going to say being a part of my life is going to always be easy. But I promise to try and not cause too many problems.”
He lifted his brow, skeptical…which prompted her to say, “I said I would try. So the decision is yours. You can believe that I love you, forgive me and we go from there. Or you can tell me to walk away and I’ll go out that door and accept that it’s over between us.”
She paused for a moment. “So tell me what you want it to be, Angelo.”
He heard the impatience in her voice, heard the uncertainty of what his answer might be. He knew what his answer would be. Probably had known when he glanced up and she stood there at the door. Could he really risk the heartbreak he might find with her?
He held her gaze and in a clear, distinct voice, he said, “Walk.”
Chapter 29
At that moment, Peyton fought back the urge to burst into tears. She had come here and had given it her best shot. If he no longer wanted her then fine. But she wouldn’t give up on him. He still loved her, she knew it. She felt it. But if he needed more time, then that’s what she would give him. He had been patient with her and now she would be patient with him.
Squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin, she met his gaze. “Fine.”
She turned and headed for the door. When she reached it, he said, “Now lock the door.”
She glanced over her shoulder. He had stood and was stripping off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. She stared.
“Peyton?”
His voice, once again clear and direct, almost made her jump. “Yes?”
“Lock the door.”
“Oh.” She twisted around to lock the door and then turned back around. He had tossed his shirt aside and had come around to sit on the edge of his desk to remove his shoes and socks. His gaze was glued to her the entire time.
“It might save time if you started taking off your own clothes,” he said, standing. She watched his hands go to the buckle of his belt as he removed it from his slacks. It was then that she saw the size of his erection. Oh, my. Her palm automatically went to her throat as she felt her pulse beating erratically.
She somehow found her voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”
By now he was sliding his slacks down a pair of muscular thighs. “I’m about to make love to you. Here in my office. Do you know how often I’ve sat in here daydreaming, fantasizing about doing that very thing? I could envision you stretched across my desk, legs open with me between them.”
An image popped into her head, and she almost lost control of her breathing as a surge of desire raced through her. “Ahh, don’t you think we need to talk, Angelo?”
He looked at her; a crooked smile touched his lips. The smile extended to his eyes. “We’ve talked. At least you talked, mostly. I heard you and the most important thing you said was that you loved me.”
“And you believe me?”
“Yes. You have no reason to lie about it.”
He began walking toward her. Naked and in a purposeful stride that was as sexy as anything she’d ever seen. “However, there will be ground rules that we will cover later. And there will be a wedding, which we can discuss later as well.”
She lifted a brow. “Wedding? I don’t recall you proposing.”
He reached out and caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. “I will, sweetheart, after stripping you naked. When I ask you to be my wife, I want you as naked as I am.”
And then, with an expertise she found amazing, he removed her clothes. She saw the hunger in his eyes and felt it all over. Since becoming involved with him, she had been taken in ways most women couldn’t even imagine.
He stepped back and his gaze raked over her naked body, leaving heat in its wake. She could hear a low growl forming in his throat as he reached out and touched the hardened nipples of her breasts with his fingertips. “If I say it once, I’ll say it a thousand times,” he whispered raggedly. “You are beautiful, Peyton, so much so that my entire body is smoldering with a need to feast on you like a starving man.”
She thought that he could say some of the most amazing things in a way that could stimulate her just hearing them. And when she felt his fingers slide away from her breasts and down her stomach to the curly hair between her legs, a shudder passed through her.
“Peyton Mahoney, will you marry me?”
She raised her eyes to meet his gaze. “You can ask me something like that at a time like this?” His fingers worked their way inside of her and were moving back and forth across her clit.
“As good a time as any… .”
“What happened to the old-fashioned on-your-knees kind of proposal?”
He chuckled. “Hey, that’ll work.”
Slowly Angelo knelt down, getting up close and personal with the juncture between her legs. He leaned in close and touched his tongue to her feminine mound. “Is this better?”
If only he knew, she thought, trying to hold herself together while his tongue skimmed her, igniting fires everywhere he touched. Every so often, she heard the words…delicious, hot, mine…flow from his lips.
When she closed her eyes, he whispered, “No, keep them open. I want you to watch me, see me take you this way. Make love to you.”
And then he was back on his feet and sweeping her into his arms. He moved across the room and placed her bottom in the middle of his desk. She shook her head. “You were really serious about this, weren’t you?”
He lifted a brow. “Why would you think I wasn’t?”
Yes, why wouldn’t she? “I’ve never been taken on a desk before.”
“Then consider it done.”
She sensed the intense need in him even before he moved between her legs, and when he leaned down and captured her lips in an open-mouth kiss that sent her nerves reeling, she moaned out his name. He lifted her hips, tilted them toward him to receive his entry. She moaned deeper with the penetration of his erection as he slowly delved deeper into her eagerly waiting feminine muscles.
He pulled his mouth away from hers when her inner muscles clamped down on him with a force that tried to limit his forward progress. “Let go,” he said in a rough tone.
“Not yet,” was her reply. She clamped down on him, then eased up, then clamped down again on him, extracting and contracting with an urgency that had him gasping with every breath he inhaled.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice deep and tortured.
“What does it feel like?”
She knew he was powerful enough to push beyond her boundaries. She was holding him hostage, but he wasn’t resisting. That meant he was enjoying her brand of possession.
And then he threw his head back and screamed her name at the same time he broke loose and pushed deeper inside of her, touching her womb at the exact moment his body burs
t into an explosion. She felt it, the very essence of him, his hot release, flooding her insides.
And then he arched upward and began pounding into her. She exploded on impact, wound her arms around him and entwined her legs with his. He leaned forward and took her mouth, his tongue tangling and mating with hers.
Each thrust into her body became more demanding, and when he came again, she, too, gave into rampaging desire and passion a second time. It was then that she realized, he had proposed but she hadn’t given him her answer.
* * *
Hours later, Angelo remembered she hadn’t responded to his proposal.
They had redressed and left his office, and he’d driven straight to his place. They had ordered pizza to satisfy their hunger and then stripped again to satisfy another hunger, one that just wouldn’t go away.
He was holding Peyton in his arms in his bed. “Before you doze off, you never gave me an answer to my proposal,” he said, looking down at her and pushing locks of her hair back from her face.
She smiled up at him. “Sure I did. You just didn’t hear it with all those moans.”
That was a good possibility. “So tell me again, so I can hear it.”
Her eyes, he noted, appeared bright with mischief. “We could just live together for a few years and—”
“Not on this planet so don’t even think about it.”
“Um, I see the Italian side of you is coming out,” she said, reaching up and placing a hand against his cheek.
“Whatever. So give me an answer.”
She shifted her body to stare directly into his face. “Yes, I will marry you.”
And then he leaned down, captured her mouth to seal their proposal with one earth-shattering kiss. And he knew at that very moment that he had helped to slay her demons of the past and together they could look forward to a perfect future.
* * *
Angelo glanced down at his fiancée and smiled. The room was filled with people in the Waldorf Hotel Ballroom in the heart of Manhattan. “Tired?”
Peyton chuckled. “I didn’t know your parents would be inviting half the country. I don’t remember this many people at Sam’s engagement party.”
Angelo shrugged. “Mainly because Sam took control of the guest list. However, you, my beautiful wife-to-be, made Mom happy by letting her handle things any way she wanted. Now you see what happened? You’ll know the next time. Hell, I don’t know half of these people.”
Peyton nodded as she took a sip of her wine. She and Angelo would be getting married in five months on Valentine’s Day, followed by an extended honeymoon in Dubai. She was looking forward to it.
Peyton had glanced back up at Angelo to suggest they go missing in action for a while when she felt a presence beside her. “Peyton?”
She jerked her head around and met the gaze of a man she hadn’t seen in close to ten years. A man she figured she wouldn’t see again. “Matthew! What are you doing here?” She felt Angelo stiffen beside her.
“My parents are friends with the Di Meglios so my family was invited.” He then glanced up at Angelo. “I’m Matthew Elton. Peyton and I attended Yale together years ago.”
Angelo took the hand offered and said in a curt voice, “I know who you are.”
Matthew nodded. “When my parents got the invitation, I had to come to see if it was really you.”
Peyton frowned. “Why? You didn’t think the Peyton Mahoney you knew would be good enough to marry someone with the last name of Di Meglio?”
“No, it wasn’t that at all.”
“Wasn’t it?” Peyton glanced up at Angelo. “Do you mind giving me a few minutes with Matthew?”
Angelo’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I mind.”
She knew the man she loved with a passion was trying to be difficult. To ease his ire she leaned up on tiptoe and placed a kiss on his lips. “Please be nice.”
“All right. Five minutes and then I’m coming for you,” Angelo warned. He then hardened his gaze at Matthew before walking off.
Peyton forced a smile at Matthew. “Come this way. We can step out on the balcony.”
“Okay.”
Peyton knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the Eltons had been invited to the engagement party. Angelo’s mother had done so with a purpose—and it was a purpose Peyton understood from the talks they’d had. Closure was important.
She was glad they were able to find a private spot on the balcony. She glanced at her watch. “We have five minutes.”
Matthew arched a brow. “He was serious?”
Peyton smiled. “Yes, he was serious. Trust me.”
Matthew nodded. “All right, then. I think you owe me an explanation as to why you left Yale without keeping in touch. I thought—”
“What did you think, Matt? That I would continue to be gullible and believe all those excuses about why you couldn’t take me home to meet your family? You knew they would think I wasn’t good enough.”
She saw the blush of embarrassment that tinted his face. “You knew?”
She shook her head. “Not at first, but I overheard you tell someone and that was okay, but as you can see it wasn’t meant for anything to last between us.”
“Is that why you left school?”
“Doesn’t matter. That was ten years ago. And now I am marrying a man who appreciates me, and neither he nor his family give a royal damn where I was born or to whom. I’m happy, and I hope you are, too.”
He shook his head. “No. I ended up marrying the woman my parents picked out for me, and we were divorced within four years.”
“A pity,” Peyton said, not really caring. He was someone in her past, and she was glad for him to stay there.
“Time’s up, Peyton.”
It seemed Angelo had appeared out of nowhere and then he was by her side, where she knew he would always be.
Matthew looked up at the both of them. “I hope the two of you will be happy.”
Angelo spoke up before she could. “We will be.” And then without saying anything else, he swept Peyton off her feet and into his arms to carry her back inside to the party.
Epilogue
At the wedding reception, when Angelo tossed Peyton’s garter into the crowd of single men, it landed right on Lee Madaris’s shoulder. He tried pushing it off, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. Nolan Madaris glanced over at him and snickered. “I guess that means you’re next.”
Lee frowned and made a move toward Angelo to give him back the garter, when a feeble yet strong hand stopped him. “Enjoy this year.”
He tried not to frown at his great-grandmother. “And what year is this, Mama Madaris?”
“Your last one as a single man.” Then she walked off.
He watched as she slowly maneuvered her way over to where her youngest son, Jake, was standing with his wife, Diamond. Leaning on her cane, she glanced back at him, nodded and smiled. A shudder ran through him. Two things you could count on: his great-grandmother dreaming about fish when someone was pregnant, and her being a busybody when it came to her grands and great-grands, trying to marry them off.
“Hey, why are you frowning, Lee?”
He glanced up and met Angelo’s grin. His frown deepened. “Why did you hit me with this?”
Angelo’s grin widened. “It wasn’t intentional. My back was turned, and I just tossed it. I guess it had your name on it.”
“Don’t try and get cute with me,” Lee said, shoving the garter into Angelo’s hands. “My grandmother thinks she has everything figured out, but I intend to beat her at her own game.” He then walked off. Shaking his head, Angelo grinned, thinking that he wished his friend luck, and placed the garter in the pocket of his tuxedo jacket.
Angelo was still grinning when Peyton joined him a few moments later. In a few hour
s, they would be leaving for Paris to begin their two-week honeymoon. Before returning home they were flying to Dubai to check on the progress of the Grand MD Hotel, a Madaris–Di Meglio joint venture. He couldn’t wait to get Peyton alone in Jake’s Learjet, which was flying them to Paris. He was eager to give Peyton her wedding present.
“It’s time for us to cut our wedding cake, Angelo.”
“Okay, sweetheart,” he said, smiling down at her. She looked beautiful, absolutely radiant, and when he’d seen her walking down the aisle to him on the arm of Mac’s cousin, Marine Colonel Ashton Sinclair, at that moment he knew he couldn’t love her any more. But he was wrong. He was falling deeper and deeper in love with her each and every time he saw her.
They were still working out the logistics of where they would live and practice law. More than likely they would both be practicing law in New York and Oklahoma for a while.
“I can’t wait to get you alone,” he said, leaning down and whispering close to her ear.
She smiled up at him. “And I can’t wait to be alone with you.”
They both got what they wanted a few hours later as Jake’s pilot flew the plane away from JFK. They had given in to his parent’s desire to have a lavish Di Meglio wedding in New York.
Cuddled up in Angelo’s lap in the private jet, he handed his wife a sealed envelope. “This is your wedding gift, sweetheart, and it comes with all my love.”
She opened the envelope, and her eyes widened. “You bought me the lighthouse?”
He chuckled. “Yes, and that’s not all.”
She read further and her breath caught. She looked back at him, astonished. “And the lagoon?”
“Yes. Both are ours and I plan for us to make a stop there after leaving Dubai.”
Peyton couldn’t hold back the tears that flowed down her face. “I love you, DeAngelo Antonio Di Meglio. Thank you for being the man to knock that chip off my shoulder.”
Courting Justice Page 24