Page 62 of Incognito

She needed him.

All of him.

Body to body, skin to skin, joined in an intimacy she’d never craved this much until this man entered her life and turned her world upside down.

Her hands splayed against his chest, her palms branding him, helpless to resist the pull of heat radiating from him. Shebasked in it, warming quickly, reaching burning point within seconds. Burning for him, only him, the only man she’d ever really loved.

The man who had to be toying with her, again.

She broke the kiss—annoyed, reluctant, breathless—her gaze drawn to his lips merely inches from hers.

“Tasha, look at me.”

He placed a finger under her chin and tilted her head up gently, giving her time to pull away if she wanted.

She didn’t.

If she thought his body radiated heat, it had nothing on his eyes, the aquamarine depths a bubbling pool of molten blue heat; the hottest part of a flame, the most hypnotic, and the most seductive.

“I love you. Every stubborn, self-reliant, capable inch of you.” His smile made her breath hitch. “You captured my heart from the first minute I saw you and I didn’t stand a chance.”

He gave a rueful chuckle. “Maybe my approach needs some work but forgive me, I have been trying to phrase my declaration exactly right. I want you to marry me, to trust in me enough to make a new beginning in a new country. This isn’t a game or a ploy or some scenario playing out. This is about you and me and the rest of our lives. If you want it to be.”

Dante, the prince of Calida, wanted tomarryher? Hope sparked deep in her soul but her self esteem had taken a beating once too often to jump up and down with joy just yet.

She’d heard smooth words before, practised words designed to deceive, to obtain an end goal.

She needed more.

She needed proof.

“If you love me, why did you leave? Why did you let me walk away after I lay my heart on the line?”

Dante didn’t look away, his steady gaze unwavering and filled with a clear-eyed honesty that took her breath away.

“I was a fool.” His sheepish expression gave her hope that he’d been as bamboozled as she had. “A man who’s never been in love before doesn’t know the symptoms, can’t recognise the cure even when it is staring him in the face. I knew we were attracted to each other, I valued our friendship and I wanted more, but when I saw you with your ex, something short-circuited in my brain.”

“You were jealous,” she said, trying to absorb the impact of his words without letting her topsy-turvy emotions get in the way.

“And stupid.” He snorted. “In all honesty, I was probably looking for a way out, a way to explain away the feelings I didn’t understand and I took it. You made it easy to love you, but you also made it easy for me by giving me an excuse to walk away because I wanted to.”

He closed his eyes for a second, a pained expression crossing his face before opening them again.

“I didn’t know what love was until I reached Calida. When I couldn’t think, couldn’t function, couldn’t breathe without going mad for thinking about you.”

He cupped her cheeks, caressing her with his fingertips, sending shivers down her spine. “Thinking about how beautiful you are, how your eyes spark golden when you’re passionate about something.”

His thumbs brushed her lips, making them tingling. “How I only kissed you once in a bout of foolery and how much I yearned to do it again. For the rest of my life.”

He kissed her, a soft, gentle melding of lips, a kiss of honesty, of hope. Her heart unfurled beneath it, filled with a burgeoning sense of infinite possibilities.

“Will you be my wife, Tasha? Be by my side, facing the future together?”

A vivid image of the two of them in bridal finery flashed before her eyes, a romantic picture to go with the romantic fairytale ending she’d never envisaged for herself.

Until now.

“I promise you everyone in Calida will come to love you as much as I do.”

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