Page 10 of Savage Proposal

My back went ramrod straight. “I wasn’t looking at you.” I shut my eyes and sighed at the high-pitched defensiveness in my tone.

Lorenzo chuckled, making an entirely masculine sound that dripped confidence. “Of course you were.”

I whirled around. “Iwasn’tlooking at you,” I insisted, lying through my teeth. “Why would I look at someone like you?”

“Someone like me?” he asked.

I scoffed and shook my head. “Men like you are?—”

He crossed the room, crowding me back against the counter. “There aren’t any men like me, Isabella,” he said, pitching his voice lower in a way that he had to know sent shivers down my spine.

Still, I couldn’t let him win either. I wasn’t sure what kind of game he was trying to play with me, but I would be damned if I let him have any kind of upper hand. “Rich, cocky assholes are all the same,Enzo,” I said. “You just happen to have a criminal cherry on top.”

Lorenzo was pissed for a moment—I could see it so clearly on his face—but then he smirked. “I’m going to have so much fun fucking the brat out of you,” he said.

I stiffened for a second: in the last week that he’d been tormenting me, he had never said anything so…forthright. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“I didn’t say sleep,” he said, leaning in. He planted a kiss on my cheek, then my jaw, and then my neck, and I sank my teeth into my lower lip to keep any kind of sound in. I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. “I said I was going tofuckyou,” he said. “Tease you until you’re soaked and aching for me, and then I’m going to take you apart piece by piece. Put you back together as something good and sweet just for me.”

Trembles ran through my body. When was the last time someone had said anything like that to me? I hated dirty talk; it always sounded so cheesy and fake, and the reality wasneveras good as the promise. But Lorenzo’s gravelly voice in my ear, his lips lightly dusting against my skin, pulled all of these strings tighter and tighter. I didn’t want to snap. I didn’t want to give in. I put my hands against his chest and, ignoring the heat of his skin against my palms, shoved. “Never,” I vowed.

“Never is a long time.”

“I’m only here until I have a baby,” I countered. “Right? That’s not forever.”

The heat slid from his eyes. “Speaking of that,” he said, “you might want to freshen up. You have an appointment.”

“An appointment?” I glanced at the windows over the sink. I could see the driveway right outside. “I get to leave?”

“No,” he said, dashing my hopes. “I have a specialist coming here to talk about IVF.”

Oh.IVF made the most sense, obviously. It was a business transaction, after all. Making the baby should be clinical. “Having a specialist make a house call is ridiculous,” I pointed out. “Why couldn’t you just take me into the city?”

“I have work to do,” he said. “It was easier to bring the doctor here instead of moving my meetings.” He checked the time on his phone. “You have twenty or so minutes.”

Shit.I hadn’t gotten the coffee maker going yet. I abandoned the task and hurried up to my room to change. There was a pit forming in my stomach that was hard to overlook. I wanted it to be because the idea of giving up a child and never getting the chance to raise them, after everything I’d been through, was too much to bear.

But I knew what it really was: for all of Lorenzo’s big talk, he was still calling in a fertility specialist. We were going to make a baby in a petri dish in a lab. He had been messing with my mind. He didn’t really want me…not that I wanted him to want me.Ugh, what is wrong with me?Despite everything that had happened to me, I thought of myself as a relatively well-adjusted person. But there was nothing normal or sane or evensmartabout the way Lorenzo Vitali made me feel.

The next time I saw my father, I was going to break his nose. He got me into this mess, and while I didn’t exactly have a phone on me—Lorenzo had taken it when he first brought me to the estate—it would be nice to know if he even bothered to look for me. Or, did he assume I had taken care of his debt, and he had to go butter up to his younger daughter now.

No one cares about you enough to come looking, the meaner parts of my brain whispered to me.You’ll be gone for a year or more, and the only people who will notice are at the university because you haven’t come to class.

I shook myself out of my spiraling thoughts, checked myself in the mirror one more time, and headed downstairs. I had just reached the first landing when Amalia opened the front door tolet in a portly man in slacks and a crisp dress shirt that screamed money. “Isabella, this is Dr. Coleman,” a voice said from behind me. Lorenzo was coming down the stairs from the second floor as well.

I held out a hand, and he shook it. His palms were clammy. “Do you have a place for this…consult?” he asked.

“We’ll take it to my office,” Lorenzo said. “Follow me.” I didn’t want to; I hadn’t gone anywhere near that office since that day I saw the man all bloody. But I trailed after the two men anyway.

In Lorenzo’s office, we all sat down around his desk. The carpet had been changed, I noticed immediately, and my stomach twisted in on itself. Dr. Coleman was talking, and I tried to shake offwhythe carpet was suddenly a deep blue instead of the cream color that I saw before and tune in as he explained the IVF process. There seemed to be a lot more needles involved than I initially thought. “After two weeks, we’ll harvest eggs from you, Ms. Rossi, and then we’ll use Mr. Vitali’s sperm to fertilize them.”

“Them?” I asked.

“In general, we implant between two and six eggs back into the uterus.”

“You want me to carry a damn litter?” I snapped, looking back and forth between him and Lorenzo like they’d lost their minds.

“Most won’t take,” Dr. Coleman assured me.

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