Page 37 of Captive in His Castle
She flinched away from him and hugged herself tighter; had to hug herself because if she let go, there was every chance her arms would wrap themselves around him. “Is this a joke to you? You kidnapped me!”
“Abducted,” he corrected, “and putting that little thing aside…”
“Little? You call abductionlittle?”
“Have you, at any point, felt you were in danger with me?” he challenged. “Have you felt any fear for even a single moment?”
“That is not the point!”
“That ispreciselythe point. You have never feared me, not even at the beginning. You was furious with me for tricking you and abducting you, but at no point was you scared, which suggests that on some instinctive level, you must trust me. Youknew when you invited me into your bed that I wouldn’t hurt you–”
“I didn’t invite you,” she quickly interjected, even as her whole body flamed at the lie.
“Yes, you did,” he refuted calmly, leaning back against the headboard and stretching out his long legs, as unashamed of his nudity as Callie was trying desperately to protect hers. “And I think part of the reason you invited me… other than the scorching chemistry between us,” he added with a wiggle of his eyebrows and a flare of his nostrils, “… was because you knew that if at any time you told me to stop, I would have done.”
Callie hugged her knees even tighter and wished she could refute everything he’d just said.
Throughout the whole wonderful, heavenly experience with Dante, her only fight had been with herself. It was the same fight she was battling now.
This was all so wrong, and on so many levels. Until Dante, every time she’d sex, all she’d wanted was for the man to leave so she could scrub herself clean from the touches that had so repulsed her. She wanted Dante to leave for the opposite reason, because she was craving more of his touches. If he hadn’t rolled off her, she’d still be lying dazed under his weight, her senses still filled with his scent and the scent of their lovemaking, and with no wish to ever move again. It had been like falling into a dream she didn’t want to wake up from.
“You know we didn’t use protection?”
“I’m on the pill to regulate my periods,” she muttered, mortified to remember how she was the one who, in her desperation to feel him inside her, had tilted her pelvis, and as she remembered that first moment of penetration, a pulse of heat throbbed in her core. For the beat of a moment, she let her gaze drift the length of Dante’s gorgeous body and, with asense of helplessness, felt the pulsing heat spread through the rest of her.
“So I must trust you too,” he said. “Because I never not use condoms.” Suddenly, he grinned. “Or maybe I subconsciously want you to have my babies?”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at both his baby quip and at how she couldn’t dispute a single word of his analysis. “Don’t even joke about it.”
“Probably not the best-tasting joke considering the circumstances,” he conceded before his amusement faded. “Callie, I brought you here to stop you destroying Niccolo but also for your own protection, and I make no apologies for that, and I make no apologies for finding you attractive… very attractive… but this thing between us isn’t a game. It might have started as one, and you could be right that it was proximity and circumstance that heightened my interest in you, but it doesn’t feel like a game now. There is something between us, Callie. We both feel it.”
How she wished she could deny it. Taking the metaphorical bull by the horns and inviting Dante into her bed in the hope the sexual attraction between them would be expunged and leave neither of them wanting more had backfired. Everything had backfired.
If she’d been frightened before, that was nothing to how she felt now.
“Are you hungry?”
She blinked at this latest swerve in conversation that Dante was such a pro at. “What?”
“You must be. You hardly ate any of your dinner.” He climbed off the bed and reached for his robe.
She hugged the sheets tighter around herself and tried to swallow the despondency that he was leaving her.
Robe on, he leaned over the bed to capture her chin in his hand. “I’m going to raid the kitchen. I won’t be long.”
“You’re coming back?” She couldn’t believe she was even asking it, let alone in a tone that sounded like a plea when only minutes ago she’d told him to leave… but not because she’d wanted him to leave but because the depth of everything she was feeling had terrified her.Wasterrifying her.
Oh, this was all such a mess.
His warm eyes glimmered. “Believe me,carina, I have no intention of wasting a minute of the time we have left together, not after that.” His mouth covered hers, tongue sliding into her mouth in a kiss that made her stomach drop and her pelvis contract. “Be honest with yourself and accept that this is what you want too. It’s just you and me here. No one else. Set your mind free, Callie… You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
When Dante slipped back through the four-poster’s drapes and bestowed her with that heartbreaking smile, Callie admitted defeat.
He’d been gone only fifteen minutes, but they had been nine hundred seconds of total paralysis, her brain warring with her body over whether to put her pyjamas on and wait for him by the door so she could tell him, politely, that she had more to lose than to gain by spending another second with him. Most especially the loss of her self-respect.
But then he bestowed her with that heartbreaking smile and put the tray laden with goods at the foot of the bed, and her heart made a motion that felt very much like a sigh.
Any self-respect had been thrown out of the window the moment she’d returned his kisses and tilted her pelvis to encourage him to possess her.
