Page 26 of Captive in His Castle
Oh God, how was she going to face him? He wasdisplaying an unerring ability to read her most private thoughts. If he should read her mind…
She’d go and hide herself in the maze and not come out until Sunday.
If Geppa hadn’t appeared on the corridor with that sweet smile of hers to escort Callie down to breakfast, there was every chance Callie would have stood on that spot with her feet glued to the floor and her gaze fixed on Dante’s bedroom door until she fossilised.
Any faint hope she’d had that he’d decided to leave her in the castle without his direct supervision and had flown back to Accardiano after all was dispelled when she entered the library.
Their eyes met.
She could no more control the electricity that charged through her veins and set her pulses into meltdown than she could control the scorch of colour flaming her cheeks.
After a long beat, he rose from his chair and softly said, “Buongiorno, carina. Did you sleep well?”
Struggling to breathe, she gave a short nod and, on legs that had gone all wobbly, took the seat Bernard held out for her with whispered thanks.
Small mercies came from the staff bustling around her, pouring coffee and fresh orange juice, giving her just enough time to pull herself together before they were left alone to eat.
“I trust you are happier with those clothes?” Dante said, breaking the silence. His voice was its usual deep, affable tone, nothing in it or in his mannerisms that even hinted at him having spent a night dealing with the tortured frustration she’d suffered.
And why would he suffer? To Dante, Callie was just another woman he was attracted to. She was reasonably pretty and they were stuck together. Once he set her free, he would move on to the next woman who captured his interest.
She nodded again in answer. She was a fraction more in control of herself but still couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
But she could smell him, freshly showered, the spicy citrus of his cologne a torturous delight to her airwaves.
There was not a single thing about Dante Coscarelli that wasn’t torturous to her, and all in the wrong way.
“You look beautiful.”
Her eyes jumped to his before she could stop them, and she came within a whisker of saying, “So do you.”
Dressed in a crisp white shirt and trousers, he looked like he was a tie and jacket away from waltzing into a boardroom, dominating all the proceedings, and turning the females in the room into quivering wrecks, and as she thought that, the shameful memory of what she’d done alone in her bed flashed through her again in vivid colour.
“You were right about your sister having a good eye for fashion,” she said, straining to sound normal as she reached for a pastry with a trembling hand. If he could act like nothing had occurred between them – and nothinghadhappened; all that had taken place had been the most excruciatingly embarrassing and yet, perversely, exciting and arousing conversation of her entire life – then she could pretend the same. She would not be the quivering wreck of the women she had just imagined. Just because she’d brought herself to a climax for the first time in a decade with Dante’s face fixed behind her closed lids meant nothing other than that she was human.
If she hadn’t woken with such shame and such heavy butterflies in her belly, she’d have swooned over the clothes Geppa had brought into her room. They were the exact kind of clothes Callie liked to wear, but with a price tag she could never have afforded in a thousand years on her teacher’s salary.
“When Georgia and I were at university, we had a Christmas job in a warehouse,” she continued, suddenly frightened of the silence that would come when she stopped talking.Frightened of what he’d fill that silence with. “It was where all the unwanted items from an uber-exclusive department store were sent for returns. I once had to sort a pair of jeans from the designer who made the jeans I’m wearing now. I remember wondering what it would feel like to wear them.”
“And?”
She gave what she hoped looked like a nonchalant shrug. “They feel nice.”
More than nice. Now she understood how a pair of jeans could be priced at more than twice her annual London transport costs.
She’d never known jeans could feel like a second skin or that a cream cashmere top could feel like a caress, and she quivered to remember how when she’d slipped the top over her head and smoothed it down, she’d imagined Dante’s hands smoothing it and stroking her breasts.
“I had a similar job when I was at university,” he said.
She pressed the top of her thighs together in a desperate effort to stem the throb beating between her legs, and ripped into the pastry. “Really?”
“I read business and economics in London – London prices were quite the shock to a poor Italian boy.”
“How could you have been poor?” she asked, confused. “I thought this castle was your ancestral home since the Medicis?” But as she asked the question, she remembered Geppa saying, ‘When Signor Coscarelli bought the castle,’ words that hadn’t properly penetrated at the time.
“It was until sixty or so years ago. Successive generations squandered the family wealth and were too busy having a good time to keep the castle in good repair. It was sold off before my father was born, but the new owners didn’t understand – or most likely were hoodwinked by my grandfather – the extent of the disrepair it had fallen into and the extent of the damage that was wrought on it during the Second World War. Myfather grew up with tales of the Coscarelli glory years but never experienced them for himself. I grew up with those same tales and knew I would be the one to bring it back to the family.”
“So you really were poor growing up then?”
