Page 33 of Captive in His Castle
She shoved her chair back like she’d been scalded and jumped to her feet. “If you must know, it’s been five years.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s a long time to be celibate.”
“No,” she snapped, but there was the same tremor in her voice that had shaken her hand. “It’s a long time of being happy and content on my own without a man using me as a vessel to get himself off on, so when you come to my bed tonight, know that that’s what you’ll find. A vessel.”
“WhenI come to your bed tonight? I didn’t know a date for sailing your ship had been set.”
“Well we might as well get it over with hadn’t we, seeing as you’re so convinced it’s going to happen anyway,” she blazed. “Come to my room tonight and see how much you enjoy having sex with a frigid mannequin.”
And then, as if she couldn’t get any more magnificent, Callie drained the last of her wine, put the glass back on the table with a flourish, and strode out of the room with her head held high and her long hair swishing.
Dante didn’t think he’d ever been so turned on.
Callie looked at the dining chair she’d wedged under the handle of her bedroom door the night before and pulled at her hair. Things like that probably only ever worked in films, and this castle was filled with so many secret passages and hidey holes that a lifetime of exploring would never find them all. If Dante wanted to enter her room, then neither a chair nor door was going to stop him.
What the hell was she thinking,ifhe wanted to enter her room? She’d ruddy well given him an invitation.
But only because she couldn’t take it anymore. The feelings he roused in her were just too much, a form of possession way beyond her control. She needed to purge them. Lie down and get it over with. Then it would be done. Over. Finished. Dante would return to his room afterwards, sated but ultimately disappointed, and then he would leave her the hell alone because she wasn’t worth the effort, and she would spend the rest of her time in this stupid castle thinking of ways to escape and reach Niccolo Martinelli rather than having her thoughts and emotions consumed by Dante Coscarelli.
Just because she’d brought herself to a climax fantasising about him did not mean her body would respond to him in the same way. In fact, she would make damn sure it didn’t. She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing in return. She wouldn’t lay like a mannequin for him because her body had frozen in revulsion – although that was still a real possibility – but out of choice.
She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing. Nothing. She repeated this to herself on a loop, saying it when she pushed aside the closed bed drapes and climbed naked under the turned-down bedsheets, still repeating it when she climbed back out and pulled her pyjamas on and then when she took them back off again, repeating it still when she scrubbed her teeth a second time. She was still repeating it when she punched the bedside light offand was plunged into darkness. She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing.
Her heart was pounding.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled the sheets tight around skin that had come alive with dread and anticipation.
A floorboard creaked. Her lungs and throat closed. Her heart came close to punching itself out of her chest.
By the time she was able to take ragged breaths again, she’d accepted the noise had been a noise that came with a castle of this age, but it did nothing to ease the nerves wound so tightly inside her.
What are you so frightened of? That you might actually enjoy it? Or are you frightened you’ll fall even harder for him?
The treacherous, unbidden, unwanted thoughts made her pull the sheets even tighter around herself, but before she could even begin to dissect them, a sliver of light diffused through a tiny gap in the curtains.
Dante was in her room.
Chapter Nine
Dante stood at the foot of the bed enclosed by the four-poster’s drapes and took a long breath.Dio, never in his life had he experienced heat in his veins and loins such as he was experiencing now or felt the beats of his heart so completely.
He’d had to force himself to stay in the dining room and eat his fill of the meal prepared for two. The urge to chase after her had been close to irresistible, but he knew what Callie wanted, even if she was too frightened of her desires to admit it. She wanted him to take the matter out of her hands. She wanted him to take the control she’d kept tight inside her for so long that she didn’t know how to release it without losing a part of herself.
He pulled the drapes apart.
The bedroom light he’d turned on had been the soft night light. The little illumination it gave revealed Callie laid on her back beneath bedsheets pulled to her chin. Her beautiful eyes locked straight onto his. Defiance rang loudly from them. Defiance rang loudly from every inch of her.
Dio, had there ever been a more magnificent creature to walk God’s good Earth?
He took her in a long moment before he smiled and murmured, “Waiting up for me, my love?”
Her chest rose sharply, and her chin lifted. “Save your loves for someone who wants them and get on with it.” Her defiance wasn’t strong enough to mask the tremor in her voice.
“I love it when you talk dirty.” Slowly, he untied the sash of his robe, then shrugged it off and let it fall to the floor… but not before noting the widening of her eyes when it dipped down the length of his body.
Her chest rose again; large eyes fixed resolutely back on his face, the lock not breaking when he stepped to the head of the bed and pinched the sheets. In one swift motion, he pulled them off her.
Dio del cielo. She was fully, defiantly naked.
