Page 42 of Captive in His Castle
She came within a whisker of making a quip about spitting that would make a nun blush, and then felt her cheeks go the colour of the wine regardless. Callie never made quips of a sexual nature. Never even thought of them. She always joined in and laughed when others made them but secretly never found them funny. The difference was Dante.Before he’d stolen her away, she’d recoiled from sex in body and mind. One long, glorious night with him had switched something on in her. Dante had liberated her body and mind. He’d brought a sexuality she’d believed missing to the surface and shown her how passionate and tender and fun sex could be.
Maybe she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but she no longer cared. She would never regret this time with him. She would never regret becoming his lover.
“What do you think?” he asked about the wine she’d just tasted.
“Very nice.”
“You could make a grown man’s head swell with praise like that.”
“Okay, it’s very,verynice. Is that better?”
“I can see why you teach history and not English. You need to work on your adverbs.”
Sniggering, she had a drink of water. “How come your English is so good? I actually think it’s better than mine.”
“I would love to say it’s because I’m naturally talented at languages, but really, I just wanted to speak it better than Niccolo. We both studied in London and, being young and horny, believed speaking the language fluently would increase our success rate with the ladies.”
“And did it?”
He raised a dark eyebrow and wiggled it. “What do you think?”
She thought she’d like to cast a spell on him to stop him from looking at any other woman ever again.
Stunned at this unexpected and definitely unwanted flush of jealousy, Callie’s face couldn’t work out a pose to strike, and she found herself biting her cheeks, something he, naturally, noticed.
“Have I offended your educational sensibilities, Miss Thomas?” he asked with another wiggle of his eyebrows.
She drank some more water to douse the disturbing and unnecessary reaction – for heaven’s sake, she’d known from the start that Dante was a player, had known too that when she invited him into her bed, she would be adding herself to a very, very long list. She had no right to feel even a twinge of jealousy.
“Where did the Miss Thomas thing come from?” she asked lightly.
His eyes gleamed with seduction. “I’m getting a real kick out of imagining you standing in front of a class… If you’d been my teacher, I would never have skipped school.”
That was better. Safer. “You were a tearaway who never tried, weren’t you.”
A delighted smile lit his gorgeous face. “You can tell?”
Her laughter expelled the last of the disturbing jealousy. “You’ve got the tearaway vibe about you. In fact, I’m amazed at what you’ve made for yourself.”
“Competitiveness and a long-term plan go a long way in motivation. I wanted to earn enough money to buy my ancestral castle and become richer than Niccolo.”
“Then why didn’t you try at school?”
“Because school was boring and I didn’t fancy any of my teachers.”
This time, her laughter came with a warmth that rose from the pit of her stomach and filled her chest. “Now you really do sound like you’re sixteen,” she teased.
The seductive gleam darkened. “Going to put me in detention and punish me?”
A sudden image of pushing Dante onto a chair, hitching her modest school teacher skirt to her hips and straddling him made her pelvis contract with rich heat.
Fully aware her cheeks had flushed with the same heat, Callie fixed him with her best death stare and adopted her strictest school teacher voice. “Mr Coscarelli, unless you wantme to leave you to finish tasting these wines on your own, I suggest you take your mind out of the gutter, shut up, and pour the next wine.”
His perfect teeth flashed. Reaching for the next bottle in the row, he murmured, “Whatever you say, Miss Thomas.”
Much later that night, Callie was finally drifting off into sleep when Dante murmured, “Did you always want to be a teacher?”
She yawned, wriggled her bottom into his abdomen and held tighter to the arm hooked around her waist, smiling sleepily to remember his reaction to the silk red dress she’d worn to dinner for him. When he’d peeled it from her body, it had been every bit as hedonistically glorious as she’d imagined. “Not really,” she answered with another yawn. “It just seemed the most logical career path.”
