Page 38 of Forbidden Property
“What?” I snap at him, my gaze flickering up to meet him. Renzo has stunning eyes, which just makes everything about him that much more annoying.
“I love you,” he blurts out. It’s so quiet that I can hear a blue jay cawing outside the dining room window several hundred feet away. Has Renzo lost his mind? What does he want me to say?
I admit that I don’t choose my words well. The confession feels like a gut punch and all my complicated feelings and negative past experiences with Renzo Taviani bubble to the surface. I can already feel tears prickling at the back of my eyes, because why the fuck would Renzo say something like this.
My voice trembles, despite my conviction. “You’re racist.”
The insult doesn’t bother him. Renzo never allows anyone else’s opinions to influence how he thinks or what he feels abouthimself. He stares at me with his unnerving, reptilian focus. “I love you.”
Does he think repeating those words makes it any easier for me to understand what he means? I look down at the practice test in front of me pretending that the words aren’t swimming together. There’s no way he means this.
“You heard me,” Renzo repeats. “I love you.”
My eyes snap to him and I wish I didn’t feel so frustrated with him, but I immediately feel resentment from him doing this. Renzo doesn’t feel love for anyone or anything but himself. He might love his sketches, but that doesn’t count as lovingme.Renzo mistakes his new obsession with breeding for love, but he has no idea what that means.
“Renzo, please. Stop with the distractions. This situation hasn’t changed your fundamentally held beliefs about race.”
He reaches across the table and allows his fingers to brush the top of my hand. The electricity that follows will never stop making me feel guilty. But it’s not love. I don’t feel any love towards Renzo. We tolerate each other. Renzo and I help each other because his sister threw us into this situation. Sure, we have sex… But that’s not love.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks calmly, but without relenting either his past or future positions on the matters between us. “You want me to go back and stop myself from calling you names? We’ve been together for weeks, Geralynn.”
Renzo has this quirk of saying my name with a slight Italian accent. I wish it didn’t completely turn me on to hear his smooth voice purring the three syllables ofGeralynn, but it sends a shiver of arousal straight between my legs.
“Your sister forced us together. Once the baby gets here, we won’t have to spend all day together or look after each other. You can go back to screwing Italian girls or Canadian girls or whatever you did before Nicki shoved us together.”
“I want to be with you.”
He runs his thumb along the underside of my palm.No.The energy travels from Renzo’s thumb straight through my palm and all the way up the length of my arm. What would loving this man even look like? We hate each other. He can’t mistake our natural human responses to captivity as some type of deep emotional connection.
“You want to own me. There’s a difference.”
He shakes his head, dismissing me immediately. “There isn’t.”
I continue to find his stubbornness irritating.
“You can’t be this easy to convince, Renzo. So please, just drop it. I want to improve my score on the LSAT.”
“I love you.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m crazy enough to change my mind like this.”
“I’ve known you basically my whole life and you never once hinted at evenremotelyliking me.”
“Then why didn’t I get rid of you?”
“That’s hardly where the bar for a decent man lies.”
“I got rid of each one of my sister’s boyfriends or friends that I didn’t like. Yet, the one I supposedly hated the most ends up here. Pregnant. With my baby.”
“We were drugged.”
“I could have strangled you.”
“But you didn’t,” I respond, struggling to hide the bubbling frustration mixed with all the other emotions I am downright desperate to suppress. Why does Renzo have to push this now? I’m 10 weeks through this pregnancy, at a point where just about everything else about my body and my future will change. I can’t think about my feelings for him when I don’t even know which one of my feelings belong to me and which ones are purely derived from the hormonal cocktail coursing through my body.
He hates me. And he doesn’t know how fucking confusing it feels to be pregnant for a man who hates my guts and visibly recoils at my presence during the day but tongue fucks me to orgasm at night. I can’t sign up for a life spent in this confusing push-pull of Renzo’s emotions. It’s much easier to deal with him hating me and the clear cut “relationship” we had back then.
