Page 13 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

She was a product of society. She might know full well that fairy-tale syndrome was a problem, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken some of the motifs on board and internalized them. And sometimes, just a little bit, she indulged in a fantasy or two that was maybe a bit more sweeping and romantic than she had pretended while talking to Dario.

You want the villain...

She didn’t.

And, oh, how she hated Dario.

She really did.

She’d been speechless with it last night when he’d reached out and grabbed her arm...

How dare he?

How dare he criticize sweet, lovely Carter and...and...

She looked at herself in the mirror and frowned. What she had ended up wearing to bed last night was not cute. It was not like any of the gorgeous things in her suitcase.

All those beautiful, sexy things. She had been so intent on having that... On playing the role of seductress.

She had so looked forward to being wanted.

Because at least with Carter she felt like something was there. Like he enjoyed having her around. At least with him she didn’t feel like she was fitting through cracks. Her father’s daughter, but only a little bit. Because somehow Dario was more his child than she was in many ways. Or perhaps the child he wished he’d had.

And he certainly wasn’t like a brother to her.

No. Not in the least.

He didn’t evenlikeher. He didn’t even...

Right then, her eyes went past the mirror, into the bathroom and landed on the baths.

Lord.

She was not going to think about that again. It had been an aberration. Dario was... He was attractive. She supposed. If you were into that kind of thing. To that macho, old-school, extremely masculine sort of beauty.

He was also a brick wall.

And anyone who was with him was going to spend most of her life flinging herself at that wall. No thanks.

She already felt unwanted and invisible half the time.

Of course, the truth was, when she thought about seducing Carter she thought about what she would wear. What she would do. How beautiful she would feel.

She hadn’t spent much time thinking about what he might do to her. Even when she had tried to have a fantasy about being in the tub with him, it had been about companionship.

That image of Dario hadn’t been companionable at all. It had been about his hands on her skin, his lips on her neck...

She squeezed her thighs together and made a short, frustrated sound as a lightning bolt of sensation centered there. She did not need that.

In any variation.

Even though she was not fond of her pajama situation, she decided it didn’t matter what she looked like, and went downstairs on the hunt for caffeine. That way, she could actually think, and not hallucinate about things she absolutely did not want to hallucinate about. Her imagination did not have her consent to go putting images like that in her brain.

She stood in front of the coffee maker, and saw it was much more complicated than she had anticipated. A manual espresso machine.

Great.

“Need some help,cara?”

---