Page 57 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

Only then did he let himself go. Utterly and completely, his orgasm his undoing. In a way that nothing ever had been. She was singular. She was dangerous. He had never wanted in this way before. Even right after having her, he wanted.

He had dropped the whiskey. He had forgotten about it. It was on the floor, spilled, and there was something about that which felt symbolic in some regard. She had dropped the coffee the day he had first seen her.

And he was no longer aware of anything but her on this day. This day that she was bound to him. To marry him.

She would be his.

Unquestionably.

He looked at her, stroking her hair. “You’re beautiful,” he said. Because there was nothing deeper that he knew how to say.

“So are you,” she said, her eyes looking sleepy.

“How do you find this?” he asked, stroking her cheek. “This association between the two of us. I am not Carter.”

She blinked. “Who?” Then she laughed. “Seriously. I barely thought of him. It’s probably unkind of me. But he and I never actually had a real commitment to each other. In fact, I think I might have overexaggerated the connection a little bit. I didn’t want him. I wanted my life to feel different. I wanted to feel different. But in a way that I could control.”

There was something about her words that resonated in him. He could understand them. He was a man who had remade himself so many times. Who had created a smoother, more polished veneer with each and every iteration. He understood that.

The knowledge that he could no longer be what he’d once been. The knowledge that he needed to be something more.

More than himself. More than the people around him.

It fascinated him that a woman like Lyssia, who’d had things he had only ever dreamed of, could feel that same way. He had, these many years, imagined that he was unscathed by his life. After all, he was a billionaire. He was successful. He was well known. Highly regarded, in general.

He was fine, in other words. Except he could see the little ways in which Lyssia was cracked by the losses in her own life. By the wounds even a loving father had left behind.

“Is this what you had in mind? Because things are different now.”

“I’m not in control of this,” she said.

She moved her hands to his shirt, and began to undo the white buttons. She pressed her palm beneath the fabric, smoothing it over his skin. “But neither of us are, are we?”

Her words held a dangerous and reckless edge, and he felt them. They went deep.

“I want you,” he said. It was the closest he could give her to confirmation.

“I know,” she said. “I want you. It’s a hideous thing, isn’t it? We used to have lives. And they weren’t about this.”

“I only thought of you most of the time,” he said.

She laughed. “Onlymostof the time? You did better than I did. I wanted... I wanted to call you so many times while we were apart. But it just seemed like a bad idea. I thought you were done with me.”

“I intended to be,” he said. He shrugged. “When I was a child... I never knew what might happen next. As a man I have sought to make my world one I can control. It’s been a long time since life has surprised me in any fashion. I suppose I should thank you. For this. It is at least something entirely different.”

And he had control now. He knew himself. He knew better than to let himself believe wholly in the fiction of everything around him.

When he was a child he hadn’t known better. He had believed that his father loved him, and he had believed that love was a certain thing. Because his mother had told him that it was. His father had told him that it was. But when everything had gone wrong, his father hadn’t protected him, he had sold him. Love had become something bitter. A betrayal. He would never believe in it again. Thus, in the decisions that he was making in regard to their child, he was using his head. Not his heart.

When it came to Lyssia, it was his body.

He could rationalize those things. And he found that to be very important.

Essential, even.

It was different from what he had imagined. But it wasn’t beyond the boundaries that he had set forward for himself.

“Is that why you wish to marry in Rome?” she asked.

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