The Prodigal Prince's Seduction / The Heir's Scandalous Affair
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“And I bet you managed to pay it all back.”
Her lashes fluttered down again. “Eventually, yes.”
“And that cost you. What did it cost you, bellissima?”
Her lips twisted in something too much like self-loathing. “Marrying the worst possible man.”
The world stopped. His heart followed. “You’re married?”
Her eyes slammed back to his, enormous with alarm and agitation. “No. I’m divorced. Six years ago now. Grazie a Dio.”
His heart attempted to restart, lurched and clanged against the insides of a chest that felt lined with thorns. “Was he rich?”
She winced. “Filthy.”
“Like me?”
“Uh, no. Your wealth transcends filthiness into obscenity.” He couldn’t reciprocate her tremulous attempt to lighten things up. “You married him so he’d repay your family’s debts?”
“Actually, it was his idea. I was his PA and he heard me on the phone with my mom and used it as another pressure tactic.”
“He needed to? You weren’t attracted to him?”
“I felt nothing beyond unease that I couldn’t reciprocate his interest. But the job was great, so I kept hoping he’d find someone else. He didn’t, kept pointing out that I didn’t, either, that maybe I can’t feel…passion, which was okay because love stories never end well, anyway. I began to think he was right, as I knew nothing of what makes a relationship work or what a man who’d make a good husband was like. Compared to my father, he seemed like the essence of stability. And he made a solid case for a marriage between us built on mutual respect and realistic expectations.”
He barely stopped himself from snarling. “He conned you.”
“Oh, no. I decided to disregard my reservations, my lack of feelings for him, followed the lure of paying off my family’s debts in one chunk. I dug my own grave by being so mercenary.”
He snarled now. “You were nothing of the sort. He was the conniving bastard. If he felt anything for you, he would have freed you from debt and left it up to you to take him or not.”
“That would have only transferred my debt to him, and I would have felt honor-bound to marry him anyway.”
“He could have made it clear that there would have been no debt, or offered that you repay it in installments.”
“I did insist on including the condition in the prenups that our funds be separate and whatever he loaned me I’d return.”
“And he pounced on those terms,” he bit off. “You were what? Twenty? Twenty-one? And how old was he?”
“I was twenty-three. He was thirty-nine. And a widower.”
“He did con you. He convinced you to consider it a business deal in which pros outweigh cons, pretended he was satisfied with that. Until he got his hands on you.” Her shrug was loud with concession. He wanted to slam his fists down on the table. “And he didn’t pay off your debts.”
“How did you…? Oh, OK. I did say I married the worst man.”
“Actually, you said paying your debt cost you marrying said man. Most would assume that he did pay it. But I’d bet my fortune he didn’t. I know that because I know users, and that man was beyond that. He kept after you to break your resistance, but instead of building anticipation as he pursued you, he built up antipathy, planned to wreak vengeance on you as soon as he had you in his power.” He caught her hand, pressed it. “I only wish to God the extent of his aggression was the passive breaking of the pact he never meant to keep. But he didn’t stop there, did he?” She shook her head. “He abused you. Verbally, mentally.” The last word seemed to cut him as it came out. “Sexually.”
She stared at him again as if he’d torn her open and looked inside, distress brimming with the shock of exposure, with the misplaced shame of the victim.
At last she gave a choking gulp. A mortified nod admitted his insight. “I bought his excuses, his blame, for four months. I didn’t love him, he was frustrated, yadda yadda. Then he…he…”
“He hit you.”
She lurched. Her chest heaved. With a sharp inhalation, she muttered, “He put me in the hospital.”
Four
Durante had never considered himself a violent man.
Now, as he stared down at her bent head, murderous aggression took hold of his every nervous transmission. Need boiled his blood—to defend her in retrospect, to avenge her, to torture and cripple that vermin who’d hurt her.
Words left his lips in a vicious staccato. “Tell me you reported him and he’s now serving time.”
“Uh, no…actually, I didn’t.” He heard something rumbling, vaguely realized the sound was issuing from him. She rushed in to add, “But he didn’t get the chance to come near me again. I started divorce proceedings before I even reached the hospital.”
He glared at her, his brain seeming to expand in the confines of his skull with the brutal buildup of anger, the inability to vent it. At least not yet. He would pay that man back.
She suddenly shut her eyes. “Okay, let’s rewind and replay before I dig a hole to Malaysia. I made it all sound so pathetic and self-pitying, and that isn’t how I see my life. I’ve had it way better than most people. Despite my father’s problems, so many things, starting with my mother and our benefactor, provided me with a secure and reasonably happy childhood. I had a great time at boarding school and college, and my marriage, ugliness and all, lasted only four months and I own up to my role in it. I’ve established my own company and I loved every second of exploring and achieving so much on the way. My mother died, but I’m thankful she didn’t suffer long and that I had such an incredible friend and parent for so long. So…I hope I haven’t caused you to reach your whining tolerance level.”
She was making light of her ordeals, and, maledizione, meaning it. The expectedness of her last words awoke his humor, which he thought an insult to the suffering she’d related. But her come-on, laugh-with-me expression forced him to submit.
He coughed a distressed laugh. “You sent my sense of perspective levels through the roof, after they’d dwindled to trace elements. You forced me to revise how I perceive my own life. Seems I’ve been guilty of letting my…issues rule my mind-set.”
She shook her head, teasing radiating from her heavenly eyes. “I thought higher beings like you had global obstacles and dilemmas and crises, but nothing so petty as ‘issues.’”
He gave a grunt laden with self-disgust. “Leave it to you to underline how oblivious and tiny and self-indulgent it all is.”
She chuckled. “Anytime.”
He reached out across the table, took her hand. He needed to be connected to her as he made his own confessions. “My experience with my mother reflects yours with your father. She died five years ago, but I too was eleven when I started to realize I was losing her. It was then that I set out to detach myself, that I learned that no one is guaranteed to be there for me. I’ve become so comfortable being disconnected, so driven and distracted, that I no longer notice all the good that fills my life.”
Her other hand descended to his, imbuing him with a calm that was previously unknown to him, a restfulness to mirror the compassion that filled her eyes. “She suffered depression, too?”
He’d never discussed this, never given what his mother had suffered a name, not even with his siblings. He needed to talk about it now, with her, needed to name what had taken his mother away a piece every day, look it full in the face instead of evading it and having it invade far more of him instead.
“I think she was bipolar. Severely so.”
“So it’s true. No one is exempt. My father, a man who had everything, your mother, a queen with the world at her feet, both prisoners to something so dark and inescapable inside them.”
Pressure built behind his eyes as cold outrage at the injustice of it all gave way to the empathy flowing between them in sweeping currents. He surrendered to the release of sharing, of having another fully appreciate and understand.
Suddenly, urgency stained her gaze. Everything inside him became primed to defend, to contain. He had no tolerance for her distress, he was discovering. “What is it, bellissima? Tell me.”
She grimaced. “It’s nothing. It’s…” She stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “What the hell. I’ve put my foot in it too much already to get delicate at this late stage. I was just wondering if…if you’ve ever wondered if you have that seed of sourceless desperation and instability inside you?”
He stiffened with yet another jolt at how in tune she was with him, sensing fears that never came into focus, but cast their darkness over his existence nevertheless.
He let his counter-question acknowledge her insight just as it expressed his concern for her. “Do you?”
“Only since my mother died. I finally wondered if I’ve never been able to be close to others because I had something lurking inside me, because I subconsciously felt that emotional involvement would raise the chances that it would manifest.”
“And what’s your verdict?”
“I don’t know. What complicates matters and stops me from coming up with anything conclusive is the fact that it wasn’t a struggle not to be close. I wasn’t even tempted until…”
She stopped. He couldn’t anymore. He cupped her cheek as he’d been aching to. “Until tonight.”
Warmth surged from his gut when she acquiesced, to the truth of his statement, to his hold, letting her flesh mold to his palm.
And he had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if whatever consumed your father wasn’t sourceless, after all?”
She nuzzled into his caress. “I guess sourceless is the wrong word to use, what with all the physiological and social factors involved in the development of such a major disorder. I guess it’s the out-of-proportion, ever-compounding emotional response that becomes so far removed from whatever triggered it, making it seem as if there were no origin.” She sighed, singeing his flesh with the heat of her breath. “As I said, I’ll never know what started my father down that spiral.”
“I know what started my mother down hers. It was my father.”
Such shock, such pain flooded her eyes at his muttered bitterness that he groaned, cupped her head, needing to alleviate her distress.
She reached out to his face, her hand trembling in a caress that assuaged some of the darkness festering inside him.
She finally said, “I’m so sorry you believe that. I can’t imagine how painful it is to think one of your parents was responsible for the other’s deterioration. It’s the only thing that holds me together, that I believe that there was no one to blame.”
He rose, bent across the table. He gazed into her misty eyes for a heart-thudding moment, then descended, pressed his lips to hers in a brief, barely leashed kiss. “Grazie, bellissima.”
Her moan reverberated inside him. His fingers fisted in her tresses, spilling another moan from her lips, detonating charges of sensation across his skin. He withdrew before temptation overwhelmed him, sat down. His gaze pored over her, the image of her beauty burned onto his retinas.
Such beauty. Totally her own, following no one else’s ideas or rules, including his own before he’d set eyes on her. Beyond physical, with so many levels to it—levels he kept discovering with no end in sight. She was short-circuiting the civilized man he’d been certain he was, unleashing a primal male who wanted to possess, plunder. But it also made that same male want to protect, to pamper.
She inclined her head at him. “You can sing, can’t you?”
He blinked at the question—the statement, really. He didn’t even think to inquire about such a detour’s origin and intent. He just flowed with her along the wave of unpredictability, of freedom from rules and expectations.
“Can’t everyone,” he said. “to some degree or another?”
“Uh, no. Not according to my singing teacher, another suffering soul who told me she had nightmares of waking up in a world where everyone had my same singing ability, making her profession obsolete and putting her permanently out of a job.”
He frowned. “My teacher criticized my intentional truancy. He wouldn’t have disparaged my performance or made me feel responsible for it had it been a limitation on my part. That inconsiderate wretch who taught you had no business telling a child something like that, just because your talents didn’t meet her standards and your progress didn’t conform to her timetable.”
She beamed him such a look, full of mischief and embarrassment, that he wondered where he found the will to remain where he was. “Uh, I wasn’t exactly a child when the brilliant idea of taking singing lessons sprouted in my mind three years ago. And I did test her last tune-sensitive nerve by insisting on singing along with Whitney Houston and Maria Callas. The comparison was agonizing even to my own self-forgiving ears. But I have a feeling you can hold your own with the Elvises and Pavarottis of the world.”
He raised one eyebrow, goading her into telling him more. “Hmm, I wonder how you came by that conviction.”
Her grin grew impish and indulgent at once. “In your case, fishing will get you whales. You reaffirm that conviction every time you open your mouth and unleash that honed weapon you have for a voice. Uomo cattivo that you are, you unrepentantly use it to its full destructive effect. It’s very easy for me to imagine you taking your mastery over it to its highest conclusion.”
Stimulation revved higher. He let himself revel in the gratification of their repartee, challenged, fishing for even bigger whales. “I’ve heard many superlative singers who don’t sound special when they talk.”
“Sure, but I bet that’s not the case with you.”
“So what are you after? An admission? An audition?”
Her dimples flashed at him. “The first would be great, so I can gloat over my uncanny acumen. The second, alas, would be so much better even than having your ear for an hour—or a week—that I think it would warrant something larger than a ten-million-dollar bid.”
He reached for her hand and placed it on her fork. “I have a third option. Let’s finish this meal, and I’ll offer you something better than either at no cost but your willingness to accept it.” She sat forward, anticipation ablaze on her face. And he offered something he’d never imagined offering to anyone, ever. “A serenade.”
Darkness was melting under dawn’s advance, the horizon starting to simmer with colors, the rest of the sky’s blackness bleaching to indigo, the stars blinking out one by one.
Durante had taken his bellissima to the bow, initiating a match of quips around the Titanic movie parallel. Merriment had dissolved with the night into a silence filled with serenity and companionship. Soon it seemed as natural and needed as breathing for her to fill his embrace, just as she seemed to need to be contained there.
For the next hour, as the magic of the night segued into the new spell of dawn, he encompassed her, her back to his front, his arms crisscrossed around her midriff, his legs parted to accommodate her, imbuing her with his heat, protecting her from the chill of the breeze. She accepted him as her shield, surrendered to his cosseting and to that of the wind on her face as the yacht sailed toward the sun.
In this proximity, there was no disguising the extent of his arousal. Not that he tried to. He’d admitted his reaction to her minutes into their first conversation. His body had made its own admissions to her the moment he gathered her to him, his erection obvious through the confines of clothes and control.
Her own state must be as acute. The only movements she seemed capable of were the spasmodic pressing of her hands on the railing, and trembling. Was she trying not to press back into him as hard as he wanted to grind into her?
But he wouldn’t fracture this intensity, this purity of feeling for anything. This was too rare to rush, too precious to squander even for the ecstasy they were certain to find in each other. Not yet. They had to have this first.
It was magnificent, sharing this with her, experiencing each other without words after the liveliness of their verbal communication. Now the only sounds that permeated the whispers and whistles of the wind and the splash of the water were his groans as he pressed his lips into her neck, against her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, her moans as her tremors spiked with every press and glide. He felt as if every inch of her was made to click into every inch of him, that the eight or nine inches he had on her five foot six or seven had been bestowed on him so he’d envelop her like this.
Then she turned her head, turned up eyes glittering with the wonder of what they’d shared since they’d met twelve hours or a forever ago, whispered, “Ora, per favore.”
Now, please. Indeed. So this was it. The moment of truth.
He’d never sung in another’s presence. Not since primary school, anyway. And he was about to sing to this enchanted creature who’d appeared out of nowhere and made him forget everything, his exhaustion, his wariness. The world.
He let his arms tighten around her for a moment before he stepped away. Then he went down on one knee.
A sharp gasp tore from her. Then, with another distressed sound, she swooped down, tried to pull him up.
He tangled his hands into her hair, tugged gently, brought her down for another of those fleeting, tormenting kisses.
Then, as his lips clung to hers, he breathed the first line of Caruso. “Qui dove il mare luccica, e tira forte il vento…”
Here where the sea sparkles and the wind is blowing…
She bolted up, severing the last clinging touch between their lips, and staggered back to lean limply against the railing, her eyes stricken, her lips parting on choppy puffs.
He remained kneeling at her feet, giving his voice full rein as he continued to sing the song he’d only ever memorized because he felt like he was soaring when he let his voice ride the beauty and power of the melody, never giving a moment’s thought to the lyrics. Now the lyrics seemed to have been written so that he could describe these moments with her. They took on meanings their writer hadn’t intended, poured into the mold of the moment.
Then he came to the refrain, and that, most of all, resonated with the exact expressions that crowded inside him, let the passion she’d aroused in him take shape and sound and flow with the fervor of the timeless words.
“Te voglio bene assai, ma tanto tanto bene sai. È una catena ormai, che scioglie il sangue dint’e vene sai…”
I want you so much, I truly want you so much it’s now like a shackle that melts the blood inside the veins, you know…
Tears gushed from her eyes, and her face shuddered with too many emotions to follow, let alone fathom. She seemed in pain.
Alarm and suspicion crashed inside his head. What if this song provoked raw memories, if he’d managed, not to please her, woo her, but to upset her? He surged to his feet. He couldn’t stop his arms from gathering her to him until he had her off the ground and in his safekeeping.
“Durante…please…” The quivering of her voice augmented his alarm, made him hold her away so he could ascertain her state, apologize, divert her agitation. His gut clenched, now he grimaced as he saw her lips working before he realized they were forming a tremulous smile. “Please…don’t stop.”
His whole body slackened with relief.
She swayed when he set her back on her feet, gripped his arms, eagerness blazing on her face. “Please, please keep singing. I thought I could imagine how incredible you’d sound, but it seems even my imagination is tone-deaf.”
He guffawed. There was no way he could ever predict what she’d say next. “If so, how do you know if I sound incredible or not?”
“Oh, my ‘difficulties’ lie in tone reproduction, not recognition. And then this…” She waved both hands at him, before taking them both to her chest to press her heart in a gesture so moved and moving he groaned. “…transcends hearing. Please—sing.”
He plastered her against him, no longer restraining his urgency, one hand dipping below her corset-like top to bask in her firm softness and heat, the other digging into her mane, turning her face up for his worshipping. And he sang.
The liberation, the exhilaration was indescribable. To cut the tethers of separateness and wariness and propriety, to let himself go, let his voice boom with passion, break with poignancy. The storm of emotions and expressions that raged on her face with every note, the tears of acute enjoyment that streamed, were the purest form of adulation he’d ever had, the only he craved having.
When the last vibrato died away, she was panting, then she flung herself at him, pressed her wet face into his chest, until he felt her fervor practically eating through it, her essence permeating it. “Grazie, Durante. Molto, molto grazie.”
It was a long time before either of them stirred. It was she who moved, casting stunned looks around, before looking up at him sheepishly. “It’s morning.”
“Sì, that’s what usually follows dawn, I hear,” he teased.
Something warm danced in her eyes. “I wouldn’t know. I’m no expert on dawn or how long it takes to break. I’m always in a coma from one until seven a.m.”
“So this is your first time staying up all night?”
“It’s my first time…for just about everything.”
There was no doubt in his mind that was the truth. There was no thought of hiding how he felt in return. “Sì. For me, too.”
The blast of delight in her clear-again eyes made him feel limitless, swathed everything in new meanings and depths. He basked in it all until contrition entered her expression. “I kept you up all night on a work day.”
He waved it off. “Why did I strive so hard to be where I am if not for the flexibility of forging my own timetable?”
“Who’re you kidding? You crack the whip over your own head harder than you do over anybody else’s.”
He guffawed again, loving this. “Very subtle way of saying I’m a slave driver. One with a fetish for self-flagellation.”
“I bet you didn’t become who you are by being flexible with your time and taking days off.”
“To put your mind to rest on the sacrifice of my taking a day off, I can afford to in this instance, because before we met I put in thirty-six hours of work, more than covering for it in advance.”
“Oh, God…that means you’ve been awake for forty-eight hours now. And I kept you up all night yakking and singing and…and…”
“And being tormented within an inch of my sanity? Laughing my head off? Confessing my darkest secrets? Being fully alive?”
“Yeah…uh…all that,” she croaked. “But I bet you were longing to hit the sheets.”
“The only sheets I want to hit are those with you spread out on them. Being with you has been the most worthwhile reason to forgo sleep that I’ve ever had. I never realized there was anything to want as fiercely as I want a steady supply of sleepless nights with you.”
She stared up at him, motionless, breathless. Then the first tremor broke through the stillness. The second merged into a stream that shook her. Gratification swelled, that he affected her to that extent. He might not be exhibiting the same outward manifestation, but she shook him, too, to the core.
He embraced her again, absorbed her tremors. They were her response to him made tangible. They belonged to him. He wanted them, along with everything that made her herself.
He’d given Giancarlo orders to keep sailing until he told him otherwise. He wanted to keep on sailing, never to return her to her life, never to return to his.
He was thinking she’d say yes if he proposed that radical plan when she raised an agitated face, whispered, “Take me home, please, Durante.”
Five