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‘I just—it seems like a very limiting way to live your life.’
‘That’s what I like about it.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have no plans to get married, and absolutely no plans to have children. It shifts the parameters of what my relationships are about.’ His eyes scanned hers. ‘But I am not a subject we need to discuss.’
Her stomach tightened with frustration, but she let it go for now. There was no sense pushing him. Amelia needed time to regroup and form a new strategy, to reconcile what she’d learned about him tonight and how best to use it to her advantage. Lost in thought, she shifted beneath the table, their legs brushed and it was as though an invisible rubber band that had been tightening around them finally snapped.
He jerked his gaze back to her face, his eyes boring into hers, an invisible war being fought, but Amelia couldn’t have said who was winning or who was losing, she knew only that she felt as though she were fighting for her survival. Her breath was held, her body stiff, her senses all finely honed on the man opposite.
‘You need to understand, Anton is my closest friend,’ Benedetto ground out, pushing back his chair, leaving the battlefield altogether. ‘Someone who stood by me when no one else would.’ He stared at her. ‘And you are his sister.’
Anger fizzed inside Amelia. ‘I am also my own person. Me.’ She stood, jabbing her fingers towards her chest, to indicate the centre of her being. ‘I am not just an adjunct to Anton. I’m not a princess. I’m just Millie Moretti and I wish you’d—’
‘Don’t say it.’ He held up a hand, eyes warning her.
‘I wish you’d remember who I am,’ she finished defiantly. ‘Not act as if my only defining characteristic is being related to Anton. But what did you think I was going to say?’ she demanded, moving around the table, towards him, until they were toe to toe. ‘Did you think I was going to say I wish you’d make love to me?’ She threw the gauntlet down between them. ‘And if so, why are you so threatened by that?’
‘You know why. It can’t happen.’
‘I don’t even know if I want it to happen,’ she lied, hating how much she did want him. ‘But I find it strange that a man with your experience can’t be a little more sanguine about the whole affair.’
He responded with a harsh bark of laughter. ‘I have kidnapped you and yet you persist in throwing yourself at me. Why?’
If he’d intended to hurt her, then he couldn’t have chosen his words more wisely. After Daniel, she’d lost her confidence completely. She’d thought they were in love, but he’d been using her, and it had made her feel dispensable and worthless. She’d sworn she’d never let another man have that kind of power over her again, and yet here she was, not twelve hours after meeting Benedetto, and clearly he already had the ability to wound her.
She shuddered and took a step back, staring at him and trying to make sense of everything, but most of all wanting to escape, to get away from him and his intently watchful gaze.
‘You’re right.’ She shivered despite the fact it was a warm night. ‘I must be mad.’ There was no other explanation for this. It simply didn’t make sense. ‘Excuse me.’
She turned on her heel and left. But before she’d reached the door to the corridor, his voice arrested her. ‘Wait.’
She stopped walking but didn’t turn around. ‘What for, Benedetto?’
‘I meant what I said before.’
She sucked in a breath.
‘If you weren’t his sister, and we’d met, as you proposed, in some other way, you would already be naked in my bed. This is not one-sided, Princess.’
She gasped, spinning to find him standing right behind her, so close they were almost touching. ‘I don’t know what to say to that.’
He held a finger up to her lips, to silence her anyway, but it was an incendiary touch. Sparks ignited.
‘Don’t say anything. There’s no point. It’s never going to happen between us so whatever we might be tempted to, it’s a far better idea if we just...ignore each other from now on. Va bene?’
CHAPTER FOUR
IGNORE HER? YEAH, RIGHT. Given the lack of other occupations, Princess Amelia Moretti had taken to sunbathing on the deck in one of the swimming costumes Cassidy had bought for her, which—Cassidy being a free spirit who’d grown up surfing—was barely sufficient to cover Amelia’s body.
His dreams had been filled with Amelia, with imaginings of her, naked and sensual, straddling him so her long hair formed curtains around her face, and yet now that he stared at her in a way that was making it impossible to keep his distance, he realised how much more desirable her body was in the real world, how much more beautiful and graceful, than he’d been able to conjure in his dreams.
So ignoring her wasn’t going to work, but nor could he act on his feelings.
Which basically put him in a form of hell for the next six days.
There was one way he could stay true to what he knew to be the right thing.
