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I am grateful for the sweet sensation of the warm sun falling on my skin, however.
“You’re awake,” says a voice that sends shivers up my spine. It’s a deep voice, and it sounds concerned. I sit up quickly and clutch the covers closer to my body as I realize that the voice belongs to Antonio and that he is the one leaning over me in bed.
He’s naked from the waist up. His legs are encased in joggers. This time I’m not tied up in the dark, so I can admire his ripped body and broad back. He smiles at me, and the center of my body clenches with want.
For just a moment, he’s not my captor, he’s just a devilishly handsome man who is half-naked in my room.
“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t ever wake up,” he says.
I refuse to meet his eyes. I look away so that I can keep the secret of my attraction to him to myself.
“I made herbal tea for you. You should have some,” he says, even though I am looking away.
He sits on the bed. The soft smell of chamomile hits my nostrils.
“I hear that it’s good for your nerves,” he says. I still don’t look at him.
He sighs, grabs my chin, and makes me face him. The aggressive man who hates to be thwarted is back. “Do you want me to force the damn tea down your throat?” he snaps.
This is the man I know—the brute who locked me up after subjecting me to a mockery of a marriage to spite his enemy.
I move my chin away from his grip and take the cup of tea from him. As I drink the cup of tea thirstily, I realize how dehydrated I am.
“Good girl,” he says, retrieving the cup from me when it’s empty again. I look away.
He sighs. “It’s going to be hard being married if you refuse to look at me,” he says.
“I don’t want to be married to you,” I mutter under my breath as tears gather in my eyes. “Maybe if I don’t look at you, I can pretend the marriage never happened.”
He laughs. “Finally, she speaks. That’s progress, and I’ll take it,” he says.
His sudden joviality has to be a trap. The last thing I remember is being taken out of my prison by strange men. I also remember an old woman wiping down my body with a washcloth, the smell of lavender soap, and being taken into the main quarters of the mansion with Antonio and the other two men.
My memory grows foggy from there. As soon as I sat down, everything went dark, and then I woke up here. He disappears through a door on the other side of the bed, and this gives me the time to scan the room. I start by looking down.
I’m lying on a huge king-sized bed with patterned white sheets that match the curtains. I sweep my gaze around the rest of the space.
It’s a big room, yet it’s sparsely decorated. Apart from a few paintings hanging on the walls, there is no other decoration in sight. The room feels basic, military in nature almost. It’s also cold and uninviting, just like the man who sleeps here.
As if on cue, he appears again, poking his head around the door. “I have prepared your bath,” he says.
I look down at myself and slide my hands into my hair, feeling immediately that it is greasy. But I still hesitate. What are his true intentions? Why is he suddenly being kind to me?
“Are you coming, or do I have to carry you?” he asks. That hovering threat is back in his voice, and it makes me want to punch him in the face.
Maybe my reply comes too slowly because he mumbles something inaudible and strides across the room. Before I can resist, he scoops me up and carries me in his arms.
My body tenses up, and I fight not to relax against his bare upper body. That changes nothing. His rock-hard chest presses against me despite my resistance. Just like when he smashed cake down my throat, I notice that he smells good.
Antonio Russo’s presence in my life is becoming a tangled mass of heart-stopping attraction and humiliating degradation. And I’m not even sure that I mind.
He lets me down in front of the door and points into the bathroom.
I walk through the door without a word and am greeted by the biggest bathroom I have ever seen. A bathtub filled with water sits in the middle of the huge room, surrounded by mirrors.
“Get in,” he says behind me.
I sigh, and I begin to strip down.
