Page 27

My heels clipped along the marble floor as I stalked down the hall to the foyer, where Dario was putting his coat into the closet. He didn’t even turn to look at me as he toed off his shoes and placed them carefully on the rack.

For some reason, that made me furious.

My hands fisted so tightly my nails dug painfully into my flesh.

“Where the hell were you, marito mio?” I demanded of my husband.

Calmly, he closed the closet and faced me, his face stoic. My gaze snagged on the faint smear of pink lipstick just above the black bristles of his beard.

“Did she kiss you?” I hissed, horrified by the idea even though it had been lodged in my head all night.

Had they done more than kiss?

Had she put her pretty hands on his big chest, traced the bulging curves of his musculature? Lines and angles I had only guessed at under his clothes.

Did she know my husband more intimately than I had ever come close to experiencing?

That poisonous bite of humiliation cut into my pulse points and made my heart hammer.

I was moving before I was even aware of it, not stopping until I was mere inches from him, my hand planted in his sternum to push him back hard. I must have caught him by surprise because even though I was tall and fit from martial arts, Dario was a beast of a man who shouldn’t have been rocked back against the closet door by my shove.

As soon as his shoulders hit, I was pressed to him, up on my tiptoes as if that would make a significant difference to our height disparity.

“Did she put her fucking hands on you?” I demanded in Italian.

Dario blinked down at me, but I had shattered his calm. There was a dangerous narrowing to his pale eyes, his brows pulled low as he studied me.

“I warned you not to play games with me, wife,” he growled in Italian but didn’t push me off. Instead, he lifted a big hand and slid it under my hair around my neck, squeezing just hard enough to make me feel his colossal strength. “You do not want my body, then it is not yours to own.”

“And mine?” I demanded, incensed, my Italian words raised because nothing existed in my universe except for this huge infuriating devil of a man I’d been forced to marry. “You are always quick to remind me that you own me, yet you won’t touch me. Am I supposed to spend my entire life a virgin and never know the touch of a man?”

“Are you so desperate for pleasure you’ll turn to the first man who shows you interest?” he retorted with a vicious snarl twisting his mouth. “That British stronzo is hardly the type of man to make your toes curl.”

“And you are?” I dared to sneer, pressing my breasts against him because they were aching and I found the hard contours of his body offered sweet stimulation. “Because you have never offered, not even on our wedding night.”

“The same night you lost your entire family?” he scoffed, but I was close enough to see the way his eyes dilated and track the thrum of a rapid pulse in his throat. “You are a silly, foolish little girl who wouldn’t know what to do with me even if I gave you a goddamn road map.”

“You do not want to play this game with me,” I taunted, echoing his words from earlier back at him as I let my drunken courage fuel my hand sliding down his chest and abdomen to the front of his slacks, curling my fingers over the half-hard shape of him beneath the fabric.

Heat sluiced through me at the girth and heft of him, and I wondered what he would feel like, look like, taste like, fully aroused and bared to me.

Dario’s square jaw ticked, once, twice, and then his hand was an ironclad vise around my wrist. For a quivering second, I thought he would wrench my hand away and send me to my room like a scolded child, banishing me once more from his presence.

So when his hand lowered over my fingers and squeezed, tightening my grasp on his hardening cock, I hissed out a shocked breath, and my gaze flew from our combined grip to his expression.

The stoicism was gone.

Eviscerated by the desire that had blown his eyes to black and added a ruddy flush to his tanned cheeks.

“Try me,” he snarled, baring his teeth in a feral grin that shouldn’t have been sexy but made me weak in the knees.

And then he was on me.

His lips fused to mine, tongue plundering my mouth, while he left my hand on his cock to lever me suddenly into his arms and spin so that it was my back against the wall. Instinct made me twine my legs around his waist, pressing the ache in my groin against him, writhing to quell the needy sensation.

I was rewarded by Dario’s fierce groan against my tongue and the tight twist of his fingers lodging in my hair to pull my head to a better angle for his pillaging.

Even this, kissing madly, rutting against him fully clothed, was the sexiest thing I had ever experienced, and I found myself helpless to resist the passion razing all my objections to ash. I wanted this.