Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
W HEN D OM ARRIVED back at Eve’s, he was unsure that she would come to dinner or even open the door. Had that been a tantrum earlier? Or her real answer?
He took the umbrella his driver offered him and moved down the path illuminated by hidden bulbs beneath the shrubs. As he hit the damp fragrance of the rose garden, the front door opened.
Eve’s snug satin trousers shimmered above laced ankle boots. Below the mock turtle collar of her cashmere top a wide cutout revealed her collarbone and upper chest. Her long raincoat flared open like a cape as she strode toward him on those endless legs of hers.
She punched his breath clean out of him. He wanted to take a fistful of her black hair and press her to the ground and not come up for air until they were covered in grass stains and smelled of crushed rose petals.
And each other.
She stopped under the umbrella and looked up from the clutch she had just closed.
“You came,” he said, because he literally couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I always do. Don’t I?” Her pretty mouth, painted scarlet, curled with self-contempt. She looked to the dark water where lights dotted the far shore.
A cold hand reached into his chest and gave his heart a quarter turn.
“You’ve spoken to your brother,” he surmised.
“I have.”
That’s why she was here, not because of him or them. Because she knew her family finances were in jeopardy. Why that disappointed him, he couldn’t say, since it was a lever he’d pulled to get her address and propose this marriage.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Ladies’ choice.” He kept the umbrella over her as they walked to the car. “I have a table booked at Il Gatto Nero, but it could stir speculation if we’re seen dining together.” The paparazzi knew that restaurant was popular with celebrities so cameras were always trained on the entrance. “If you’d rather dine privately at my hotel, we can do that.”
“Please don’t pander to me with the illusion of choice, Dom. We both know I don’t have one. The public option is fine.”
He waited until they were in the back of his car and his driver had them underway to ask, “What exactly did Nico say to you?” He was dying to reach for her, but he was pretty sure she’d snap in half if he did.
“It’s not what he said. It’s what he made me realize.” She pulled her attention from her side window. “I was very close to my grandmother. She was also the only girl in a family of headstrong boys. Her two eldest brothers had been drafted into World War II and didn’t come home. She knew what it meant to be treated as an asset, not a person.”
Dom’s grandparents had lost brothers to that war, too. It was the reason their great-grandparents had tried to shore up their partnership with the marriage between Michael and Maria, to solidify what they’d managed to hang onto through so many difficult times.
“Nonna didn’t want to be treated like a stock, traded and invested by her parents into an arranged marriage, so she defied them and eloped with the man she loved. That always seemed heroic to me. Aspirational. Even though the consequences continue to ripple into my life. I didn’t want to see that our family is still paying interest on a debt she incurred. I wanted to believe that her taking a stand meant I could and would be valued for my intelligence and ethics and dedication. That I was a person, not a vessel whose only purpose was to conceive and carry a strategic alliance. These aren’t childbearing hips, Dom.” She looked right at him as she said that. “Do factor that into your negotiations with my brother when you’re attaching a value to this marriage.”
Her tone was dripping with bitterness, but all he could think was, Children? He hadn’t considered what the reality of a family with her would look like. Some dark-eyed hellion planting her feet and closing her fists and saying a defiant, No, Daddy , most likely.
He smirked, entertained by that notion for absolutely no good reason at all.
He waited until they’d wound their way through a sea of glances and murmurs at the restaurant and were seated at a table by the window, wine in hand, before he spoke again.
“Was I your first?”
“What do you mean?” She played dumb, but her eyes flared in alarm.
“You know what I’m asking.” He had his answer in the mortified blush that stained her cheekbones and the way her mouth flattened to a pugnacious line while she turned her gaze to the candlelight reflected on the window.
Virginity was not something he prized or even considered much of a thing. By the time he’d hit his first home run, he’d rounded all the other bases dozens of times.
Being her first wasn’t gratifying in a possessive, ego-driven way. Well, maybe there was a little of that. He was growing more possessive of her by the minute, but he was doing his best not to be a barbarian about it. No, it was more about what being her only lover told him about her and them.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that,” he said.
“From whom ?”
“I put it together from bits of gossip.” He shrugged. “The first time I heard that you were saving yourself was in Budapest. To be completely frank, before that, I had never given you a thought. Your whole family was beneath my notice. The late arriving baby sister was never going to be a threat to me so your name was all I knew.”
Beneath my notice .
“This is turning into a great first date.” She took a hefty gulp of her wine and looked to the window again.
“After I left your room that morning, I caught up with the bachelor party, emerging from their hangover. I asked if anyone had recognized you as a Visconti. They hadn’t, but one said he’d heard you were saving yourself for marriage. He knew of a man who’d had his nose broken when your brother defended your honor.”
“Jax was demonstrating how it’s done,” she said with a flutter of her lashes. “So I could learn.”
“I dismissed it as urban legend. I had been with you that morning and knew that if I hadn’t stopped when I did, we would have had sex. There was no way you were saving yourself.”
She sobered and swallowed and frowned at the window. “Can we not do this here?”
“You chose the location,” he reminded her.
She threw an aggrieved look at him. “I thought you were only mean when it was necessary.”
“This is,” he insisted. “You need to hear it. The few times I saw you before Australia, we were in public, but you were always with someone. At the wedding, you were sharing a suite with Logan. Of course, I assumed you were sleeping with him. When you told me you had your own room, I wondered for about half a second if those old rumors were true, but you’re twenty-five, Evie. And when I touch you—”
“Would you stop?” she hissed, glaring at him. “This is not necessary.”
“It is. There’s a septic little boil between us that needs to be lanced.”
“Your love poems need work.”
“I want you to understand, Evie.”
“Understand what?” Her mouth trembled and her eyes sheened with persecuted tears. “That you have the upper hand? That you can make me do things that are out of character and self-destructive? I know . That’s why I hate you.”
And that was it. “That’s why I hate you, too.”
She flinched.
He took no satisfaction in it. In fact, concern hit him at her words. It was a worry that had been rubbing like sandpaper in him even before he’d fully grasped that their night together had been her first time having sex with anyone.
“I didn’t really believe I was your first until right now,” he said gravely. “I wish you would have told me, Evie. If you felt like you couldn’t stop me—”
“I couldn’t stop myself. Okay? Is that what you need to hear?”
“I need to hear that I didn’t hurt you,” he said through his teeth, leaning in because they were talking so quietly. “I need to hear that, in future, you will tell me if I do.”
The gloss on her eyes thickened. “You’re hurting me now. This is awful ,” she told him in a strained, angry voice. “You’re putting me on the spot for your own entertainment. How much humiliation do you need, Dom? Tell me the exact degree so I can get there and get it over with.”
God, he wanted to grab her and... Not talk. Not have to find words and admit to things that turned him inside out in the same way they were torturing her.
So he just said it.
“There was no one else for me, either. Not after we met in Budapest. No one interests me, not the way you do. And that made me very grumpy, Evie. Very .”
Eve’s heart swerved in her chest. Her stomach was already wobbling from his, “I need to hear that in future...”
After talking to her brother, her emotions had been all over the place and she’d gathered them all into blame and resentment toward this man because, well, who else would a Visconti target when life was not going right?
“You’re lying.” She realized they were both angled into the center of the table so they could spike their hot words across the candle at each other. She pressed back in her chair, body trembling as though coming off a wild ride at an amusement park.
“We do a lot of things to each other, Evie, but we don’t lie.” His mouth was a bitter line that he pressed to the rim of his glass, draining half the contents before he sat back and stared at her, seeming to say Your move .
The waiter seized his moment. He rushed in to drop their amuse-bouche before them. With a mumbled handful of words in Italian, he topped up their glasses and hurried away.
Eve took a shaken breath, wondering if the entire restaurant was watching the forks of lightning they were throwing at each other, counting as they waited for the roll of thunder.
“Our marriage will be an alliance that will benefit both our families,” Dom said grimly. “I will exploit it in every way I can. I’m not stupid. But that’s not why we’re marrying, Evie.”
She had come here believing she had no choice in this matter and her stomach dipped afresh at the resolve in his statement. At the way he talked about it like it was a done deal.
“We’re going to marry because we don’t want anyone else.” His pinning gaze was impossible to break. “Do we?”
It seemed laughable that he was asking her to speak for both of them, but there was too much acrimony in him for her to believe he was being anything but truthful.
“No,” she admitted with defeat. It didn’t make any sense, but, “We don’t.”
He signaled to their server and ordered, “Champagne, per favore .”
As the man hurried away, Dom reached into his pocket and brought out a velvet box. He opened it to reveal a stunning oval-cut diamond with a halo of smaller diamonds around it. He set it between them then held out his hand.
Dimly aware of gasps and attention turning their way, Eve set her hand in his palm. The spark between them was almost visible as skin touched skin. She began to tremble all over.
Dom slid the ring onto her finger, sending a sensation like a lasso up her arm to loop around her heart and drag it into his palm so he kept it as he released her.
The ring fit perfectly. She admired it as he rose and came around the table to draw her to her feet. His heavy hand cupped the back of her head and his arm banded possessively across her back. He dragged his mouth across hers in a slow, devastating kiss that rocketed her into a black hole from which she’d never return. The pull was too strong.
Applause broke out as the bucket of champagne arrived.