Chapter 4 #2
“Clearly you do, or you wouldn’t be foxed!” Giovanni shouted, throwing up his hands in disbelief. “What kind of behavior do you call that display this evening?”
“What part was so objectionable?” Beatrice demanded bitterly. “The part where I danced with the man, just as required, or the part where I had a quiet discussion with him, as was expected?”
“The flirting!” Giovanni yelled.
He looked at her with such thunder in his green eyes that Beatrice was suddenly quite unsettled.
The look she saw there was not the glance of a man who was ashamed of a woman he saw as a sister.
If she didn’t know any better and wasn’t entirely sure that she did, she would think it was the smoldering glare of a jealous lover.
“Why do you care who I flirt with?” She snapped back, trying to hide her discontent, but also wondering what might happen if she pushed him further.
She had the feeling that they were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and one more outburst might push them over it.
She didn’t know what would come next, but she had an urgent need to find out.
“You see me only as a child,” she remarked hotly, “a young nuisance to be rallied and organized, and dressed up and sent out into society like some show dog or a wayward puppy!”
“You are young, Bea, you need to be careful with whom you give such attentions to,” Giovanni was trying to speak in a calmer tone, but Beatrice noticed the way his hands clenched on his knees. “There is so much you don’t know, so much you don’t understand?—”
“Don’t speak to me like that,” Beatrice cried out, pushing him in annoyance. “As if I know nothing, as if I am some innocent flower—do you forget how I grew up, how we lived?”
“This isn’t about that!” Giovanni shouted back. “This is about men and their ways!”
He was flushed now, his darker skin reddening around the ears. Beatrice didn’t care if he was embarrassed talking to her about these things; she was tired of being treated like she was stupid. She shook her head at him, frustrated that he refused to see her the way she wanted to be seen.
“You’re just like Silas, you don’t trust me to make my own decisions,” she snapped, breathing heavily and starting to move back across to the other side of the seat.
“How am I supposed to trust you when you act like you did tonight?” Giovanni’s hand was around her wrist, pulling her back beside him, his dark eyes glaring at her. His hands were hot against her skin. “You know better, Bea.”
“And you know better than to try and control me,” Beatrice shouted back, wrenching her hand from his grip only to find his other hand on her other wrist. She was suddenly very aware of his strength and agility, that if she tried to run from him, he would, at this moment, catch her and pin her down until she listened. Part of her wished he would.
“I wouldn’t have to control you if you weren’t making such foolish errors in judgement,” he shouted back, his face far too close to hers. She could see his long dark eyelashes, the dark waves of his hair. God, how she wanted to run her fingers through it.
“What on earth would you get up to if left to your own devices?” he growled.
Beatrice was done. She was done with being treated like a child and denying herself what she most wanted. Him.
“This!”
She moved forward, quick as a cat, and had a moment to register the shock and surprise on his face. But she also noticed a hint of the very thing she was hoping for—deep in his eyes, she saw a burning desire. She closed her eyes and kissed him.
Beatrice was kissing him.
Beatrice was kissing him. Beatrice was kissing him!
Giovanni felt like his brain had stopped working, and whilst it jarred over and over on this one thought, his body had taken over control.
He was kissing her back, because, of course, he was; he had burned for her for years.
, And yet his hands held onto her shoulders, as if he knew he would have to push her away at any moment.
Push her away! You shouldn’t be doing this, this is a huge betrayal of Silas’s trust. She is drunk, she is compromised?—
“Bea,” he whispered against her lips, his mind finally catching up to his mouth. “Bea, we can’t do this.”
“What’s the matter?” She gasped against his lips. “Do you want to stop?”
She pulled away to look at him. Her dark curls were beginning to unwind out of her stylish hair arrangement.
Her dark eyes were black coals in the dim light of the carriage, lit from inside with a burning fire.
Her red lips were plump and flushed from the blood that rushed there.
Her breasts rose and fell rapidly inside her exquisite gown, a sign of her own excitement.
Holy mother of God, please help me, Giovanni prayed. She is the most alluring creature I’ve ever seen.
“No,” Giovanni’s voice was hoarse. “But I should.”
Beatrice eyed him carefully. Not for the first time, Giovanni felt like she was seeing every part of him in that moment. It was a thoroughly disconcerting—but thoroughly erotic—feeling, and he let out his own low, shuddering breath.
“Why?” Beatrice whispered. Her gloved fingers found his hand, entwining hers with his. “If I like it… and you like it…”
Giovanni’s heart almost stopped at the words “I like it,” but he shook his head, closing his eyes tightly, as if he would no longer need her so desperately by not seeing her.
“You are drunk. You don’t know what you like,” he stated. “You will regret it bitterly in the morning. Besides, you are Silas’s sister. I owe him everything. It is hardly appropriate.”
He kept his eyes closed, hoping this rebuttal would be enough to deter her.
Perhaps she would simply forget all of this in the morning, and it would become nothing but a champagne-tinged dream she only looked back on with embarrassment and not horror.
But then he felt those clever, insistent fingers stroking his arms, and a warm body moving closer, warm legs pressing against his.