are you doing here?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious.’
Marcus’s spluttering blaze of fury was bad enough, but the edge of laughter in Dario’s retort was far worse, setting her teeth on edge and bringing home to her just how dreadful this must all look. She had been sprawled on the settee, her hair tumbling down around her face and shoulders, her legs wide apart, and her clothes...
Cheeks flaming, she tugged her skirt down, struggled to pull her dress up around her shoulders once again, desperate to restore her appearance to a degree of order. Her hands shook so badly that she couldn’t reach the zip to pull it up and when she tried to draw Dario’s attention to the fact, telegraphing wildly with her eyes and her brows that she needed help, his only response was a blank-eyed stare. Either he didn’t understand or...
Her heart quailed inside her, her stomach turning over in sudden nausea. Was it possible that Dario knew only too well what was troubling her but had no intention of making any move to help her? It certainly looked that way. He had barely spared her a glance; instead, all his attention was focused on his raging adversary.
‘I— This isn’t what you think, Marcus...’
She stumbled over the words, lost them completely when she saw the way that Dario turned, casting a darkly contemptuous look in her direction as if he could barely believe that she had actually said such a stupid thing. Listening to herself as the idiotic comment hung in the air between them, she couldn’t believe it either. There was only one possible interpretation of the scene in front of Marcus, and that was the right one. It had also been the one she had wanted him to have, but that had been before this dark fury had erupted around her—and before Dario had seemed to turn away from her.
‘And what the hell else would I think it might be?’ Marcus spat at her now, making her flinch from the poisonous venom of his tone. ‘Unless you’re trying to claim that he forced you?’
‘I— He... No—I’m not claiming that...’
How could she do any such thing, even to save herself from this hellish embarrassment? She just wished that Dario would say something—anything—to break the tension that stretched tight between the three of them. But after that one demonic touch of humour, the coldly blazing scorn he had turned on her just moments before, he had now frozen where he stood, arms crossed over his broad chest, dark brows drawn together, a silent, watchful observer of the scene in front of him.
‘Not that I’d put it past him,’ Marcus stunned her by declaring now. ‘A man with his reputation.’
‘Rep...reputation?’ Alyse managed, stunned to learn that Marcus seemed to know something about Dario—more, in fact, than she did herself. ‘What...?’
But Marcus wasn’t listening, intent instead on turning the venom he had directed at her previously onto Dario himself.
‘Dragged up in the gutter by a mother who was anyone’s for the price of—’
It was only the tiniest movement. Just a tensing of Dario’s long body, a curl of his fists, a hint of a step forward. But that, when combined with the black thundercloud of his frown, the way his sensual mouth was clamped hard and tight into a thin line, was enough of a warning to have Marcus biting off the last of his insulting sentence and clearly backing down. He obviously didn’t think that it was safe to risk baiting Dario any further, however much he might want to.
And the other man’s reaction turned Alyse’s legs to water at the memory of the way that this had been just what she had planned as part of her original scheme in the first place. It had all seemed so exciting, so brilliant—so possible when she had come up with the idea as a way of getting rid of Marcus’s unwanted attentions. Give him the impression that she was involved with another man, that she was seeing someone else—maybe even sleeping with someone else—and then surely he would back off and leave her in peace?
But now, finding herself in exactly the situation she had anticipated, with Marcus at the door, having found her and Dario in a decidedly compromising situation—far more compromising than she had ever planned—things were not at all as she had foreseen. For one thing, Marcus, though looking disgusted and furious, didn’t seem to have the intention of turning round and walking away, as he had in her mind when she’d imagined this happening.
And Dario...
She risked a glance at the tall, dark, glowering man to her left, and immediately wished she hadn’t. He wasn’t actually snarling but he might as well have been and she could practically see his hackles rising in hostile threat to the intruder into his territory. The sparks that seemed to flash between the two men made her feel like some tasty but already wounded prey that was the subject of a face to face confrontation between two powerful and equally ravenous lions.
Giving up on trying to fasten her dress, she folded her arms tightly around her waist, as much to hold herself together as to keep the blue silk from falling into a pool on the carpet at her feet.
‘No matter what my reputation,’ Dario drawled now, making Alyse start because she was so used to him being silent, ‘it seems that Alyse doesn’t give a damn about it, mi caro fratello.’
My—what? Alyse shook her head faintly, unable to believe she had heard right. The stress must be getting to her so that she was imagining things. He couldn’t have said...
But, whatever he had said, it had been deliberately provocative. And it had the desired effect, enraging Marcus so that his whole face went white with fury, pulling taut over his bones.
‘Marcus...’ she tried, desperate to have this appalling stalemate broken, to avoid what she was now starting to fear might actually bring these two to blows. There was something here between these two that was evil. Something she didn’t understand but if she could just avoid an actual fight...
‘Look, I’m sorry if this has upset you, but really you know I never said...’
He wasn’t listening, all his attention focused on Dario’s hard, set face. But, even as she watched, Alyse was stunned to see the faint flicker of a smile on the Italian’s sensual lips. A smile that was there and gone again in a moment and had nothing warm about it at all.
‘I could kill you...’
Marcus’s threat, directed at Dario’s impassive face, was a low, savage mutter, one that sent a horrified shiver slithering down Alyse’s spine. In a panic she stepped forward, her hand coming out as she forgot about holding her dress up and could only think about stopping him.
‘Marcus, I tried to tell you that I couldn’t see any future for us, so I thought—’
‘Thought you’d teach me a lesson?’
‘No—I...’
But her voice had no strength, no conviction. Wasn’t that really what she had wanted to do? To convince him that she was not for him? That she wasn’t at all interested in the proposal he had pushed at her so unexpectedly and had kept pushing for days.
‘You thought you’d rub my face in it,’ he snarled, the look he turned on her scraping over her body like the burn of acid.
It was only now, when that hateful look paused and lingered deliberately, that Alyse became aware of the betraying damp, darkened patches directly over her breasts where Dario’s hot mouth had sought out the sensitive peaks that had strained against her bra. The realisation dried her throat in a moment.
‘No...’ she tried but, even though her lips moved, no sound managed to come out. And when she glanced uncertainly at Dario, the darkness and focus of his eyes told her that he had something else on his mind other than belief in her declaration.
From a shadowy corner of her thoughts came an uncomfortable memory of the time in the car when she had looked back and seen Marcus staring after them. She’d been careless enough to smile just briefly. And Dario had caught it. Could he think this was what she had wanted?
‘Well, you couldn’t have made a better