what I said, Angie. I want you back. I want us to give this marriage the shot it deserves. You come back to me with your heart and head fully in it and I will ensure your legacy survives.”
The confusion swirling in her head deepened, thickened. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, struggled to contain her emotions, but they spilled outside of the edges of her barely shored-up walls. “Wasn’t it enough for you?” she asked, voice trembling. “Every second, every minute of those last excruciating months together? We couldn’t even be in the same room without tearing each other’s throats out. And when we did, it didn’t feel any better...it felt worse.”
He got to his feet and prowled toward her. “We lost a baby. It was painful, Angelina, it hurt.”
A rock climbed into her throat. “And here we are hurting each other again.”
He stopped centimeters from her. Her body reacted to the heat of him, the familiarity of him, vibrating with an internal memory she couldn’t control. She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, trying to hold it in, trying to stop the insanity midflow, but he saw it, read her as he always had, eyes darkening with heat.
“The point is to get past the pain. To deal with what we should have dealt with years ago.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, fear bubbling up inside of her like magma, threatening to push her on a course she knew she’d regret. “I’m engaged, Lorenzo. I love him.”
Fire licked his gaze. “You know that’s a lie.”
“It’s not a lie. It’s the truth.”
“You are my wife.” Curving an arm around her waist, he drew her to him. She swallowed as her vibrating body swayed perilously close to the wall of heat that drew her like a moth to a flame. She flattened a palm against his chest, but her feet wouldn’t seem to take her anywhere and her eyes locked on his. “Kiss me like you don’t belong to me,” he said huskily, “and I might reconsider.”
“No.” Her sharp response sounded as panicked as she felt. “Why are you doing this? Why are you being so cruel?”
“Because I should have stopped you the first time you walked out. Because the thought of you with another man drives me insane...because you haunt me, Angelina, every time I’m with another woman. All I can see is those beautiful blue eyes of yours and those vows we recited...” He cupped her jaw in his hand, fingers closing possessively over her skin. “Because we are not over, mi amore. We never will be.”
Her heart stuttered, an ache enveloping her that seemed to go soul-deep. “You can’t do this to me,” she said hoarsely. “Throw threats at me one minute, then say these things the next and just expect me to—”
He lowered his head, breath mingling with hers. “Prove you feel nothing for me. Prove what I’m saying isn’t true and I’ll walk away.”
“No.” But even as she said it, his mouth was covering hers in a whisper-soft caress that switched on every cell in her body. She closed her eyes. Just do it, Angie. Prove it to him, then walk away.
He slid a hand up her back, flattened his big palm against her spine. Warm, possessive, his touch seeped into her senses, stroked a wounded, jagged part of her that had never healed. Warning bells went off in her head, a blaring, unmistakable cautionary signal she should stop this now. But she had to convince him it was over.
Slow, infinitely gentle nudges of his mouth demanded a response. She held herself rigid, determined to end it. Tightening his fingers around her jaw, he tilted her head back and took a deeper possession of her mouth. The alarm bells in her head grew louder as the sweet intoxication of his kiss melted her bones.
“Lorenzo—”
He slicked his tongue across her lower lip. Erotic, intimate, it sent shock waves of pleasure rocketing through her. Her mind blanked, stomach clenched, fingers curling around a handful of his T-shirt. He did it again, stroking soft, vulnerable flesh with a deliberate possession that made her quiver.
When he flicked his tongue along the seam of her lips and demanded entry, she obeyed, lost in a sea of sensation. He rewarded her with a hot, toe-curling caress that made her moan low in her throat, grab hold of him more firmly.
He brought her closer with the palm of his hand at her back. Swept it down to cup the flesh of her buttock. The kiss turned needy, desperate, her hips arching against his burgeoning arousal. Thick, hard, he was so potently virile he turned her blood to fire.
Reality slammed into her like a bucket of ice dropped over her head. She shoved a hand against his chest and pushed back. Breathless, her mouth bruised from his kisses, she stood staring at him.
How had that happened? How had she let that happen?
“I hate you,” she breathed. “I really do.”
His mouth twisted. “That makes two of us. Sometimes I really hate you, too, tesoro. It’s the rest of the time that messes us up.”
She shook her head. Backed away from him. Turning, she snatched her purse off the chair and walked out without looking back.
What had she done?
New York Daily Buzz
Society Shocker!
Word has it the engagement of up-and-coming designer Angelina Carmichael and district attorney candidate Byron Davidson is off after a flashy soiree to celebrate the couple’s betrothal just two weeks ago.
The buzz about town is the prominent lawyer is clearly devastated at the split, perhaps suggesting it was Angelina who called it off?
One can’t help but wonder if the reason for the break comes in the form of none other than Angelina’s ex: sexy corporate raider Lorenzo Ricci. The two were seen dining at Tempesta Di Fuoco last week, conjuring up images of the couple’s tempestuous marriage that offered this column a regular supply of juicy news over its fiery but short duration.
Given the much lusted-after Lorenzo has been curiously devoid of a woman on his arm since the split, suspicion is running rampant that Angelina could be the cause.
The question on everyone’s lips is...are the Riccis back on?
OH, FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE. Angie tossed the salacious tabloid on the coffee table in her studio, blood heating. Did those people not have better things to do with their time? Her heart sank as she imagined what Byron must be thinking. Feeling. How he was coping with the barrage of gossip that had spread through town faster than a forest fire eating up dry timber.
She hadn’t talked to him since the night after her confrontation with Lorenzo, when she’d given him back his ring. Since that kiss with her husband had made it clear she couldn’t marry her fiancé. Even if Lorenzo had miraculously changed his mind and offered to expedite their divorce, she still couldn’t have married her fiancé. Not after everything she’d done to prove she was over her husband, that she didn’t care about him anymore, had been exposed for the lie it was.
Her mouth turned down. That was why she’d felt so off the night of the engagement party. Because she’d been trying to convince herself she was in love with her ultraintelligent, grounded fiancé, that she wanted the opposite of her roller-coaster ride of a marriage, when in fact she had never truly gotten over Lorenzo—the man who had made her feel as if her emotions were out of control.
The movers, currently emptying her apartment above the studio of her possessions, stomped back in to take the final load of boxes out to the truck parked on the street. The ball of tension in her stomach grew as she witnessed what was left of her carefully constructed existence disappear before her eyes.
A conversation with her father had provided no alternatives to her husband’s proposition, only a suggestion by her father to repair the marriage she never should have left in the first place.
Potential