Dante's Shock Proposal

Lise had a habit of disrupting his plans. When he’d gone to her table at first, his plan had been simple: find out what she knew and make sure she didn’t tell anyone about The Inferno. That plan had lasted all of two minutes.

He’d formed a new plan for the way that evening should’ve ended as they’d danced and the chemistry had grown, and that hadn’t worked out either.

When he’d instructed she come to his office, he’d been planning to demand answers to her tardiness—mostly to make sure she hadn’t overslept after a long sexy weekend with the jerk who’d stood her up.

“Why did you stand me up?” he asked.

And another plan went down the drain. Probably not the best use of a work environment, but his plan to keep his work and his club completely separate had also blazed out when Lise had walked into it in that dress. Besides, how else was he supposed to figure her out but to ask questions?

She looked momentarily confused again, but embarrassed too. “I didn’t think you wanted those places to cross-contaminate each other. Am I supposed to call you Dante or Dr. Valentino right now?”

“Dante,” he answered immediately—he liked it when she said his name. “I didn’t want it, but it happened anyway.”

“You sexy-danced with me and sang Spanish into my ear. That’s not just something that happens.” Her voice had gone up, the same as when she’d yelled at him about being rude in the club. She might not plan to behave differently in the club and in the hospital, but she did.

“You being there happened. Everything that came afterward was a choice, and nothing I regret.” He cleared that up, so she couldn’t think he was blaming her for his apparently clumsy seduction. “So, why did you leave?”

“So I wouldn’t sleep with you.”

“Why? You wanted to. You wanted a last hurrah. I’d guaranteed a last hurrah without complications.”

She all but rolled her eyes at him. “It’s easy to say no complications, but it would’ve messed everything up. It’s already messing things up, and all we did was dance and kiss.”

Dante scooted his chair toward her, then grabbed the arms of her chair to drag her to face him.

She made a face as her chair slid on the carpet, a flash of pain that gave him pause. But it was gone as fast as it had come, so he tried to stay on plan—the new plan, the one that had re-formed without his reasoned intention a moment ago.

“This right now is only awkward because you ran out. Did you think I would force you to do something you didn’t want?”

“No. I wanted it. But it was a bad decision, fueled by mojitos and hormones and because, well, I’ve been lonely, if you must know. And you’re very handsome, and then there was the dancing and the sexy stuff you said in Spanish.” She blew out a breath slowly and reached up to rub her face.

She looked just as frustrated as he was. “If you’re going to storm into single motherhood, you need to get better at handling social interactions. In the future, you can just say, ‘Thanks, but I changed my mind.’”

“Thanks, but I changed my mind,” she repeated, but, despite the sarcastic repetition of his words, not an ounce of it rang in her voice.

“Cute.” He reached out and snagged one of her hands to force her to focus on him—contact with another had a great side benefit of granting the appearance of trustworthiness, and he needed an advantage with her. “I was actually worried about you. Something you’ll become familiar with as a single parent, trust me.”

“What were you worried for?” She didn’t pull away, but her arm had a stiffness that spoke of inner turmoil, and when she met his gaze he felt the balance shift.

“I saw your face during the set. You were smirking at your cell phone. WonderDate texted you back.”

“WonderDate?” she repeated, and then grinned despite herself. “He did. But don’t call him that—he’d have to have shown up to be any kind of wonder. In fact, I didn’t even text him back. You were worried that he’d come for me and I just forgave all and ran off with him?”

“You’d had at least three mojitos, and I’d been doing my best to seduce you, so it was possible I’d contributed to you making a bad decision.”

Mild exasperation had her shaking her head at him, even though she still didn’t pull her hand away. “He texted several times after getting the picture. I never answered. When he finally texted that he was on his way and would be there well before your set ended, I decided to get out before I did anything stupid.”

“Explain stupid.” He kept her hand, kept looking her in the eye. It had a double benefit, as he also got to look at her clean-faced, and the pale blue eyes drew his own gaze.

“You know what stupid is. Stupid is what we were doing. What we were going to do. What we might be doing now!” She wriggled her hand out of his, but the buzzing connection he’d felt lingered.

“That wasn’t stupid. That would’ve been a much-desired reprieve from reality for a while. You feel it.” He gestured to her freed hand. “I know you do.”

“It’s just chemistry. It doesn’t mean that the rest disappears.”

He caught both her hands and stilled, holding her wary gaze while the buzz resumed and morphed to a persistent tingle that either required more touching or none at all.

More.

Dante leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and brought one small hand to his lips to brush a kiss across her knuckles, then turned it until it was palm up, and feathered a trail of kisses from the center of her palm to the tender inside of her wrist.

Her breathing changed, and when he lifted his eyes to hers again, her mouth was open and she had that excited haze settling in her eyes again.

“That connection you feel? Sex with us would be like that—intense and hot. It’s kind of silly that we’re still talking about this when we both know it’s going to happen.”

“You don’t know that.” She breathed, blinking her eyes and pulling her hand free, gently but firmly. She knew it too, but she didn’t want to know it. Why, though, he couldn’t fathom. “And what did you mean before?”

“When?”

“When you said that I would know about worry,” Lise said, grabbing for anything to chase away the charge in the air. Today had been far from her image of a great day at work. It had started out badly, she’d dropped instruments in surgery and new ones had had to be broken out of their sterile packaging. Twice. She never dropped instruments. Now every cell in her body was zinging and she wanted more contact with his skin, with his lips... She wanted to dance, she wanted to argue with him more—probably the weirdest part of the compulsion she felt to engage with him.

The sooner they got past this, the better it would be—as it was, she struggled to resist that sensation, which turned it into that need, that near ache.

Being a sarcastic witch had always been helpful in persuading men that she was entirely not worth the effort, but so far, not Dante. “Is that an implication you worried about me like a parent?”

Lise sat up straighter in her chair, then regretted it. Her neck and right shoulder had started to ache from the accident this morning, and sitting up straighter just put added tension on those muscles.

“I’ve been a parent. I know what it is to worry. And,” he said, mirroring her actions, sitting up but taking it a step further with folded arms, “in no way do I feel parent-like toward you.”

“You have kids?” The image of her ducky nursery swam into her mind.

“Had. Younger siblings. I raised them with my brother when our parents were murdered.”

When our parents were murdered.

The words curdled deep in her belly, but she didn’t see even a trace of emotion on his handsome face.

In surgery, she could read his eyes—she had a context and two years’ practice interpreting his looks to make that possible. Now? His expression had gone as blank and as unaffected as his voice had been.

An innate desire to help and heal had made her become a nurse, but this was so big and his words were so heavy that she couldn’t even focus on them. Shifting sand, that’s what it was like to speak with the man. No direction ever looked safe, but plodding directly for what had to still be a wound felt the least safe.

Talk about the kids. “How old are they?”

“Now or then?”

“Then.” Though she doubted he’d entirely given up those parental feelings, no matter how old they all were now.

“Alejandro is youngest, he was ten. Santiago was fourteen. Rafe and I were eighteen.”