A Scandal, a Secret, a Baby

Why did he have to be so damned sexy? she thought. And why was her traitorous body reacting so hungrily to him as she breathed in his warm and earthy scent?

‘I looked at the table plan and your name was nowhere near mine. I was just celebrating my good fortune at such a sympathetic placement and now I find you next to me. So how did that happen, Dante?’

‘Simple. I changed the names,’ he said unrepentantly.

Justina glared at him. How could she have forgotten his high-handedness? That way he had of just blazing in and taking whatever it was he wanted as if the world was just one giant boardroom? ‘You can’t turn up at a posh society wedding and start rearranging the seating!’

‘I just did.’ He sat back in his seat and glittered her a lazy smile. ‘And since no one else has a problem with it I suggest you go with the flow and enjoy yourself.’

‘Enjoy myself? With you beside me? That’s a joke, right?’ She bent to put her bag on the floor, mainly in an attempt to disguise the sudden tremble of her fingers. ‘If I wanted to spend the afternoon in the company of a snake I’d head for the nearest pit.’

Dante saw the mutinous look on her face as she lifted her head again and for a moment he almost smiled. How could he have forgotten her outrageous defiance—the only woman in the world who had not deferred to his wishes? Who had been determined to get her voice heard and insisted that her career was just as important as his.

For a while he had enjoyed their delicious battle of wills, with the subsequent make-up sessions which had been all about red-hot passion. Until he’d been forced to realise that she meant what she said. That her objections had not been some sustained sexual tease and that she had no intention of compromising her lifestyle after their marriage. She was a singer and a performer, she’d told him, and she’d been given opportunities which came along all too rarely. She’d told him she couldn’t—no—she wouldn’t turn them down. She’d also smilingly had the nerve to tell him to stop being such a dinosaur and to respect how important her career was. But behind her smile had been the definite glint of steel, and that had unsettled him. He remembered being furious and then—surprisingly—hurt. Until he’d forced himself to be grateful for his lucky escape. Because her attitude did not bode well for a long-term relationship with someone like him.

His thoughts cleared and he found himself looking into clear amber eyes which were framed so exquisitely by her dark lashes. He waited until their wine had been poured and then let his gaze linger on her bare left hand.

‘So. No wedding band. I note that you have not been as fortunate as your bandmate in the matrimonial stakes,’ he observed.

Pausing midmouthful of wine, Justina almost choked with indignation. ‘The matrimonial stakes! It’s not some kind of horse race!’

‘No?’ He shrugged. ‘But it is a race, all the same. Most women like to be in a permanent relationship by the time they’re your age because they are thinking about the inevitable ticking of their biological clock. What are you now, Justina? Thirty-one? Thirty-two?’

‘I’m not even thirty!’ she gritted out, and it wasn’t until she saw the answering gleam in his eyes that she realised she had fallen into some horrible sort of trap.

She’d ended up sounding defensive about her age, just because she was about to leave her twenties behind without a wedding ring on her finger. Dante had managed to do what Dante always did so well—he’d made her feel bad about herself.

So don’t let him! She slanted him an adversarial look. ‘I think these days you’ll find an emerging breed of women who don’t need the mark of a man’s possession to define themselves.’

‘I see your rather aggressively feminist stance hasn’t softened with time.’

‘Feeling threatened, are you?’

‘Believe me, Justina—I’m feeling something a lot more basic than threatened.’

His mocking gaze had flickered to his groin and Justina felt her cheeks grow hot with a mixture of anger and desire. Viciously, she jabbed her fork into an unsuspecting spear of asparagus, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to eat it. What was the matter with her? He was insulting her, and even if he did underpin the insults with a deliberate sensuality why the hell was she responding like this?

She put her fork back down. Perhaps that was what absence did? It hadn’t made her heart grow any fonder, but it had certainly awoken a sexual appetite which she had thought gone for ever. And Dante was the last person she wanted to make her feel this way. As if she’d been wandering around, starved of all comfort and pleasure, until he had suddenly reappeared, symbolising everything she’d been missing in one dark and very dangerous package.

‘Did you go to all the trouble of rearranging your seat just so that you could spend the entire meal being objectionable?’ she questioned.

‘Oh, come on, Justina. You know exactly why I did it. Surely you can appreciate that I am a little curious about you—especially considering that we were once planning to be man and wife?’

‘You mean until you decided that you’d have sex with that...that...’ She wanted to spit out the word tart or whore—but that might give him the erroneous impression that she still cared. Picking up her wine glass, she knocked back a large mouthful. ‘Woman,’ she finished acidly.

‘Will you stop rewriting history?’ he demanded. ‘You know damned well that we’d already broken up by then.’

She opened her mouth to object, and then shut it again—because what was the point? He arrogantly refused to see that he’d done anything wrong and nothing she said was going to change his mind. So let it go. Stop reacting to him, because that’s what he wants you to do.

Yet it felt like hell to be this close to him. Trying like mad to pretend that she felt nothing when inside her heart was beating so loudly she was surprised that someone hadn’t told her to turn the volume down.

She played around with the food some more, before forcing herself to look into his face. ‘Okay. Let’s do it your way and get the niceties over with. What are you doing these days? Still living in Rome, I suppose?’

‘Not any more. These days I have an apartment in New York.’

‘Oh?’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Not really. Surprise would imply a degree of interest, which I simply don’t have.’ She pushed her plate away and—forgetting her no-carbs rule—started nibbling on a piece of bread instead. ‘It’s just that you used to act as though paradise was a place in Italy, sandwiched in between Umbria and Emilia Romagna.’

‘My love of my homeland has not diminished, Justina,’ he said silkily. ‘And I go home whenever I can—though that is becoming increasingly less these days.’

‘Business is doing well?’ She made the question sound as if it was a bore to have to ask it.

He attempted a modest shrug, but she reflected with a growing feeling of frustration that modesty was one of the few things he didn’t do well.

‘Business is doing excellently. We’ve expanded our interests in North America and I love the vibrancy of New York. Okay, it isn’t Tuscany—but you can’t have everything.’

Justina ate some more bread—as if that could help fill the emotional hole which Dante had exposed with his words. She didn’t want to think about Tuscany—or the palazzo where the D’Arezzo family had lived for centuries. She had been blown away by the dramatic beauty of the region and the country itself, but her visit there hadn’t been a success. Actually, that was a complete understatement. Dante’s aristocratic family had disapproved of his English pop-star fiancée—especially as her visit had coincided with the release of a promotional video. The one where she’d been dancing energetically while not wearing a bra. Even she had been appalled by how raunchy the finished product had appeared to be—but it wouldn’t have seemed very credible for her to come out and say so at the time.

She had been deemed an unsuitable girlfriend for one of the D’Arezzo men, as well as being a potentially bad influence on his younger sister, and their trip had been cut abruptly short. At the time Justina had accepted what had seemed a rather harsh verdict because she’d had no choice other than to accept it. But it had been yet another nail in the coffin of their relationship.

‘Can’t have everything?’ she echoed sarcastically. ‘But I thought you were the man who always believed he could. Who made “having it all” into an art form!’

‘Oh, how brittle you sound, Justina,’ he murmured. ‘I do hope that your attitude isn’t motivated by envy or avarice. Career taken a nose-dive, has it?’

She was tempted to tell him to go to hell, but some remnant of pride stopped her. Let him know that you’ve carved a respectable life for yourself, she thought. That the sacrifices she’d made had been worth it. She was independent and proud of it. And she was never going to be like her mother.

‘On the contrary, I’m living in London and still writing songs,’ she said. ‘But for other people now.’

‘And you’re successful?’

‘Oh, I do okay.’ Justina kept her smile tight. She could have told him about her recent chart-topping song, or the invitation to write the score for an upcoming musical, but he wouldn’t be impressed. Dante didn’t approve of ambition unless it came from a man. ‘It keeps me in shoes.’

‘Very expensive shoes, by the look of them.’ He lowered his gaze to study her skyscraper heels before lifting his head to let his eyes drift lazily over her face. And it was still the most beautiful face he had ever seen. Her pink lips were pressed together as if she was trying to decide what to do with them and Dante felt a rush of pure and potent lust. It hit his skin like the buffeting of a powerful wave. It turned the blood in his veins into a heated flow as he imagined kissing her again.

And in that moment he knew that he was going to have her one last time. That this fever wouldn’t go away unless he did. He realised then that his desire for her was like a disease which had lain dormant all these years and the sight of her had suddenly reactivated it all over again.

He felt the heavy aching at his groin as he leaned forward a little. ‘And what about men?’ he questioned softly.

‘Men?’

His gaze was steady; his voice was not quite. ‘Nobody in your life you like enough to bring him along today as your “plus one”?’

Justina met the blaze of his eyes, determined he wouldn’t discover the truth. Because wouldn’t he laugh—or, even worse, act smug—if he knew that her time with him had ruined her for other men? That she’d been unable to trust another man enough to get close to—even if she’d found anyone else attractive enough to want to try.

So why not play games with him? Why not pretend that she loved men just as they loved her? Surely pride demanded something along those lines? For Dante was traditional and old-fashioned enough to see her still-single status as some kind of failure.