Page 13 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)
He let his gaze drift down her slender neck and down to the V of exposed flesh at the top of the robe before drifting back up to meet her stare. “I can’t guarantee multiple orgasms, but I can certainly guarantee pleasure.”
She laughed again. “Were you born with a giant ego or did it come with making oodles of money?”
“A man doesn’t need money to know that when there’s attraction and chemistry, then sex is all the better for it… for both parties.”
“There is no attraction, not on my part.”
Now he was the one to laugh. “If there isn’t any attraction, why did you feel the need to tell me about your sexual preferences?”
“I was telling you I don’t have any sexual preferences, and that’s because I don’t like sex! It was a warning to back off.”
“But why did you feel the need to warn me? I haven’t tried to seduce you – you were the one to bring the subject of sex up, not me.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a seductive murmur. “You were the one to sniff my neck.”
All her fake lightness of expression fell away, dark colour crawling up her neck and enflaming her beautiful face.
“You warned me,” he continued in the same low, seductive voice, “because you feel the chemistry between us as strongly as I do, and you, my little spitfire, are so terrified you won’t be able to keep your hands off me that…”
“That’s bullshit!”
“… that you told me about your so-called frigidity in the hope of frightening me off,” he finished as if she hadn’t just spoken over him.
“Not to frighten you off–”
“Yes, to frighten me off because you know it is easier than having to fight your own desires.”
“You are full of shit.”
“And you blush like a teenager.”
“Shut up.”
He laughed before dropping his voice even lower. “If I’m so full of shit then why don’t you come here and prove it? Come here and kiss me.”
She pushed her chair back. “I’m not kissing you.”
“Frightened you’ll discover that all the feelings you’re supposed to have , as you put it, exist in you after all?”
“ No !”
“Frightened you won’t be able to control yourself once you’ve had a taste of the forbidden? That’s what I am to you, aren’t I? You’ve made me forbidden in your mind because you’re scared of your desire.”
“Shut up !”
“Tell me you’re not aroused right now.”
She tightened her sash and choked, “I hate you.”
“See, you can’t deny it, can you?” He leaned back and, not taking his gaze from her face, took a large drink of his wine.
“I am willing to admit that I’m aroused – you arouse me.
The difference between us is that I have full confidence in my self-control.
Any feelings you rouse in me… more than you already have…
” he added with a half-smile, “might be out of my control, but how I choose to act on them is entirely within my control, but you can’t say the same, can you? ”
She jumped to her feet and wrapped her arms around her breasts, one hand holding the base of her throat, which was as flush as her cheeks.
“Just shut up . I will never willingly give myself to you,” she said tremulously.
“The only way you will ever have sex with me is if you come into my room and force me.”
The tension that enveloped them at the end of this outburst was thick enough to taste.
Dante contemplated her a long moment and then smiled. “Oh, my sweet little spitfire, don’t you know the inflection and huskiness of your voice makes that sound like an invitation? ”
The flush on her skin deepened. The fingers around her throat tightened. Her large eyes were as dark and as stark with longing and fury as he’d ever seen them. And then she dropped her hands from her throat and, without another word, turned on her heel and left the room.
There was no key for the lock on Callie’s bedroom door, but even if there was, she would have still dragged one of her dining chairs across the room and hooked it under the door handle like she’d seen them do in films.
It killed her to know she was putting it there to stop herself from charging back out of the room and running back down the stairs to find Dante.
Killed her to know the zing on her lips was the tingling that had set off the moment Dante had dared her to kiss him.
Killed her that she’d had to root her feet to the floor to stop herself from doing exactly that.
In that moment, the temptation to vault herself over the table had come close to taking her over, and she covered her cheeks as mortification burned through skin that had suddenly started to feel as if it were its own living being.
Why had she said what she’d said? Why had she said he’d have to come to her room?
Why even mention her room? Why hadn’t she just left it at never willingly giving herself to him and then stuck to her guns and refused to discuss it a second longer?
It had to be that horrible dream that had been plaguing her waking hours at the root of it, and now she was locked in the very room she’d put the imagery of them having sex in both their heads.
“Oh, my sweet little spitfire, don’t you know the inflection and huskiness of your voice makes that sound like an invitation ?”
A knock on her door came within a breath of making her scream.
She had to find another breath to call out, “Who is it?”
“Geppa. I’m here to do your turndown service.”
She slammed a hand to her racing heart. “I don’t need it doing.”
“How are your blisters? Can I get you anything or do anything for you?”
If she was capable of laughing, she would do so.
All Callie wanted was a car and the code for the gates so she could flee this place…
but that wasn’t all she wanted, and it burned her skin afresh to even think of admitting to herself what that other thing she wanted was.
“I’m fine. I’m going to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning. But thank you.”
“ Buona notte , Callie.”
“Goodnight, Geppa.”
When she was quite certain the young woman had left the corridor, Callie wiggled the chair to make sure it was firmly in place and then dashed to the bathroom to brush her teeth, keeping the door open so she could keep watch on the main door.
Teeth clean, she jumped onto the bed and double-knotted the robe. She would leave the bed’s drapes tied back.
If she’d been overwrought the night before, it was nothing to what she was feeling now. Not even close. Her core temperature had risen so much it felt like her skin was going to break out in a fever.
God, what was happening to her? She must have crossed paths with thousands of men in her life without feeling even basic attraction, so why this man, the worst man?
A sound outside her door made her heart thrash to escape her chest.
Eyes glued to the door, she gripped the top of her arms tightly, barely able to breathe.
Dante took another shower in the coldest setting he could endure, but this one did nothing to stymie his arousal.
Dio , he wanted Callie. Badly. So badly.
He’d goaded her, and now he was the one paying the price because all he could see was the flush of colour that had ravaged her cheeks and neck and that stark moment of longing before she’d run away like a frightened but defiant rabbit.
Knowing she was in her own room with the same arousal coursing through her veins…
He groaned and bowed his head. When he made Callie his, he wanted all her fight to be entwined in pleasure, not in resistance with herself. It made his loins burn to imagine it.
Dio, this was becoming intolerable.
Turning the temperature of the water up, he put a hand on the tiled wall and gripped his erection.
With the fantasy of Callie opening that oversized dressing gown to reveal her naked body and then opening her arms and legs to him playing vividly behind his closed eyes, Dante masturbated with an urgency he’d not had since adolescence and brought himself to a release that barely doused the burn.
Callie gripped the pillow tightly with both hands and squeezed her eyes shut with the same firmness she’d done the previous night.
She’d been rigid in this position for at least an hour. The only noise her straining ears had picked up on since that earlier sound had been the creaking plumbing.
Her skin was cold from the draft the unclosed drapes weren’t protecting her from, but she barely felt it, not with the furnace heating her from deep inside. The arousal that awful conversation had unleashed in her… God help her, it was still pulsing through her, dancing to its own hot, sticky beat.
Why had she thought for a single second that starting a conversation about sex with Dante could be a good thing?
Suddenly, she could bear it no longer and threw the covers off and twisted onto the cold hardwood floor on feet whose blisters she no longer felt.
She wrenched the chair away from the door and then flung herself back onto the bed.
Burrowed deep under the covers, her face burrowed even harder into the pillow; she took a deep breath in an attempt to force her body to loosen and relax.
One night of hardly any sleep was bad enough, never mind two.
If she was going to have any chance of coping with Dante, she needed to keep her wits about her.
She would never get any sleep if she stayed this wound up and didn’t find a way to control her racing thoughts.
But it wasn’t her sister or the baby or Dante’s implication that telling Niccolo about the baby was dangerous careering through her mind.
It was Dante. The way his eyes had gone from angry frustration to melting when he’d held her in his arms. The way that had made her feel.
The scent of his skin beneath his cologne.
The sensuality in his voice and stare throughout that awful, awful, awful meal she’d endured.
‘Frightened you’ll discover that all the feelings you’re supposed to have, as you put it, exist in you after all?’
‘No!’
‘Frightened you won’t be able to control yourself once you’ve had a taste of the forbidden?’
‘Shut up!’
‘Tell me you’re not aroused right now.’
‘I hate you.’
‘See, you can’t deny it, can you?’
With barely any thought, she slipped a hand between her legs and cupped her sex .
‘Tell me you’re not aroused right now.’
Her breaths suddenly ragged, Callie stilled.
‘Tell me you’re not aroused right now.’
Now hardly breathing at all, she slowly moved her hands, slipping one beneath the band of her pyjama shorts and the other beneath her t-shirt to cup a bare breast.
Closing her eyes, she dipped lower until she reached her swollen nub.
“Tell me you’re not aroused right now.”
She moaned at the sensation and squeezed her breast harder, and then she let her body take control, ragged breaths turning into soft groans as the pleasure she was giving herself deepened.
When she reached her climax, it was with barely muted cries and with the image of Dante’s hand squeezing her breast and his fingers sliding between her legs.