Page 18 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)
“If you’re hoping she will send the cavalry to rescue you, then I’m afraid you will be disappointed – she knows you’re here.”
Although she’d guessed Georgia would have been told the Callie problem had been taken care of, it still landed like a fresh wound to her heart. Georgia knew Callie was being held hostage by Dante, and she didn’t care.
Hardly being held hostage , the treacherous voice in her head taunted.
“I just want to talk to her.” And she wanted Dante to take another shower and scrub off the fresh Dante scent clinging to him. God, how could one person smell so good ?
He contemplated her speculatively for a long moment before his eyes gleamed and his lips twitched. “You must be the only person in the world whose mood isn’t soothed by a bath.”
Dante had the pleasure of watching Callie’s glorious eyes widen.
He leaned a little closer and dropped his voice.
“I can smell your bubble bath. Your skin heats the scent beautifully.” Until these last few days with Callie, he’d never appreciated how perfume drenched over skin masked the true scent of a woman.
Callie’s natural, clean scent was far more alluring than anything a perfumer could create.
At some point soon, he would clasp her cheeks in his hands and rub his nose over her face and neck to inhale that scent deep into his lungs.
To his greater pleasure, colour flushed over the face he wanted to inhale and which he’d spent the day becoming more and more mesmerised by.
Not just her face. All of her. The way she moved.
The way she talked… there had been a few moments in the vaults when her wonder at what she was being shown had shone so brightly it had dazzled.
He did not doubt that if she’d been allowed to stay there after the staff had gone home, she’d have become metaphorically lost in it all.
He also did not doubt that his presence there had stopped her from fully immersing herself in it all.
The awareness that had developed between them had grown so strong that the manuscripts that had surrounded them would have breathed it in and trapped its essence in the weave of the ancient paper.
“I just want to talk to her,” she repeated in a voice as tight as her body language, leaning away from him and picking at the evening’s antipasti to avoid looking at him.
He poured them both a glass of wine. “And what if she doesn’t want to talk to you? ”
“Then that will be no change to how things have been recently. I just want to know she’s taking care of herself and the baby.”
“Why would she not?”
“Because she never does… take care of herself, I mean. She’s a dreamer who floats through life.”
“Let me guess; you take care of her.” He would guess, too, that taking care of her sister was something Callie had done or tried to do her entire life.
“Well, someone has to.”
“She’s a twenty-six-year-old woman and is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”
Her eyes suddenly zapped to him. “And how would you know that?”
He shrugged and took a drink of his wine. “Because Niccolo would never have got involved with her otherwise.”
“Niccolo will sleep with any woman with a pulse, just like all you stinking rich playboys.”
“A rather sweeping generalisation, don’t you think?
” Callie was working herself up. Tension had been vibrating off her delicious skin from the moment she’d entered the dining room, and now he could smell it too, and had no doubt about the reason for it: Night was falling, and in the dark, anything could happen…
“He whisked my sister away to Paris when he was engaged to another woman, impregnated her, and then dropped her like a hot rock, and according to Georgia, that’s perfectly normal behaviour for the men in your world.”
“She said that, did she?”
“Not in so many words, but she implied it, and never minding your disgustingly casual suggestion that she be Niccolo’s mistress, I’ve read too many stories of what stinking rich men like you get up to not to imagine your attitude to women is identical to theirs.
Let’s be honest, you’re a rich, good- looking man who could have any woman he wants, and I bet you do have them, probably more than one at a time. ”
“Any woman I want, ‘eh?” he said meaningfully. Dante had certainly enjoyed more than his fair share of women over the years, had dated some of the most beautiful women in the world. None of them had intrigued him a fraction of the way Callie did.
Colour darkened the whole of her face and neck, and she reached for her wine glass with a trembling hand. “You know what I mean.”
“I know that you sound jealous.”
“Jealous? Ha! The only thing I feel is pity for those poor women whose hearts you’ve broken over the years.
” She was holding the stem of the glass so tightly that burgundy liquid spilt over her hand.
Snatching at a napkin to blot the mess on the tablecloth, she added, “You just turn it on and off, don’t you.
There’s no meaning to it. I could be any woman. ”
“Is that why you have never enjoyed it? Was the meaning absent for you?”
“Stop deflecting! I was talking about you .”
“You were talking about a me that exists only in your imagination, and now we are talking about you.”
“We are not ,” she refuted hotly.
“Oh, but we are. You’re the one who professes to dislike sex…”
“I don’t profess . Me not liking sex is a fact.”
He smiled. “We’ll see.”
Instead of coming back at him, she drank half her wine in one swallow.
“You never did tell me how long it’s been for you,” he commented idly, wondering if she was aware her nipples had visibly hardened. Watching Callie fighting her attraction was as arousing as imagining taking one of those ripe, puckered nipples into his mouth. “A year? Longer? Shorter? ”
“How long has it been for you ?” she retorted.
“Two months.”
She snorted in disbelief.
“I have become discerning in my choice of sexual partner. I believe it is a hazard of age... and a hazard of overworking to ensure I had this week free for the wedding.”
“Then go back to the wedding. There’s bound to be women your newly discovered discerning eye will appreciate there.”
Unable to resist, he dipped his mouth to her ear. “Probably, but none it will appreciate more than you.”
She shoved her chair back like she’d been scalded and jumped to her feet. “If you must know, it’s been five years.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s a long time to be celibate.”
“No,” she snapped, but there was the same tremor in her voice that had shaken her hand. “It’s a long time of being happy and content on my own without a man using me as a vessel to get himself off on, so when you come to my bed tonight, know that that’s what you’ll find. A vessel.”
“ When I come to your bed tonight? I didn’t know a date for sailing your ship had been set.”
“Well we might as well get it over with hadn’t we, seeing as you’re so convinced it’s going to happen anyway,” she blazed. “Come to my room tonight and see how much you enjoy having sex with a frigid mannequin.”
And then, as if she couldn’t get any more magnificent, Callie drained the last of her wine, put the glass back on the table with a flourish, and strode out of the room with her head held high and her long hair swishing.
Dante didn’t think he’d ever been so turned on.
Callie looked at the dining chair she’d wedged under the handle of her bedroom door the night before and pulled at her hair.
Things like that probably only ever worked in films, and this castle was filled with so many secret passages and hidey holes that a lifetime of exploring would never find them all.
If Dante wanted to enter her room, then neither a chair nor door was going to stop him.
What the hell was she thinking, if he wanted to enter her room? She’d ruddy well given him an invitation.
But only because she couldn’t take it anymore.
The feelings he roused in her were just too much, a form of possession way beyond her control.
She needed to purge them. Lie down and get it over with.
Then it would be done. Over. Finished. Dante would return to his room afterwards, sated but ultimately disappointed, and then he would leave her the hell alone because she wasn’t worth the effort, and she would spend the rest of her time in this stupid castle thinking of ways to escape and reach Niccolo Martinelli rather than having her thoughts and emotions consumed by Dante Coscarelli.
Just because she’d brought herself to a climax fantasising about him did not mean her body would respond to him in the same way.
In fact, she would make damn sure it didn’t.
She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing in return.
She wouldn’t lay like a mannequin for him because her body had frozen in revulsion – although that was still a real possibility – but out of choice.
She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing.
Nothing. She repeated this to herself on a loop, saying it when she pushed aside the closed bed drapes and climbed naked under the turned-down bedsheets, still repeating it when she climbed back out and pulled her pyjamas on and then when she took them back off again, repeating it still when she scrubbed her teeth a second time.
She was still repeating it when she punched the bedside light off and was plunged into darkness.
She would let him take whatever he wanted but give him nothing.
Her heart was pounding.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled the sheets tight around skin that had come alive with dread and anticipation.
A floorboard creaked. Her lungs and throat closed. Her heart came close to punching itself out of her chest.
By the time she was able to take ragged breaths again, she’d accepted the noise had been a noise that came with a castle of this age, but it did nothing to ease the nerves wound so tightly inside her.
What are you so frightened of? That you might actually enjoy it? Or are you frightened you’ll fall even harder for him?
The treacherous, unbidden, unwanted thoughts made her pull the sheets even tighter around herself, but before she could even begin to dissect them, a sliver of light diffused through a tiny gap in the curtains.
Dante was in her room.