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not to drown your sorrows after all?’

      ‘Not now that you’ve consented to visit me, Anna.’

      She crossed her arms over her dark green top, and Dante couldn’t think of a colour that would complement her pale satin skin more. Without warning, the fresh, searing pain of his recent loss swept over him. It returned with renewed force and he wanted to reach out, anchor himself to life again, remind himself that even though his mother had gone beauty and grace were still his to appreciate if only he’d take the trouble to see it. If he brushed up close to such admirable qualities in Anna would it relieve him of the bitter, despairing thoughts that pounded on him so disturbingly? Thoughts that confirmed his growing belief that he must be no good?

      Yes, his nature was clearly unlovable and unworthy of regard—hadn’t his own father abandoned him?—so perhaps he deserved abandonment by the people close to him? Especially when he’d been so ruthlessly focused on making himself rich that he scarcely saw the needs of anyone else.

      ‘It upsets me when you look like that,’ Anna confessed softly.

      ‘Like what? ‘

      ‘As if you don’t like yourself very much.’

      ‘Is there no hiding from that all-seeing gaze of yours?’ Dante retorted uncomfortably.

      ‘I just want to help you if I can.’

      ‘Do you? Do you really?’

      ‘Of course I do. Why do you think I came? Would you like to talk about it?’

      ‘No, sweetheart. Talking is not what I need right now,’ he answered, gravel-voiced.

      And for a man who had prided himself on achieving anything he put his mind to in life it was ironically too difficult a task to keep the raw need that surged through his body like a tidal wave completely out of his tone.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IN SLOW motion he reached for Anna’s hand. His eyes—those intense, burning, ethereal eyes—held her willing prisoner, right then becoming her whole world.

      ‘What do you want?’ she whispered, hardly able to hear over the pounding of her heart. ‘What do you need?’

      ‘You, Anna…right now I want and need you.’

      After that, words became unnecessary. His fingers were slipping through her hair, anchoring her head so that she was placed perfectly for his kiss when he delivered it…when the touch of his lips ignited a heartfelt need that had slumbered achingly inside her for years and promised to more than satisfy it.

      She’d always thought that maybe her impassioned secret desires were doomed to remain unrequited. On the rare occasion when she’d allowed herself to overcome her mistrust and be caressed by a man, the experience had never remotely lived up to her hopes. All it had done was leave her feeling vulnerable, scared that she would end up alone and unloved until the end of her days. But now, as his warm velvet tongue so hungrily and devastatingly swept her mouth’s interior, the flavours she tasted rocked her.

      Along with passion, fervour and consuming need, Anna was alive to the anger, despair and pain that she tasted too. But she didn’t let such stark emotions scare her…not when they mirrored feelings of her own that she’d often been too afraid to bring into the light. Because of that she innately understood the tumult that flowed heatedly through his blood—good and bad—even if she didn’t know the details.

      Crushed to his warm hard chest in its dark roll-necked sweater, she felt musky male heat and sexy woody cologne captivate her senses as he ravished her in the starved, insatiable way she’d always dreamt of being loved by a man. Holding on to his hard-muscled biceps to keep from falling, Anna feverishly and willingly paid him back in kind. And in her head echoed the advice from her mother that she’d never forgotten: Only give yourself to someone you love.

      On the bed in a room where in their haste to be together they hadn’t even paused to turn on a light they raided each other’s clothes with trembling hands—desperate for skin on skin contact and more drugging open-mouthed kisses that promised to last all night long. And if he’d temporarily lost his mind in taking this young red-haired beauty to bed then Dante heartily welcomed the state. She was the first really good thing that had happened to him in ages, and he wasn’t about to question his good fortune.

      The intoxicating feminine scent of her body had already taken up residence in his blood, and it thrummed with wanting her. The arresting sight of that rippling blanket of fiery hair on the silk cream pillow behind her head made a stirring, ravishing picture that he would not soon forget. Now, as his hands eagerly caressed the smooth, slender contours of Anna’s body, the breathless gasps she emitted made him blind to any other sensation but their wild and heady mutual desire. He was all but desperate to plunge inside her, to forget everything except the unrestrained thundering joy of the chemistry that had exploded between them from almost the first glance, to relegate the darkness that had recently threatened to suffocate him, to the shadows.

      Sensing her stiffen a little as he explored her heat with his fingers, Dante rose up to cup and stroke her face. A duty that should have been at the forefront of his dazzled mind suddenly stabbed at his conscience.

      ‘I’m sorry, Anna…I should protect you. Is that what you are concerned about? ‘

      ‘It’s okay,’ she sighed, dark eyes shy. ‘I’m protected already. I’m on the pill.’

      For an indeterminate amount of time Dante got lost in her wide fire-lit stare, and then he came to and kissed her. The caress seemed to gentle her. Then, his blood flowing with increasing desire and demand, slowly, care fully, he drove himself deep inside her. The heat that exploded around him was incredible.

      Anna’s sherry-brown eyes smouldered and brightened at the same time, but Dante had not missed the momentary flash of apprehension in her beautiful glance either. Too aroused and aching to wonder about it for long, he felt his body naturally assume the age-old rhythm that would take him to the destination and release he longed for…a destination that could and would free him for a while from the merciless torment that had deluged him when his mother had breathed her last laboured breath in his arms. Instead of grief and misery, ecstasy and bliss would be his. And for a blessed short time, at least, all the hurt would be swept away.

      His strength of purpose all but overwhelmed Anna as she watched him move over her, his arrow-straight hips slamming into hers as his loving became ever more intense, ever more voracious. By instinct and by desire she wound her long legs round his back, until he was so deep inside her that she felt as if her body no longer existed just as one. Instead, she and he had become a single entity, with two hearts beating wildly in tandem and mind, body and spirit in stunning accord. She had given herself to him without doubt that it was the right thing. destined, even.

      Would it scare him to know that she thought that? A girl he had just met, to whom he probably wouldn’t even give the time of day normally?

      In the soft darkness that seemed to be growing ever lighter as Anna’s eyes grew more accustomed to it his smooth muscles rippled like warm steel beneath her trembling, caressing fingers. His breath was harshly ragged as he alternately devoured her lips and then, with that same hot, tormenting mouth, moved lower to caress her breasts. He suckled the rigid aching tips in turn, and Anna couldn’t withhold the heated moan that broke free. It was as though her very womb rejoiced when he touched and caressed her.

      When he rose up again to capture her lips in another hotly exploring and intimate kiss, something inside her started irrevocably to unravel, to spiral dizzyingly out of control. At first, because she was nervous of being so vulnerable and exposed in front of him, Anna tensed, trying to stem the sensation. But at that same moment she stared up at him, to find the corners of his oh-so-sensuous lips lifting in what might have well been a quietly knowing smile, and she completely gave up trying to control what was happening.

      Instead, she allowed the fierce, elemental power of the tide that swept through her to take her where it willed. She

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