LITMIR.BIZ

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Alessandro stretched out beside her, tracing one finger along the tender skin of her navel. Meghan shuddered lightly.

      ‘I’m rushing things,’ he said after a moment. ‘When we make love, it won’t be like this.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘Rushed. Frenzied. Because we are angry.’

      It took a great deal of her pride and courage to say, ‘If I was angry, it was at myself. For wanting you.’

      He paused, sitting up on one elbow to regard her thoughtfully. His fingers drifted up to touch her chin, tilting her face so their eyes met. He traced the outline of her lips with a fingertip.

      ‘He hurt you very much, didn’t he?’

      Meghan opened her mouth soundlessly. She hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t expected tenderness on the heels of such passion, understanding coupled with desire. She nodded, helpless to deny what he already knew. ‘Yes, he did.’

      Undone by compassion where she’d expected condemnation, she felt tears sting her eyes. She forced them back. Lying next to him, her sorrow plain to see, Meghan felt far more exposed than when her clothes had been rucked up.

      She tried to shrug away, but he stilled her with one gentle hand on her shoulder.

      ‘Don’t hide from me.’

      ‘What do you want from me?’ Meghan whispered. He wanted her body; she knew that. Understood it, even. Yet now he seemed to be asking for more. Her emotions, her desire, her soul.

      Her heart.

      Except he didn’t want that, did he? He couldn’t possibly want that.

      Alessandro’s eyes darkened even as he continued to stroke her face with tender, absent movements, a gesture of unthinking intimacy. ‘I want you to want me,’ he said at last. There was a hidden vulnerability in his voice that made Meghan ache.

      Want him? Of course she wanted him. He had to know it. It was in her every look, her every word.

      Her every thought.

      ‘I do want you,’ she admitted with a little laugh. ‘I think that’s obvious.’

      ‘But you’re ashamed,’ Alessandro said quietly. ‘Ashamed to be with me.’ There was an ache in his voice, of need and pain, that Meghan couldn’t begin to understand. It almost sounded as if he thought she were ashamed of him … rather than herself.

      ‘I can’t help that. I … I have a lot to get over, I suppose. When you touch me I want to forget. I want to feel and not to think.’

      ‘That’s only half of the experience.’ He smiled down at her, his expression softened with tenderness, yet a shadow lingering in his eyes. ‘You can make love with your body and your mind.’

      ‘I suppose you’re the expert?’ Meghan said, and it came out halfway between a joke and a jibe.

      ‘Perhaps with the body.’ Alessandro’s mouth tightened briefly before he smiled and brushed the hair back from her forehead, tangling his fingers in the silken strands. ‘Like you, I’m waiting for my mind to catch up.’

      Meghan’s mouth opened soundlessly at this admission. We ‘re so alike. Yet they were impossibly different. ‘Where do we go from here?’ she forced herself to ask, though at the moment she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want Alessandro to leave.

      She didn’t know what she wanted.

      ‘We wait.’

      ‘For what?’

      ‘For you to come to me of your own free will, with no shame, no fear, no frenzy. For both of us to give … completely.’

      Meghan struggled to sit up, pushing her hair away from her face. Alessandro dropped his hand, still smiling.

      ‘That’s asking quite a lot.’

      ‘I don’t mind.’

      ‘Maybe I do.’

      He raised one eyebrow. ‘Do you want to leave me?’

      Meghan let out a shaky breath. ‘No. But I should.’

      ‘Why? What is this should?’

      ‘Alessandro …’ She closed her eyes, felt his fingers drift along her face. ‘There’s no future for us, is there? I’m not …’

      ‘You’re not what?’

      She bit her lip. How could she explain her doubts, her fears, without opening the Pandora’s box of her past? ‘You thought I was a whore.’ She hadn’t meant to say it, didn’t want to remind him, knew from the chilling silence that she shouldn’t have. Her old wounds were too fresh, the scars raw and red.

      Alessandro stiffened, his hand dropping from her face. Meghan opened her eyes.

      He rolled off the bed, standing there, his chest brown and bare and glorious, his expression like iron.

      ‘You still think I invited you here presuming you were a whore, that I hired you for a whore’s work.’ He shook his head, the movement sharp and contemptuous. ‘This is old ground, Meghan. And I’m getting bored with it.’

      ‘As you’re bored with me?’

      His voice was level, almost a drawl. ‘Just about.’

      Meghan swallowed painfully. He had the ability to hurt her so easily. ‘But you judged me,’ she whispered.

      ‘Yes, I did. But you’re the one judging me now.’ There was a moment of taut silence, then Alessandro’s hand slashed through the air. ‘I won’t have it, Meghan. I won’t be judged—condemned on old evidence. I’ve had enough of that!’ His voice was savage, yet as he turned away his head was bowed, as though under a burden too great to bear. ‘I won’t have you throwing one thing I said into my face time and time again,’ he continued in a low voice. ‘I can’t have it. Nothing I ever say or do will prove what I am. You damn me on one piece of flimsy evidence. I will not be damned. Not by you.’ His voice shook slightly. ‘Not by you.’

      Meghan stared, stunned by the force of his emotion. Her mind spun.

      He turned back to her, his voice now cool. Cold. ‘You must take responsibility for your own actions. Stop blaming me, or that other man, for your own desires. You may have been a victim before, but you are not one now. And I won’t let you act like one.’ He shook his head, his expression suddenly weary. ‘There are too many shadows, Meghan. Perhaps for both of us. I’ll drive you back to Spoleto, or wherever you want to go, tonight. It is better that way. It has to be.’ With that, he gazed at her one last time, smiling sadly, then turned on his heel and left.

      CHAPTER SIX

      MEGHAN sat back on the bed, her mind still numb, yet whirling. Spinning horribly with implications she had pushed away, refused to consider.

       You may have been a victim before, but you are not one now.

      She lay back against the rumpled sheets and mussed pillows, an ache of regret throbbing through her, threatening to rise up into an overwhelming howl of misery.

      She’d wanted control. She’d entered Alessandro’s villa—his life—so she could prove something to herself. To him.

      She’d wanted to prove that she was in control, that she wasn’t a victim. She’d been determined to show how she could be in control of her own life, her own body.

      She’d failed spectacularly.

      She was such a fool.

      She took a deep, shuddering breath. If she wanted control this was the time to take it with both hands, and show Alessandro she understood.

      Meghan pushed the tangled mass

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