A Hunger for the Forbidden - By Maisey Yates Page 0,27
do everything she could to hold on to her last little bit of it.
“Well, what is your charity for, then?”
“This is an education fund. For the schools here.”
“That’s … great,” she said. “I didn’t get to do any higher education.”
“Did you want to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean … I didn’t really have anything I wanted to be when I grew up.”
“Nothing?”
“There weren’t a lot of options on the table. Though I did always think I would like to be a mother.” A wife and a mother. That she would like to have someone who loved her, cherished her like the men in her much-loved books cherished their heroines. It was a small dream, one that should have been somewhat manageable.
Instead, she’d gone off and traded it in for a night of wild sex.
And darn it, she still didn’t regret it. Mainly. “Mission accomplished.”
“Why, yes, Matteo, I am, as they say, living the dream.”
“There’s no need to be—”
“There is every need to be,” she said. “Don’t act like I should thank you for any of this.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said, his tone biting.
“You were headed there. This is not my dream.” But it was close. So close that it hurt worse in some ways than not getting anywhere near it at all. Because this was proving that her dream didn’t exist. That it wasn’t possible.
“My apologies, cara, for not being your dream.” His voice was rough, angry, and she wanted to know where he got off being mad after the way he’d been treating her.
“And my apologies for not being yours. I imagine if I had a room number stapled to my forehead and a bag of money in my hand I’d come a little closer.”
“Now you’re being absurd.”
“I don’t think so.”
Matteo maneuvered his car through the narrow city streets, not bothering with nice things like braking before turning, and pulled up to the front of his hotel.
“It’s at your hotel,” she said.
“Naturally.” He threw the car into Park, then got out, rounding to the passenger side and opening the door for her. “Come, my darling wife, we have a public to impress.”
He extended his hand to her and she slowly reached her hand out to accept it. Lighting streaked through her, from her fingertips, spreading to every other part of her, the shock and electricity curling her toes in her pumps.
She stood, her eyes level with his thanks to her shoes. “Thank you.”
A member of the hotel staff came to where they were and had a brief exchange with Matteo before getting into the car and driving it off to the parking lot. Alessia wandered to the steps of the hotel, taking two of them before pausing to wait for her husband.
Matteo turned back to her, his dark eyes glittering in the streetlamps. He moved to the stairs, and she advanced up one more, just to keep her height advantage. But Matteo wasn’t having it. He got onto her stair, meeting her eyes straight on.
“There are rules tonight, Alessia, and you will play by them.”
“Will I?” she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was goading him. Maybe because it was the only way in all the world she could feel like she had some power. Or maybe it was because if she wasn’t trying to goad him, she was longing for him. And the longing was just unacceptable.
A smile curved his lips and she couldn’t help but wonder if he needed this, too. This edge of hostility, the bite of anger between them.
Although why Matteo would need anything to hold her at a distance when he’d already made his feelings quite clear was a mystery to her.
“Yes, my darling wife, you will.” He put his hand on her chin, drawing close to her, his heat making her shiver deep inside. It brought her right back to that night.
To the aching, heart-rending desperation she’d felt when his lips had finally touched hers. To the moment they’d closed his hotel room door and he’d pressed her against the wall, devouring, taking, giving.
He drew his thumb across her lower lip and she snapped back to the present. “You must stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re frightened of me.” There was an underlying note to his voice that she couldn’t guess at, a frayed edge to his control that made his words gritty.
“I’m not.”
“You look at me like I’m the very devil sometimes.”
“You act like the very devil sometimes.”
“True enough. But there are other times