A Scandal, a Secret, a Baby

She managed to slip from the room without comment, but had got no further than the pillared entrance hall when her search to locate her cell phone was halted by the deep caress of a familiar accent.

‘Going somewhere?’

She turned to find Dante effectively blocking her path, and she hated the shiver which whispered its way down over her spine. Hated even more the way she seemed mesmerised by the sardonic curve of his lips. ‘Trying to,’ she said pointedly. ‘If you’d be so good as to get out of my way?’

‘But there’s dancing.’

‘I know there is. But I’ve had enough.’ Of you. She didn’t say the words out loud; she didn’t need to.

He frowned. ‘So you’re travelling back to London?’

‘Not tonight, no. I’ve booked into a hotel in Burnham Market.’ She gave a little sigh as she met his raised eyebrows. ‘It’s a town not far from here.’

He nodded as he delved into the pocket of his suit trousers for his car keys. ‘I’ll drive you there.’

‘Thanks, but I’d prefer to get a cab.’

‘Don’t be melodramatic, Justina. A cab will take ages and my car is parked by the stables.’

In the cool shadows she could see the bright gleam of his eyes.

‘What are you so afraid of?’

She wondered how he would react if she told him the truth. She was afraid of wanting him. Of wanting him to kiss her, despite knowing that it was wrong. Because what did it say about her that she should still desire him after everything that had happened?

‘I’d hate to drag you away from the party.’

‘I’m happy to be dragged. As it happens, I’d intended driving back to London tonight anyway—I have a flight to the States tomorrow.’

Put like that, it made her continued resistance sound unreasonable—or maybe she just didn’t have the strength to oppose him any more.

Justina accompanied him outside as he handed his keys to a valet. While they were waiting for his car to be brought round he turned to her.

‘Whatever happened to Lexi?’ he asked suddenly.

Justina met his curious gaze. It was a long time since anyone had mentioned Alexi Gibson, the third member of the Lollipops—or ‘Sexy Lexi’ as the press used to dub her.

‘You know she went solo?’ she questioned. ‘That it was her desire to go it alone which led to the break-up of the band?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Up until the day he’d received the wedding invitation he’d deliberately excised all references to the Lollipops from his life, as carefully as a surgeon might remove an area of diseased tissue. ‘Is she here?’

‘Nope. Nobody ever sees her since she married one of Hollywood’s biggest players.’ Briefly, Justina found herself wondering if Lexi was happy—and for the first time in a long time, she turned the question on herself. Am I happy? she wondered. The answer hit her with a jolt. She wasn’t. Successful and fairly contented, yes—and certainly fulfilled in her choice of career. But happy? No way. Not compared to the happiness she’d known in the past, with Dante.

The valet had arrived with Dante’s sports car—a low and gleaming machine which made wriggling into the passenger seat something of a challenge, despite the accommodating side-split in her cheongsam dress.

‘Name of hotel?’ he questioned steadily, as if the sight of her bare thigh hadn’t just sent his blood pressure shooting through the ceiling.

‘The Smithsonian.’

She watched as he keyed the details into his sat-nav and then sat back as the powerful car pulled away from the big house with a small spurt of gravel. The silence which descended hung heavily on the air—with what they weren’t talking about filling the space around them and making the atmosphere feel claustrophobic. The elephant in the room was alive and well, thought Justina wryly, and currently crammed into a powerful car in Norfolk.

They drew up outside the lighted hotel which stood in a pretty Georgian Square and her fingers were unsteady as she tried to unclip her seat belt. Despite her relief that the awkward journey was over, she felt strangely reluctant to get out and just walk away. It was funny, but the older you got, the more you realised the significance of goodbyes. At twenty-five she hadn’t really thought about whether or not she’d see Dante again because at that age she hadn’t been thinking beyond her heartbreak. This time she was aware that their paths were unlikely to cross again, that this was probably the last time she would ever see him—and she was unprepared for the sudden twist of pain in her heart.

‘Justina?’

The soft dip in his voice was distracting, and so was the false intimacy created by the limited space inside the vehicle. In the dim light she could see the gleam of his eyes and she became aware of just how close he was. ‘What?’

There was a pause. ‘You know that I still want you.’

She thought how blatant he was. How only Dante D’Arezzo would have the nerve to come out and say something like that. ‘Well, tough. The feeling isn’t mutual.’

‘Oh, come on. You’ve been undressing me with your eyes since you walked down the aisle and saw me at the cathedral.’

‘I think you must be mistaken. I’m not interested in a man who spreads his favours so thinly.’

There was a heartbeat of a pause, and when he spoke his voice was harsh. ‘You know damned well that it was over when I went with her! How many times do I have to tell you that?’

Justina looked down at her lap. Yes, it had been over between them—certainly as far as he’d been concerned. Her determination to go on tour with the Lollipops had led to Dante abruptly ending their engagement. But she had missed him. She had missed him more than she’d thought it possible to miss anyone. The reality of life without him had hit her hard, and his absence had felt like falling down a bottomless black hole. So she had flown back to England unexpectedly, planning to go to his hotel and ask him if they could try again, to give it one more go—because deep down she’d thought that they loved one another enough to overcome their fundamental differences. But she had been cruelly mistaken.

Her last memory of Dante was bursting into his hotel suite and seeing him in bed. But he hadn’t been alone. His eyes had been closed and something had been moving at his groin beneath the sheet. Justina’s horrified gasp had made the movement stop and a head had emerged. It had been a tousled blond head, and somehow that had only driven the knife in deeper. As if he was piling on cliché after cliché. Not just taking another lover—taking a blonde lover.

Justina had managed to turn on her heel and make it all the way to the lift. She’d even managed to hold it together enough to hail a taxi outside the hotel. But her heart had felt as if he’d stamped on it with a metal-studded boot.

She had cut all communication with him from that moment and done everything she could to try to forget him. No one could have been more assiduous than Justina in cutting all references to Dante from her life. She had destroyed every photo of him and had sold all the jewellery he had showered on her and then donated the proceeds to charity.

She was aware that his dark eyes were still fixed on her questioningly, and she vowed that he would never know the true depths of her heartbreak. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to move on with quite such insulting speed!’

‘You think I should have waited?’ he questioned heatedly. ‘When already you had kept me waiting for so long? Waiting while you did your world tour. Waiting while you did more of your television interviews and your damned newspaper spreads. You knew the kind of man I was, Justina. I was young and I was hungry and I expected the woman I loved to be by my side, supporting me. I had certain appetites which needed to be fed—and I could not tolerate the life you were forcing me to lead. Our very separate lives.’

‘It’s done,’ she said flatly, her heart contracting painfully as she heard him say it. The woman I loved. Past tense. The love was gone—for both of them. ‘It’s in the past, Dante—and it was best for everyone in the long run. It certainly made for a clean break.’

His eyes searched her face and in that moment he felt a pang of regret washing over him. Guilt, too. And he was unprepared for the way it made his heart clench, as if someone was squeezing it with icy fingers. ‘You know, you were never meant to find me with her,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you.’

Justina nodded. Once she would have given anything to have him acknowledge the pain he’d caused. But now it sounded like a patronising afterthought. Almost as if he suspected that she’d never really been able to move on from him without this final sense of closure.

And yet was that so far from the truth? Despite all her best intentions she’d never really got over him, had she? Part of her was still stuck inside her old self, still remembering the lover he’d been—against whom all subsequent men had been measured only to fail.

Maybe she had continued to idealise him. Maybe his undeniable qualities as a lover had made her place him on an impossibly high pedestal which had subsequently distorted her views on men. Was that what had caused her to erect these high barriers around herself, which nobody else had ever been able to scale?

Pride helped her form careless words, and a career on the stage meant that she was able to utter them with a degree of conviction. ‘The hurt I felt was just a part of growing up,’ she said. ‘You were simply a necessary part of my sexual education, Dante.’

For a moment there was a stunned silence, and when he spoke his voice was underpinned with a dark note of anger. ‘I must say that I’ve heard myself described in many ways—but never quite like that before.’ The tip of his tongue slowly traced the outline of his upper lip. ‘And did I provide you with good grades during this sexual education I gave you?’

Justina’s heart skipped a beat as her body began to ache with half-forgotten hunger. She told herself she ought to get out of the car while she still had a chance, but it was as if someone had turned her limbs to stone. ‘I don’t...I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t? That’s such a pity. Then maybe I ought to refresh your memory for you.’

She met the challenge in his shadowed eyes and saw the way his lips had parted. Did she murmur something—or indicate with her expression that she wasn’t averse to the idea? Was that what made him move closer?

And suddenly they were kissing. Kissing as she’d forgotten how to. His hands were at her waist and she was reaching for his shoulders. In no time at all he was running his fingers over her satin-covered breasts and she was moaning like a woman in pain.

He snapped his seat belt free, swiftly followed by hers, but the space inside the car was cramped and already the windows were starting to get steamed up. It was hard to move, because there was nowhere to move, and her cheongsam made it even harder. The realisation that they were sitting right outside her hotel didn’t even enter the equation until she heard Dante mutter something urgent in Italian. He dragged his mouth away from hers and she could see the look of frustration burning in his eyes.

‘Not here,’ he bit out, shaking his dark head. ‘Not like this. Take me inside, Justina.’ He bent his head to drift his lips over hers. ‘Take me into your body before I explode.’

CHAPTER THREE

HER HOTEL ROOM was pristinely tidy. It was one of the things which Dante remembered as being uniquely Justina. While the rest of the band had existed in a rubble of half-eaten room service food and discarded wine bottles she had lived in her own neat little bubble, sitting writing her songs in the middle of all the chaos. He remembered her telling him that it was her particular antidote to a messy and erratic upbringing.

But his thoughts about her orderliness lasted for about as long as it took for the door to close behind them, for him to take her into his arms again and for his mouth to crush down on hers in another hungry kiss. He could feel the restless movement of her body as she writhed against him, but he got the sense that her mind was screaming out all kinds of objections.

Very deliberately, he grazed his mouth over hers with a slow and erotic brush. ‘I want you,’ he said, his words coming out unsteadily. ‘I have never wanted a woman as much as I want you in this moment.’

Justina closed her eyes as his lips moved to her neck, her fingers tangling themselves luxuriously in the thick darkness of his hair. ‘Dante...’ she whispered, knowing that the rest of the sentence went something like, You know we shouldn’t be doing this. But the words remained unspoken—and how could they be spoken when he had started touching her breasts like that?

‘What the hell kind of dress is this?’ he questioned as he felt around for a zip.

‘It’s called a...a cheongsam. I...I bought it in Singapore and I—’

‘I’m not interested in its history!’ Roughly, he cut through her stumbling explanation. ‘The only thing I’m interested in is how to get the damned thing off.’

‘There are buttons down the side,’ she gasped.

‘Sono mille!’ His fingers were trembling as he began to fumble them open. ‘How many?’

She felt cool air rushing onto her skin and told herself to call a halt to this madness. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Her body was too hungry, her desire too strong to be able to resist what he was doing to her. Hadn’t she spent the past five years wondering if she’d ever feel like this again? Wondering if her body would ever feel this incomparable rush of desire? And suddenly Justina knew that she didn’t want to be passive. That if this was to be their swansong then they would come together as the equals they’d never really been. She was no longer the virgin lover he had needed to teach. She had graduated with honours, and maybe it was time to remember just how much she’d loved having sex with this man.

She kicked off her high heels and sent them flying across the room before beginning to tug at his tie.

‘Impatient?’ he queried, thinking that in the past she would have slid the shoes tidily from her feet.

‘Aren’t you?’ she whispered back as she turned her attention to his shirt. She slid open the buttons and greedily peeled it away to reveal the honed torso beneath, bending her head to graze her teeth against his skin, her tongue licking luxuriously against its silken surface.

‘Dio.’ He shuddered, and tore at another button of her dress. He pulled the garment away from her with hands which were shaking, and if such a reaction was unheard of for someone of his experience he didn’t care. He unclipped her bra in one deft movement. Her panties he disposed of by ripping apart the delicate lace with his fingers, and he heard her little gasp of pleasure as they brushed over her honeyed heat.

‘You always liked me to play a little rough, didn’t you, tesoro?’ he demanded as he tugged off the last of his own clothing—and was taken off guard by her fervent passion as she pushed him down onto the bed.

She moved over him, her face filled with an expression he could never remember seeing before as she straddled him. Her eyes were slitted so he couldn’t read them, and she was biting her lips as if she was trying to stop them from trembling.

‘Do it,’ he commanded.

But Justina shook her head. Tonight she was going to call the shots. This was going to be her therapy, the recovery she needed. She would feast on his body until she’d had her fill. She would let the harsh light of reality shine down on this demi-god of her imagination and by morning she would see him for the mortal he really was. This was sex, she told herself fiercely—and she wasn’t going to make the mistake of confusing it with love.

‘I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.’

Dante moaned as she circled her hips to brush her feminine core over his steely erection so that he could almost feel her—but not quite. She was close enough for him to be able to plunge inside her, and yet she kept her moist treasure almost tantalisingly out of reach. His head fell back against the pillow and for a moment he felt almost helpless. This was not how he liked it to happen—at least not with Justina. He liked to be in control, to play the dominant role, and yet she was writhing around on top of him like some teasing whore. And, God help him, he liked it.

‘Per favore,’ he groaned. ‘Please.’

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