Page 25 of Forbidden Until Midnight

He barely saw any of the grandeur of the old banquet hall as he entered the hallway, from which various private rooms led. And while there were nearly two hundred people in attendance that evening, he was painfully aware that only one tailed him down that corridor. Barely restraining a growl, he shoved open a door and shut it behind him, hoping that Eleanor Carson wasn’t so stupid as to follow him in here.

Eleanor wanted to know why he was ignoring her. Needed it like a feral thing in her blood.

All evening she’d hoped to snare his attention but had failed, again and again. At first, she’d simply wanted to thank him for last year. Again. Over the year, she’d come to think of him as her knight in matt black armour. Santo certainly had none of the shine and pomp of fairy tale heroes. But what use did she have for them? No, she needed the brutal honesty he offered.

But when she’d realised that he was ignoring her on purpose she’d been devastated...until that had turned to anger. She had been shocked by the fury that had whipped through her like wildfire. She’d almost had to physically hold herself back from going up to him and demanding why.

She knew it was dangerous to speak to him, it would draw her fa—Edward’sire. More of it, anyway. She clenched her jaw, hoping that the tension would hold her still enough to stop her from looking his way. She knew they were by the bar set up along the back wall of the hall, speaking to the Müllers.

Her mother would be standing beside him, Eleanor imagined, wondering if anyone would notice the paleness of her skin beneath the make-up, or the brittle way she held herself. Fragile, breakable, fractured—most definitely—but not yet broken, Eleanor thought of her mother.

But the lies that lay between the three of them were like splinters stuck under the skin, festering, infected, untreated.

She’d thought that the worst thing had happened to her when she’d discovered that Edward wasn’t her father. But when she’d finally emerged from her room after the drunken disaster of last New Year’s Eve she’d found out the true extent of her situation.

Her grades at university had slipped under the strain of her personal life and Edward had decided that funding any future studies was a waste of his finances, so he had cancelled them. He had put a block on her cards and her account and finally she had realised how much of her life was under his control. Any attempt to circumvent his authority was met with the reminder that he would take Freddie and leave. Her mother’s desperate urging for her to do as he said only damaged what was left of her soul that bit more.

And standing in the grand banquet hall overlooking the cobbled streets of this beautiful, ancient European city, she’d just wanted someone who wouldn’t make her feel like a stranger in her own body. She’d wanted Santo. But he had cut her dead. It was the final straw and she barely cared whether Edward saw or not, as she followed him out of the hall and into the corridor.

With all the hurts and denigrations and misery she’d had to suffer this last year riding her hard, at that point it wouldn’t have even mattered if he’d gone straight to the men’s toilets, she would have followed him. A red haze had descended and even if distantly she could see that she was skirting the edge of hysteria...it didn’t matter. It was too late.

She turned the handle on the door she’d seen Santo disappear behind and pushed.

Barely half a step across the threshold and a hand snatched around her wrist and she was dragged into the room, the door slammed behind her, and she found herself pushed up against it, staring into the furious depths of Santo Sabatini’s unfathomable gaze.

‘Who do you think you are playing with?’ he demanded.

‘Wh-wh-what?’ she asked, everything in her—all the anger, the edge of hysteria, the determination—retreating under the sheer force ofhim. He crowded her, the press of his body oddly delicious to her near delirious state, his piercing aquamarine gaze flashing shards of ice that burned where they fell as he took in her every response.

Life. Her body had come to life for the first time that entire year.

She was touch-starved, and her body responded to his as if it were food. She wanted to gorge on him. Worse. She wanted him to gorge onher. To feast on her. To take everything that remained of her and leave nothing behind.

‘Little girl, do not mess with me,’ he warned, his voice a growl that sent shivers down her body to parts of her she’d been utterly unaware of until that moment. It called to her in a deep, primal way—the challenge, the dare, the taunt from him.

She had been dismissed, rejected, cast aside by almost everyone. Even him, and she was so damn tired of it.

‘Then stop messing withme,’ she stressed, pushing herself away from the door and walking him back further into the room. ‘Why are you ignoring me?’ she demanded.

‘Why are you looking for me?’ he retaliated, his question, his tone throwing her off-course.

She clenched her teeth together. ‘I was looking for you because I thought you were different,’ she accused.

‘Don’t you dare compare me to them,’ he threw back at her almost before the words had left her lips. The slash of his hand through the air punctuated his response, his fury feeding her own.

‘Why not? You’re here every year, just like them. Your business is financed through investments in their companies and they invest in yours. You keep yourself pleasured with their wives,’ she lashed out, her eyes narrow and the seething anger that she wasn’t able to unleashanywhereelse, here suddenly free to roam. It rose within her like a fire-breathing monster, consuming everything in its path.

‘Jealousy? It doesn’t suit you,cara,’ he all but snarled at her.

‘I’m not jealous of a widow nearly twice my age,’ she lied. Because she was. Because Santo had looked at Marie-Laure in a way that he’d never looked at her. And she wanted that. She wanted something, anything other than the near violent fury that threatened to tear her sanity from her.

He frowned, just for a moment, as if he’d read her thoughts. As if she’d let them slip from the locked box she kept them in all year round.

‘You should go before someone finds you in here,’ he said, turning his back on her and once again dismissing her from his company.

Go here. Stay there. Don’t do that. Do this.

He was just like Edward. Ordering her around as if what she wanted, what she felt, had absolutely no importance to them.

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