Page 233 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

‘For God’s sake, Victoria, are youblind?’ Slamming a hand on the floor beside her thigh, he leaned his taut face down to hers. ‘How can you not see it?’

Trembling, trapped in Marcello’s stare, she had no choice but to stare even deeper into the darkness that she suddenly saw with a kick in her heart wasn’t darkness at all, but a swirling vortex pulsing a mirror of what she was feeling.

The world moved around her. Sensation throbbed in her chest, like he’d squeezed her heart with his bare hand.

As if she were a magnet irresistibly drawn to his hypnotic pull, her face moved closer to his. She could hardly raise her voice above a whisper. ‘Then why...?’

The pained look she’d seen earlier flashed over his rugged features. The look she’d interpreted as a mixture of disgust and pity... ‘Why do you think?’

But the world was moving too fast around her to think with any coherence. The realisation that her feelings were shared was hitting her in an ever increasing crescendo of waves. Now that she could see it, it was all she could see, right there in the depths of the blue eyes glittering with his desire for her.

He tilted his head. Now he was the one to bring his face closer.

His voice dropped. ‘I do not want to hurt you, Victoria, and I do not want to lose you. I want you by my side for the rest of my professional life. To act on our feelings...’ He inhaled deeply through his nose. His exhale landed like a whisper against her mouth. ‘I have done marriage. You know that, don’t you?’

It was a statement rather than a question.

Her chest hitching, she nodded.

The intensity of his stare deepened. ‘I will never marry again. I will never live with anyone again. I have committed to being a bachelor for the rest of my life and I date from a pool of shallow vipers precisely for that reason. I can end it with one message and move on without a second of guilt or regret. You deserve so much more than to be treated like that, and your friendship and value as my right-hand woman are worth more to me than any short-lived fling.’

It wasn’t just the hoarse delivery of his words compelling her to listen but the demons glimmering in his pulsing eyes. The demons she’d always sensed lived beneath his affable exterior. Marcello’s demons, showing themselves to warn her away.

‘You’ve given it a lot of thought,’ she said, shaken at the depth of emotion she was seeing.

‘I have thought of nothing else since my eyes opened to just how beautiful you are.’

Victoria’s shoulders slumped. Her eyes closed. She tried to breathe through the smashing of her heart and the ripples of its beats.

The only people who’d called her beautiful before were drunken, lecherous men. To hear it from Marcello filled her with such anache...

Oh, this wasmadness! It felt like only five minutes ago that all the reasons he’d just laid out to her had already been firmly lodged in her mind. She hadn’t needed telling. She’d known only fools let themselves fall for Marcello Guardiola.

And now she was that fool. She’d woken from the worst illness of her life and gazed at him sprawled out on the sofa he’d been keeping watch over her from, and felt something fundamental shift inside her.

But he was right. However deep the longing to press her hand against his stubbly cheek and breathe in the scent of his skin and the undertones of his cologne deep into her lungs, and however deep the burning yearning to fuse herself to him, to act on her feelings would be to press self-destruct on her whole life.

Pride filling her with resolve, she lifted her gaze back to him. ‘I think you’re forgetting something.’

His shoulders rose. ‘What is that?’

‘I don’t work for you any more.’

For the first time since the glass shattered, the tautness of his features relaxed and, though his eyes didn’t lose an ounce of their intensity, the lines around them crinkled. ‘Yes, you do. And I will pay any price to keep you.’

And if that meant keeping his desire contained then that was how it had to be. Marcello would not hurt Victoria for anything. He would not lose her for anything.

Victoria sat on the sill staring out of a bedroom window. The wind had picked up again. If she strained her ears she could imagine its howl. The sun had set. Another night under the same roof as Marcello was closing in.

A light tap on the door made her heart thump. She tightened the sash of his robe, taken earlier from the back of the bathroom door, and took a deep breath to compose herself before turning to face him.

He stood at the threshold, arms loosely crossed around his chest. It was the same stance he’d adopted when he’d checked in on her a few hours earlier. As with earlier, he made no comment about her wearing his robe. But he’d noticed. She knew he had. It had been in the flare of his eyes before he’d turned his stare away.

This time he kept his gaze on her. ‘I am going to work on my cooking skills. Is there anything you want for dinner?’

‘Anything that’s readymade works for me,’ she managed to jest. Lunch had gone in the bin. Once the broken glass had been cleared, she’d tried the pasta he’d made for her. It had been inedible and not just because it was cold. Her stomach had been too tense and knotted to accept his offer of something else. He hadn’t forced the issue. He’d retreated to his office and given them the space they both needed.

He might as well have brought his computer into the bedroom.

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