Page 34 of The Scandal Behind The Italian’s Wedding

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHEDIDN’TKNOWwhat was happening to her. She felt warm and flushed all over and she couldn’t seem to do anything but stare at his chest.

She was trying to remember if she had ever seen Dante without a shirt before. She must have. At least when she was younger, and they went to the beach.

She was around shirtless men all the time. She lived in California. They had beachfront property.

She didn’t know why this felt different, why it made her insides shiver, and why she felt overheated.

It had been strange to watch him hold Isabella, the way his powerful hands gripped her delicate body.

It made her so unbearably conscious of his strength, and the control that he utilized in unleashing it. And now he was offering her cake.

And the image he made, shirtless and extending that decadent treat to her, his muscles shifting and bunching...

He had hair on his body. Not enough to conceal his muscles, but just enough to make her unbearably aware of his testosterone.

And that prickling in her skin was back. That racing in her heart, that unbearable, unsettling feeling that made her feel as if she had to do something. Anything. To get his attention. To get him to notice her.

And with a sudden horror, she realized what that feeling was.

And it was a feeling she had for a very long time. For Dante.

No. No. No. She wouldn’t acknowledge it. She couldn’t. She could not... Would not...

She had never.

And suddenly, she realized the little lie that she had told her father, her mother, her sister, might not have been such a lie after all.

Had she had feelings for Dante all this time?

That something in her simply refused to make them into the shape of what they truly were?

It was as if in that glorious chest of his she could see clearly. The most absurd thought she ever had in her life, but it was true.

Years of following after him, trying to climb trees in his sphere so that he might say something about her daring, talking and talking and talking at him even though he was so patently disinterested.

But she had never allowed herself to call it what it was, because he was far too old, far too beautiful, and if he was going to choose a woman from her family...

It would have been Violet.

It never would have been her.

Ever.

But maybe that was the real reason why the kiss in the club in Rome had felt so disappointing.

Because the man wasn’t Dante.

And maybe that was why she had shut down completely the two times Dante had kissed her.

Because it wasn’t real.

Because it was all a farce that she had set up, and if she really did feel this way, if the burning intensity of that bright something in her chest really did mean that she... That she had a crush on him, then perhaps using his name, using him as a solution, the fact that he was the father of Isabella, as a solution to her problem was...

The very idea made her squirm. Surely her subconscious hadn’t done that.

But then, her subconscious was apparently a straight-up hussy for Dante, and she had kept her actual conscious from acknowledging that somehow.

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