Page 26 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

Be brave.

“Why would I be in danger from you?”

She set her plate down. She removed the barrier.

“Lyssia...”

“Why?”

He looked pained then, as if he was on the verge of something he actually feared. And then he spoke.

“Because you are as stubborn as you are beautiful. Because you are my mentor’s daughter, and far too young for me to have the thoughts that I have toward you.”

Her heart jumped. Hit square against her breastbone.

“You don’t like me,” she whispered.

His gaze was impenetrable obsidian.

“Like and dislike have little to do with chemistry, or have you not noticed that chemistry is what we have?”

“We fight all the time.”

“Why do you think that is?”

He didn’t call herchild, but she felt it was implied.

But it was also not as infuriating as it might’ve been. She expected it to be. It was fascinating. Like the rest of him. Like this moment. Like the fantasy that she had, unbidden, of the two of them in the tub. It had felt intrusive at the time, but now it felt... Intoxicating. It felt like it had potential. To be something. To be something that she wanted.

“I don’t know. I...”

“Because you have trafficked in boys. And I am a man. As I told you, if Carter truly wanted you, then he would have spoken to you from the beginning. He would never have allowed me to take his place. He would’ve made alternative arrangements. You were not in the forefront of his mind. And in my opinion, when a man does not make you the beginning and end of everything, he does not deserve to have you. Why should he have access to your body? Why? If he does not make having you, cherishing you, the focus of the moment, then why give him all of you?”

“It’s just that that’s a very outdated—”

“Is it? Do women not surrender more during sex? Risk more?”

“I guess we do,” she said. That she was unwilling to tell him that she actually didn’t know firsthand.

He already thought her to be so much younger, so much less experienced, she didn’t want to compound matters by letting him know just how much that was true.

“You can’t possibly be saying that you’re attracted to me,” she said.

“Perhaps that is the problem. I am trying to say it. Perhaps it would be better if I showed you.”

CHAPTER FIVE

DARIOKNEWTHAThe had made a very bad deal with the devil just now. Sold a piece of his soul, and he didn’t have all that many left. What he had said to Lyssia was true. He was a man who had done a very good job of making connections and then using those connections to his advantage whenever possible.

He was a man who had endured some very dark things. And he had very few connections in this world that were not about business. Her father was one of them. She was the other.

For that reason alone she had always been sacred to him. The connection had been sacred. They were fire and flame, and honesty—except in this. And now he had done it. He’d forced this truth into the open between them. And here they were, in the snow, the power out. And somehow, he had taken that connection and twisted inside of himself. He was telling himself now that she needed to know. That she needed to know what it was like to be with a man.

A man who wanted her.

A man who would not give her insipid sex and a wishy-washy petering out, or worse still, a ghosting. Dario was definitive.

No, he could not give her a relationship, but he would give her honesty. He would give her good sex, and worship her the way she should be.

---