“As things are right now, yes, I would care.”
So he was feeling as thrown by what they’d just shared as she was. It shouldn’t matter. She shouldn’t care.
“I want to push you off me,” she confessed even as she scratched her nails through his hair.
“And I want you to push me off you,” he said even as he brought his mouth down for another kiss.
Another sharp swell of emotion filled her chest. “When I push you off, we go back to hating each other, don’t we?”
He closed his eyes and nodded. Looking back at her, he smoothed his fingers over her forehead. “While we have these last moments of not hating each other, assure me that I didn’t hurt you.”
She palmed his thickly stubbled cheek. “You didn’t hurt me.”
He turned his cheek to kiss her palm. “Good. I would never have treated you like I did last night if I’d known you were a virgin.”
“Why should it have made any difference?”
“I hate the air you breathe, but I never want to hurt you.”
“You just want to degrade me.”
“Wanted,” he corrected. With a deep sigh, he touched his forehead to hers and quietly said, “You need to understand, my feelings for you have always been complicated. Who you are, what you represent, everything about you. You’re a sexy, sexy woman, Siena, and the times we found ourselves in the same club or bar, and you met my eye, I would see the same awareness I felt for you, but then you would turn your nose up and move your stare away as if I were scum.”
Only the intimacy of the moment they were sharing allowed her to admit, “You unnerved me. Your stare was always so intense.”
His intense stare gleamed. “I unnerved the sexy, glamorous, self-assured Siena Esposito?”
She slid her hand down his neck with a sigh. His skin was so beautifully smooth. “Wasn’t that your intention?”
“Yes.”
“Then why assume I was turning my nose up at you?”
“Because you were.”
“Yes, but not because you’re a Ranieri.” Elio had frightened her before she’d learned who he was. But he’d fascinated her too. Those damned vampiric eyes had drawn her like a magnet to him.
It felt like she’d spent her entire adulthood walking into bars and clubs with her gaze darting everywhere, seeking him out. It had got to the stage where she would find herself more on edge ifhe wasn’t there than if he was, almost as if she were disappointed at his absence…
“Because you turn your nose up at any man who shows his interest in you?”
Siena swallowed, disturbed at the train of her thoughts. Disappointed not to have seen him? She really needed to push him off before her mind played any more tricks on her, not keep gazing into his mesmerising vampiric eyes. “Not many men are as bold as you were in the way they show it.”
“Not towards you,” he conceded. “But you are not a normal woman. You’re Siena Esposito, Lorenzo Esposito’s daughter, and you have a fierce reputation of your own, which is why it never crossed my mind that someone could have hurt you enough to put you off men and relationships. Who was it?”
He asked the question so gently and casually that he caught her off guard. By the time she’d untied her tongue enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her denial sounded so feeble, even to herself, that it acted as a jolt of much-needed sanity.
She was sharing the most intimate conversation of her life with Elio Ranieri. She was revelling in sensations and allowing hidden emotions air to breathe, and all for the man she despised, who’d married her for vengeance. But, even though she knew it was vital, it was all she could do to blink any emotion away, put her hands on his shoulders and push. “You can get off me now.”
Eyes narrowing, he gazed at her a moment longer before rolling onto his back.
She immediately turned over and drew the bedsheets up to her chin. Without his body heat, her skin felt chilled.
“Was it Stefano? Did he hurt you?” The gentleness of tone had gone, but not the casualness.
Incapable of comprehending how someone who hated her so much could be so damned intuitive, frightened at how muchshe wished he was still covering her with his body, Siena drew her knees to her stomach. “I told you before, I might be your possession, but my thoughts are my own. Whatever happened between me and Stefano is none of your business.”
That was better. Beautiful sex did not change a damned thing between. Nothing could change the fact that they were enemies.