Maximos inhaled hard, lips pinching, nostrils flaring, his beautiful features alive with anger. “I don’t have time to do this—”
“You don’t have to do anything. Just ignore me. It’s what you usually do, right?”
“Cassandra.”
“Yes, Max?” She’d intentionally shortened his name, turning it into slang and she knew how he hated the abbreviated version. He wasn’t a Max. He was Maximos. He was a ruler, a conqueror, a king.
His hand wrapped around her upper arm, fingers pinching. Her arm flooded with hot, painful sensation.
“This is my family,” he said, his deep rough voice falling lower. “This is a private party, a private family function, and I won’t have you upsetting my family the night before my sister’s wedding.”
“You’re close to your family then? I had no idea. But then, we never really got to know each other that well, did we?”
“We had two years together.”
“Really? That long?” She made a clucking sound of surprise. “Who would have thought?” she added, even as she laughed inwardly, bitterly. She knew exactly how long they’d been together, could remember the first night so clearly, as well as the next thousand and ninety five nights between then and now.
“So we did know each other.”
“Obviously not that well,” she contradicted, amazed at how steady her voice was. She’d always had a husky voice for a woman but it was even deeper, stronger than usual. Six months of crying had bruised her vocal cords, torn up her heart completely but at least she could look Maximos in the eye and not tear up. The tears were gone. He’d had something good and he hadn’t cared. He’d wanted sex. He could have had all of her.
But the sorrow was in the past. The heartbreak, the indecision behind her. She’d been on a toggle board for months, struggling to get her balance, struggling to get her footing when everything just kept changing, rolling, shifting beneath her and then she finally got the picture. She didn’t have to keep fighting for balance, didn’t have to keep standing there struggling to hang tight.
She could just get off.
She could just get the hell off and stand on level ground again.
No more madness, no more insanity. No more love. She was leaving it behind for a new start, a new life, a life where she wouldn’t lean on anyone else.
Or ask for help.
Or think she couldn’t do it for herself.
She forced a mocking smile now, even as she smashed the pain down inside of her. She wouldn’t be hurt by him anymore. She’d never again allow him that kind of power over her, never let him close.
“I knew who you were,” she continued, “and what you did, but I never met your friends, or your family. I was never included in your real world, and it was the real world I wanted, not just the bedroom.”
“And Emilio gives you the real world?”
“Oh, that and much much more.”
His jaw thickened and he made a hoarse sound of disgust. “When did you start seeing him?”
Her brow creased as she pretended to try to remember. “February? March?”
His expression grew blacker. “We were still seeing each other in February. I took you to Paris for Valentine’s Day.”
“Then March.”
“You didn’t waste any time,” he answered brutally, his fiercely beautiful features so hard they could have been carved from stone. He’d never seemed as Sicilian as he did now, his intimidating expression, his harsh beauty reminding her of the rocky Mediterranean island his family had called home for hundreds of years.
Waste any time? She silently repeated, thinking about what had really happened, recalling the stunning grief, and the discovery that she was pregnant. Maximos had left her abruptly in the middle of the night, left her, leaving her bed and walking out of her apartment, and three weeks later when her period didn’t come she’d taken a pregnancy test. And then another. And another.
It had been so shocking, all of it, and the long, difficult months dealing with the pregnancy, and then the discovery that the baby wasn’t healthy, had changed her. There had been no one to lean on, no one to go to for comfort or advice. She’d had to deal with it all on her own.
She blinked, shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “You weren’t coming back, and Emilio treated me well…” She let her voice drift off, letting Maximos fill in the missing pieces. “Anyway, I do hope you can be happy for us.”
“Happy.”
“We both do so want you to attend the wedding—”
Maximos was big, fast, and his arm reached out, his hand encircling her upper arm before she knew he’d moved.
His hand felt hard on her arm, his fingers tighter than they’d ever been, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d felt many emotions around Maximos, felt so much sometimes she didn’t know if there was anything left to her, but the one emotion she’d never felt was fear.
Love, lust, hurt, need, agony, grief, despair, hatred.
But fear? Never.
Maximos was huge, thickly muscled, a hundred times stronger than her but he wasn’t violent, didn’t need to resort to violence. Not when his touch had been so effective—enslaving. He’d owned her, controlled her just by knowing her body, knowing her response. One touch on her breast, one kiss on the side of her neck, one leg between her own and she was gone. Lost. His.
Now with his hand wrapped around her arm he was dragging her out of the room, dragging her like a madman down the narrow corridor to an even narrower, darker hall at the back.
They turned a corner, and then another and they were alone, very alone, in a very dim corridor.
Maximos pressed her against the wall, pressed his body into hers, his knee parting her legs so wide she felt splayed, exposed. “He’s the wrong man for you, Cass. The absolute wrong man.”
“No,” she flung back even as his body covered hers. “You were the wrong man. But this time I have it right.”
Maximos leaned hard against her, his chest roughly crushing her breasts, his shoulders pinning her to the wall. “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.”
“And you do?”
“A hell of a lot better, yes!”
She laughed out loud, and her laughter was like pouring gas oline on a fire. His eyes blazed, his body seething with rage. He was too angry. She’d never seen him like this. Never seen him anything close to this but she wasn’t afraid, just defiant. “He warned me about you. Emilio said you’d say horrible things.”
“He’s playing you, Cass. Playing you just to get back at me.”
“Or maybe I’m playing him, because I love being alone with him…naked with him.”
Maximos’s control shattered. His hand snaked into her hair, grabbing thick strands close to her scalp. “How is he in bed?”
“Fantastic. The most selfless, devoted lover you could ask for.”
“I hear a challenge in there.”
His hand wrapped tighter, twisting the long strands between his fingers. This was war. Out-and-out war. “You hear right.”
“There’s no way you could have with him what you had with me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. As you love reminding me, what we had was just sex, and I can