HER HEART RACING with fury and an unwanted kind of excitement, Justina stared into Dante’s dark face—wishing she could wipe that supercilious smile from his lips. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said viciously, and an
emerald-decked redhead sitting opposite jerked up her head in surprise.
‘Do keep your voice down, Justina,’ he said. ‘This is an aristocratic wedding where name-calling will almost certainly not be tolerated.’
Justina could have shaken him. Or punched against that solid wall of a chest. Or...something. Something which involved stamping her foot like a child and demanding that he be removed from her proximity as quickly as possible. As it was, she could do little except sit down in the chair which he was now pulling out for her. Because he was right. This was the wedding of one of her oldest friends and she could hardly cause a scene by demanding that she be moved to a different seat, could she?
He had risen to his feet and was helping her into her chair, his fingers briefly brushing over her shoulders before he slid into the vacant chair beside her.
She turned to look at him, careful to keep her voice low even though she could feel her nerve ends screaming in response to that unexpected touch of his hands. ‘I’m surprised you even know the meaning of the word “tolerate”,’ she said. ‘How did you manage to get here before me when I was on the first bus?’
‘I drove.’
Justina nodded. He’d driven. Of course he had. Could she really imagine him obediently trooping onto the transport provided like everybody else? He was the ultimate control freak, and whatever happened it always had to be on his terms.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘What I don’t understand is why you happen to be sitting here?’
‘For exactly the same reason as you, I imagine. Waiting for the wedding breakfast to begin, and with it the opportunity to toast the bride and groom and wish them many happy years of wedded bliss.’
‘Please don’t wilfully misunderstand me, Dante. That’s not what I meant and you know it.’ Reluctantly Justina’s eyes focussed on the hard planes of his face, which were softened only by the sensual curves of his lips. She saw the faint shadow at his jaw which always appeared, no matter how often he shaved.
Why did he have to be so damned sexy? she thought. And why was her traitorous body reacting so hungrily to him as she breathed in his warm and earthy scent?
‘I looked at the table plan and your name was nowhere near mine. I was just celebrating my good fortune at such a sympathetic placement and now I find you next to me. So how did that happen, Dante?’
‘Simple. I changed the names,’ he said unrepentantly.
Justina glared at him. How could she have forgotten his high-handedness? That way he had of just blazing in and taking whatever it was he wanted as if the world was just one giant boardroom? ‘You can’t turn up at a posh society wedding and start rearranging the seating!’
‘I just did.’ He sat back in his seat and glittered her a lazy smile. ‘And since no one else has a problem with it I suggest you go with the flow and enjoy yourself.’
‘Enjoy myself? With you beside me? That’s a joke, right?’ She bent to put her bag on the floor, mainly in an attempt to disguise the sudden tremble of her fingers. ‘If I wanted to spend the afternoon in the company of a snake I’d head for the nearest pit.’
Dante saw the mutinous look on her face as she lifted her head again and for a moment he almost smiled. How could he have forgotten her outrageous defiance—the only woman in the world who had not deferred to his wishes? Who had been determined to get her voice heard and insisted that her career was just as important as his.
For a while he had enjoyed their delicious battle of wills, with the subsequent make-up sessions which had been all about red-hot passion. Until he’d been forced to realise that she meant what she said. That her objections had not been some sustained sexual tease and that she had no intention of compromising her lifestyle after their marriage. She was a singer and a performer, she’d told him, and she’d been given opportunities which came along all too rarely. She’d told him she couldn’t—no—she wouldn’t turn them down. She’d also smilingly had the nerve to tell him to stop being such a dinosaur and to respect how important her career was. But behind her smile had been the definite glint of steel, and that had unsettled him. He remembered being furious and then—surprisingly—hurt. Until he’d forced himself to be grateful for his lucky escape. Because her attitude did not bode well for a long-term relationship with someone like him.
His thoughts cleared and he found himself looking into clear amber eyes which were framed so exquisitely by her dark lashes. He waited until their wine had been poured and then let his gaze linger on her bare left hand.
‘So. No wedding band. I note that you have not been as fortunate as your bandmate in the matrimonial stakes,’ he observed.
Pausing midmouthful of wine, Justina almost choked with indignation. ‘The matrimonial stakes! It’s not some kind of horse race!’
‘No?’ He shrugged. ‘But it is a race, all the same. Most women like to be in a permanent relationship by the time they’re your age because they are thinking about the inevitable ticking of their biological clock. What are you now, Justina? Thirty-one? Thirty-two?’
‘I’m not even thirty!’ she gritted out, and it wasn’t until she saw the answering gleam in his eyes that she realised she had fallen into some horrible sort of trap.
She’d ended up sounding defensive about her age, just because she was about to leave her twenties behind without a wedding ring on her finger. Dante had managed to do what Dante always did so well—he’d made her feel bad about herself.
So don’t let him! She slanted him an adversarial look. ‘I think these days you’ll find an emerging breed of women who don’t need the mark of a man’s possession to define themselves.’
‘I see your rather aggressively feminist stance hasn’t softened with time.’
‘Feeling threatened, are you?’
‘Believe me, Justina—I’m feeling something a lot more basic than threatened.’
His mocking gaze had flickered to his groin and Justina felt her cheeks grow hot with a mixture of anger and desire. Viciously, she jabbed her fork into an unsuspecting spear of asparagus, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to eat it. What was the matter with her? He was insulting her, and even if he did underpin the insults with a deliberate sensuality why the hell was she responding like this?
She put her fork back down. Perhaps that was what absence did? It hadn’t made her heart grow any fonder, but it had certainly awoken a sexual appetite which she had thought gone for ever. And Dante was the last person she wanted to make her feel this way. As if she’d been wandering around, starved of all comfort and pleasure, until he had suddenly reappeared, symbolising everything she’d been missing in one dark and very dangerous package.
‘Did you go to all the trouble of rearranging your seat just so that you could spend the entire meal being objectionable?’ she questioned.
‘Oh, come on, Justina. You know exactly why I did it. Surely you can appreciate that I am a little curious about you—especially considering that we were once planning to be man and wife?’
‘You mean until you decided that you’d have sex with that...that...’ She wanted to spit out the word tart or whore—but that might give him the erroneous impression that she still cared. Picking up her wine glass, she knocked back a large mouthful. ‘Woman,’ she finished acidly.
‘Will you stop rewriting history?’ he demanded. ‘You know damned well that we’d already broken up by then.’
She opened her mouth to object, and then shut it again—because