A Hunger for the Forbidden(28)

“And my apologies for not being yours. I imagine if I had a room number stapled to my forehead and a bag of money in my hand I’d come a little closer.”

“Now you’re being absurd.”

“I don’t think so.”

Matteo maneuvered his car through the narrow city streets, not bothering with nice things like braking before turning, and pulled up to the front of his hotel.

“It’s at your hotel,” she said.

“Naturally.” He threw the car into Park, then got out, rounding to the passenger side and opening the door for her. “Come, my darling wife, we have a public to impress.”

He extended his hand to her and she slowly reached her hand out to accept it. Lighting streaked through her, from her fingertips, spreading to every other part of her, the shock and electricity curling her toes in her pumps.

She stood, her eyes level with his thanks to her shoes. “Thank you.”

A member of the hotel staff came to where they were and had a brief exchange with Matteo before getting into the car and driving it off to the parking lot. Alessia wandered to the steps of the hotel, taking two of them before pausing to wait for her husband.

Matteo turned back to her, his dark eyes glittering in the streetlamps. He moved to the stairs, and she advanced up one more, just to keep her height advantage. But Matteo wasn’t having it. He got onto her stair, meeting her eyes straight on.

“There are rules tonight, Alessia, and you will play by them.”

“Will I?” she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was goading him. Maybe because it was the only way in all the world she could feel like she had some power. Or maybe it was because if she wasn’t trying to goad him, she was longing for him. And the longing was just unacceptable.

A smile curved his lips and she couldn’t help but wonder if he needed this, too. This edge of hostility, the bite of anger between them.

Although why Matteo would need anything to hold her at a distance when he’d already made his feelings quite clear was a mystery to her.

“Yes, my darling wife, you will.” He put his hand on her chin, drawing close to her, his heat making her shiver deep inside. It brought her right back to that night.

To the aching, heart-rending desperation she’d felt when his lips had finally touched hers. To the moment they’d closed his hotel room door and he’d pressed her against the wall, devouring, taking, giving.

He drew his thumb across her lower lip and she snapped back to the present. “You must stop looking at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re frightened of me.” There was an underlying note to his voice that she couldn’t guess at, a frayed edge to his control that made his words gritty.

“I’m not.”

“You look at me like I’m the very devil sometimes.”

“You act like the very devil sometimes.”

“True enough. But there are other times …”

“What other times?”

“You didn’t used to look at me that way.”

“How did I look at you?” she asked, her chest tightening, her stomach pulling in on itself.

“When you were a girl? With curiosity. At the hotel? Like you were hungry.”

“You looked at me the same way.”

“And how do you think I look at you now?”

“You don’t,” she whispered. “When you can help it, you don’t look at me at all.”

He moved his other hand up to cup her cheek, his thumb still stroking her lower lip. “I’m looking at you now.”

And there was heat in his eyes. Heat like there had been their night together, the night that had started all of this. The night that had changed the course of her life.

“Because you have to,” she said. “For the guests.”

“Oh, yes, the guests,” he said.

Suddenly, a flash pierced the dim light, interrupting their moment. They both looked in the direction of the photographer, who was still snapping pictures in spite of the fact that the moment was completely broken.

“Shall we go in?” he asked. Any evidence of frayed control was gone now, the rawness, the intensity, covered by a mask. And now her husband was replaced with a smooth, cool stranger.

She’d love to say it wasn’t the man she’d married, but this was exactly the man she’d married. This guarded man with more layers of artifice than anyone she’d ever met. She had been so convinced she’d seen the man behind the fiction, that the night in the hotel she’d seen the real Matteo. That in those stolen glances they’d shared when they were young, she’d seen the truth.