by Olivia Gates
“The only thing that hurt me was thinking he didn’t...didn’t...”
“Didn’t love you?” Ivan supplied for her. “If he loved you any more he’d be downright dangerous. As it is, I think he is, very much so, to himself. All this...” Ivan flicked a hand at all the paperwork. “Signing his life away to you? Going to put bodies back together in the most dangerous war zone he could find? He might not be doing it consciously, but I know him. He’s given up on you, and he can’t face life without you, so like a missile on its last burst of fuel, he’s trying to go out with a bang.”
The horror of Ivan’s analysis and prophecy froze the blood in her arteries.
Then she exploded, pouncing on the two men, shoving the folders at them and dragging them up. “You have to stop him!”
Jakob’s gaze became contemptuous. “You think we didn’t try? After the number you did on him, he’s been like an automaton with no course-correction function left.”
Anger broke through her distress. She grabbed Jakob’s arm, shaking him. “Aren’t all of you all-powerful? Do something!”
Still probing her, Jakob remained unperturbed by her agitation. “Antonio instructed us to give you all this after he left for his mission.”
The world spun, made her stagger back. “He—he already left?”
Jakob steadied her, his gaze no longer accusing. “Not exactly, but that was another instruction. Not to tell you when he left or where he went.”
Ivan took her arm, turned her to him. “And that’s actually why we’re here now. To tell you he’s leaving tonight. Because we’re not the ones who’re all-powerful here. You are. The only one who can stop him is you.”
* * *
Lili believed Ivan and Jakob would never talk to her again.
Not after she’d blasted them for wasting all that time testing her and not telling her about Antonio’s plans right away.
She’d also drafted them for a ride to his mansion, where they said he’d be, packing and emptying it for her possession. On the way, with Antonio’s phone shut off, going mad thinking she’d be too late, she’d piled more and more invective on their sullen, silent heads.
Now they both turned to glare at her as she spilled out of the car at Antonio’s door.
Before they drove off in a shower of gravel, Jakob shouted from his window, “You broke him, now you fix him.”
Lili rushed to the front door. Climbing steps was still awkward for her, but she took them two at a time.
She entered the mansion to total silence, and dread almost chomped her in half. Was she too late? She’d failed to intercept him before he disappeared out of reach, maybe forever?
Terror mushroomed out of her on a scream. “Antonio!”
Footsteps exploded from the direction of the bedroom, which had been theirs once. They thundered before abruptly stopping. And then Antonio appeared across the great room.
He froze, just like she did.
But even across the distance his eyes told her everything, explained everything, put to rest everything that had been driving her insane.
He did share her heartache and misery, felt her same desperation and pain. But his agony seemed to have broken him. Her invulnerable Antonio. She’d done this to him.
Would he leave still because she’d hurt him beyond repair?
Suffocating with dread, all she could say was, “I love you. Please forgive me. Don’t go.” Then everything turned black.
* * *
“Liliana!”
Antonio exploded into a run and caught her before she hit the ground in a dead faint. After a frenzied exam proved she was physically fine, he rushed her to his bed. The bed he hadn’t come near since she’d left him.
Though he knew from his obsessive follow-up of her condition that she was perfectly healed, she looked so spent and fragile. Just like he’d felt...until he’d heard her screaming his name, seen her standing there, her eyes open to him again, showing him into the depths of her soul. Until she’d said she loved him and asked him not to go.
Holding her made him feel as if the heart that had been ripped out of his body was restored. Feeling her warm and whole and there, he felt that the life that had oozed out of him every second since he’d lost her was returning. She was here to revive him, to give him another lease on life.
She came to with a gasp, her eyes frantic before she saw him. Then she came apart, clinging to him, a quaking, weeping mass.
Her sobs tore him up inside. “Don’t go, please. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me anything of yours. I want you, only ever you...please...”
His lips silenced her agony, his tears mingling with hers. “And I want only you. I wanted to leave everything behind when I thought you could no longer want me back.”
She wrenched at his neck, his chest with trembling lips, soaking his flesh with her tears, covering it with the worship he’d withered without. “I’ll stop wanting you when I stop breathing. Probably not even then.”
Before he succumbed to the need to reclaim her, he had to know one thing for sure.
He rose above her, holding her precious face in his trembling hands. “Do you forgive me, mi amore? Really forgive me, for how I once planned to use you? I don’t want the least doubt or bitterness lurking in your heart. That’s what you said that day I let you go—that’s why I couldn’t persist anymore. I felt I could overcome your pain, but I would never erase your mistrust. And I couldn’t do that to you. So do you really believe that I loved you from the beginning, and that I did change for you?”
She burst out in another weeping jag, dragging him down to her and deluging him with kisses and tears. “I believe you. I’ll always believe you.”
After the storm had abated, she drew back to look at him with such earnestness. “But I want you to promise me that if you ever feel any differently, you will tell me. You must never hide anything from me again, whether you’re afraid it would hurt me, or know for sure it would.”
“I take it this is a two-way street? If you ever stop feeling the same as you do right now, you’ll tell me?”
“Since I’ll never stop loving you, the only thing I’ll confess is that I’m loving you more.”
“But if for some unimaginable reason you stop loving me?”
She rose, her eyes telling him everything he needed to breathe again, to live again. “I’ll always tell you the whole truth. You know I’m incapable of saying anything else.”
“I know.” His groan exorcised the last of his tension. Then he let her push him on his back, reveling in her beauty and honesty and openness, all the treasures he’d thought he would never be blessed with again, in the absoluteness of her love, which he’d thought he’d destroyed. “It’s why I was in such despair. I knew you would never exaggerate to punish me, so I truly thought I’d lost you forever.”
“I would have remained yours forever even if I never found my way back to you.”
“And what good would that have done me?” he exclaimed.
She took his lips in a deep, devouring kiss before she pulled back, a grin lighting up her beauty. “I’d already found my way back to you. When your brothers arrived to give me your insane bequest and tell me of your crazy plans, I—”
He heaved up, his whole body tensing. “Those bastards! I’m going to strangle each and every one of them. I told them not to—” Then it hit him. “What am I saying? It’s because they disobeyed me that you’re here in my arms again.”
“Actually, it isn’t. That’s what I was trying to say. I was coming to you when they came knocking.” She looped her arms around his neck. “It seems I felt you were going to do something drastic, and I reached my limit at the same time you did.”
“Even if you hadn’t, and you decided much later to call me back, I would have come running.”
“If I
’d missed you, you would have come back to find your brothers roasted.” At his incomprehension, she grinned sheepishly. “They put me through their elaborate tests to determine if I’d been manipulating you into giving me what you left me. It almost made me too late to stop you. If it had, I would have turned into a fire-breathing dragon.”
A guffaw escaped him, the world suddenly bright and limitless again. “That must have been Jakob and Ivan. No other brother who got his wife’s seal of approval on you would have dared suspect you of any ulterior motives.”
“Yeah, it was Starsky and Hutch.” As another laugh burst out of him, she clung to him again, her shudder shaking through him. “Promise me that whatever humanitarian missions you undertake won’t be in areas of active conflict. If you don’t want to kill me with worry.”
Taking her down, he covered her, pressed into her, as if he wanted to absorb her into his being. “I’d never put myself in harm’s way when you need me.”
Her fingers convulsed in his hair as she pulled his head up, her eyes fierce with conviction. “The whole world needs you, alive and well and being the irreplaceable force for good that you are. And this brings me to your bequest. All I’ll ever need from you is your heart, your trust, your appreciation. But only you can direct everything you’ve built and achieved.”
“You do have a better scientific mind than me.”
“My mind and whatever else I have are at your service always. It will be an honor, a privilege and a pleasure to work with you in any capacity. But only you know how to bring everything together, to create and grow the best businesses that are beneficial to the world. You must take everything back.” She suddenly chuckled, her golden eyes gleaming. “If you only saw your brothers imagining me filling your shoes, you wouldn’t have had the heart to suggest it. Holmes and Watson were having little heart attacks at the very thought.”
His laughter rang out with hers, until they were both almost in tears all over again.
Then merriment turned to passion, then to desperation and they were tearing each other’s clothes off, competing to give more pleasure, to drag the other deeper into oblivion.
After repeated storms, full domination and surrender, Antonio rose above her and finally touched the places he’d avoided all night. Her faint scars. As he traced them, tears blinded him.
At her gasp, he raised his gaze, found her own eyes streaming again. She realized how he felt.
He still needed to put his feelings into words. “Those moments when your lifeblood bathed my hands as I struggled to stem it, when I was forced to cut into your flesh to save your precious life, when I felt you fighting me so you could let go... I’ll never heal from them.”
Hers sobs fractured her breath, her words. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”
Wiping at his eyes, he smiled with everything in him. “Never be sorry for anything. Just like you made me a new man who has no rage or darkness, who can be ecstatically in love, who can be a son and a brother, you’ve probably absolved me from every sin I’ve ever committed. This punishment is enough to take care of all of them. I only wish you didn’t have to get hurt so I’d be punished. It’s a catch-22 really, since I can only be hurt through you.”
Her dawning grin caught on another sob. “I hate being your Achilles’ heel.”
He hugged her again. “But I love having you as my only vulnerability. I can’t live without you being everything to me. My strength and weakness, my joy and agony, my desire and dread.”
“You’re all that to me and everything else and it’s...enormous.”
Heart swelling with gratitude, he nodded sagely. “Humongous.”
They shared another moment of total communion, before they laughed again. Their mirth caught fire again and they were again surrendering to the power of their bottomless passion and hunger.
* * *
Afterward she lay satiated in his arms, wondering what she’d ever done in her life to deserve him.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he turned her face to him, his words sounding like an irrevocable pledge.
“The heart that grew inside me from the first moment I saw you is yours forever because you gave it life. You changed my perspective and priorities. You made me let go of my anger against my family even before I met them. It’s because of you that I gave them and myself a chance, why I have them back in my life now. You’re the reason I have a life, not just a race for more achievements and acquisitions. You’re the reason I want to live forever.”
The tears that came so easily to her now flowed again, ones of bliss this time. “Maybe immortality should be my new research, then. I’ve been eyeing gene therapy for longevity for a while now.”
“If anyone could find its secret, it’s you.” He gathered her tighter, his expression becoming adamant. “And it is you who’s more qualified scientifically to run the research division, while I want to give back to the world now. And that’s another reason I’m yours. Until I met you, I took what I thought life owed me, and I gave back only strategically, to increase my profits. But now that I’ve found you, now that you love me, the world has given me far more than I can ever deserve. Now I have to create balance, give back everything I can so that I can continue to deserve having the miracle of you and your love.”
Drowning in his love, in relief and gratitude, she took hold of the hands that had given her her life back, took them to her lips as she gave him her own pledge.
“And I only want the privilege of sharing your exceptional journey. You have all of me—the heart that grew to love you, the body you awakened and owned and saved, the soul that became whole only when you healed it, and everything else that I am. They’re all yours, my love. Now and forever.”
* * * * *
Pick up these BILLIONAIRES OF BLACK CASTLE novels from Olivia Gates!
FROM ENEMY’S DAUGHTER TO EXPECTANT BRIDE
SCANDALOUSLY EXPECTING HIS CHILD
PREGNANT BY THE SHEIKH
CLAIMING HIS SECRET SON
Available now from Harlequin Desire!
***
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Second Chance with the CEO
by Anna DePalo
One
“Cole Serenghetti,” she muttered, “come out, come out, wherever you are.”
She knew she sounded like a corny fairy-tale character, but she’d been short on happy endings lately, and the words couldn’t hurt, could they?
Then again, there was always be careful what you wish for...
As if she’d conjured him, a tall man appeared under a crossbeam at the construction site.
A feeling of dread curled in her stomach. How many times had she started out thinking she could do this and then her courage had flagged? Three? Four?
Still, the students at Pershing School depended on her bringing Cole Serenghetti to heel—her job could hinge on it, as well.
Marisa lifted her hand from the steering wheel and squeezed it to stop a sudden tremor. Then she raised her field glasses.
Features obscured under his yellow hard hat, the man strode down the dirt path leading to the opening in the chain-link fence surrounding the construction site, which would soon be a four-story medical office complex. Clad in jeans, a plaid shirt and vest and work boots, he could have been just any other construction worker. But he had an air of command...and his physique showed potential for inclusion in a beefcake calendar.
Marisa’s heart pounded hard in her chest.
Cole Serenghetti. Former professional hockey player returned to the family fold as CEO of Serenghetti Construction, high school troublemaker and her disastrous teenage crush.
Could the package be worse?
Marisa slunk lower in the driver’s seat, letting the binoculars dangle against her chest from their cord. The last thing she needed was for a police officer to come around and ask why she was stalking a rich bad-boy real estate developer.
