Page 37 of Coerced Wife
Dante frowns. “Why would she be with him if she didn’t love him?”
“Dunno.” Giorgio doesn’t break our eye contact. “Maybe I find that hard to believe because she’s too good for him.”
He’s damn right about that. She has a far greater effect on me than simply making my cock hard. She settles me. Calms me. For a strange reason, I feel at peace when I’m with her. The only time that my head is quiet is when she sleeps in my arms. She’s the sole thing that’s not ugly in my life.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I tell Giorgio.
He holds my stare with a dare in his. “Fine. I’ll bite. How is she going to prove her love and her undying loyalty?”
I look around the room, feeling no small amount of victory as I say, “She’s going to marry me.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Anya
Oh my God.
Antonio really screwed things up. The accounts payable subsidiary ledgers are a crow’s nest of faulty data capturing. The debit and credit totals of the trial balance aren’t equal. The budget is so far off the mark there’s not enough funds to pay salaries. What was he thinking? He didn’t even account for accruals. Don’t get me started on accumulated depreciation.
It’s going to take months to fix this mess.
Suppressing a sigh, I start a new document to make notes.
I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed while Saverio replaces the bathroom door, the one he broke to get to me. I’m still angry with him. The bruise in my chest hasn’t eased, but as much as I’m trying to ignore him, it’s difficultto do when he’s wearing nothing but ripped jeans that rides low on his hips.
Hormones again.
“You’re frowning,” he says, putting his tools aside.
“This is going to take time to sort out.” I roll my sore neck. “A couple of months at least.”
He walks over and climbs onto the bed. My body tenses in reflex. We haven’t spoken about the engagement or the wedding after he told me he was going to marry me. That didn’t stop us from fucking. We’re like animals, insatiable and wild.
He shifts behind me, catching me between his bent knees, and massages my aching shoulder muscles.
I close the laptop and push it away. It feels so good where he’s working on the knots with his thumbs that I groan and lean back against his chest. The work of his hands is like magic. Slowly, the tenseness evaporates, and my body relaxes. No one has ever touched me like this—literally and figuratively. His strength and warmth wrap around me, and as always, it’s exactly what I need.
Closing my eyes, I choose to ignore reality for a while. I sink deeper into that dark, ignorant place of safety I’ve created for myself since Saverio gatecrashed my life, a place where my logical thoughts and troubles are banished and only my senses exist.
He plants a kiss on the curve where my shoulder meets my neck. “You’re stressed.”
My skin tingles under the soft pressure of his lips. I almost moan when he scrapes his stubble along the side of my neck to suck my earlobe into his mouth.
He bites down gently before kissing the shell of my ear. “I didn’t give you this job to make you work even harder than before.” His breath is warm on my wet skin. “There’s no rush to fix the books. If it takes half a year, so be it.”
Goosebumps erupt over my arm. “In the meantime, the new work piles up, making it harder and harder to catch up.” I tilt my head, giving him better access. “The sooner I get things in order, the sooner I’ll relax.”
He presses on pressure points at the top of my shoulder blades and says with a low chuckle, “I know how to relax you, baby girl.”
He’s only partially joking. He’s getting hard, his erection growing against my spine. My belly heats with anticipation.
I don’t want to want this, but my body wants what it wants. It’s completely ignoring my brain, not that my mind is any help in the matter. It seems to have gone on strike with the pregnancy.
Abandoning his work on my back, he wraps his arms around me with one hand splayed over my stomach and the other on my breast. My nipple hardens under my clothes. He cashes in on the reaction by rolling the tip between his fingers through the layers of my bra and sweater while he dips his other hand into the elastic of my leggings and brushes a knuckle over my silk-covered clit.
“Sav,” I say, half begging and half protesting.