Snowbound with the Prince, page 6
“That’s what you meant when you said to be grateful I had a choice about whether or not to follow in my father’s footsteps? That you did not? That you were expected to go into the family business?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I meant. But enough about me now. Tell me about you. About growing up with a father like yours.”
Maybe it was because of the wine. Or maybe it was because their experience was a little like being trapped with a stranger on an elevator given the relentless storm outside, but there was a kind of instant intimacy developing between them. However, there was a time limit on this.
He lived around the world in a place she was never likely to go. After the storm abated, she was probably never going to see him again.
Why did that feel, already, like a sadness?
Still, Erin found herself confiding in him about growing up in the crazy world of professional skiing with a very famous father.
“I had skis on practically as soon as I could walk. And I loved to ski—and still do. It’s my place where I feel one hundred percent engaged. Present. Alive.
“But, to my father’s great disappointment, I wasn’t interested in putting my natural ability, which I had inherited from him and my grandfather before him, to work for me. I’d raced since I was tiny. When you’re small and everyone gets a trophy, it was fine, and fun.
“But I grew to hate it,” she said softly. “There was too much pressure on me because I was the great Enrique’s daughter.
“Remember when Sebastian Avio’s daughter wanted a career in music? And everyone kept comparing her to him? It was like that. I mean... I was just a kid and I was being interviewed on the evening news after a race.
“Plus, even at the junior levels—we’re talking under ten—racing brought out this horrible competitive side in my dad. He became my mentor and my coach. I could do nothing right. If I won a race, he started dissecting how I could have done better immediately. If I lost, he’d be furious, pouting and sulking.
“It took what I loved the most and changed it into something I could barely recognize. So, at age eleven, I stood firm and told him I was leaving my career as a ski racer behind me. I quit. Nothing was ever the same between us after that, as if he couldn’t handle it that my life didn’t belong to him.
“In retrospect, with everything going on in the family, I think ski racing had become just one more pressure. One I was ill-prepared to handle.”
“What was going on in your family?”
Erin thought she had really said quite enough. And yet there was something about the way he was looking at her and listening to her that felt like an elixir: if she drank of this cup, she would feel better.
That was astonishing because she hadn’t been aware she wasn’t feeling okay. Harvey jumped on her lap and she scratched his ears. Valentino reached over and scratched his ears, too.
It was such a nice moment. It had a lovely intimacy to it. Their total isolation from the whole world made her feel as if she could tell him anything.
Not just as if she could tell him anything, but as if she had carried a burden too long by herself and this stranger had come along and unexpectedly offered to share it.
During the tumultuous years of her childhood, and just before they’d called it quits for good, her parents’ relationship had been more volatile than ever.
“My mother,” she said softly, “had just discovered my father had yet another love interest. The days were filled with the sounds of slammed doors and shouted arguments. So many accusations and so much pain. Love that had burned too hot had finally consumed everything in its flame, destroying everything around it.”
Erin cast a look at Valentino. That’s where mooning over someone’s lips got you. That was where passion led.
“That’s why I said I owed the cat,” she confessed. “Harvey chose me. He showed up on our doorstep and became my shadow, just when I needed him most. Even back then, when he was young and handsome, silky-furred and svelte, Harvey hated absolutely everyone. Except me.
“This silly old guy reserved his absolute devotion for me, at the time in my life when I could do nothing right in my father’s eyes and our family unit was exploding around me. Maybe some people—maybe most people—would see my loyalty to the cat as odd, but he gave me hope when the world seemed utterly hopeless.
“The cat was my constant as I moved between my parents’ ever-shifting households, partners, locations.
“I fell asleep at night, in whichever house I was in, often with my pillow soaked in tears. But the cat curled in close to me, his purr reassuring and solid.”
Solid. Stable.
She cast a glance at Valentino. His hand had gone still on the cat’s fur. He was frowning at the fire.
She had said way too much.
But when he looked away from the fire and at her, his dark eyes were even darker, shadowed with sadness, as if he had, indeed, taken some of her burden as his own. Erin felt something she had not felt for so long.
A trust in this man beside her unfurled within her.
“And tell me,” he said softly, “what all this has to do with you and your cat bringing a feast up here to have Valentine’s Day alone.”
She wasn’t sure if she hated it or loved it. That he saw, immediately, how her tumultuous childhood and being alone right now were linked.
“Naturally, after all that excitement and chaos growing up, I longed for what other people seemed to have. Family as a place of refuge. Calm.
“I thought I was going to build that with my boyfriend, Paul, because his family was the polar opposite of mine. A mother and father who never seemed to say a cross word after thirty years together. Who had roast chicken on Sunday nights. Who belonged to the bowling league.
“What I didn’t realize was that while I’d been enchanted with all of that, Paul had felt oppressed by it, as if his family’s solid life was a trap he was being walked into. By me.”
Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “His parting words to me were that it was all just too boring.”
Valentino stiffened beside her. “Boring?” he said, his voice soft and deliciously incredulous. And then indignant. “Boring?”
“Which I inferred meant I was boring. He certainly acted like it. I mean, near the end, he would barely look up from his phone.”
Valentino snorted with an outrage on her behalf that Erin found quite sumptuous. “He wouldn’t look up from his phone and he thought you were boring?”
“Well, I mean I know I’m not exactly a barrel of excitement. Look at me, a career accountant.”
“Look at how you ski!”
“He wasn’t a skier.”
“You were with somebody who didn’t share that passion with you? It is you.”
It would be easy to just lap up his defense of her, but she felt driven to prove Paul might have had a point.
“I do have a kind of unusual attachment to my cat.”
“He didn’t like your Harvey,” Valentino intoned with a sad shake of his head. “How could he not love the cat who saved you?”
Erin realized she had never shared Harvey’s role in her life with Paul. A few hours in, this man already knew more about her secrets than Paul had in the entire length of their relationship.
Wasn’t that telling her something?
As was the look on Valentino’s face as he gazed at her. It felt as if she was being seen and, whatever Valentino saw, he did not seem to think it was boring. His hand left the cat’s fur. It cupped her chin. His thumb scraped across her cheek. His eyes held hers.
“A man who could be bored with you is not even a man,” he said firmly, his soft, accented voice as sensual as the touch of lips on the back of her neck.
She laughed a little nervously. Despite the snowed-in-together confidences, there was a larger truth here they both needed to acknowledge.
“You don’t even know me, Valentino.”
Still, she didn’t try to move away from his hand, and he looked stunned that she would suggest that!
“I do,” he said fiercely. “No man could look into your eyes and not know you. And no man could look into your eyes and ever have a moment’s boredom. Not unless there was something lacking in him.”
“I’m not the kind that inspires great passions,” she protested. But she was aware of how suddenly, and dangerously, she wanted to be that woman.
Valentino snorted, moved his hand from her cheek, tucked her hair behind her ear.
“Not inspire great passions?” he said, his hand still smoothing her hair. “A painter would die to paint you. The sun in that hair. That look on your face. A man could get lost in your eyes. He could dive into them as if they were a cool pond on a hot summer day. He could let what is in them fold over him, soothe him, hold him, heal the parts of him that are wounded.”
Erin stared at him, her heart hammering so hard she thought it would break from her chest. This close, she could see the faint stubble beginning on his chin and cheeks. She was aware of the scent of him, as crisp, as exotic, as she imagined the land he came from would be.
Everything he was saying about her eyes held true for his own. Fringed with an incredible abundance of sooty lash, they were as rich as dark chocolate, melted. They held depth and compassion, and mystery. A mystery a woman could spend her whole life solving...
He dropped his hand from her hair and abruptly created some space between them on the sofa.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was a scrape of pure gravel. “That was way too personal. I’m not generally—” he looked genuinely abashed “—given to poetry.” Then his eyes found hers again and he sighed with a kind of surrender.
“But that is what your eyes do,” he said softly. “They call out to the poet in a man.”
Oh, God, something in her was absolutely melting. They’d had too much wine, obviously. Both of them. Too much wine, and the feeling of being safe inside, together, as the storm raged on, was creating a natural affinity between them.
Even knowing those things, even knowing what they were experiencing was akin to being shipwrecked on an island together, it felt as if she was being seen in a way she had not ever been seen before.
And she wanted, suddenly and urgently, to be a person she had never been before.
Not boring.
But the one Valentino had just seen. Fully a woman. A sensual woman who called to the painter in a man, and the poet.
She wanted to embrace the adventure of finding out who she really was, if there were hidden facets of herself that she had never discovered.
It felt as if maybe she never would discover those hidden things if she did not say yes to what was right in front of her, in this moment in time. She wanted, not to shrink away from the power he said she had, but to embrace it, to uncover it, to unleash it.
She wanted to get lost in his eyes and say yes to whatever hid in their dark, compelling depths. Empowered by what he had said, she reached out and traced that plump split in his lip. At that touch, her heart felt as if it had slumbered.
Not just now, but with Paul, through her entire life, a protective layer around it that fell away like a thin layer of ice tapped with a hammer.
Valentino went very still. His eyes were steady on her face, full of knowing, full of hunger. And then he opened his mouth ever so slightly, just enough to nibble the finger that explored his lip.
A kind of insanity overtook her. A delicious loss of mind. Years of careful control evaporated as if they had been a muddy puddle waiting for the heat of the sun. Years of feeling as if she knew exactly who she was vanished like a mirage in the desert.
This was who she really was.
This was who she was always meant to be.
She leaned into him. And she took his lips with her own. His hands came up and bracketed each side of her head, tangled in her hair. He pulled his mouth away from her and whispered endearments in her ear in another language, his words soft with the poetry of the heart.
Then his mouth found hers again. Urgent. Questing.
And Erin’s world was changed for all time. Even as she took his lips, she knew whatever was happening, she could never, ever, go back to the way it had been—and she had been—before this moment.
“Love me,” she whispered against his lips. In her tone, things she had never heard before. Urgency. Desperation. Hunger. “Please.”
“How could I do anything but?” he whispered back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VALENTINO PICKED UP ERIN, cradling her against his chest as he strode down the short hallway into the darkness of the bedroom. She wrapped her arms around the beautiful column of his neck. She did not consider herself a small woman, and her ex had consistently made her feel as if she came from the land of the giants.
Yet, in Valentino’s arms, in the effortless way in which he had lifted her and now carried her, she felt light as a feather, exquisitely feminine and desirable. She felt cherished. She felt he was like a warrior who had found his way home to the maiden who had waited, her candle lit, believing he would come, even before she had known his name.
If they wanted light, the lamps would have to be lit. But she liked the room as it was, the atmosphere dimly lit and dreamlike.
He set her tenderly into the billowy embrace of a white down comforter. The bed was a beautiful, intricately carved antique that had come with her great-grandparents from Norway in the eighteen hundreds.
It felt right and good. That this bed that had been woven into generations of her family’s love stories, was where she would come to know Valentino in every way possible for a woman to know a man.
He stood over her and as her eyes adjusted to the deep shadows, she saw that he was staring down at her with a gaze both tender and fierce. His hand moved to the buttons on his shirt.
He had forgotten his bandaged finger and so had she, and they both laughed, breathless with anticipation and delight, as she scrambled to kneeling and he came to the edge of the bed. She undid the buttons of the shirt one by one, her eyes never leaving his face.
When she was done, she got off the bed to stand before him. She peeled the plaid fabric off him, over his shoulders, caressing the naked skin beneath the shirt as it was revealed to her. Finally, she tugged each arm out of its sleeve. The shirt dropped from her fingers to the ground, leaving her to stare with stunning avarice at what she had unveiled.
Valentino was absolutely perfect. The weak light from the gas lamps in the other room outlined the carved lines of his arms, powerful triceps and biceps, illuminated the broadness of his back, and spilled over the wideness of his shoulders. She had thought, because of his abundance of curls, that he might have a hairy chest, but he did not.
His skin was taut and golden, hair-free, molded to the perfect plain of a deep chest, the pebbles of his nipples, stretched over the slight rise of his ribs and the slender, hard curve of his belly.
She reached out tentatively and laid her hand, splayed, across his heart, and the sensual silk of his warm skin made her mouth go dry. She could feel the steady, strong beating of his heart under her fingertips.
He captured her hand, pulled it to his mouth, anointed the inside of her wrist with his lips and then tugged her yet closer to him.
His hands found the hem of her sweater and he hesitated.
His voice low, he asked, “Are you—?”
The sentence did not need finishing. Was she sure? Was she ready? She had never been more sure or more ready in her life.
Her tongue flicked to lips that suddenly felt dry and his eyes fastened there. She nodded.
There was nothing clumsy now, not even with that bandage on his finger. He peeled the sweater up and over her head, her hair hissing from the static as her head popped free. He tossed the sweater away and smiled, taking in what he had revealed.
Slowly, tenderly, he smoothed her hair with the fingertips of his unbandaged hand, owning her in some way with that possessive gesture that made her mouth even drier, her breath even more ragged, her need even more acute.
Valentino looked at her, a man who could never get his fill, a man with eyes that would paint her. Words spilled from his lips, tender, soft, in a language so universal she did not need to know the words to appreciate their meaning.
He had come to worship at the altar of her femininity.
And she at the altar of his masculinity.
They had entered a dance as ancient and as sacred as the earth itself.
Little by little, slowly, with reverence, the rest of their clothes fell away, until it was just the two of them, at the beginning of time, exploring each other with wonder. With curiosity. With awe. Exploring the miracle and the marvel of a man and a woman.
Together.
Finally, when the urgency would not be denied any longer, they tumbled together deep into the embrace of the bed. Their bodies met, fused, entwined, melted. They climbed, and climbed, and climbed, exploring the jagged, endless precipices until finally they stood on the edge of a cliff.
And then, unhesitatingly, they leaped off.
Falling into the abyss of pure sensation. Joining the motes of cosmic dust that made up the stars. Joining what had always been; that place that did not acknowledge space or time.
Exhausted, content, they folded their arms around each other and, despite the storm that screamed under the eaves and at the windows, they slept the deep sleep of two people completely satiated.
* * *
Erin awoke in the morning to the sound of the storm still raging outside, as if it wanted to pick up the cabin, twirl it in the air and smash it down somewhere else on the mountain.
Her confidence in the sturdiness of the cabin strengthened her sense of contentment, her awareness of how her skin felt under the deep warmth of the down comforter and beneath the heat of Valentino’s arm. It felt as if her whole body was tingling; the way it might feel going from a hot shower into a snowbank.
