Olivia Gates - The Prodigal Prince's Seduction / The Heir's Scandalous Affair

She chuckled. “Anytime.”

He reached out across the table, took her hand. He needed to be connected to her as he made his own confessions. “My experience with my mother reflects yours with your father. She died five years ago, but I too was eleven when I started to realize I was losing her. It was then that I set out to detach myself, that I learned that no one is guaranteed to be there for me. I’ve become so comfortable being disconnected, so driven and distracted, that I no longer notice all the good that fills my life.”

Her other hand descended to his, imbuing him with a calm that was previously unknown to him, a restfulness to mirror the compassion that filled her eyes. “She suffered depression, too?”

He’d never discussed this, never given what his mother had suffered a name, not even with his siblings. He needed to talk about it now, with her, needed to name what had taken his mother away a piece every day, look it full in the face instead of evading it and having it invade far more of him instead.

“I think she was bipolar. Severely so.”

“So it’s true. No one is exempt. My father, a man who had everything, your mother, a queen with the world at her feet, both prisoners to something so dark and inescapable inside them.”

Pressure built behind his eyes as cold outrage at the injustice of it all gave way to the empathy flowing between them in sweeping currents. He surrendered to the release of sharing, of having another fully appreciate and understand.

Suddenly, urgency stained her gaze. Everything inside him became primed to defend, to contain. He had no tolerance for her distress, he was discovering. “What is it, bellissima? Tell me.”

She grimaced. “It’s nothing. It’s…” She stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “What the hell. I’ve put my foot in it too much already to get delicate at this late stage. I was just wondering if…if you’ve ever wondered if you have that seed of sourceless desperation and instability inside you?”

He stiffened with yet another jolt at how in tune she was with him, sensing fears that never came into focus, but cast their darkness over his existence nevertheless.

He let his counter-question acknowledge her insight just as it expressed his concern for her. “Do you?”

“Only since my mother died. I finally wondered if I’ve never been able to be close to others because I had something lurking inside me, because I subconsciously felt that emotional involvement would raise the chances that it would manifest.”

“And what’s your verdict?”

“I don’t know. What complicates matters and stops me from coming up with anything conclusive is the fact that it wasn’t a struggle not to be close. I wasn’t even tempted until…”

She stopped. He couldn’t anymore. He cupped her cheek as he’d been aching to. “Until tonight.”

Warmth surged from his gut when she acquiesced, to the truth of his statement, to his hold, letting her flesh mold to his palm.

And he had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if whatever consumed your father wasn’t sourceless, after all?”

She nuzzled into his caress. “I guess sourceless is the wrong word to use, what with all the physiological and social factors involved in the development of such a major disorder. I guess it’s the out-of-proportion, ever-compounding emotional response that becomes so far removed from whatever triggered it, making it seem as if there were no origin.” She sighed, singeing his flesh with the heat of her breath. “As I said, I’ll never know what started my father down that spiral.”

“I know what started my mother down hers. It was my father.”

Such shock, such pain flooded her eyes at his muttered bitterness that he groaned, cupped her head, needing to alleviate her distress.

She reached out to his face, her hand trembling in a caress that assuaged some of the darkness festering inside him.

She finally said, “I’m so sorry you believe that. I can’t imagine how painful it is to think one of your parents was responsible for the other’s deterioration. It’s the only thing that holds me together, that I believe that there was no one to blame.”

He rose, bent across the table. He gazed into her misty eyes for a heart-thudding moment, then descended, pressed his lips to hers in a brief, barely leashed kiss. “Grazie, bellissima.”

Her moan reverberated inside him. His fingers fisted in her tresses, spilling another moan from her lips, detonating charges of sensation across his skin. He withdrew before temptation overwhelmed him, sat down. His gaze pored over her, the image of her beauty burned onto his retinas.

Such beauty. Totally her own, following no one else’s ideas or rules, including his own before he’d set eyes on her. Beyond physical, with so many levels to it—levels he kept discovering with no end in sight. She was short-circuiting the civilized man he’d been certain he was, unleashing a primal male who wanted to possess, plunder. But it also made that same male want to protect, to pamper.

She inclined her head at him. “You can sing, can’t you?”

He blinked at the question—the statement, really. He didn’t even think to inquire about such a detour’s origin and intent. He just flowed with her along the wave of unpredictability, of freedom from rules and expectations.

“Can’t everyone,” he said. “to some degree or another?”

“Uh, no. Not according to my singing teacher, another suffering soul who told me she had nightmares of waking up in a world where everyone had my same singing ability, making her profession obsolete and putting her permanently out of a job.”

He frowned. “My teacher criticized my intentional truancy. He wouldn’t have disparaged my performance or made me feel responsible for it had it been a limitation on my part. That inconsiderate wretch who taught you had no business telling a child something like that, just because your talents didn’t meet her standards and your progress didn’t conform to her timetable.”

She beamed him such a look, full of mischief and embarrassment, that he wondered where he found the will to remain where he was. “Uh, I wasn’t exactly a child when the brilliant idea of taking singing lessons sprouted in my mind three years ago. And I did test her last tune-sensitive nerve by insisting on singing along with Whitney Houston and Maria Callas. The comparison was agonizing even to my own self-forgiving ears. But I have a feeling you can hold your own with the Elvises and Pavarottis of the world.”

He raised one eyebrow, goading her into telling him more. “Hmm, I wonder how you came by that conviction.”

Her grin grew impish and indulgent at once. “In your case, fishing will get you whales. You reaffirm that conviction every time you open your mouth and unleash that honed weapon you have for a voice. Uomo cattivo that you are, you unrepentantly use it to its full destructive effect. It’s very easy for me to imagine you taking your mastery over it to its highest conclusion.”

Stimulation revved higher. He let himself revel in the gratification of their repartee, challenged, fishing for even bigger whales. “I’ve heard many superlative singers who don’t sound special when they talk.”

“Sure, but I bet that’s not the case with you.”

“So what are you after? An admission? An audition?”

Her dimples flashed at him. “The first would be great, so I can gloat over my uncanny acumen. The second, alas, would be so much better even than having your ear for an hour—or a week—that I think it would warrant something larger than a ten-million-dollar bid.”

He reached for her hand and placed it on her fork. “I have a third option. Let’s finish this meal, and I’ll offer you something better than either at no cost but your willingness to accept it.” She sat forward, anticipation ablaze on her face. And he offered something he’d never imagined offering to anyone, ever. “A serenade.”