A Hunger for the Forbidden Read Online Free PDF

baby.”
    He felt like he was drowning, like every breath was suffocating him. A baby. She was having his baby. And he was just about the last man on earth who should ever be a father. He should walk away. But he couldn’t.
    “And this was the only way?”
    Her eyes glittered with rage. “You know damn well it was!”
    He did. He’d avoided her every attempt at contacting him. Had let his anger fuel the need for distance between them. Had let the very existence of the emotion serve as a reminder. And he had come back frozen again. So he’d thought. Because now Alessia was here again, pushing against that control.
    “Why didn’t you meet me at the airport?” she asked, her words a whisper.
    “Why didn’t I meet you?” he asked, his teeth gritted. “You expected me to chase after you like a dog? If you think you can bring me to heel that easily, Alessia, you are a fool.”
    “And if you think I’m trying to you’re an idiot, Matteo Corretti. I don’t want you on a leash.”
    “Well, you damn well have me on one!” he said, shouting for the first time, his tenuous grip on his control slipping. “What am I to do after your publicdisplay? Deny my child? Send you off to raise it on your own? Highly unlikely.”
    “How can we marry each other? We don’t love each other. We barely like each other right now!”
    “Is that so bad? You were prepared to marry Alessandro, after all. Better the devil you know. And we both know you know me much better than you knew him.”
    “Stop it,” she said, the catch in her voice sending a hot slash of guilt through his chest. Why he was compelled to lash out at her, he wasn’t sure.
    Except that nothing with Alessia was ever simple. Nothing was ever straightforward. Nothing was ever neat or controlled.
    It has to be
.
    “It’s true, though, isn’t it, Alessia?” he asked, his entire body tense now. He knew for a fact he was the first man to be with her, and something in him burned to know that he had been the only man. That Alessandro had never touched her as he had. “You were never with him. Not like you were with me.”
    The idea of his cousin’s hands on her … A wave of red hazed his vision, the need for violence gripping his throat, shaking him.
    He swallowed hard, battled back the rage, fought against images that were always so close to the surface when Alessia was around. A memory he had tohold on to, no matter how much he might wish for it to disappear.
    Blood. Streaked up to his elbows, the skin on his knuckles broken. A beast inside of him unleashed. And Alessia’s attackers on the ground, unmoving.
    He blinked and banished the memory. It shouldn’t linger as it did. It was but one moment of violence in a lifetime of it. And yet, it had been different. It had been an act born of passion, outside of his control, outside of rational thought.
    “Tell me,” he ground out.
    “Do you honestly think I would sleep with Alessandro after what happened?”
    “You were going to. You were prepared to marry him. To share his bed.”
    She nodded wordlessly. “Yes. I was.”
    “And then you found out about the baby.”
    “No,” she said, her voice a whisper.
    “What, then?”
    “Then I saw you.”
    “Guilt?”
    “We were in a church.”
    “Understandable.”
    “Why didn’t you meet me?” she asked again, her words holding a wealth of pain.
    “Because,” he said, visions of blood washing through his brain again, a reminder of what happenedwhen he let his passions have control, “I got everything I wanted from you that night. Sex. That was all I ever wanted from you, darling.”
    She drew back as though he’d struck her. “Is that why you’ve always watched me?”
    “I’ll admit, I had a bit of an obsession with your body, but you know you had one with mine.”
    “I liked you,” she said, her words hard, shaky. “But you never came near me after—”
    “There is no need to dredge up the past,” he said, not wanting to hear her speak of that day.