Chapter 24

• Anastasia stood in a room brimming with guests—distant relatives, maids, the cook, the designer, the planner, guards, and a priest—and felt a tension clench within her. As if sensing her turmoil, Sandro's smile took on a feline quality.
• She knew she shouldn't be there. There was no future for them, no possibility of an "after." It was naive for her to think otherwise, especially a woman who had never been intimate with the same man twice in her life. She should have been accustomed to the emotional detachment that followed sex; after all, it was just sex.
• But what drew her to Sandro's door, clad in a dress she had borrowed from the laundry and black socks that ran up to her calves, was more than mere physicality. Though she knew she shouldn't be there, she craved to feel it again—the warmth of his lips on hers, the strength of his fingers against her neck, balancing the line between lethal and gentle. Their mutual hunger made her desperate for any contact, the press of his skin against hers.