His heart contracted with an emotion he’d never bothered with. Shame. But also wonder, that she was so attuned to him she’d sensed his early ulterior motive. This was his punishment for harboring those intentions, to have them resonate in her psyche, tainting her view of his motives when they no longer existed. When he now just wanted her.
Those eyes that filled his every waking and sleeping second probed his, filled with the candor and strength and vulnerability he’d become addicted to. “If you don’t have specific reasons why you want me, then just tell me. Tell me what you expect from me, what you wish from being with me. I also want to know all the possible outcomes.”
His head spinning, he blinked. “Outcomes?”
“Yes, like what to expect when you lose interest, how you intend to handle the eventual end of whatever we start.” Her shoulders lifted in a self-conscious shrug. “I told you I can’t handle uncertainty or afford upheavals.”
Her scientific approach to his offer, insisting on analyzing his motives and charting a probable course for their relationship, was at once endearing and stunning. But what oppressed him was her expectation of worst-case scenarios.
“You mean you’d accept being with me even when you expect it to be a limited and finite liaison?”
She gave him such a look, as if he’d just said the most ridiculous thing, as if it was impossible for her to expect anything else, either from him or for herself.
Then she laughed, the sound mirthless. “I think anyone who enters a liaison without such expectation is just courting disaster. But I do want you so intensely that I’d take whatever is being offered, as long as I know what it is. I just need to go in knowing what to expect. That’s all I ask. Total honesty.”
His heart twisted with another feeling he’d never suffered from. Guilt. Total honesty was the one thing he couldn’t offer her. He couldn’t come clean about his initial plot to use her to get close to the Accardi family. He doubted even her pragmatic nature could forgive that. Even if it did, he feared her spontaneity with him wouldn’t survive the revelation.
But he couldn’t bear that she thought herself his inferior, that she expected nothing but impermanence and limitations as her due.
Itching to shake her out of those beliefs, he took her by the shoulders, groaning with the pleasure of her response, of touching her again.
“I’ll say this once more and never again, Liliana. You are not only absolutely wrong in how you value yourself, but you appallingly underestimate my desire for you. I’ve never wanted anything like I want you. As for why I do, let me enlighten you. I want you because of everything you are. Every single thing about you fascinates me, elates me, inflames me. I adore your candor, and your wit leaves me with the bends. Your mind delights me and everything else about you, every gesture and breath and inch, makes me want to devour you. I’m the one who worries that once you come closer, it might be you who loses interest.”
To say she looked incredulous was as accurate as saying she was reticent. But those eyes he’d been lost without flared with renewed life with his every word. Now their blaze made him almost give up any pretense of control.
But it was she who mattered here, and he had to make her feel secure. “All this doesn’t only equalize our positions, Liliana, it makes me the supplicant. As such, I have no expectations. It’s you who’ll state your terms, set your parameters and every other thing you wish for in our intimacies.”
Growing excitement glinted in her eyes. “What if I make outrageous demands?”
“I will welcome anything.” His lips twisted as he surveyed the caring and generosity filling her expression, what he knew made up most of her being. “Though I doubt you’d ask for anything. You don’t have a selfish or greedy cell in your body.”
“I don’t know about that, but I’d never make any demands. I want you free of obligations, for they have no place between us. I want you, and if you want me, for me, I’ll be with you. Until it no longer makes you and therefore me happy.” He started to object, furious that her insecurity about him hadn’t been appeased, but she overrode him. “What I want to renegotiate is our professional situation. As my boss...”
He groaned his frustration at her evasion. “Will you please forget that? I’m no longer your boss. I gave you back full control over your work.”
“Did you do that only to please me? To remove the obstacle of the boss/employee dynamic between us?”
He shook his head. “I do want to please you, Liliana, and remove all barriers between us, but I would have found another way to do so if I didn’t believe your work held more merit than mine, given that you’re so much further ahead in your research. I only attempted to force you to relinquish it initially as a demonstration of dominance. But not only am I now giving you absolute autonomy, I’m here to turn the whole lab over to you.”