by Lynne Graham
‘Che cosa...what?’ he husked, staring down at her with stormy, dark golden eyes and lashes longer than her own.
‘Nothing.’ Not fair to bless a man with those lashes, she had thought the very first time she saw him. But his eyes were absolutely beautiful, his lean, dark features equally so. Raffaele hadn’t been standing behind any door when the gifts were handed out at birth. Her heart was banging inside her chest like a drum tattoo and when his hand roved across her inner thigh, her body sang in a chorus of anticipation that was as terrifying as it was thrilling. He stroked her, lightly, almost playfully, and her back arched and her hips rose, the hunger rising as demandingly as any bone-deep craving. And that was what it was, she conceded in a daze, a hunger so instinctive she couldn’t fight it, couldn’t control it, certainly couldn’t snuff it out and go back to the innocence that had once been hers.
‘If there’s something bothering you, you should tell me,’ Raffaele muttered, gazing down at her, enthralled by the pleasure of Vivi not fighting him for once, while, at the same time, suspiciously wondering what had brought about this miraculous change.
Vivi half slid out from under him to turn on her side and aimed her reddened lips at his. ‘You’re talking too much, taking too long,’ she complained, because no way was she ever going to tell him the truth: that sometimes he mesmerised her into being a woman she despised, a weak woman, a woman without proper self-discipline and strength.
‘No, tonight will be what our first time should have been but wasn’t,’ Raffaele declared with maddening resolve.
‘It was good...us...the first time,’ Vivi protested through compressed lips.
‘Good, but crazy and brief—like a couple of teenagers having sex for the first time,’ Raffaele reasoned, his pride clearly troubled by that reality.
‘You will just never do what I ask you to do!’ Vivi complained helplessly.
‘Probably not,’ Raffaele agreed smoothly, amusement gleaming in his dark eyes as he crushed her ripe pink mouth under his again, taking the easy way out of the disagreement. It went against the grain with him to accept that he had gone utterly out of control the first time he had been with her and in retrospect that performance shamed him. This time around nothing short of an earthquake was going to be allowed to distract him.
His hand massaged over a long smooth thigh, relishing the satiny feel of her skin and the receptive dampness at her core even more. He wanted to do something he hadn’t done before because he wanted to drive her wild. It momentarily crossed his mind that in the past he had been a fairly selfish lover, accustomed to the women in his bed doing everything possible to please him. It had never been the other way round for Raffaele. He had never been eager to impress a woman with the gratification he could give her and the novelty of that challenged and aroused him.
As Raffaele lowered his tousled dark head in the direction of the most intimate part of her, Vivi froze. ‘No, I don’t want that!’ she gasped, hot with embarrassment at the very thought of it.
Vivi closed her eyes, telling herself she could get through anything and that presumably he would know what he was doing. That was one advantage of an experienced lover, she told herself even as every nerve cell in her body rose up in anger at the very idea of Raffaele being with another woman. Seriously, what was that reaction about? she asked herself in bewilderment. She didn’t own him. Theirs was a temporary marriage of convenience and once their baby was born...
A sudden burst of intense pleasure blurred her active brain and a startled gasp was wrenched from her. In the compelling timeless moments that followed, crashing waves of sensation gripped her slender length, building and building to a peak of rapture that was spellbinding. Her hips rose and the heat in her pelvis mushroomed up to grip her entire body. A tiny shriek escaped her and she saw stars as the tension broke and she reached a breathtaking climax. Raffaele grinned down at her and crushed her mouth under his as the after quakes of pleasure still cocooned her. Her arms came up and locked to him, some need in her responding to that urge to hold him close and unnerving her.
‘You’re amazing, tesoro mio,’ Raffaele growled, sliding her thighs back, moving over her.
Nobody had ever called Vivi amazing before and her eyes literally prickled with tears, tears of gratification that shook her. But before she could even think about that, Raffaele was hauling her legs round his waist and sinking into her with delicious force. It felt exquisite, it felt like everything she had been waiting for as her body expanded to take him, and the glorious friction of his every movement took her by storm. Her heart raced and she could feel his movement and it felt like the most intense bond ever. Little ripples of pleasure gathered again at her core and she gasped for breath, her body rising and falling against his, exhilaration shooting through her in wave after wave as he plunged deeper into her, inflaming every sense. Vivi was sensually enthralled as the sweet tension began to gather and tighten in her pelvis again, her excitement climbing, all control wrested from her as he ravished her with pleasure. Another orgasm rocked her like a blazing star igniting inside her pelvis, paroxysms of liquid hot delight sending radiant tendrils though her entire being. She cried out, feeling him shudder over her, the locked-tight tension of his lean, strong body as he too reached the same peak and it broke over him.
Sliding free of her, Raffaele disconcerted Vivi by tugging her back into him and closing both arms round her. ‘As we’ve just demonstrated,’ he intoned, ‘giving this marriage a chance can work.’
And that fast, Vivi was shot from the blissful aftermath of relaxation to wanting to pound both her fists into Raffaele, because she could hear the smile in his voice and couldn’t bring herself to look up and actually see that smile. When had she decided to forget what Raffaele was really like? He always had an agenda and he had just used sex to entrap her in an arrangement she had already refused to consider.
She should’ve had more control, should’ve said no, should’ve looked beyond the moment, she told herself with self-loathing. Only she never managed to do any of those sensible things when Raffaele was involved, did she? He always caught her unprepared because he was calculating, clever, usually working towards a goal.
‘It was just sex,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘Meaningless.’
Raffaele gritted his teeth on an angry response. ‘It’s not meaningless because you’re my wife. This is a beginning,’ he informed her arrogantly.
‘But I didn’t agree to trying to stay married,’ Vivi almost whispered, because having that conversation while lying naked in bed with him felt very very uncomfortable. ‘I think that’s silly. We agreed to stay married until the baby’s born and surely that’s enough.’
Raffaele shifted position and lifted up to gaze down at her. ‘What have you got to lose, Vivi? Whatever happens, we’ll be together for the next few months,’ he pointed out levelly. ‘If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’
‘It’s never going to work between us,’ Vivi assured him.
Shimmering dark golden eyes held her evasive gaze fast. ‘But you could at least give us a chance...it’s not going to cost you anything to try.’
Vivi lost colour and closed her eyes tight against the intrusion of his. He made trying sound so reasonable, was making her feel bad for refusing. But then he didn’t know, couldn’t possibly understand that she was trying to protect herself from getting hurt. Just suppose it worked for her but not for him? Where would that leave her? Just suppose Raffaele was being a manipulative nasty guy? This was, after all, a man who had been willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths purely to marry her and make a profit even though he already appeared to be wealthy beyond avarice. Wasn’t it entirely possible that Raffaele felt that if he had to be stuck with a wife for the next six months and more, it might as well be a wife who also shared his bed? Wasn’t it possible that he was only trying to use her?
Or was that her paranoia talking?
Raffaele had to have many more sophisticated options than her available if all he wanted was sex, she reasoned more calmly. Even though he was now ostensibly married, there would still be willing women on offer because he was rich and young and very, very good-looking. Also, incredible in bed, she added and felt her face burn. So why would he want to simply use her for that physical outlet? No, she finally decided, the odds were that Raffaele was serious when he suggested giving their marriage of convenience the chance to become something more real. And if Raffaele was making a genuine offer, cowardice—the fear of being hurt—wasn’t a good enough excuse for her to employ as a defence.
Vivi breathed in deep and opened her eyes, colliding with his intent dark golden stare. ‘Everything in this household is way over the top—too fancy for me,’ she admitted uncomfortably.
‘You can make changes,’ Raffaele said easily, startling her with that immediate response. ‘The palazzo hasn’t had a proper mistress since my mother died over twenty years ago and it’s running on the same lines now as it ran under my grandmother. Nothing has been altered.’
‘Arianna’s mother didn’t change anything?’ she asked in surprise.
‘She was always too busy chasing her next high or she was in rehab or she was shopping,’ Raffaele said drily.
‘You really didn’t like your stepmother.’
‘There was nothing to like. She had no interest in the man she married, his son or even her own daughter. She wanted the money, the lifestyle, nothing else. I remember her screaming at my father that Arianna was a dreadful accident.’
Vivi grimaced and said nothing, registering, however, that Raffaele’s rich, privileged childhood had not been as idyllic as she had naively assumed. If he had made false assumptions about her, she acknowledged ruefully, she had been equally guilty of making similar assumptions about him based on superficialities like wealth and background.
‘Why didn’t he divorce her if she was so awful?’
‘He believed marriage was for ever, but I also suspect that he couldn’t bring himself to face the fact that he’d made a hideous mistake remarrying so quickly after my mother’s death. He was lonely, still grieving, not in the right state of mind to make such a major decision. I don’t think he even appreciated that women as corrupt as Arianna’s mother existed in the world. He’d married young, he couldn’t have been very experienced with women.’
‘So, I could make changes here if I wanted to?’ Vivi recapped.
‘Of course, it’s your new home. If you’re going to raise our family here, it has to be comfortable for you.’
‘Don’t put the cart in front of the horse,’ Vivi urged stiffly. ‘Sometimes, you are so pushy, Raffaele.’
‘And sometimes, you like that about me,’ Raffaele fielded, bending down to claim her parted lips with his, sending a dizzy spurt of pleasure travelling through her slender length.
Vivi rolled out of reach, not trusting him that close, not trusting herself either. ‘We may not work. We don’t have much in common.’
‘Incredible chemistry and a baby are a healthy start,’ Raffaele informed her with a sizzling smile.
‘All right, I’ll give it a go,’ Vivi told him grudgingly, sliding off the side of the bed at speed when he tried to reach for her again. ‘I’m going for a shower and then I want to eat. I’m ravenous.’
* * *
‘My foster mum was a darling but her husband was a drunk,’ Vivi volunteered ruefully. ‘And there were horrible violent scenes when he came home at night and he would beat her up. I’d be at the top of the stairs listening to him shout, praying he wouldn’t hurt her too much. And then one night he came into my room and sat down on my bed and told me I was a big girl...’
‘What age were you?’ Raffaele cut in rawly, incensed by what she had experienced while she was still a child.
‘Thirteen, not very developed either,’ she muttered with a shudder. ‘He tried to touch me and I screamed and his wife came in and, well, that was the end of that placement.’
‘I hope the next placement was happier for you,’ Raffaele breathed through gritted teeth, shocked against his will by what he was learning about the care system for orphaned kids.
He had also learned that the stepmother whom he had loathed had not been quite the nightmare he had believed her to be, certainly not when compared to some of the parenting figures Vivi had endured. His stepmother’s essential lack of interest in him and his father’s care had protected him from the worst of the older woman’s drug excesses. Separated from her sisters, however, because it was hard to find a single home willing to take all three girls, Vivi had been deprived of the family support she had relied on as a child.
‘That was the worst that ever happened to me and, to be honest, it wasn’t so bad. Zoe had it roughest of all of us. That’s why she is the way she is,’ Vivi told him ruefully, suddenly feeling uncomfortable because as a rule she was very private when it came to her childhood experiences. ‘How on earth did we get talking about this stuff?’
Raffaele hid a smile because he had learned how to draw Vivi out of her shell and he wasn’t about to share his secrets. Ironically it was new to him to wonder what made another human being tick. Beyond the business world where sizing up opponents was the norm, Raffaele never got close enough to people to care why they did what they did or why they thought a certain way. To date, Arianna was the sole exception to that rule and now Vivi was the second, and both of them were family, which put them in a different category, he reasoned. If only it were as easy to get Vivi to take his advice, actually listen to him, he conceded with considerably less assurance, because Vivi was as stubborn as a rock planted in concrete.
Over the past seven weeks, his bride had begun to look more noticeably pregnant, something which she complained about because apparently her sister had not shown the same signs at such an early stage. In addition, Vivi was as sick as a dog several times a day, something which she simply took in her stride and brushed off as an unalterable fact of pregnancy. She had yet to go near a doctor, had an innately practical attitude to her condition and saw no need for medical intervention. Raffaele had learned to hide his concern because she did, literally, consider her pregnancy to be none of his male business, but he had contrived one small achievement by persuading her to go for a scan that afternoon with a top-flight obstetrician in Florence. Luckily for him, Vivi wanted to see their baby and was willing to take advantage of that facility.
Feeling somnolent even in the shade, Vivi contemplated her rising stomach above her bikini pants with disfavour. She was blowing up like a balloon, just as Zoe had forecast, and there was nothing she could do about it. Vivi refused to let pregnancy get in her way of making the most of her enjoyable new life.
Enjoyable? She smiled at that disconcerting acknowledgement, gazing out at the beautiful sun-drenched gardens surrounding the private pool. The view beyond was of even more spectacular countryside, composed of rolling hills and vineyards and olive and orange orchards and, as far as the eye could see, it was all Mancini land. Slowly she had begun to understand that Raffaele lived like a feudal prince because his family had once been feudal rulers. His father had used his ducal title throughout his life but Raffaele didn’t use his, respecting that the Italian Republic no longer legally recognised the titles of the former nobility. Only the fact he didn’t use the title didn’t stop the staff routinely referring to him as Il Duca or to herself as La Duchessa, nor did it change the outlook of the many people who revered Raffaele for his pedigreed heritage. It no longer surprised her that Raffaele had that aristocratic cool and dignity that had once set her teeth on edge.
It was the weekend, which meant that Raffaele was at home, and she loved the weekends best when she generally had him all to herself. Possessive...much? Oh, yes, very possessive, she conceded ruefully. He ticked every box in the husband stakes, as if he had contrived to swallow some magic potion that endowed
him with perfection. No such thing as a perfect man, her hind brain reminded her, but if there had been, Raffaele would top the lists. Initially she had been shocked by how considerate he could be of her comfort.
She had changed stuff at the palazzo, stuff that had been set in stone for probably at least a hundred years, she thought wryly. They no longer ate in a giant dining room surrounded by staff. Now they dined in much more relaxed surroundings in a much smaller room. The menus had also become considerably less elaborate because they were both quite sparing eaters. She had banished dated practices like the staff lining up to greet Raffaele every time he came home and he hadn’t even noticed their absence. Piece by piece she was dragging daily life at the Palazzo Mancini into the modern world.
The biggest challenge, however, had initially been her need to find something to occupy herself while Raffaele was at the bank. She had been amazed to discover that the palazzo was opened to the public one day every week, a day when Raffaele had been routinely in the habit of removing himself to the family apartment in Florence for twenty-four hours. Although a very private man, Raffaele saw it as his bounden duty to open his ancestral home to tourists, and to architectural historians and interested conservationists. At the same time, Vivi had stayed home one week simply to see the entire process in operation and she had been appalled at the mess that was being made of the experience, with untrained staff struggling to cope with questions they couldn’t answer and poor Amedeo giving a very boring talk about the family.
Vivi had taken over by engaging a young historian to write up the Mancini family history and then hiring proper tour guides. She had plans for a shop and a café as well for the end of the tour because there was so much unused space in the palazzo. Those plans had kept her very busy. Surprisingly, Raffaele was content to allow her a completely free hand but worried that she was taking on too much of a burden, until it finally dawned on him that Vivi adored being busy and needed a purpose in life as much as he did.