Her smile lit her entire face.
“I am glad,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “Me, too.”
Rafe drew her close in his arms, gave the driver his Fifth Avenue address, and took his wife home.
A private elevator was a fine thing.
It meant a man could kiss his wife as soon as the door shut, and by the time the door opened again, he could have her half-undressed. It meant he could lift her in his arms, carry her into his living room, tear off his own clothes and the rest of hers and then make love to her on a white silk sofa with the warmth of the midday sun on them both.
Rafe lingered over Chiara’s every curve. No inch of skin went unkissed. He lavished attention on her breasts, sucking the nipples deep into his mouth, then gently spread her thighs and gave her clitoris that same intense care. And while she was sobbing from her first orgasm, he turned her on her belly, kissed the nape of her neck, the sensitive places behind her ears, stroked his hand down her spine, followed that same path with his lips, then cupped his hand between her legs, groaning with pleasure at how her body wept with desire for him, for his penetration.
“Please,” his wife whispered, “Raffaele, please…”
He eased her onto her knees. Slid slowly, slowly inside her, his hands cupping her breasts, his breathing harsh as he fought for control. She cried out as her second orgasm took her. Then, only then, Rafe let go, let his control shatter, his emotions soar as the truth filled him with almost unbearable joy.
He was in love with his wife.
After, he opened a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape and poured glasses of the rich, red wine for them both.
Though it was fall, it was not really cool enough for a fire. Still, he built one in the massive stone fireplace, dumped a couple of fat couch pillows in front of it, wrapped his wife and himself in a black cashmere afghan and sat holding her in his arms as they watched the flames and drank the wine.
The knowledge that he loved her weighed inside him.
He had not wanted Chiara, because his father had ordered him to want her. Now he wanted her with all his heart—but what if she didn’t want him?
What if she wanted the quick divorce he’d promised her? Yes, that was before all the rest, the hours in each other’s arms, but he wasn’t a boy, he was a man. He knew damned well making love wasn’t the same as being in love.
She’d lived the life of a fairy-tale Rapunzel, locked away in a castle. She’d been lonely. Innocent. Afraid of being given to a man who was an ogre. He’d come along and changed all that. If he told her he loved her, she might feel grateful enough to say she loved him, too, and gratitude was the last thing he wanted.
What if he wanted her…and she wanted her freedom?
When had things become so complicated?
He looked down at his wife, lying peacefully in his embrace, her head against his naked chest, her eyes half-closed, the dark lashes curved against her cheeks. His heart swelled with love.
Why was he trying to work this like an equation? He had to tell her what he felt, just say, “Chiara, sweetheart, I don’t want a divorce. I want you. I need you. I love—”
The intercom buzzed.
Rafe frowned. Who could it be? He certainly wasn’t expecting anyone.
Chiara looked at him. “Raffaele? What is that?”
“It’s nothing, sweetheart. Just the intercom. It’ll stop after a—”
Bzzzz.
Ah-ha. The Saks delivery. Rafe bit back a smile, kissed the top of her head and eased her off his lap. “It’s the doorman. Must be a delivery. He’s authorized to sign for me but…” He smiled. “I’ll be right back.”
But it wasn’t a delivery. It was, the doorman said, his brothers. Two of them, anyway. They had their own elevator keys and they’d gone straight by him. In fact, they were pressing the call bell right now and considering that Mr. Orsini and his lady guest had, um, had gone upstairs rather hastily.
Rafe slammed down the phone. He could hear the gentle hum of the car starting its descent. Bewildered, he ran his hand through his hair. Two of his brothers. Nicolo and Falco, probably, unless Dante was back in town and—and what in hell did that matter? His brothers were on their way.
And Chiara was naked in his living room.
He ran to her. Took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“Raffaele?”
“It’s okay,” he said as they raced up the stairs. “It’s just that my brothers are here.”
Her gasp almost suctioned all the air out of the stairwell. “Dio mio! Your brothers? But we are—”
“Right.” He shouldered open the door to his room, almost broke his neck tripping over the dozens of boxes and shopping bags piled on the floor. “I haven’t told them anything about—I haven’t said a word to anyone about—” He took a breath. “Just get dressed, baby, okay? I’ll handle the rest.”
“Get dressed in what? This is not my room, it is yours.”
“Yeah. Okay, but there’s stuff here.” He gestured at the packages. “The things you tried on this morning.”
“You bought it all?”
“Yes. So just grab something and—”
“But I told you—”
“This is no time to argue!” Rafe hurried into his dressing room, yanked on a pair of jeans, tugged a T-shirt over his head and heard Nick’s voice drifting up the stairs.
“Rafe? Are you up there, man?”
Chiara froze. So did he. “Raffaele?” she whispered.
Rafe shook his head, held up his hand. “I’ll be right down.”
“We’ll come up if—”
“No! No, that’s okay. I’m on my way.”
“Raffaele.” His wife was the color of cream. “My clothes…they are all over the living room!”
So were his. Damn. It was face-the-music time. A couple of minutes from now his brothers would know all about Chiara. That he had gone to Italy, that he had married her against his better judgment…
That he loved her.
The timing sucked. They’d know that last part before she did but what the hell, if there was one thing life had taught him, it was that you played the cards you were dealt even if they weren’t the ones you’d have preferred.
He took a couple of breaths, then went to the door.
“Raffaele, wait!”
Chiara flew to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, rose on her toes and kissed him. He took her by the wrists and drew her hands to her sides.
“We have to talk.”
He sounded more serious than she had ever heard him sound. The look in his eyes was serious, too. A chill swept through her.
“Talk about what, Raffaele?”
She saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed.
“About us.” He lifted his hand as if he might cup her cheek but he didn’t. Instead he headed for the stairs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FALCO and Nick were on the terrace, deep in conversation.
Rafe knew they were talking about him. He hadn’t gone to the office in over a week. He’d shown up at The Bar and behaved like a crazy man, and today, again, he hadn’t shown up at work.
Yeah. Well, okay. The sooner he told them what was going on, the better.
First he’d get rid of that telltale pile of clothes by the sofa. Maybe they hadn’t noticed it. He could just grab the stuff, like this, open a door of the built-in sound system and jam it all inside.
Good. Excellent. Now take another deep breath—he was becoming an expert at those—and join them on the terrace.
“Hi,” he said brightly.
His brothers turned toward him. They looked grim.
“Great idea, coming out here,” he said so cheerfully that he felt like a TV commercial. “The sun, the blue sky—”
“What’s going on?” Falco said.
“Going on?”
“You heard him,” Nick said. “What’s the deal with you?”
“No deal.” This was going to be
harder than he’d thought. “I just…I just—”
“You haven’t come to the office in days.”
Falco’s tone annoyed him. “What, I need a note from Mama saying why I’m absent?”
“Are you sick?”
“Am I—?” Rafe shook his head. They were worried about him, was all. His expression softened. “No, Nicolo. I’m not.”
Nick and Falco exchanged looks. Then Nick reached into the pocket of his suit jacket.
“You left this in the elevator.”
He looked at what was in Nick’s hand. Hell. Chiara’s white cotton panties. He’d forgotten to tell the clerk at Saks to provide his wife with lingerie, but it didn’t matter; there was something about all that innocent white cotton that—
“Rafe?”
His head came up. Nick’s eyebrows were raised. So were Falco’s.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, and grabbed the panties from his brother.
“Either you’ve taken to cross-dressing,” Falco said calmly, “or more than the elevator was going down.”
Another time Rafe would have laughed. Now he was too busy trying to stuff the panties into his pocket.
“Very amusing.”
“Does this have to do with that woman you said was staying here?”
“No. Yes.” Rafe glared at Nick. “Hey, man, what is this? An interrogation?”
His brothers looked at each other again.
“It’s called brotherly concern,” Falco said wryly. “It’s what happens when you have a brother who’s always behaved a certain way and all of a sudden he begins doing stuff that doesn’t make sense.”
“Look, I’m fine. Okay? I’m not a kid. And—”
“We’re worried about you, man.”
Rafe’s righteous indignation vanished. They were worried. He could see it. Besides, putting this off wouldn’t make the telling any easier.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Uh, anybody for a beer?”
“No,” Falco growled.
Nick gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs. “Beer sounds good.”
Falco glared at him. Nick shrugged his shoulders, raised his eyebrows, did everything he could to transmit the message. Back off. Give him time. Don’t crowd him. Okay?
A muscle ticked in Falco’s jaw. He was not good at backing off, but after a couple of seconds he nodded.
“Beer’s fine.”
The brothers marched into the kitchen. Nick almost tripped over a woman’s high-heeled boot. He grinned, gave Falco another elbow. Falco looked, grinned, but then the two of them frowned.
The situation might have been funny, but it wasn’t. They had come here worried that Rafe was sick. Now they knew whatever was wrong with him had something to do with a woman. A woman for whom he’d lost a week’s worth of appointments. A woman he was so hot for he’d undressed her in his elevator. Okay, sure, each of them had done the elevator bit or something close to it, but for one of them to change the very pattern of his life…
Not good. Not good at all.
They took the cold, sweating bottles of beer Rafe took from the Sub-Zero fridge. Opened the bottles, drank, wiped the backs of their hands across their mouths, gave him time, gave him time, gave him—
“I got married.”
Nick’s beer bottle slipped through his hand. He made a last-minute grab and caught it, but not before half its contents spilled on his shoes. The bottle in Falco’s hand tilted, sending a waterfall of beer down the front of his suit.
“You what?”
Rafe raised his shoulders, let them drop.
“I got married. A week ago.”
Nick looked at Falco. “He got married.”
Falco nodded. “The white underpants.”
“He married a woman who wears white—”
“Okay,” Rafe said coldly, “that’s enough. We’re not going to do a comedy riff on my wife’s underwear.”
Silence. Then Nick cleared his throat. “Fine. What we’d really like to discuss is your wife.”
Rafe hesitated. Then he gave another of those shrugs. “Yeah. I just—The thing is, I don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning almost always works,” Falco said quietly.
Rafe nodded. He put his bottle of beer on the counter. His brothers did the same. Then they wandered into the living room, sat down, and Rafe began to talk.
He did as Falco had suggested. Began at the beginning, at the meeting called by their father.
“The old man was at his best,” he said grimly. “He didn’t just talk about dying, he talked about his soul.”
His brothers snorted. “What soul?” Nick said.
“I told him that, but he insisted he’d done something years ago, in Sicily, and now he had to make up for it.”
“And what did that have to do with you? For that matter, what does it have to do with your getting married?”
“He said the only way to make up for what he’d done was for me to go to San Giuseppe—”
“Where he was born?”
“Right. He wanted me to go there and marry the daughter of a Sicilian don.”
“And you told him what he could do with that request,” Falco said.
“I did. I told him there was no way in the world I’d do it. Trouble was, I’d already given my word that I’d help him with the immortal soul nonsense.” Rafe paused, tried to pretend his brothers weren’t looking at him as if he’d lost his mind. “So I said, okay, I’d fly to Sicily but I sure as hell wasn’t marrying anybody.”
“Then, how’d you end up marrying this—this hoodlum princess?”
“She’s not,” Rafe said sharply. “She’d not anything like that.”
“Sorry,” Falco said coolly. “How’d you end up putting a ring on a stranger’s finger?”
Rafe laughed. “Actually, I haven’t. Not yet. It was—it was a kind of quick thing, you know? See, what happened was…”
Was what?
He thought about how Chiara had waylaid him on the road from Palermo. He thought of the first time he’d kissed her. They didn’t need to hear all that. It was too personal, too much a part of what he and his wife had immediately felt for each other and tried to deny. Instead, he told them the only part that counted. The ultimatum handed down by her father, that if Rafe didn’t marry her, he would give her to his brute of a capo.
Nick swore softly.
Rafe nodded. “I didn’t have any choice. I said I’d marry her. And I did.”
“You had a choice,” Falco said. “You could have walked away.”
“Would you?”
Falco gave him a long, assessing look. Then he shrugged. “Okay. You married her. Brought her to the States. And then what? Surely you told her you weren’t doing this for real.”
“Of course!” Rafe dug his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and began to pace. “Would I marry a woman I didn’t choose for myself? Would I marry a woman because Cesare demanded it?”
“Hell, no.”
“I made it clear this whole thing was temporary.”
“You called your lawyer?”
“Sayers. Sure. I called her right away.” Rafe shook his head. “She’s been out of the country. She told me to call the guy covering for her.”
“And you did.”
“No. I didn’t.” Telling the story was almost as complicated as living it. “I thought I’d wait for Sayers to come home…but things began to change.”
“The white-panties-in-the-elevator kind of change,” Nick said mildly.
Rafe swung toward him, glaring. “I told you that wasn’t up for discussion.”
“Maybe it should be. You took the lady to bed. You turned a logistical problem into an emotional one,” Falco said coldly.
“No. Yes. Damn it, it’s not that simple!”
“Isn’t it?”
“I knew what I had to do. Be supportive. Help her get started. Find her a place to live, that kind of thing.”
“But?”
“But it was all
easier said than done. I felt responsible for her.” He paused. “And then, just a little while ago, I got it all sorted out.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Falco muttered.
“I realized I’d been dancing around, refusing to deal with reality.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “Hallelujah.”
“And now, I know exactly what I have to do.”
“Then do it.”
“I was going to. I was going to talk to Chiara, tell her the truth—but you two bozos showed up.”
“So, you’ll tell her after we leave.”
“Of course I will. But, see, it isn’t that easy.” Rafe turned and paced the room again, then swung toward his brothers. “She knows I wanted out. I was up-front about it right from the start. Hell, I said it every chance I could. I didn’t want her misunderstanding our deal. But—”
“But you’ve slept with her,” Falco said bluntly. “And that complicated things.”
“Did you hear what I said? It isn’t that simple.”
“Sure it is. You’re worried about how she’ll react when you tell her the truth.”
“Damn it, of course I’m worried! What if she doesn’t react the way I want her to react? What if she says no? What if she says, ‘Raffaele, I married you. And now—’”
“And now,” a female voice said, “and now, it is over.”
The three men swung around. Nick and Falco blinked. The woman who stood halfway down the steps was dressed all in black. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she was carrying a black overnight bag.
“Chiara.” Rafe smiled and started toward her. “Baby. I’m glad you’re here. I want you to meet my—”
“I have no interest in meeting these men.”
Chiara’s tone was frigid. A good thing, because her pulse was racing so fast that the room was spinning. If she sounded cold, sounded controlled, perhaps she would not weep. Perhaps her Raffaele would never know that he had broken her heart.
“Sweetheart. These are my broth—”
“I left the things I wore on the bed, Raffaele. I am sure you can give them to charity.”
Rafe blinked. What in hell was happening? Why was his Chiara dressed like this? Why was she looking at him through such cold eyes? He’d just been about to tell his brothers that he was in love with his wife, that he was terrified of telling her he loved her because she might say that was all very nice but she wanted her freedom, just as he’d promised.
Raffaele: Taming His Tempestuous Virgin Page 16