by Lynne Graham
‘Cesare…’ she gasped helplessly on the peak of a hunger too painful to be borne.
‘Bella mia…’ With a savage groan, he plunged into her, and the wildness of pure sensation took over as he surged inside her in a driving possession, moving harder and faster with a shuddering intensity that utterly controlled. Remorselessly he took her with him to the heights of mind-blowing ecstasy. When release came in a flood of shattering sensation, it felt like flying into the sun and burning up…
Mina wakened with a frantic start when the door opened. She snatched the sheet up over her in sleepy consternation as Giulia appeared with a laden tray. ‘Buongiorno, signora.’
‘Buongiorno,’ she mumbled, stealing a glance round the unfamiliar room and the mortifyingly tossed bed. Cesare’s room…Cesare’s bed.
Giulia pulled back the curtains letting the sunlight flood in. ‘You want I run bath, signora?’
‘No, thanks.’ Even to her own ears Mina sounded a little shrill. Having staff around added a whole new dimension to embarrassment, she decided.
Wild imagery of the night before choked her on her first sip of fruit juice. It was little wonder she had slept so late. Hot pink drenched her skin as she noticed a tiny bluish bruise on one breast and became aware of the unaccustomed ache which was doubtless the reward of an orgy of lovemaking. Don’t kid yourself, she urged herself painfully. You were making love, he was having sex…
She had come into this bedroom simply to talk yet talking had bitten the dust ludicrously fast. It was all very well to complain that Cesare did not take her seriously but succumbing to his every lustful advance with mindless, breathless surrender was not exactly the intelligent approach likely to impress a rich, arrogant Sicilian tycoon. The bedroom was a battlefield with a man of Cesare Falcone’s ilk. Every time she went weak at the knees in his radius she was letting herself down!
When he had told her that he had been in love with her four years ago, all sorts of softened feelings had foolishly blossomed inside her. But loving Cesare did not mean she didn’t see his flaws. She could well imagine him getting half way to Hong Kong before it dawned on him that he might actually be in love. Having satiated himself with sex, she thought darkly, there had then been space for him to consider feelings.
But in five long days he had made no attempt to contact her. There had been no phone calls. Indeed phones which had normally rung off the hook in her office while he was away had remained defiantly silent. It was as if the world had stopped dead and on the fifth evening she had gone home to that special delivery. Dismissal and rejection combined.
Pain engulfed her. He might think he had loved her but Mina didn’t believe that what he had been feeling then was love. He had openly admitted that he had wanted her physically from the very first moment he saw her. And for three months he had fought that desire. Shamelessly candid on the subject, he had even admitted seeing other women in an attempt to satisfy that lust elsewhere.
But when that hadn’t worked he had decided to take her to bed. Neither of them had been able to ignore, suppress or control that powerful attraction and Mina was painfully convinced that what Cesare had briefly interpreted as love had merely been a fancy word for intense sexual desire. No doubt had fate allowed him more time with her, he would have got bored and appreciated that reality.
The door opened. Her hand shook so badly when she saw him that she had to put her cup of coffee back down on the tray. He strolled to the foot of the bed and smiled with raw brilliance. And that was it. He didn’t even need to open his mouth. She wanted to throw the tray at him.
‘I took down the barricades next door,’ he drawled indolently.
Mina turned a beetroot colour and reached back for her coffee, any excuse to avoid looking at him again. But it really didn’t matter. He was etched in her mind’s eye anyway. Drop-dead gorgeous in faded tight jeans which clung to narrow hips and long, lean thighs, and a casual white polo shirt which hugged broad shoulders and a superbly muscular chest. He looked stunningly handsome…and one hundred per cent predator on the prowl.
‘You look spectacular,’ he murmured, his accent growling sexily along every syllable of the extraordinary assurance.
‘Spectacular’—with her hair on end, last night’s makeup probably blackening her eyes and teeth-marks in impossibly intimate places? Inwardly she cringed from her own weakness. There were degrees of susceptibility. Consummating their marriage was one thing. Throwing herself heart and soul into an orgy was another thing entirely.
She stole an upward glance and collided with another slow burning smile that was intimately redolent of the erotic memories tormenting her. Only itwas obvious that Cesare was not being tormented. He was quite visibly on a high. If he had brought out a bottle of champagne and uncorked it, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
‘Why are you smiling all of a sudden?’ Mina muttered suspiciously.
‘You want an honest answer?’
‘Last night about the only thing you didn’t threaten me with was a dungeon and chains!’
‘Celibacy doesn’t agree with me.’ Deep-set dark eyes rested on her with unconcealed satisfaction.
Mina lost her heady colour and gulped back cooling coffee in an effort to conceal how devastating she found that response. They were married and she didn’t feel married. She squinted at her bare finger, dimly recalled hurling the ring down the table down at him. She had no desire to go looking for that ring. It was the empty symbol of a relationship which did not exist on his side of the fence.
Cesare’s prime motivation had been acquiring his daughter. Since he had been quite honest about that from the outset, why had she married him still cherishing such naive expectations? Shouldn’t his behaviour before the wedding have been a sufficient warning of what lay ahead? Agonising as it was to face hard reality, she made herself face it. Cesare had only one use for her and it was a pretty basic one.
Weeks ago in London, he had said he would pay the price for her sexual favours and in the end the price had turned out to be marriage. Her skin chilled at that acknowledgement. He might not have wanted to marry her but right now Cesare thought he had it all. He had Susie, he had a convenient mother for Susie and he had an outlet for that shockingly high-powered sex drive of his. Little wonder that he was content with the current status quo. It demanded nothing from him.
She had less value than a mistress, none at all as a wife. Now that he had her stashed in the darkest depths of Sicily, he didn’t give a damn about her feelings or her needs. Why should he? He thought she was a moneygrubbing confidence trickster finally receiving her just deserts. No pain, no gain. That was the level on which that brooding Latin temperament of his functioned and in sharing a bed with him she betrayed her self-respect.
‘I also accept that you weren’t lying about Clayton,’ Cesare imparted lazily, as though he was merely mentioning it in an afterthought, golden eyes resting on her with unashamed gratification. ‘Whatever game you were playing with him, you weren’t sleeping with him.’
Flames of angry colour drenched her cheeks. So he finally believed her about something. But it was a case of too little too late. Indeed when she registered just how primitively pleased Cesare was by the knowledge that he had been her only lover, ironically she found herself wishing that she had kept her mouth shut.
He harboured a medieval streak of outright sexual possessiveness. She should have left him to stew in the pit of his own dark suspicions. He hadn’t deserved the truth but Mina’s essential honesty had betrayed her. Foolishly she had fallen in to the thankless habit of constantly defending herself, vainly struggling to establish a relationship which had a future with the man she loved…and where had it got her? she asked herself now.
‘How would you like to spend the day?’ he enquired, magnificently untouched by the bitter regrets attacking her.
‘Dressing in sackcloth and ashes and jumping off a cliff.’
‘That is not funny.’
‘I don’t feel funny…
I feel…’ Her voice wobbled. ‘I feel used and angry and very, very bitter!’
In despair, she thrust away the tray, slid out of bed and returned to her own room, for once indifferent to her own lack of clothing.
‘Mina…?’
‘Look, leave me alone!’ she slung back at him shakily, and vanished into the bathroom.
Well, her generosity had finally died, she told herself. Loving him didn’t mean she had to make a doormat of herself. If he wanted a marriage for Susie’s benefit, he could have a marriage for Susie’s benefit. She would be Susie’s mother but she would not be his wife. Why should she allow him to humiliate her? Had he ever done anything else? She was sick and tired of being attacked with sins she had not committed. Sick and tired of the pain, sick and tired of the wayward emotions which kept on making her a target for more pain. This was never going to be a normal marriage. Cesare was not going to wake up some day and magically believe that she was an innocent victim. He had destroyed the evidence which she might have been able to use «to establish her innocence. He had refused to listen to her. He had not once made the slightest effort to employ that brilliant mind on the startling idea that she might not be guilty as charged. Well, OK, fine…if that was how he was determined to play it, but Mina intended to embark on her own offensive.
She went downstairs an hour later, clad in denim Bermudas and a cerise tie blouse, both of which had retailed at chain-store prices. She had dumped every single scrap of the clothing he had bought her on the floor in his bedroom.
She ran Giulia to earth in a room off the vast kitchen and engaged her services as an interpreter so that she could invite Cesare’s housekeeper to show her round the castello. Paolo, who turned out to be Maria’s husband, officially took charge of the tour. With Giulia translating as best she could, Mina struggling to pick up the humble beginnings of a basic working vocabulary in Italian and everyone cheerfully correcting her pronunciation while answering her many questions, it was a lengthy but surprisingly enjoyable exercise.
‘So this is where you are.’
The animated conversation tailed away into silence. Mina’s amethyst eyes darkened and hardened on the sight of Cesare poised in the doorway. ‘I’ve been taking the official tour,’ she said.
‘I planned to show you round.’
‘As you see, it wasn’t necessary.’
Her companions melted away like snow in summer, subdued by the electric tension in the air. Cesare surveyed Mina’s defiantly set face, took in the outfit and elevated an ebony brow. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Well, I don’t want to play at being your wife any more,’ Mina breathed flatly. ‘I gave it a whirl and, let me tell you, twenty-four hours was more than enough.’ A deep dark bitterness unlike anything she had ever known lanced through her as she drew herself up to her full diminutive height, quite untouched by the incredulous look stamped on Cesare’s dark, vibrant features. ‘The worm has turned, Cesare. I can’t change the way you feel about me but the good news is I don’t care any more! I don’t give a damn what you think. Nor do I have the slightest interest in what you say, what you do or where you go!’
‘I’m not going anywhere——’
‘Oh, I expect you’ll change your mind about that. If you want what you call personal entertainment,’ Mina phrased in a tone of shaking rage, ‘then you can go find it elsewhere! As far as I’m concerned I’m not married to you.’
Cesare surveyed her with blatant disbelief. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous. Out of the utmost generosity of spirit, I decided to give you a second chance——’
‘You decided to give me a second chance?’ he practically whispered.
‘And you blew it in one night. I was prepared to do the very best I could to make this a real marriage,’ Mina told him rawly. ‘I was not prepared to be greeted with a new series of threats and yet another one of your revenge fantasies——’
‘My what?’ Cesare roared at her.
‘I hate your guts!’ Mina splintered back at him with what was perfect truth at that precise moment, on the edge of leaping up and down with sheer uncontrollable rage. ‘I wouldn’t want your precious forgiveness if I was on the edge of the grave! And not if you were lying on that floor right now dying would you get my forgiveness for what you’ve done to me! I’m finished with you—absolutely, totally finished with you on a personal basis!’
There was an instant of sharp silence as she spat out those final syllables.
Eyes narrowed to a gleam of glancing gold beneath black lashes rested on her for a timeless moment and then, without the smallest warning, Cesare flung his arrogant dark head back and burst out laughing.
It was like throwing a match on a bale of hay. Mina went up in flames. Stalking across the room, she swung her hand back to slap him but he ducked with fluid speed and shot out two powerful hands to capture her wrists before she could pull back. Her teeth gritted, she attempted to kick him to force him to release her. He dropped his hands fast to her narrow ribcage and simply lifted her off the floor.
‘Put me down!’ she screeched at him as he held her at arm’s length.
Rampant amusement sent a dazzling smile across his sensual mouth. ‘I plead self-defence.’
Meeting that charismatic smile was like running into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Rage turned to complete bewilderment. If she had been on her own feet, she would have swayed with dizziness, and while she was warring with that alarming reality Cesare brought her up to him and closed his arms round her.
‘Put me down,’ Mina mumbled in a different voice entirely.
‘I have this appallingly sexist urge to kiss you,’ he whispered in a thickened tone that sent tiny little shivers running down her spine.
‘F-forget it.’
In blatant disagreement, Cesare rearranged her even more intimately against him, settling her arms down on to his shoulders and splaying his hands on the swell of her hips. He let his mouth nuzzle against the taut curve of her delicate jawbone and then probed the mutinously sealed line of her lips. She quivered, fighting what he could make her feel with every fibre of her being, terrified that she would respond.
Disconcertingly, hot, salty tears suddenly lashed her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks. She despised her own weakness, despised herself utterly for even being tempted. Wanting hurt, loving hurt, and she had allowed him to teach her those things.
Abruptly, Cesare lowered her back down to the floor. ‘Mina?’ He sounded shaken.
She dashed a furious hand across her wet cheeks and slung him a look of uninhibited loathing. ‘I hate you!’ she gasped in an ironic lie.
CHAPTER NINE
MINA gazed out over the valley. Near the castello the landscape was thickly wooded but further off she could see olive groves and orchards of orange and lemon trees. The wrought-iron bench she sat on stood in the dappled shade of a huge beech tree. The noisy exchanges of two goats tethered on opposing sides of the road far below briefly disrupted the silence. Mina sighed, charmed by the beauty of the peaceful scene but more troubled than ever by her own tangled thoughts.
She hadn’t seen Cesare since yesterday. He had left her alone. She had asked for a tray in her room last night and had lain sleepless until long after midnight, ruefully reflecting on the truly mortifying reality that even fighting with him was preferable to being deprived of him altogether. She was deeply ashamed of that fact.
The soft crunch of footfalls turned her head. Cesare stilled several feet away, sunlight gleaming over his black hair and glancing off the hard angles of his classic profile. She tensed, disconcerted that he had tracked her down.
‘This was my great-grandmother’s favourite place,’ he murmured in wry explanation. ‘She died when I was thirteen. For a long time afterwards I would come here to feel close to her and I would still see her sitting there on that bench, dressed from head to toe in black. She was a wonderful old lady, very sharp, very shrewd.’
‘You never talk about your family…’ Mina stared at him.
‘Bisnonna was the most important part of it,’ Cesare told her, his mouth twisting as he looked out over the valley. ‘When my grandparents died in a train crash, she raised my father. He married my mother when she was twenty-one. I was born, then Sandro. My parents may have stayed together but it was a lousy marriage.’
Mina looked at him in astonishment. She remembered him saying that Susie deserved the very best that he could give her and that his parents had done that for him. It had not occurred to her that the best might have been less than perfect.
Cesare expelled his breath in a hiss and swung back to her, his strong features taut and clenched. ‘Believe it or not, I don’t want the same for us,’ he told her with harsh emphasis. ‘I don’t want a charade for Susie’s sake. You can’t fool a child. She would sense the lack of warmth between us, feel the resentment, hear the silences…’
Mina bent her head. He had shaken her and she was suddenly gripped by raw tension as she wondered where the dialogue he had initiated was leading. It sounded very much to her as though he was about to admit that their marriage had been a bad idea, entered into in haste but not to be repented at leisure.
‘You think we made a mistake,’ she forced herself to say out loud.
‘No…’ The silence stretched as taut as a rubber band. ‘I think I am the one who has made mistakes,’ he contradicted grittily.
Her head flew up, startled amethyst eyes skimming to his fiercely set jawline. He still wasn’t looking at her. But abruptly that changed. He spun fluidly round, darkas-night eyes settling on her with perceptible force, a tiny pulse tugging at the edge of his unsmiling mouth, revealing the depth of his strain. ‘It may be no consolation …but I’m not like this with anyone but you. I thought I’d put it all behind me but recognising you in that charity newsletter was like getting a shot of insanity in my veins. Four years ago you left me high and dry and feeling as foolish as an infatuated teenager. I was very bitter. Maybe this time I was trying to rewrite our history…’