by Penny Jordan
Lizzy flinched when the sleeve to his shirt brushed her arm as he reached past her to pick up her discarded piece of pineapple.
‘No comment,’ he mocked when she still said nothing. ‘I admit, when I saw it, it made me feel positively medieval.’ He put the pineapple into his mouth. ‘I half expected to arrive back here this lunchtime to see the evidence hanging from the window as proof of your chastity and my undoubtedly—’
With a stifled choke, Lizzy turned and ran, switching the cruel battery of his words off like a flick of a switch. As she made it into the hall without throwing up she wondered bitterly if the heavy crash she heard behind her was a sign that he was angry he’d been left mocking a lost audience!
Outside the heat was so intense she almost changed her mind and went back into the coolness of the house. But—no. Burning alive was a better option than going back in there, she thought painfully as she took off across the grass, heading for—she didn’t know where or care.
She did not understand what made him want to be so constantly cruel to her. Twenty-four hours as his bought bride and already she did not know how much more of it she could take.
Dropping down on the stone steps of the gazebo, she hugged her knees to her chest and stared out to sea. She was trembling, her mind filled with lurid images of giggling maids whispering their secret to the rest of the staff here. Luc had called it medieval, Lizzy wanted to call it—
A step sounded close beside her, shutting off her painful thought patterns to replace them with a whole aching set of new ones.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’M—SORRY,’ Luc murmured tautly. ‘That was unforgivably brutal of me.’
So he was aware of it? Lizzy supposed it had to mean something at least. Though thinking that did not stop the glaze of hurt from washing across her eyes before she blinked it away again.
‘When you’ve had enough of punishing me for being the wrong woman you married,’ she whispered, ‘do me one small favour, Luc, and arrange my flight home for me, please.’
His sigh was carried away on the light breeze coming in from the ocean. When he dropped down into a squat in front of her and gently touched his fingers to her pale cheek, she refused to look at him and still just wanted to break down and weep.
‘I was shocked,’ he said gruffly, ‘when I saw the—evidence myself this morning. I felt I had stolen something from you that did not belong to me.’
‘That’s your only excuse?’ Lizzy still would not look at him.
‘No. I have others,’ he admitted, ‘though I don’t think you’re ready to hear them right now.’
He was probably right. She’d heard more than enough of his cynical view of everything. Her heart was breaking into little pieces in her chest and her eyes were still stinging.
‘I will not take the stick you should be beating Bianca with,’ she told him thickly. ‘You spoiled last night for me—twice, counting your performance just now—and I think you did it deliberately.’
‘I attack when I am on the defensive.’
Doesn’t everyone? Lizzy thought painfully.
‘I expected you to throw some deserved accusations at me just now, so I got in first.’
‘You know what you are, Luc?’ At last she turned her face to look at him, and felt no sympathy whatsoever for the now penitent expression she saw on his handsome dark face. ‘You’re so cold and cynical about everything you don’t recognise feelings in others. You believe you can treat me with contempt because I made it so obvious from the start that I’m—attracted to you.’
A strange smile touched his tense mouth. ‘Not contempt,’ he denied.
‘So there was blood on the sheets,’ Lizzy continued unsteadily. ‘A sensitive man would have gently pointed it out to me, but not you. You stride off into the day without a care as to what the embarrassment was going to do to me.’
‘I thought you would have noticed it for yourself.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’ She turned away again. In truth she hadn’t dared look at the bed once she’d scrambled out of it. ‘And what is it you find so wrong with my—inexperience?’ she challenged suddenly. ‘Why do you believe it’s okay to mock it, make a mockery of it?’
‘I can do better.’
Too late for Lizzy.
‘Yesterday I was—angry about a lot of things,’ he disclosed. ‘Things I should not have brought into our bedroom and should not have carried with me out of it this morning. Now I am asking you to accept my apology and my promise that I can and will do better from now on.’
Quite a speech for the sardonic man who believed himself above such things.
‘You’re hunting,’ she murmured absently.
There was a sharp moment of shock, then the soft sound of rueful laughter, then his fingers returned to her cheek and firmly turned her face.
‘I am hunting,’ he agreed with a real smile that actually relaxed his tense features, ‘which makes this a bad day for male lions, cara, because it means they must be feeling desperate.’
That was a message, Lizzy recognised, a serious hint wrapped up in a new kind of rueful warmth. She drew in a breath, wishing she could decide if this was just another one of his clever strategies aimed to keep his life running on its nice even keel.
‘Make me feel ashamed of you once more,’ she said finally, ‘and I walk away from this marriage no matter what you threaten me with.’
To her surprise he just nodded, no clever quick counterattack, face still serious, the dark golden eyes wrapped in luxurious dark eyelashes, an even shape to his beautiful mouth. He’d dropped the cool mask, Lizzy realised, and all she was seeing now was the too handsome, worryingly alluring man.
Then he was rising to his full height and holding out a hand for her to take so he could help her up. Lizzy stared at that hand for a few seconds, still hesitant to take what she knew it was offering, yet too aware of the tingling sting of enticement at work in her blood to stop her own hand from lifting and settling into his. His fingers closed around hers and he drew her upright. When she tried to take her hand back he held onto it and used it to bring her even closer until she was standing a mere breath away from touch-close to his lean, hard, now very familiar length.
Her heart began to thump. He was going to kiss her, and she couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted to be kissed right now. Tension inched up along the length of her spine and made the air shiver as it left her lungs.
‘I n-need some things your wonderful style team forgot to pack in my luggage.’ She went for a diversion on a quick agitated rush of speech.
‘Like what?’ he murmured.
The murmur was disturbingly husky. ‘A gentleman doesn’t ask that question,’ she responded distractedly.
‘I thought we had already established that I’m not one—a gentleman,’ he added.
She looked up, at his mouth, saw the hint of a grimace taking control of it, felt her own lips tremble and part. ‘A s-sunhat, then, and a truckload of sun screen,’ she compromised her answer, trying so hard not to sound as unnerved by his closeness as she actually felt.
But maybe he knew, maybe she even quivered. It was difficult for her to tell any more because tense inner quivers around him had become such a permanent thing she was learning she had to live with. Anyway, he gave a tug at her hand. The thin gap between them disappeared altogether, the warmth of his body heat stimulated every nerve-end she possessed and sent her eyes lifting up to clash warily with his.
Whatever he saw reflected in her eyes sent a strange kind of grimace moving across his lips. Then he did it—he kissed her.
It was such a brief embrace that it had gone before she could even think to react to it.
‘Then let’s go shopping,’ was all he said.
Lizzy knew then that they had just sealed yet another deal between them, though heck if she had enough sense left to work out what this one was about.
And he was back to playing it cool again, being the guy who liked to be in control of everythi
ng—including his renegade wife. He drove them into town in a soft-top sports car with the roof firmly in place to keep the heat of the sun off her fair skin. They strolled in and out of small shops painted in different pretty pastel shades, each one carrying the kind of interestingly individual things that made Lizzy want to linger and browse.
He chose her sunhat while she wasn’t looking, a wide, floppy-brimmed thing made of bright pink straw that he paid for, coolly put on her head, then walked her out of the shop without giving her the chance to object about the colour and the way it had to be clashing with the colour of her hair.
‘Arrogant,’ she muttered.
‘All of my life,’ he answered smoothly, and walked her into a pharmacy and proceeded to pick out the highest factor sun screen he could find and Lizzy let him because—
Well, why not? she told herself. He’d taken command of every other decision in her life, like her clothes, her wedding—her wedding night. So she left him to it and went off to find the other female-type items she’d wanted to buy that she’d left off her list back at the gazebo.
He paid the bill.
And she began to feel like a very mute, very pampered female with just enough resentment burning inside her to stop her from liking it.
As he walked beside her his hand was always in touch with her somewhere—her hand, her arm, the base of her spine—until they bumped into some people he knew, when his arm became that angled pressure across her back and the hand a long fingered clamp in the indentation of her waist that drew her in very close to his side.
Making a silent statement as he’d done at the wedding or being protective of his new bride? Lizzy didn’t know but she leant into him anyway for protection as he introduced her as, ‘My wife, Elizabeth.’
She could tell from their expressions that the news about their scandalous marriage had even reached as far as this tiny island in the Caribbean.
‘Cara, this is Elena and Fabio Romano, friends of mine,’ he completed the introductions.
Elena Romano was young and slender and extremely beautiful, but she wore the kind of curious gleam in her dark eyes that made Lizzy think of a black-eyed witch with long sharp nails. Fabio Romano was tall and tanned and middle-aged with a languid boredom about him that had her wondering if that was where Luc was going to be by the time he reached his middle years.
They said they were cruising the Caribbean on their yacht and invited Luc and Lizzy to join them for the afternoon. Luc was beautifully suave and gracious with his refusal. Fabio Romano was beautifully suave and gracious in his acceptance of it. His lovely wife was not. Her black eyes sparked with irritation, which she vented on Lizzy.
‘Such a sweet hat, cara,’ she murmured, ‘very cute and—pink. How do you dare to wear that shade with your hair colouring?’
‘Luc chose it,’ Lizzy answered smoothly. ‘He likes cute and pink.’
Elena’s light laugh tinkled off into the sunlight. Lizzy felt the press of Luc’s fingers as they bit into her waist.
‘Ah,’ Elena hadn’t finished, ‘that explains your wedding photograph in this morning’s papers—’ she nodded ‘—and the positively dramatic image you made of the pale young virginal bride standing next to her sternly reformed rake.’
Well, the cruelly perceptive bitch, Lizzy thought breathlessly. ‘My style team managed to get it just right, don’t you think?’ She smiled through gritted white teeth.
She hadn’t been around Bianca for years without learning how to respond to such a woman. And even if the floppy brim to her cute pink hat hadn’t been blocking him off from the shoulders upwards, nothing on earth would have made her look up at him as she felt Luc’s fingers bite into her again.
‘And with so little notice.’ Elena slid her eyes down to Lizzy’s stomach, the suggestion she was implying shocking Lizzy into releasing a gasp.
‘Gosh,’ she rallied. ‘It never entered my head that people would think poor Luc had been forced into marrying me!’
‘They don’t.’ Surprisingly it was Fabio Romano who pulled himself out of his boredom to put a stop to this. ‘Elena is fishing for information. She is always fishing for information—it is the staple diet for a professional bitch.’
Well, he said it, Lizzy’s eyes told the other woman while Elena flushed. A few minutes later they’d made their polite farewells and were walking back to where they’d left the car.
‘You were a great help,’ Lizzy said, stiff with anger and a very bruised pride.
Luc, on the other hand, was coolly indifferent. ‘You will learn soon enough that it is safer to say nothing at all around people like Elena.’
Well, Lizzy didn’t want to learn to be quiet. If that was a brief taster of what was waiting for her when they returned to Italy, then she didn’t want any part of it.
‘She’s attracted to you, which is why she got her nails into me.’
‘Now you are being fantastical.’
‘An ex-lover, then, with a grudge because she didn’t end up your dramatically pale virginal bride.’
‘You would have to go back a long way into Elena’s past to find the virgin,’ he laughed. ‘And why are you angry with me when you were more than capable of handling the situation without any help from me?’
‘I don’t like your lifestyle,’ she muttered.
He didn’t say anything to that one. He just opened the car door for her and waited for her to get in. Lizzy pulled off her hat and placed it on her lap, then watched in simmering silence as he dropped her purchases at her feet before he shut her door and strode round the car bonnet to get in beside her.
‘I want to see the photograph she was talking about,’ she told him.
‘No.’ The engine vibrated beneath her on a low growling leap into life.
‘Why not?’ she persisted. ‘Have you seen it?’ she then demanded sharply.
All she got back was a view of his profile set in stone. Her head suddenly began to buzz as he swept them back up the hill towards the villa. Like little pieces of a jigsaw falling into place, Lizzy began to link that ugly scene he’d orchestrated this morning with what Elena Romano had said.
‘You have seen it,’ she declared in a hot, husky voice filled with fizzing resentment. ‘It was the reason why you were so nasty to me this morning. You saw that photo and didn’t like what it fed out there for everyone else to see—namely me, looking all pale and interesting, and you, looking like some poor rich guy who’d been caught by the oldest trick in the book.’
‘You possess a wild imagination,’ he drawled casually.
‘I want to see it,’ Lizzy repeated.
He said nothing, just pulled the car to a stop outside the sugar pink plantation house and climbed out of it. Lizzy did the same thing, glaring at him across the car’s soft top. He was frowning, grimly ignoring her as if she were an irritating fly he would like to swat away with his hand.
Well, that was fine, she told herself as she stalked around the car and into the house. She wasn’t a complete air-head. She knew a man like Luc didn’t go anywhere unless he had a reliable connection to the internet.
So she began stalking the huge hallway, opening doors and glancing inside them before she moved on to the next.
‘If you want to see over the whole house, cara,’ his hateful voice murmured, ‘I am happy to show you around without risking the paintwork on all the doors. Go away, Nina,’ he added as a mere calm aside.
Lizzy turned in time to see the housekeeper disappearing towards the back of the house. He was standing in the middle of the pale marble floor looking so darn together against her sizzling anger that she wanted to fly at him with her nails unsheathed.
Instead she balled her fingers into tense fists by her sides. ‘If you and the rest of the world can see a picture of me at my own wedding, then I want to see it!’ she insisted furiously.
‘I assure you, you don’t,’ he said, smiled, then dropped the smile and shot out an impatient sigh when all she did was to spin her back to him and
move on to fling open the next door. ‘Why is it,’ he snapped out, ‘that everyone else gets to enjoy your placid side while I only get the—?’
His voice just stopped. Lizzy didn’t notice. She was too busy taking in the room she had just stepped into filled with the softest light and gentle shadows—and a huge gold-framed portrait hanging from one of the pale blue walls.
‘The virago,’ she murmured, just too stunned to remember that she was supposed to be hunting down some kind of office in this many-roomed mansion. ‘Dear God,’ she added on a thick shaken swallow as her feet took her further into the room.
‘La Contessa Alexandra De Santis,’ Luc’s deep dry voice fed to her from behind. ‘Grande Dame, matriarch, bad mother, wonderful grandmother, and my other virago inglese.’
‘She looks like me,’ Lizzy whispered.
‘I believe Nina said so,’ he returned evenly.
‘But you don’t?’ She was staring up at the face of a breathtakingly beautiful creature who could have come straight out of a Titian painting.
‘Your hair is darker and your eyes are grey, not blue.’
But the shape of her mouth and the small pointed chin and the hourglass shape of her slender figure inside a gentian-blue gown that could only have been fashioned by the finest haute couture looked like Lizzy.
‘How old is she here?’ she asked on a reverent murmur.
‘Forty nine,’ he replied, dragging another gasp from Lizzy’s shocked lips because she looked barely eighteen. ‘My grandfather commissioned the painting as a gift for her fiftieth birthday. He claimed that her beauty was the only thing about her that kept them together. She claimed they stayed together because she allowed it, despite the countless affairs he enjoyed during their long marriage.’
‘She loved him, you mean.’
‘I like to think so, though I don’t believe he deserved such devoted loyalty—and divorce was not heard of in Italian society in their day.’