by Lynne Graham
‘Are you planning to prosecute us both?’
‘Can you really see me dragging my wife into court? But your mother...’ Santino met her wide, fearful eyes in a head-on collision that slithered through her like a hard physical blow. ‘I have no inhibitions about punishing her.’
‘But if you consider me equally at fault that wouldn’t be fair!’ Frankie protested, utterly appalled by the idea of her mother being taken to court and prosecuted like a criminal.
‘Are you telling me that you were in on it too, from the start?’ Santino demanded very quietly. ‘I had received the impression that Della ensured that you received only a small percentage of the money.’
Frankie’s heart was pumping at feverish speed behind her breastbone. She could hardly breathe. ‘I knew exactly what Della was doing right from the beginning,’ she lied with fierce emphasis, reasoning that if she forced him to share out the blame it might somehow lessen his fury with her mother and persuade him to direct it at her instead.
Santino was very still, his spectacular bone structure rigid below his golden skin, his eyes hooded. ‘You’re changing your story now?’
‘I knew that taking your money was wrong but I... I hated you after I saw you with that woman in Cagliari!’ Frankie shot her last bolt in her determination to give her mother what protection she could.
‘That I can believe...but I also once believed that you would sooner starve than knowingly accept my support. Hence the original secrecy. Was I really that naive?’ Santino surveyed her with narrowed dark eyes of grim enquiry, his beautiful mouth taking on a uniquely cynical twist. ‘That protective, that romantic? It seems you’re not the only one who needed to grow up five years ago. I set out to be a hero and fell at the first fence!’
Frankie wasn’t listening to him. ‘Please don’t do this to Mum,’ she whispered pleadingly. ‘Give her the time to move out of the house with dignity—’
‘And what would I get in return for such undeserved restraint?’
The silence lay thick and oppressive in the stillness. There wasn’t the slightest breeze. The heat of midday was like a cocoon. It dampened her skin beneath her clothing. As she breathed in deeply, her distraught green eyes locked into that lancing look of ruthless challenge.
‘I don’t know what you want...’
‘Don’t you?’ A derisive smile of disagreement twisted Santino’s sensual mouth. ‘I want you in my bed.’
‘I can’t believe that...’ Frankie muttered unsteadily, unable to accept that he could be serious. ‘I can’t believe that that’s what you want.’
‘Isn’t that what every man wants from a beautiful woman?’
‘I’m not beautiful—’
Santino advanced in one long, graceful stride. He stared down at her with brooding dark golden eyes that burned hotly beneath her skin. And then he lifted his hands and with cool, deft fingers detached the clip from her plait ‘I like your hair loose.’
With disturbing patience he threaded out the multiple strands one by one, and the whole time Frankie stood there trembling, barely breathing, but with every brush of those brown fingers against her cheekbone, or her scalp, or even the nape of her neck, her heart raced faster and her pulses pounded even harder, leaving her dizzy.
‘Very beautiful, very sexy,’ Santino stressed huskily as he drew her closer.
Instantly she tensed, the sun-warmed, eerily familiar male scent of him flaring her nostrils. Her breasts felt languorously full and heavy, the nipples taut buds of swollen sensitivity pushing against the rough cotton that bound them. There was no thought in her dazed mind as she connected with shimmering golden eyes, only a powerful, drugging awareness of every throbbing skin-cell she possessed.
‘And so incredibly submissive all of a sudden too. And you might tell yourself it’s to save Della from her just deserts, but really that wouldn’t be honest, piccola mia. There’s a streak of wildness in you. There always was,’ Santino breathed in a harshly amused undertone as he released her again. ‘And right now you’re more likely to expire from excitement than petrified reluctance!’
In shock, Frankie fell back from him, outraged by that assurance but silenced by a sudden sense of intense shame as she acknowledged the truth of it. Her own weak body betrayed her with wanton efficiency. For an instant she had wanted him with a desperate physical yearning over which she had absolutely no control. And it had nothing to do with any echo from the past, nothing to do with what she had once felt...it had been an instinctive craving born very much of the present.
Santino bent down and, drawing two glasses from the basket, he passed her one. ‘I’m not complaining, you understand,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘A sacrificial lamb wouldn’t appeal to me. But then what you’ve become doesn’t have any lasting appeal either...’
Her skin as hot as hellfire, angry pain sparking in a raw surge through her taut length, Frankie stood her ground. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That at this moment I believe three weeks will suit me fine.’ Dense black lashes screening his gaze, Santino treated her to a gleaming scrutiny that was coolly derisive. ‘Three weeks will be quite long enough.’
Three weeks was the span of the vacation she had planned to spend touring Italy. Her hand shook slightly as he let clear sparkling wine splash down into her glass. ‘You’re asking me to spend that time with you?’
‘Only this time around Hamish gets to sleep alone,’ Santino spelt out lazily.
‘I had gathered that,’ Frankie gritted, but she couldn’t meet his eyes.
‘At the end of it, we go our separate ways and get a divorce. Della moves out of the house and I wipe the slate clean. It’s a very generous offer,’ he asserted softly.
It didn’t feel generous to Frankie; it felt horribly humiliating and degrading. She recalled the derision in his gaze and shrank inside herself. Santino had seemed almost like a stranger in the café, but that impression had melted away when she’d seen flashes of the Santino she remembered. Only now he was a stranger again.
‘The choice is yours.’
‘I don’t see a choice.’ If she didn’t stay, he would prosecute Della. She could not bear to think of her mother being dragged through court on a charge of serious fraud, even if that was very probably what she deserved, she allowed painfully. ‘I have no option but to agree,’ she breathed tightly.
‘Don’t pluck violin strings,’ Santino advised very drily as he dug a mobile phone out of his pocket, punched out a number and proceeded to speak to someone in Italian too fast for her to follow. Retracting the aerial, he slung the phone aside. ‘The eviction order will not be served.’
In a silent daze of disbelief at the agreement he had forged on her, Frankie sank clumsily down on the rug and tipped the wine to her parched lips with a trembling hand.
CHAPTER FOUR
A FIRM hand shook Frankie’s shoulder and she opened her eyes. The sun had changed position in the sky.
‘It’s time to leave.’ Reaching down to close his hands over hers, Santino pulled her upright with easy strength.
It was afternoon. Her last recollection was of setting down that empty wine glass. She had slept for a couple of hours. Awkwardly smoothing down her creased trousers, Frankie straightened and finger-combed her wildly tumbled hair out of her drowsily bemused eyes. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
‘I assumed that you still needed some extra rest.’ Santino swept up the rug and folded it. The picnic basket had already gone.
‘Why did you bring me to this place anyway?’ Frankie demanded with helpless curiosity.
‘Perhaps I was foolishly attempting to resurrect fond memories of the family you abandoned on this island.’
At that charge, Frankie froze in shock. ‘I beg y-your pardon?’
‘Gino, Maddalena and Teresa,’ Santino enumerated with cutting precision. ‘Although you have yet to ask, your grandfather and your great-aunts are all alive and well.’
Santino swung fluidly on his heel and stro
de back up the grassy track towards the road. Turning a furious pink at that censorious assurance, Frankie raced after him. ‘I wrote several times and my grandfather never replied once!’
‘Don’t tell me any more lies,’ Santino advised with an icy bite in his tone as she drew level with him. ‘You didn’t write. I would’ve been the first to hear of it if you had.’
‘I did write...I did!’ Frankie protested defensively, but then in her mind’s eye loomed the memory of Della taking the letters from her and assuring her that she would post them. Her heart sank like a stone. Had those stilted communications she had sweated blood and tears over ever been posted? After all, any exchange of news between Frankie and Gino Caparelli might have endangered Della’s plans to enrich herself at Santino’s expense.
‘I bet Mum didn’t post my letters!’ she exclaimed.
Santino skimmed her a look of silent and crushing contempt.
Frankie turned her head away, conscious that he didn’t believe her and that her excuse sounded pitifully weak. Yet she had written several times to her Sard relatives. But those first months back in London had also been a period of frightening disorientation and readjustment for Frankie...
Suddenly plunged back into the world her father had taken her from, she had felt utterly lost and had holed herself up in her mother’s flat like a wounded animal, surrendering to both depression and self-pity. Finding Santino with that other woman in Cagliari had devastated her. Santino had been her whole world then—the focus of her love and trust, the support she leant on in times of crisis and the source of all her self-confidence.
And then, in one appalling moment of revelation, she had finally been forced to face the demeaning reality that their marriage had never been anything other than a cruelly empty charade and a burden on his side of the fence. Well, no matter how badly Santino thought of her now, she certainly wasn’t about to tell him how she had fallen apart after leaving him or how long it had taken her to pull herself back together again!
She climbed into the four-wheel drive. ‘A bloody rich man’, he had called himself. Vitale...the bank in Cagliari... Vitale. She could even recall seeing that name a couple of years ago in a glossy magazine, recognising it because it had once so briefly been her name as well. The story had been about a banking family, a great and legendary Italian banking family, who shielded their privacy to such an extent that photographs of any one of them were rare. And that extreme caution had stemmed from the kidnapping of a family member thirty years earlier.
Two months after her very first meeting with Santino, he had come to tell her grandfather that his son, Frankie’s father, Marco, had been killed in a car crash in Spain. Frankie had been savaged by the news, not least because by that stage she had begun thinking resentfully of the father who had deserted her as being no better than a kidnapper. In her guilt-stricken distress, she had admitted as much to Santino.
‘When your father lied to you and told you that he and your mother were reconciling, when he brought you here and chose to leave you with a family who were strangers...yes, that was irresponsible, selfish and wrong,’ Santino had responded fiercely. ‘But don’t you ever say that you were kidnapped, piccola mia. I have an uncle who many years on still bears the scars of that crime. Kidnappers are cruel and violent criminals who deprive innocent people of their freedom for profit!’
Sinking back to the present, Frankie stole a shattered glance at Santino’s hard classic profile as he ignited the engine of the powerful car and drove off. What was it he had said earlier? That the sight of a Vitale bank draft with his signature on it would make her feel sick? He had also mentioned having an office in Rome.
‘Why were you working in that bank in Cagliari?’ she asked in a wobbly voice, because even though she had had it hurled in her teeth by him already she just found it so incredibly hard to believe that the man she had married at sixteen might always have had a life far removed from hers which he’d chosen to keep secret.
‘I was the manager there. My father believed that it would be useful practical experience for me before I took my seat on the board. However, he did think that choosing to bury myself in a small branch of our bank in Sardinia was going to severe extremes. But he was not then aware that I had other reasons for making that curious choice of locality ... not least a child-bride stashed away in the mountains!’
Our bank. Frankie gulped, realisation dawning. ‘And all the time you owned a blasted castle at the other end of the island!’
‘I only took possession of the castello last year,’ Santino contradicted her. ‘Before that it belonged to my father, and he had leased it out as a hotel for over twenty years.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You told me nothing about yourself—’
‘I told no lies and I gave you as much information as you could cope with. You were perfectly content within your own little world just playing house. Measure the level of your maturity then by recalling how much you ever asked me about what I actually did for a living,’ Santino suggested drily. ‘As I remember it, your sole angle of interest then was that working kept me away from you all week!’
Flames of mortified colour burnished Frankie’s complexion. ‘What was I supposed to ask you? I’d never been in a bank in my life and I just didn’t want to expose my ignorance! Look, where are we going?’ she demanded abruptly. ‘This isn’t the way we came—’
‘We’re heading to Sienta for a long-awaited Caparelli family reunion,’ Santino delivered levelly.
At the news that they were heading for her grandfather’s village, Frankie’s soft mouth dropped open. ‘Sienta?’ she gasped strickenly.
‘I hope your family never learn that you would’ve come to Sardinia and left again without even treating them to a brief visit—’
‘Damn you...don’t you dare turn pious on me!’ Frankie flared back at him in furious reproof. ‘You know better than anyone how miserable I was in that village! My grandfather could’ve written to my mother at any time and she would’ve flown over and taken me home, but she never got the chance because she didn’t know where I was...’
Santino drew the car to a halt again. Then he turned to survey her angry, resentful face. His expressive mouth compressed. ‘I will tell no more lies or half-truths to protect you. You’re old enough to deal with reality. Your mother made no attempt to regain custody of you.’
‘How could she when she didn’t know where I was? My father was always on the move, and naturally she assumed I was with him!’
Santino emitted a pained sigh. ‘After he learnt of his son’s death, Gino gave me his permission to make contact with your mother—’
‘I don’t believe you!’ Frankie cried feverishly.
‘Your grandfather said, “Let my daughter-in-law come here and talk to us and then we will see what is best for the child.” The next time I was in London I visited Della and informed her of Gino’s invitation and your unhappiness. Your mother did nothing.’
‘That’s not true...that can’t be true!’
‘I’m sorry, but it is,’ Santino asserted steadily, his veiled dark gaze meeting her appalled eyes and then skimming with cool diplomacy away again. ‘Your mother had always known where you were because your father phoned her the day he took you, to tell her that he was bringing you to live with his family. Delia has little maternal instinct, and by the time I caught up with her she was out partying every night with her second husband. Even when I told her that Marco was dead, she saw no reason why you shouldn’t stay where you were.’
Frankie twisted her bright head sharply away from him, tears smarting below her lashes. A beautifully shaped masculine hand closed over her convulsing fingers and she tore free of his touch in a stark gesture of repudiation.
Santino released his breath in a raw hiss that sliced through the screamingly tense silence. ‘In telling you the truth I chose the lesser of two evils. At the time, Gino could not bring himself to hurt you with that truth, and his reward was your resentment and bitterness. A
fter your father died, you blamed your grandfather for keeping you in Sardinia. I could not let you return to your family still harbouring that grudge.’
Santino had unveiled the murky core of something Frankie had always secretly feared. Her young and beautiful mother had indeed just got on with her life once her daughter was gone—content, possibly even relieved to be free of the burden of childcare. And ever since Frankie had come home at sixteen that awful truth had been staring her in the face...hadn’t it? Her fond hopes and expectations had never been met by the detached and uninterested parent she had foolishly idealised throughout her years away.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ Frankie breathed, tight-mouthed, falling back on her pride with fierce determination. ‘But I should’ve been told the facts a long time ago.’
Santino drove on. ‘That was not my decision to make.’
A distraught sob clogged up Frankie’s throat. She despised and feared the very intensity of her own emotions. Yet it was a weakness she had learned to live with and conceal. Unfortunately that felt like an impossible challenge in Santino’s presence. And just at that moment it seemed to her that in all her life she had never been loved...
Not by her emotionally cold mother, not by her feckless father, who had stolen her purely in the vengeful hope of punishing his estranged wife, not by her father’s family, who had had no choice but to keep her... and certainly not by Santino, who had already admitted to marrying her because she’d been on his conscience and he’d pitied her.
A tiny gulping sound escaped her compressed lips.
‘Cry... it always makes you feel better,’ Santino suggested, with the disturbing cool of a male who had suffered through countless impassioned sessions of weeping while she was in her volatile teen years.
‘I hate you, Santino...’ And she despised herself even more then, for sounding like a sulky adolescent.