The Reluctant Husband

by Lynne Graham

  Her mouth ran dry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘WELL, well, well, at least you’re not still pretending to be asleep,’ Santino commented silkily. ‘Perhaps you are at long last beginning to feel just a little married?’

  ‘Like heck I am!’ With the greatest difficulty, Frankie dragged her attention from the intimidating breadth of his chest and the intensely masculine triangle of rough dark curls hazing his powerful pectoral muscles.

  ‘By dawn I assure you that you will no longer be in any doubt that you belong to me.’

  At that assurance, Frankie bridled in outrage. ‘I do not belong to you!’

  Santino sent her a winging smile that was a shockingly cold threat. ‘For the next three weeks, you do.’

  Something deep down inside Frankie shrivelled up under that chill. That distance, that detachment had been concealed in the presence of her family. Now it sprang out at her from his diamond-hard and incisive scrutiny.

  ‘When you look at me like that, you scare me,’ she muttered, and then would’ve done anything to retrieve that craven admission.

  ‘You’re a beautiful woman and I want to make love to you. That has nothing to do with either emotion or temper,’ Santino asserted with devastating cool, and ran down the zip on his jeans.

  Far from reassured, Frankie sat up with the abruptness of a puppet having her strings jerked. ‘Santino...’

  Santino slid out of his jeans in one fluid motion and stood there, quite unconcerned, in a pair of black briefs which did spectacularly little to conceal the overt differences between the male and female anatomy.

  Hot colour flamed in Frankie’s cheeks and she hurriedly averted her attention to the bedspread instead. ‘Santino...no!’ she whispered frantically.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ he demanded, and with an undeniable lurch of dismay she saw the briefs hit the floor.

  ‘Please, whisper back,’ she begged, in an agony of embarrassment at the thought of her family hearing him.

  The sheet was remorselessly wrenched from her frantically tight hold. ‘I wasn’t planning to do much more talking,’ Santino confessed as he slid into bed with her.

  ‘Not here...not tonight, please,’ Frankie pleaded from the furthest edge of the mattress.

  It wasn’t far enough. Santino reached up with two frighteningly powerful hands and simply tumbled her down on top of him. She landed with a strangled gasp and found herself mercilessly pinned to his uncompromisingly hard male physique, startled eyes on a direct collision course with his questioning scrutiny.

  ‘What the hell is this all about?’ he enquired grimly. ‘If you think you can default on an agreement with a Vitale, you are very much mistaken. What I said earlier I meant. What I paid for I fully intend to enjoy, however briefly.’

  ‘But perhaps you’re not thinking very clearly right now,’ Frankie suggested in breathless dismay as the all-pervasive masculine heat of his naked body began to penetrate even that impregnable nightdress. ‘You’re still very angry with me...and you don’t want to do something you might regret—’

  ‘I want to make love to my wife, Francesca...not commit some violent criminal act,’ Santino incised with considerable irony.

  ‘If you wait until tomorrow night, I’ll do anything you want!’ Frankie gabbled the wildly impulsive promise in desperation.

  Frowning, Santino surveyed her through the veil of his lush black lashes. ‘How many glasses of wine did you have over dinner?’

  ‘I...I...oh!’ Frankie gasped as he rolled her off him again, tumbled her back onto the mattress and pinned one long thigh over her trembling lower limbs.

  ‘Madre di Dio...what are you wearing?’ Santino enquired with incredulous volume, registering the full effect of the garment for the first time.

  Frankie visibly shrank. Disorientatingly, Santino uttered a harsh laugh. He wound one hand into her tousled mane of multicoloured hair and murmured with a cynical twist of his beautifully shaped mouth, ‘I wonder who first told you that what is hidden is infinitely more tantalising to most men?’

  Frankie’s teeth ground together. Her green eyes flashed bright with temper and disdain. ‘Right... you want what you paid for...just go ahead and get it over with!’ she urged with supreme scorn. ‘But don’t expect me to join in or pretend I like it!’

  Gleaming golden eyes settled on her and flamed with slow-burning satisfaction. ‘I love to be challenged.’

  Since that had not been quite the response Frankie had foreseen, her soft mouth dropped open.

  ‘I’ll make you beg me to take you,’ Santino promised.

  ‘No...no, you won’t,’ Frankie mumbled in what sounded even to her own ears a very small, seriously rattled voice.

  ‘You always wanted me,’ Santino countered with drawling, deeply disturbing assurance. ‘I could seduce you with both hands tied behind my back.’

  ‘No...no,’ she said fearfully, registering too late that that was what she was truly afraid of. Not Santino, not even the act of sex itself, but the infinitely worse threat that he might have the power to make her lose control over her own body.

  ‘You’re shaking like a leaf,’ Santino whispered, when suddenly she wanted him to shout because whispering sounded far, far too intimate.

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘It’s anticipation,’ Santino muttered thickly. ‘I know it is—’

  ‘It’s not!’

  ‘Once you could bum up all the oxygen in the room just looking at me. That kind of animal attraction doesn’t fade without fulfilment—’

  ‘I grew out of it!’

  His ebony brows pleating, his long, lithe body tautening, Santino studied her with sudden flaring intensity. ‘Is it possible that the sight of me snogging the life out of that blonde did turn you off men?’

  ‘You have the most incredible ego!’ Frankie practically spat at him.

  ‘Then there isn’t the remotest possibility that you could still be a virgin?’ Santino prompted tautly.

  ‘What do you think?’ Frankie snarled, at her aggressive and defensive best when it came to falling back on pride for strength. ‘Do you also cherish fond hopes about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?’

  At her stinging sarcasm, a tiny muscle jerked at the comer of Santino’s now fiercely compressed lips. ‘Sì...in this day and age you have every reason to greet such a question with incredulity.’

  Over-emotional tears smarting behind her eyes, Frankie jerked her head away and blinked rapidly. She had read that it was often difficult for men to know whether or not a woman was experienced. She prayed that that was true. She could not bear Santino to know that she was still such an innocent! Admitting that truth would be horribly humiliating because he would instantly grasp just how deeply he had wounded her self-image with his indifference five years earlier.

  Shifting, Santino lowered his dark head, his breath mingling with hers. The clean warn scent of him enveloped her. Her own breath shortened, a nervous tremor racking her.

  ‘You’re ridiculously tense...’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Frankie flared accusingly. ‘This is like waiting to be attacked!’

  Santino stiffened and then disconcerted her entirely by bursting out laughing. ‘Is it really? And you want me to...what was that wonderful phrase?...sì, “just get it over with”?’

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  With a wolfish smile that challenged, Santino gathered her to him with dauntingly sure hands and pushed her bright hair back from her cheekbones. Drawn into the raw heat of him, Frankie shivered violently. He dipped his head and, instead of directing his attention to the rigidly uninviting line of her mutinously closed mouth, he pressed his lips to the tiny pulse beating out her wild tension in the hollow of her collarbone. Frankie jerked in complete shock, bereft of breath and if possible even more alarmed by that unexpected opening move.

  ‘You will experience only pleasure in my arms. I promise you that. In fact it is a matter of honour that you should rel
ish sharing a bed with me.’ Playing the tip of his tongue erotically across the excruciatingly tender skin of her throat, Santino sent her pulses leaping into sensual disarray. ‘Open your mouth,’ he urged, glittering eyes like scorching shards of pure gold.

  Frankie trembled, unyielding as marble, but he brushed her mouth with his and then somehow—and later she genuinely couldn’t understand how—her lips softly parted. And without the slightest warning at all Santino was kissing her with slow, deep, shattering intimacy. Her mind was just as suddenly an astonishing blank; her heart pounded in mad excitement with every rawly intrusive thrust of his tongue. What she had never counted on, and what her treacherous body had never before encountered, was that amount of sheer seductive pleasure. It was the pleasure which bowled her over and overwhelmed her.

  ‘San—tino...’ she mumbled, coming up desperately for air.

  ‘Nothing but pleasure,’ Santino promised in growling repetition.

  A hot, melting sensation had begun deep down inside Frankie. Before she knew what was happening to her she was giving back kiss for kiss with frantic, driven urgency.

  ‘You’re very passionate,’ Santino muttered with hoarse satisfaction, curving a firm hand over the thrust of one full breast and unerringly locating the swollen tender nipple beneath the cotton.

  Involuntarily Frankie’s spine arched, and a soundless gasp was torn from her as he gently, deftly used that barrier that she had naively hoped would frustrate him to excite her beyond all bearing. As, with his guidance, the coarse grain of the fabric massaged and tormented those achingly sensitive buds, Frankie started burning all over and found it quite impossible to stay still.

  An arrow of piercing heat twisted between her restive thighs. He lowered his mouth to the straining peaks and still the screening material failed to lessen the depth of her response. Indeed her whole body jackknifed under that fresh onslaught. A strangled moan was wrenched from her and instantly he covered her mouth with his again, silencing her.

  ‘Hush, cara...’ Santino instructed in his deep, dark drawl as he ran an exploring and incredibly arousing hand down the quivering length of one securely cotton-shrouded thigh. ‘I haven’t even begun yet.’

  But, whether he had begun or not, Frankie’s sensationstarved body was already out of her control, and seething with a feverish, needy passion utterly outside her experience. She clutched at his shoulders with straining fingers, striving to find his mouth again for herself. And then, still quite tormentingly indifferent to the shielding thickness of the nightdress, which was now driving her to the heights of screaming frustration because she wanted so badly to feel her skin naked against his, Santino discovered the most sensitive place of all with an impossibly gentle hand.

  A tortured moan of intolerable hunger escaped Frankie. ‘Take the wretched thing off,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Shush,’ Santino soothed, while doing everything possible to ensure that the only way she could keep quiet was either to bite him or bite the pillow. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  It was more than Frankie did. Twisting and turning against him, out of her mind with excitement, her entire body was clenched unbearably tight by the burning hunger he had ignited with his touch. Lost and driven without her own volition to a shattering peak of hunger, an explosion of ecstatic pleasure burst without warning inside her, plunging her into wave after wave of drugging sensual delight. At the same moment Santino crushed her under him and sealed his mouth to hers to swallow every gasping cry she made.

  When he freed her and she was able to breathe again, Frankie was in so much shock she was a shadow of her usual aggressive self, limp with the satiation of physical gratification and simultaneously devastated by the experience.

  In the thundering silence, Santino scanned her shaken face and dazed eyes with a disturbingly shrewd look of satisfaction. ‘Now that was definitely a first for you.’

  Assailed by the most outraged sense of seething mortification, Frankie thrust him away from her with wild and frantic hands. Turning her back on him, she curled up as warily stiff as a hedgehog ready to repel attack. The light went out. She lay there, boiling alive with shame at the awareness that Santino had watched her lose all control while he caressed her wanton, hatefully responsive body. And he hadn’t even had to take her nightdress off...though she had actually begged him to remove it, she recalled strickenly, absolutely horrified by her own behaviour.

  A long arm plucked her off the very edge of the mattress and drew her remorselessly back into all too physical contact. Frankie went rigid but Santino ignored the fact. Flipping her over, indifferent to the imprisoning folds of the nightdress entrapping her, he sealed her into relentless connection with his long, lithe body. In the moonlight, her eyes flew wide. Against her stomach she felt the shocking proof that he was still very aroused. He had given her the pleasure he had promised but had as yet taken none for himself.

  ‘You said if I waited until tomorrow night you’d do anything I want,’ Santino reminded her, with terrifying timing and truly devastating effect. ‘A provocative offer... and for me? Pure erotic temptation. So for what remains of tonight I will practise patience and selfrestraint...’

  Whipped back into life by that tigerish taunting purr, Frankie very nearly exploded with temper. And then she bit her lower lip so hard she hurt herself, but contrived to practise some much needed restraint of her own while she continued to squirm at the memory of him cutting off her whimpers and moans of excitement with kisses.

  ‘Unless you’ve changed your mind...?’

  ‘No...no, I haven’t,’ Frankie mumbled, wondering if she had been temporarily insane to say such a thing to a virile male as experienced as Santino. Precisely what would he want her to do? Hurriedly shutting that enervating thought back out again, Frankie breathed in slowly and carefully to calm herself. Tomorrow night felt like a long way away.

  Frankie stared into the little mirror propped on top of the chest of drawers and hated what she saw. A woman who had let herself down a bucketful. If she had reacted with revulsion when he’d touched her, Santino would not have persisted. But then what might he have done? Gone back to his original plan to evict Della and prosecute her for fraud? Frankie shivered. No matter how badly Della had behaved, Frankie couldn’t bear to think of her mother being humiliated to that extent.

  And Frankie was painfully aware that she had betrayed herself to Santino. He had recognised her hunger and chosen a punishment calculated to decimate her pride. And why shouldn’t he have? she conceded, with new and bitter acceptance of the situation she had impulsively put herself in. After all, she had stood herself beside Della and had deliberately taken on the guise of a mercenary little confidence trickster.

  Now she was reaping the benefit of Santino’s angry and vengeful contempt. Santino who knew her so much better than anyone else alive; Santino who knew exactly how much her pride meant to her... Santino who would be quite capable of tearing her to tiny emotional shreds in the space of three weeks. For she didn’t know Santino, not as he was now.

  She was so vulnerable where he was concerned. And it wasn’t just that she still found him wildly attractive. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women would take one look at Santino and go weak at the knees. He had spectacular looks and an electrifying aura of sensual dominance. But Frankie was also threatened by infinitely more subtle and dangerous promptings. For Frankie, Santino had just always been so special. So terrifyingly, hopelessly special...

  The door opened without warning. In the act of plaiting her hair, Frankie flinched. Santino stilled in the doorway, lean, mean and magnificent in a black shirt and black close-fitting moleskin jeans. ‘Breakfast is almost ready.’

  As she collided reluctantly with lustrous dark golden eyes, her entire face burned. It seemed to her that there was a new knowledge in his steady gaze, a sardonic male savouring of her abandonment in his arms only hours earlier. Turning back to the mirror, she said coldly, ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

  ‘Don’t you h
ave a skirt in that case?’ Santino enquired drily.

  Frankie skimmed an irritably self-conscious hand down over her navy cotton trousers. ‘I don’t like skirts.’

  ‘I do...and what I like you have to like for the next three weeks.’ Santino delivered the reminder without remorse.

  ‘You think I’m going to turn into some sort of combination sex-slave and dress-up doll?’ Frankie enquired, tight-mouthed, breasts swelling with chagrin as she sucked in a deep restraining breath. ‘Well, you’ve got the wrong woman—’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Santino appeared behind her in the mirror and she tensed in surprise. He loosened the plait with ruthless cool and planted the brush back into her nerveless fingers. ‘You can’t suppress that passion in the same way that you strive to conceal that glorious hair. I won’t let you.’

  Frankie trembled with rage. ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do—’

  ‘So find out the hard way what happens when you rebel. That seems to be the only way you ever learn,’ Santino said flatly. ‘Just as you learned last night that the family you spent all those years trying to escape actually love you.’

  Choked up by that reminder, temper cruelly squashed by it, Frankie froze. ‘I know,’ she muttered guiltily.

  ‘And when I fade back out of their lives again you will stay in touch,’ Santino told her grimly. ‘You can blame me for breaking up our marriage and tell them you got the farm in the divorce. They have about as much grasp of the extent of my wealth as you once had.’

  ‘But they’re fond of you too...’ Frankie heard herself protest shakily.

  ‘I still won’t be back,’ Santino drawled with flat conviction. ‘I think that in your absence I have done everything that could reasonably be expected of me, but my responsibility here is now drawing to an end.’

  ‘For a bigshot like you, it must’ve been a real drag to come visiting out in the boonies!’ Frankie flung, in a distress she couldn’t even understand.

  Santino’s lean hands came down on her taut shoulders to spin her round. Ice-cool dark eyes scanned her overbright gaze and the sudden intense confusion etched there. ‘Keep those emotions under control,’ he advised harshly. ‘I may want that beautiful body but that’s the only interest I have now. At the end of this little interlude, I have every intention of walking away.’