by Lynne Graham
Frankie held her breath, heartbeat crashing like warning thunder in her eardrums. Her own attention was all for him. In a dinner jacket and close-fitting black trousers, with a white dress shirt heightening the exotic effect of his black hair and golden skin, he looked alien and yet alarmingly, wonderfully spectacular. A tingle ran down her responsive spine.
‘Are you planning to poison me during the first course?’ Santino enquired lethally.
Frankie stiffened incredulously. ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’
‘I know you’re temperamental, but this scenario is unbelievable. “Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly...’”
Feeling foolish, Frankie tilted her chin in challenge. ‘Why shouldn’t I amuse myself by cooking up a storm when I’ve got nothing better to do?’
Santino’s sensual mouth slanted with unsettling sardonic amusement. ‘A complete volte-face within the space of hours? Naturally I’m suspicious.’
‘Just sit down and eat!’ Frankie stalked back out to the kitchen.
She poured herself another glass of wine with an angry hand. So Santino refused to be impressed. Damn him for having the power to play his cards so close to his chest, not to mention the dismaying ability to look at her, in spite of all her efforts, as he might have looked at a stone statue.
‘You could ravish a saint in that outfit,’ Santino drawled with silken mockery from the doorway. ‘You look gorgeous from top to toe. Happy now? But when you stood there patently expecting me to compliment you something in me refused to give you what you wanted.’
Frankie focused on him with mortified resentment. He made her sound so naive, so obvious. Sidestepping him, she returned to the table. ‘That’s because you’re devious and stubborn, Santino...you always were. I used to not see that, but now I do,’ she confided with driven honesty.
‘So be warned,’ Santino murmured chillingly. ‘I have never liked games, Francesca.’
Her lashes lowered, her appetite ebbing. When she glanced up again, Santino was uncorking a dusty bottle of champagne. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘It was in the cellar,’ he revealed. ‘Waiting for just such an opportunity.’
Frankie played restively with her food and just watched him eat. Whenever she looked at him her mouth ran dry. In her mind’s eye she was trying to picture them in that bed upstairs. Anxiety at the challenge she had set herself and the tingling heat of undeniable anticipation warred like mutual enemies inside her. Every time she went out to the kitchen she drank more wine. As she sank deeper into abstraction, Santino’s polished attempts to make conversation earned only monosyllabic responses.
Over the dessert course, she surveyed him and breathed in an abrupt tone of discovery, ‘You secretly wanted me to be a virgin, didn’t you?’
Santino’s superb bone structure tensed, lush black lashes narrowing on fiercely intent but uncommunicative eyes. ‘Now why would you think that?’
Frankie propped her chin on the heel of one hand, knowing she had startled him almost as much as she had startled herself with that sudden suspicion. A rather malicious smile formed on her generous mouth. ‘I can’t explain it, but somehow I know it’s the truth. You must be very disappointed.’
‘Hardly.’ His beautiful mouth curled as he met that provocative smile head-on. ‘I can think of no more tedious a start to a brief affair than the need to initiate a nervous amateur.’
The silence stretched. Frankie had paled.
‘I was just self-conscious last night,’ she informed him even more abruptly. ‘Usually I’m very confident in the bedroom.’
‘Good...I’m feeling unusually shy tonight,’ Santino imparted silkily.
Involuntarily, Frankie studied him, her heart banging frantically fast against her ribs. Those incredible magnetic eyes of his. She wanted to drown in them. Maybe that was why her head was swimming and it was taking such appalling effort to concentrate. ‘Coffee?’ she asked jerkily.
Santino watched the tip of her pink tongue snake out to moisten her dry lower lip. He tensed, and then rose in one fluid sweep from behind the table. Deftly depriving her of her glass, he drew her up into his arms. ‘Not for me,’ he breathed huskily.
A ripple of quite tormented excitement ran through Frankie. Long fingers curved against her spine and pressed her closer. Her pent-up breath escaped in a shaken hiss as she registered the swollen fullness of her breasts and the urgent sensitivity of her nipples, but the power of those sensations was somewhat diminished by the disorientating dizziness assailing her.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ Santino suggested, his deep, dark drawl fracturing to send a responsive frisson through her trembling length.
Frankie closed her eyes to block him out and resist the overpowering pull of his dominance. This wasn’t how she had planned it. He was taking control. ‘No...you go up...you wait for me tonight,’ she urged, wondering why her words were slurring.
‘OK.’ She lifted her lashes and caught his faint frown and then watched him stride towards the stairs.
Swaying slightly, she steadied herself on the chairback, dismay gripping her. Rather too late she was appreciating that she had had too much to drink and far too little to eat. She was furious with herself for being so stupid. Pouring herself a cup of black coffee, she forced it down and then crept outside to breathe in great gulps of the night air in the hope of sobering herself up again.
Her head a little clearer, she nonetheless plotted a far from straight path up the stairs. She could still do it. She could, she could. Santino was waiting for her just the way she had planned it, so she wouldn’t risk embarrassing herself with potentially clumsy attempts to undress him. And there he was in the marital bed for the very first time in his life...
At that enervating sight something akin to pure anguish seized Frankie. Santino was a gorgeous vision of raw masculine appeal against the white bedlinen. All tousled and golden and breathtakingly sexy...and she was feeling...she was suddenly feeling so horribly sick, and the room was revolving round her in the most nauseating way.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Santino demanded as he thrust the sheet back with startling abruptness. ‘Dio...I thought it was my imagination downstairs, but you’re—’
Frankie made a most undignified dive for the bathroom across the landing. Her worst apprehensions were fully fulfilled. Afterwards she just wanted to be left alone to die, but no such mercy awaited her.
‘You’ll feel a lot better after you eat,’ Santino asserted drily.
Unconvinced, Frankie stared down at the rather charred toast on the breakfast tray. It was safer than looking at Santino. Severe embarrassment clawed at her, for she recalled almost every awful moment of the previous night. Santino initially incredulous at the state she was in, then impatient, exasperated, but ultimately kind. And why had he been kind? It was bred into Santino’s privileged bones to be kind towards those weaker or less able than he was. She squirmed, pride choking on a generosity which had only increased her sense of humiliation.
‘Thank you,’ she contrived between clenched teeth, pushing up the sliding strap of the slinky nightdress she had woken up in, shamed as only a woman could be by the knowledge that she had no recollection of donning the garment.
‘There has to be a reason why you got that drunk.’
‘I wasn’t drunk...I was only a bit tipsy,’ she countered, so desperate to escape a post mortem, she even bit into a piece of that unappetising toast while wondering if she ought to preserve it for posterity. Unless she was very much mistaken, this toast was the closest Santino had ever come to cooking.
‘Are you in love with Matt Finlay?’
Frankie almost choked on the toast. ‘Of course I’m not...he’s just a friend!’ she spluttered in frustration.
Santino contemplated her with galling cool. ‘Then you over-indulged because you were nervous—’
‘That’s ridiculous! Why do you have to make such heavy weather out of something that was purely accidental?’
Santino’s beautiful mouth clenched hard. ‘Possibly because the idea of you endangering yourself with such reckless behaviour in the company of a less scrupulous male angers me. You should know better.’
‘The days when I looked to you to tell me how to behave are far behind me.’
Santino dealt her a derisive glance from the doorway. ‘It shows.’
Head lowering, cheeks burning, Frankie swallowed convulsively.
Having believed Santino had left the room, she was startled when the tray was lifted away and he sank down instead on the edge of the bed. Unprepared for that proximity, her pained eyes unguarded, she stiffened defensively as he threaded long, sure fingers through her wildly tumbled hair in a disturbingly comforting gesture.
And then, without warning, Santino smiled, one of those blinding, sudden, charismatic smiles that shook her up and made her treacherous heart race. ‘That wasn’t a very generous comment when you spent so much time apologising last night,’ he conceded huskily.
He was so close she could smell the hot, sun-warmed scent of him, intrinsically male and powerfully familiar. Her nostrils flared, her breath catching in her throat as she raised an involuntary hand and let her fingers rest on one broad shoulder to steady herself, her gaze welded to the shimmering gold of his. She shivered as he eased her forward and bent his dark head. A warm, drugging anticipation trapped her in submissive stillness.
He kissed her very gently, his tenderness a soothing balm to her smarting sensitivities. And it made her want him even more. In fact it made her want to cling. He tasted her lips in tiny hungry forays that sent her arms snaking round him in desperation to pull him closer. Her whole body felt as if it was reaching up and out, craving what only he could give. An explosive charge of hunger burned up inside her, and when his tongue penetrated between her readily parted lips her heart lurched so violently she could barely breathe in the seething excitement that controlled her.
Santino lifted his imperious dark head and absorbed her dazed expression. His strong face impassive, he sprang lithely upright. A tiny pulse flickered at the corner of his compressed mouth but in every other way he looked utterly relaxed and in control. ‘I haven’t had breakfast yet,’ he murmured, and strode gracefully out of the room.
Chilled by that abrupt withdrawal, Frankie flopped back against the pillows, stunned by the passion he had fired and then abandoned. Had he regretted that terrifyingly seductive instant of tenderness at the outset? No matter...he had still cut through her prickly defences as easily as a child knocking down a wobbly tower of building blocks—and, worst of all, he was well aware of the fact.
Her hands trembled as she reached for the tray again. Physical hunger, that was all it was, she told herself, and maybe she was more susceptible than he was in her inexperience. Only that didn’t explain why she had suffered a great suffocating attack of fear and insecurity as she’d watched him detach himself from her and walk away.
She was emerging from the shower when she thought she heard the knocker sounding on the front door. Snatching up Santino’s towelling robe, she pulled it on hurriedly and walked out onto the landing.
‘Francesca?’ Santino called softly. ‘Come downstairs.’
With a frown she moved to the head of the staircase. In amazement she gazed down at Matt where he stood in the hall, equally welded to the spot by the sight of her.
’M-Matt?’ she stammered in amazement.
‘Yes...Matt,’ her business partner confirmed thinly as he ran indignant eyes over her flustered and damp appearance in the oversized male garment she wore. ‘Would you like to tell me what’s going on here?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE tension in the hall was so thick it sent a shocking trickle of apprehension down Frankie’s spine as she descended the stairs. Matt’s fair face was flushed and he looked, to her, incomprehensibly furious and accusing. Her attention skimmed to Santino, who stood with impenetrable eyes and a curiously threatening quality of absolute stillness.
‘What on earth are you doing here, Matt?’ Frankie began uncertainly. ‘How did you even find out where I was?’
‘This was the only place left to look,’ Matt returned. ‘I remembered the name of this village and I knew you had family here... But why the blazes didn’t you tell someone where you were going?’
‘I left a message on the apartment answering machine yesterday...’ Frankie continued to stare at him in astonishment for she could imagine no good reason for Matt to leave the agency and come racing over to Sardinia in search of her. ‘I know I was a little tardy with that call, but what made you think you needed to fly over here to track me down?’
‘Your mother—’
‘My...mother?’ Frankie interrupted incredulously.
Matt swore, only half under his breath. ‘I wasn’t unduly concerned about your silence until I called your mother to ask if you’d been in touch with her. The minute she realised that you were in Sardinia and that I hadn’t heard from you, she went off into blasted hysterics.’
‘Hysterics?’ Frankie echoed in a wobbly voice, unable to imagine Della in such an emotional state.
‘So naturally that panicked me, and when I found out that your hire car had been returned it did look very suspicious. Nobody about to go on a touring holiday dispenses with their only means of transport. It seemed like you had disappeared off the face of this earth!’
Frankie was horribly embarrassed by her own thoughtlessness. ‘It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would worry... nobody ever has before—’
‘You’ve never staged a vanishing act before. Your mother’s called in the police—’
‘The police?’ Frankie blinked, appalled. ‘I’m sorry...I just don’t understand what’s got into everybody—’
‘Yes, well, personally speaking, neither do L’ Matt shot a resentful glance of unease at Santino, who had gone rigid at the reference to the police, his jawline taking on a distinctly aggressive slant. ‘But you made the headlines on the television news last night. British tourist missing—’
‘Oh, no...’ Frankie mumbled weakly.
‘Della thinks you’ve either been kidnapped because of your secret wealthy connections or—’
‘Kidnapped?’ Santino incised in an outraged growl.
‘Or because of some crazy vendetta against you by that same secret connection,’ Matt completed with considerable sarcasm, surveying Santino with naked antipathy. ‘I think we can rule out both possibilities, since you appear to be on such cosy and intimate terms with your estranged husband.’
‘Oh, heck, I’d better phone Mum... Matt, I’m so sorry... I really don’t know what could’ve made Della carry on like this—’
‘Guilt,’ Santino ground out grittily.
‘You should’ve told me you were still married. You told me everything else.’ Matt glowered accusingly at Frankie. ‘Does he know how long you’ve been shacked up with me?’
‘Sh-shacked up with you?’ Frankie was thoroughly disconcerted by that misleading description of the terms on which they shared the same apartment.
‘Yes... what kind of kinky marital relationship do you two have?’ Matt sent Santino a malicious half-smile. ‘I hope you appreciate that she runs around with a lot of other men too... Here today, forgets you’re alive tomorrow. That’s my Frankie!’
Santino lunged off the wall like a ferocious tiger suddenly provoked by a whip. ‘You—!’
‘Please...!’ Frankie yelped in horror, and, grabbing Matt’s arm, she yanked the smaller man hurriedly into the lounge with her, speedily slamming the door on Santino’s unfamiliar and frightening aggression. ‘Why are you behaving like this, Matt? What the heck’s got into you?’
Matt stiffened with an angry jerk. ‘I thought I knew you! I thought we were a pretty successful team. I even thought I would marry you...it certainly would’ve made good business sense.’
Frankie stiffened at that revealing admission. Seemingly her share of the agency had been her greatest a
ttraction in Matt’s eyes. ‘But you never showed the slightest personal interest in me until Leigh moved out of the apartment. We were just flatmates. We led separate lives outside working hours—’
Matt wasn’t listening. ‘So that is Santino...your husband since you were sixteen, according to Della... and all the smooth bastard is prepared to offer you is a dirty weekend reunion in some godforsaken hole in the hills!’ Matt sneered. ‘Still, if that’s what it takes to turn you on, who am I to interfere?’
‘You deliberately let Santino think that you and I were lovers... why did you do that?’
Matt grimaced and compressed his mouth, the anger draining out of him to be replaced by sullen resentment ‘You really don’t have the foggiest clue how the average male reacts to being made to look and feel like a fool, do you? Hell, I’ve had enough of this nonsense! You’d better contact the police and sort it all out...and what about those villas?’
Still in shock, and feeling guilty about the trouble he had been put to on her behalf, she muttered, ‘I’m still working on that.’
‘This set-up is work?’ Matt opened the lounge door again and shot her a bitter look. ‘I’m glad you’re OK, but I feel like wringing your mother’s neck for all this!’
Santino was no longer in the hall, and in another thirty seconds Matt, too, was gone, striding out stiff-backed to the hire car parked outside.
Frankie breathed in deeply and then, her mind a whirling turmoil of chaotic thoughts, raced back into the lounge and lifted the phone to contact her mother.
A strange woman answered the phone and questioned her identity. Frankie’s voice trembled as she realised she was speaking to a police officer. Only then did the genuine gravity of the situation finally sink in.
Della came on the line, breathless and tearful. ‘Are you all right...? Are you really all right, Frankie?’