The Reluctant Husband

by Lynne Graham

  ‘You’re exquisite, cara mia,’ Santino murmured intently. ‘At this moment, I don’t care about anything else.’

  ‘There is nothing else,’ Frankie whispered, thinking that there would be just this one time and then they would part, for he had already referred to their leaving the village. A hazy image vaguely reminiscent of Brief Encounter seduced her with its drama and romance.

  Her hand lifted and curved over a broad brown shoulder, fluttering in an instinctive wondering caress over smooth, taut skin covering a spectacular blending of bone and muscle. It felt so daring and yet so right, here in this bed and in this house, the world shut outside, just the way it might have been five years ago—just the way it should have been, she reflected helplessly. A spontaneous and natural event because she had never been infatuated, she had been deeply in love. And, just as then, looking at Santino melted her deep down inside. Her breathing fractured, her quivering body clenching on the all-pervasive sense of dissolving liquidity between her thighs.

  ‘When you look at me like that,’ Santino confided, his deep, dark drawl like abrasive sand on silk, ‘I want to forget every preliminary I ever learned and fall on you like a sex-starved teenager.’

  ‘Do you?’ A dreamy smile of satisfaction curved Frankie’s generous mouth, the last shred of uncertainty forgotten as she rejoiced in the sheer power of being a woman.

  Santino leant over her and kissed her with a plundering urgency that both shook and excited her simultaneously. He wound a ruthless hand into her hair and held her captive, crushing her lips and invading her mouth with an erotic thoroughness that swiftly changed the status quo—because she became a creature of all feeling and no thought, dragged down into shivering excitement by his innate sensuality.

  His hands were slightly rough against her softer skin, the knowing exploration of his fingers over her achingly tender breasts a tormenting pleasure as she strained helplessly up to him, her whole body awash with response and reaction to his every tiny move and caress. She felt dominated and confined and she liked it, and she laced her seeking fingers ecstatically into his thick black hair, holding him tightly to her.

  He dragged himself free, shone an innately ruthless smile of satisfaction over her confused face. Her treacherous heart contracted in response.

  He looked so dangerous, his slashing confidence unhidden. ‘I’m not going anywhere, cara...your hunger is the one true gift you have to give me and the only thing you cannot lie about or control. The completeness of your surrender will be my triumph.’

  Her stomach twisted, apprehension threatening to break through the unstoppable waves of hunger that controlled her as surely as he did. But with a soft taunting laugh Santino kissed her again, with all the fiery carnal expertise she was defenceless against. Her body burned, no longer willing or able to do her bidding. She was possessed by her own need, her own ever more desperate hunger. She wanted to sink inside his skin and share it with him.

  His mouth teased at the straining buds of her swollen breasts. Slow, sure fingers skimmed through the damp curls that guarded her femininity to touch where only he had ever touched. The sensitivity of her flesh was almost unbearable and the explosive, agonising pleasure which seized Frankie in its relentless hold made her jerk and twist and whimper in mindless abandonment.

  ‘You’re so ready for me,’ Santino groaned.

  His lean, strong features harsh and intent in passion, he rose over her, lifting her trembling thighs back and settling himself fluidly between them. As she felt him, hot and urgent and alarmingly male against her tender entrance, Frankie gasped and tensed, and yet with every contrary fibre of her being she would have died of frustration had he stopped. Then he moved, and pleasure splintered into shocking pain as he thrust deep and a startled cry was wrenched from her.

  For an instant Santino fell still. He surveyed her with lancing golden eyes that scorched like flames over her hectically flushed and shaken face. ‘If ever anyone got the punishment they deserved for lying...’ he breathed, unexpectedly deepening his invasion with a powerful twist of bis hips. ‘I would have been slow and gentle if I had known the truth.’

  So intent was Frankie on the alien intrusion wreaking such upheaval inside her tormentingly sensitised body, she barely caught his words. She was afraid to move until the pain faded, and then she gazed up at him in open surprise. ‘It feels so strange,’ she whispered.

  ‘It gets to feel good,’ Santino promised, with a reluctant laugh and a slanting, almost tender smile.

  She couldn’t imagine that, but then it was happening and suddenly she couldn’t concentrate any more and that instant of control was wrested from her again. Her whole being centred on his every movement, over her, inside her, and the raw power of his possession filled her with wild energy and impatience. It was timeless, utterly absorbing, and she lived each second on an edge of excruciating all-encompassing craving and then she was splintering and shuddering, flung in shock to the furthest boundaries of pleasure. With a hungry growl of release, Santino followed her there, and when she surfaced from that drugging languor of satiation she found herself clutching him with a sense of feverish possessiveness.

  As he freed her partially of his weight, Frankie yanked her clinging hands from him. That was inappropriate now that the lovemaking was over, she told herself.

  Outrageously unfazed by any concept of what was or was not appropriate in the circumstances, Santino rolled her over and contemplated the sheet with impossible cool, not a muscle moving on his vibrantly handsome face. ‘Welcome back, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy,’ he mused softly. ‘Miracles do happen against all the odds.’

  Silence stretched and strained like an elastic band drawn to breaking point. With a galling air of expectancy, Santino took in her outraged look and waited.

  ‘I despise you for this most of all!’ Frankie shot at him, feeling naked inside and out, exposed as a fraud where she had most wished to pose as an equal.

  As she attempted to shoot off the edge of the bed, a strong hand restrained her. ‘My bride, the fake seductress. No wonder you got drunk last night. You needed Dutch courage because you weren’t quite sure what to do with me,’ Santino breathed with grim amusement, stunning dark eyes raking over her hot and furious face.

  Without even thinking about it, Frankie swung up a punitive hand and tried to slap him. Instead she found herself pressed back to the mattress, shocked by the speed of his reactions even as he glowered down at her. ‘No,’ Santino said succinctly. ‘Lash out with your tongue, not your hands, and comfort yourself with the knowledge that I only hurt you because you lied to me.’

  Shock surged back over the edge into sheer ungovernable rage. Frankie struggled to free herself from his strong hands and failed. ‘Let go of me!’ she railed at him, her strained voice breaking.

  ‘My wildcat wife.’ Santino surveyed her with a disturbing light of understanding in his shrewd assessment. ‘When I crack the surface you are as hopelessly volatile as ever you were. Passion will always betray you—’

  ‘Damn you, Santino... shut up!’ she hissed.

  ‘As long as I live, I will never forget you shouting across the lobby that day in Cagliari. “You were mine,” you screamed. “Now I wish you were dead!” And you meant every word of it,’ Santino mused reflectively. ‘If you had had a gun you would have shot me—because if you couldn’t have me nobody else could be allowed to have me. In the space of a heartbeat, love turned to violent hatred...’

  Shutting him out with her lashes, all temper quelled by the unbearably painful reminder of her devastation that day, Frankie said unsteadily, ‘I want to get up and pack now.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Santino conceded, releasing her in a cool, almost careless movement, as if he could not quite understand why he should still have been holding her close. ‘The helicopter should be here soon.’

  ‘Helicopter?’ she queried, and then she remembered the phone call he had made downstairs and muttered, ‘Yes, of course.’ A helicopter to whis
k them away at speed to the airport, where they would each go their separate ways—for anything else was now impossible. The publicity, the huge furore Della had ignited would follow them both, and Santino naturally wouldn’t want to encourage greater media interest by keeping her with him.

  She ran a bath for herself and climbed in, wincing at the unaccustomed soreness she could feel. Herself and Santino? It was over, totally, absolutely and for ever over. She would never see him again. Frankie stared for a long, timeless moment into space, and then her eyes prickled hotly and stung and the tears surged up and gushed like a waterfall. Perfectly natural, grieving for the end of an era, she told herself feverishly, snatching up a towel and burying her face in it as a choking sob swelled up inside her constricted chest.

  ‘Mourning your lost virginity?’

  Startled by the interruption, Frankie dropped the towel in the bathwater. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she demanded strickenly.

  ‘I need a shower...only one bathroom.’ Making that reminder, Santino gazed down at her, hard dark eyes sharp enough to strip paint. ‘If you want to say goodbye to your family in person, you had better hurry. Otherwise you can call them from Rome.’

  ‘R-Rome?’ Frankie repeated in a daze, pausing in the very act of plastering the soaking wet towel to her bare breasts. ‘But I’m not going to Rome...’

  ‘Oh, yes, you are,’ Santino confirmed steadily. ‘Where else did you think you might be going?’

  ‘I thought...I thought we were heading for the airport and then splitting up... I thought I was going home—’

  ‘You thought wrong. I haven’t had my three weeks yet...and, by the way, the clock only started ticking when we climbed into bed an hour ago,’ Santino imparted as he reached into the shower cubicle and switched on the water. ‘You get your timesheet docked for nerves and insobriety.’

  ‘You can’t want to keep me with you after all the publicity there’s been!’ Frankie was reeling with renewed shock, a state that Santino appeared equal to keeping her in almost continually. The pressure of never really knowing what was likely to happen next was starting to wear down her nerves.

  Santino shrugged out of his robe and let it fall to the floor, gloriously unconcerned by his nudity. ‘Cara...I don’t care if I have to pitch a tent at the top of Everest. You’re putting in your time...’ He glanced back at her, classic profile hard and implacable. ‘I can only hope that I don’t live to discover that you’re likely to be around even longer...’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Frankie whispered without comprehension.

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken we just had sex without precautions.’ Santino sent her a charged look, obsidian in its chilling gravity. ‘When I asked you if I needed to worry about your fertility, I took your silence for confirmation that I didn’t need to protect us both from that risk.’

  ‘I don’t remember you asking me anything of the sort!’ Frankie gasped. ‘You mean you didn’t...? No, you didn’t...’ As she answered that question for herself her voice died away, and she shivered in the cold, clammy clasp of the sopping towel, gripped by panic at the threat of an accidental pregnancy by a male who despised her. That she was actually married to that same male didn’t seem remotely relevant.

  ‘And if your misleading silence was less a mistake than a deliberate attempt to prolong a most profitable association with me... you’ve made a cardinal error which you will undoubtedly live to regret,’ Santino assured her, jawline hard as iron.

  An almost hysterical giggle feathered dangerously in Frankie’s dry throat. She surveyed him with huge, unwittingly fascinated eyes. Right then she was wondering if the blood of the suspicious Borgias ran in Santino’s veins. Here she was, still in shock at the realisation that there had been a misunderstanding and that they had made love without contraception, but Santino’s serpentine reasoning processes were infinitely darker and more cynical than her own. He already suspected her of having deliberately deceived him into running that risk.

  ‘I won’t even dignify that accusation with an answer,’ she returned tightly.

  ‘Even if you prove to be pregnant, I will still divorce you,’ Santino gritted with ferocious bite as he strode into the shower. ‘Three weeks and you’re out, bag and baggage... no matter what!’

  ‘Santino...’ Frankie breathed, and then she stopped because she heard the betrayingly emotional wobble affecting her diction. Reluctant to probe the complex and painfully confusing storm of emotions attacking her, she chose only to voice her impatience with his fatalistic conviction that one little oversight would unerringly lead to conception.

  ‘I’m quite sure that any egg of mine would have more taste than even to consider an approach from anything with the Vitale signature on it...’ Frankie countered curtly. ‘In fact, I’m utterly convinced that right now your reproductive cells are fighting a pitched and losing battle in hostile territory and wishing very much that they had stayed home!’

  ‘I can only hope...for both our sakes...that you’re right,’ Santino delivered rawly, ramming shut the doors on the comer cubicle with a suppressed violence that fully illustrated his mood.

  As she clambered out of the bath, dashing tears from her eyes, Frankie scolded herself furiously for her own over-sensitivity. It was stupid to feel so totally gutted by Santino’s appalled reaction to the risk that she might conceive. After all, how likely was it that they might be unlucky? And why should his attitude hurt and wound her? Why should it feel like the ultimate rejection? Goodness knew, she would be climbing the walls too if that misunderstanding of theirs led to such a consequence!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘BUT your passport is in the name of Caparelli, signora,’ the portly little local police inspector remarked with a frown of surprise. ‘Indeed it still carries the designation of a single woman.’

  ‘Francesca applied for a British passport in her maiden name shortly before our marriage.’ As Santino spoke, Frankie studied him covertly. He was sheathed in a stupendously well-cut pearl-grey suit that framed his broad shoulders, lean hips and long, long legs to quite spectacular effect, and she was finding it a really horrendous challenge to look anywhere else.

  ‘Perhaps the continued use of Caparelli was intended as a security precaution?’ the older man hazarded uncertainly, evidently aware of the kidnapping that had once occurred in the Vitale family. He returned the item to Frankie with a wry shrug of acceptance. ‘It should be brought up to date now. Your face has been splashed all over the newspapers and the television screen. It is sadly ironic, signor...your illustrious family are famed for their zealous protection of their privacy but your wife couldn’t walk down a street anywhere in Italy today without being instantly recognised as a Vitale.’

  Santino tensed, his strong face darkening at the assurance. Frankie was certain he had to be appalled by that information. Discretion, yes, he had mentioned the necessity of discretion at their very first meeting in La Rocca, only then she had not grasped his true meaning because she hadn’t had a clue that Santino belonged to one of the wealthiest and most newsworthy families in Europe. Nor could she even believe as yet that she was really to fly to Rome with him.

  ‘It’s crazy to force me to accompany you back to Rome,’ Frankie contended half under her breath as she watched the policeman climb back into his car, his subordinate, who had played no part in the interview, taking the wheel.

  ‘When you steal a ride on someone else’s rollercoaster, Francesca, you can’t expect it to stop just because you find it scary that events are moving out of your control.’

  Frankie lost colour at that perceptive stab, her stomach twisting. The tension between them nagged like toothache at her raw nerve-endings. The racket of a helicopter coming in low over the valley broke the silence and she turned towards the lounge window, eager to make use of any distraction. But long brown fingers closed with ruthless precision over one slim, taut shoulder and prevented her retreat.

  Her head whipped round, tilting back to look up
at Santino. ‘I am in control!’ she informed him doggedly, digging her unsteady hands deep into the pockets of her loose ankle-length summer dress. ‘And I am not scared—’

  ‘But you should be,’ Santino emphasised, his rich, dark drawl feathering down her rigid spine like a dangerous storm warning that ironically both threatened and thrilled. Stunning dark eyes raked over her defensive face. ‘For there is one weakness we do not share...unlike you, I will never be passion’s slave. When it is time for us to part, what will you do if you find yourself possessed by a devastatingly strong need for our affair to continue?’

  Imprisoned within inches of his lean, muscular body and painfully, newly aware of his erotic masculine power in a way that lacerated her pride and filled her with foreboding, Frankie stared up at him, appalled to feel a deep inner trembling begin and spread a terrifying woolly weakness through her lower limbs. ‘I think I’d cut my throat!’ she countered with fiery disdain.

  Santino’s mesmeric eyes glittered, his shapely, sensual mouth slashing into a reluctant smile of appreciation. ‘Kill or cure, all or nothing...how little you have changed, cara. But unfortunately life rarely makes one’s choices so simple.’

  ‘It’s always simple if you want it to be,’ Frankie told him between gritted teeth as she fought the onslaught of that shattering sexual awareness. Her pulses were racing so fast she felt dizzy and her hands were balled into fists inside her pockets for fear that she might reach for him. Like a mindless addict she wanted to move closer and drink in the hot, achingly seductive scent of him, seek contact, actual physical contact to satisfy the treacherous craving that made her breath catch in her throat and her sensitive breasts tingle and swell.

  A long forefinger stroked down the side of her face and her green eyes darkened and centred with compulsive intensity on the lean dark features above hers. ‘Sexual hunger is never simple because we are not animals, mating without thought or feeling at nature’s behest... how innocent you are in spite of your avarice. You can’t even admit your own ignorance. But the higher you climb on that ladder of self-deception, the harder you will fall.’