by Lynne Graham
Silence lingered. Frankie collided tensely with clear dark golden eyes. Melina wasn’t his lover, never had been his lover, or his intended wife or indeed anything else, but he hadn’t even considered it important to tell her those facts. ‘Why didn’t you explain about Melina five years ago... why did you allow me to go on believing that you’d been unfaithful?’
‘We had to part. You had to grow up and you couldn’t do that with me,’ Santino informed her tautly, watching her spin her head defensively away from him. ‘To the best of my ability, I put you and our marriage to the back of my mind and got on with my life.’
‘Yet you made no attempt to have our marriage annulled...’
‘I didn’t meet anyone else I wanted to marry. And you were a sweet memory... the woman I believed you might become figured in my mind as an ideal.’
Frankie’s head swivelled instantly back to him. ‘An ideal?’
Santino smiled. ‘You look just like an enquiring sparrow when you do that, cara mia. Don’t ask me to explain to you how or why I love you. I only know that I do...’ Her stunned eyes clung to his, her breath catching in her throat as she struggled to accept and believe in the sentiments he’d expressed with such deep and unashamed sincerity.
Santino strolled forward and reached down to grasp her hands and draw her slowly upright. Brilliant dark eyes scanned her face with immense and tender appreciation. ‘We have ties that go back so many years. And you had such courage, such tremendous warmth and faith. No other woman has ever reached my heart as you did, and yet I realise now that I probably hurt you more than all the rest put together by not discouraging your attachment to me...’
Frankie leant forward into the welcoming shelter of his big, powerful body. Trembling, she rested her brow against his shoulder, eyes prickling with tears of intense happiness. ‘No, I needed you then. I had nothing else,’ she told him honestly. ‘And being in your arms is still like coming home.’
‘Today I was afraid that you weren’t planning to come home again,’ Santino confided unevenly, his arms closing round her slowly, as if he was still afraid to credit that the worst was over and the best was all to come. ‘You switched off me so fast five years ago. Then I told myself that it was for the best, but I was scared that it could happen again...’
‘I just love you more with every day,’ Frankie muttered in a wobbly voice choked with tears. ‘I’m really not that easy to get rid of.’
‘But you are. Five years ago you severed every connection between us. You had no second thoughts. You didn’t go home to face me; you just climbed on a plane. And you didn’t write. I was tempted so many times to seek you out, but I knew that that wouldn’t be fair. You had to be free to become an adult, and yet letting go so completely was the hardest thing I ever did.’
‘I never once thought you could’ve felt like that.’
‘I couldn’t end our marriage without giving us one more chance. I had such incredibly high hopes, and the instant I saw you in La Rocca the same fierce attraction leapt into being—’
‘And then Della’s dishonesty got in the way.’
‘But I still couldn’t bear to let go of you,’ Santino confided. ‘I promised myself that at the end of three weeks I would be cured of you.’
‘Initially I had the same objective.’ Frankie carefully unknotted his tie and slipped it off. ‘But it didn’t work.’
‘No, I just got in deeper...and deeper...and deeper...’
‘You said that having a good time in bed didn’t mean that you loved—’
Santino clasped a strong hand over the uncertain fingers braced against his chest. Intense dark golden eyes held hers fiercely. ‘And neither it does. Even if I could never make love to you again, I would still love you.’
‘But you hurt me so much saying that.’
‘I didn’t want you to mistake your feelings for me...I wanted you to take the time to get to know me again and be sure that what you were feeling was real and lasting. I couldn’t risk you waking up some day and deciding that you were too young to be tied down and that possibly it was a mistake to have stayed married to your first lover...’
Frankie was deeply touched that Santino had suffered from his own insecurities. ‘I’m sorry, but you are really the only man I have ever wanted.’
Santino coloured. ‘I liked that—’
‘I know...you’re possessive. So am I.’
‘Before I went to Milan—’ Santino tensed, throwing her an anxious look ‘—I didn’t know whether you were upset because you might be pregnant or upset because you might not be.’
‘You should’ve told me up front that you didn’t want a divorce any more,’ Frankie censured.
‘I needed you to make your own decision about what you wanted...but I tried to show you in every way possible how much I cared...’
‘I was afraid that was just because you thought I might be pregnant.’
‘Now you know differently...’ Santino curved his mouth with hungry fervour over hers and kissed her long and deeply until she shivered with need against him. ‘But, having got so used to the idea that I was going to be a father, I was a little disappointed... But perhaps it was for the best. You’re still only twenty-one. We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘You’ll be a father in time for Christmas,’ Frankie confided breathlessly.
Santino was stunned. ‘Say that again...’
Frankie explained the error of jumping to premature conclusions.
A slow smile of delighted satisfaction slashed Santino’s darkly handsome features. ‘So my reproductive cells won that battle on hostile territory...not so hostile after all, it seems.’
Frankie blushed as he drew her down on the bed with a strong look of intent in his lustrous dark eyes. ‘I found the teddy in the limo,’ she told him.
‘We’ll call her Flora...she can hen-peck Hamish. I was planning to gauge your mood with her and suggest that if you really wanted a baby we try again.’
‘What would you have done if I had taken all that money?’ Frankie asked reflectively.
‘I would’ve concentrated on rehabilitating you. I couldn’t possibly have let you go at the end of the three weeks. I love you too much, piccola mia.’ Shrewdly assessing the faintly troubled look still tensing her face, Santino added, ‘I can afford to look after your mother, but this time I’ll ensure she is kept within reasonable bounds—’
‘No...it wouldn’t be right for you to support her again,’ Frankie protested, strongly convinced that Della was young and able enough to support herself through her own efforts, and that any other arrangement would be akin to rewarding her for her dishonesty.
‘Allow me to know what is right just this once,’ Santino murmured, strongly amused by the steely glint in Frankie’s gaze. ‘I promise you that I will wreak the revenge of a lifetime when I see Della’s reaction to the news that we are about to make her a grandmother!’
Since he chose that exact same moment to extract another feverishly hungry kiss, Frankie’s ability to argue was severely diminished. Her quivering body strained up into the hard heat of his virile frame and she caught fire, driven by a primal need to seal their love in the most physical way possible.
‘Hal is very fond of children,’ Della confided rather unnecessarily as her third husband, a rock-solid middleaged Texan rancher, cradled her grandchild with deft hands and made chortling sounds to amuse him. ‘In fact...he would like us to try for one.’
At that unexpected news, Frankie’s eyes opened very wide.
Her attractive mother reddened and gave her an uncertain glance. ‘I know I was pretty hopeless with you, but Hal thinks that I’d cope much better now because I’d have his support and I’m more mature.’
Nothing came so readily to Della’s lips these days as ‘Hal thinks...’ Hal Billings, burly, blunt-spoken and bossy, had rescued Della from her job on a department store beauty counter. While she was trying to sell him perfume Hal had fallen in love, and Della, who hadn’t had the sli
ghtest intention of ever falling in love again, had fallen hardest of all.
Hal was comfortably off, but he considered idleness a vice and was fond of what he called ‘plain living’. Della had had to make sacrifices to meet Hal’s high standards, but she had done so with surprising eagerness. Frankie had finally appreciated that her mother had been a deeply unhappy woman, who had tried to use material things to fill the emptiness inside her. Now a new love and a challenging lifestyle with a man she could rely on had given her the chance to make a fresh start.
Having reclaimed their son, Marco, Santino strode across the room with him, his lean, strong face concerned. ‘I think Marco should bow out of his big day now...what do you think?’
Frankie stretched out her arms to receive her baby, gazing down at his sleepy little face, the dark silk fans of his lashes sinking over eyes as green as her own. ‘Yes... he deserves some peace and quiet.’
But it still took another half-hour for them to work through the crush of their combined relatives and make an escape. Gino Caparelli and Alvaro Vitale were in close conversation in a comer. Frankie’s great-aunts, initially as nervous as they were excited about leaving the village to come all the way to the castello, where Santino and Frankie had decided to hold the christening, were now happily chatting with two elderly ladies from Santino’s side of the family.
‘He is a little darling... a precious child,’ Sonia Vitale sighed, her face softening as she delicately smoothed the soft black hair lying on her sleeping grandson’s brow.
Frankie smiled. Her mother-in-law’s unconcealed delight in her grandchild had done much to bring down the barriers between the two women. After a decade of living in near seclusion, nourishing her grief for the son she had lost, Sonia was returning to the business of living again.
With amusement, Santino was watching Della rush to fetch a cold drink for Hal. ‘When you insisted that your mother give up the house and find a job, it was you I was worried about, cara. I thought she would never forgive you for being so tough, but you did her a favour. She’s a changed woman.’
‘She’s even considering motherhood again,’ Frankie confided.
After an arrested pause, Santino burst out laughing. ‘There’s method in her madness,’ he pointed out. ‘If she has a baby, Hal might let her off some of the chores round the ranch!’
Together, Santino and Frankie put their son down for a nap in his cosy crib. In perfect concert, they moved into each other’s arms.
Frankie thought back on the first blissful year of their marriage. Matt had found another partner for the travel agency. She had had an easy pregnancy and Marco had been born with very little fuss. The joy of becoming parents had brought her and Santino even closer together. Santino adored his son. They spent quite a lot of weekends in Sardinia. Some day Marco was destined to hear about his family’s humble beginnings on that hillside above La Rocca, just as Santino had learned his from his late grandfather.
‘Have I made you happy?’ Santino murmured huskily as they walked down the corridor.
Frankie gazed up into those lethally dark and sexy eyes and went weak at the knees, and gloried in the sensation. ‘Head-over-heels happy. When I picked you out at sixteen, I knew what I was doing.’
‘And I didn’t know what had hit me,’ Santino confided, dark head bending with the suggestion of a male yielding to an irresistible force. ‘But I’m incredibly glad I was picked.’ With that ragged confession, their lips met in hungry rediscovery, and it took the couple a suspiciously long time to make it back to the family celebration.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-6228-7
THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND
First North American Publication 1998.
Copyright © 1998 by Lynne Graham.
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