The Reluctant Husband Read online

  Since that was more or less Frankie’s estimate of Sonia Vitale’s feelings as well, she averted guilty eyes from his. Santino would naturally scorn empty protests. And for the first time she understood what might have drawn him so frequently to his great-uncle’s isolated village in Sardinia. Father Vassari had been a kind and practical man. Santino had been treated like a pariah by his parents while he was still only a teenager. He must’ve been comforted by the old man’s continuing affection, and no doubt his reassurance that Rico’s death had been in no way his fault.

  She was warmed by that image but troubled and hurt by it too, for once she had eagerly shared her every anxiety and fear with Santino. Yet he had never told her about his brother, never once risked burdening her with anything she might not have been able to handle. More than everything else that underlined how unequal their relationship had been then. He had put her needs and concerns ahead of his own. Always. He had been the giver, she the taker... and the long-overdue acknowledgement shook Frankie to her very depths.

  ‘All of a sudden you’re very quiet,’ Santino remarked softly.

  Squirming with discomfiture, Frankie lifted her bright head again. Santino was already crossing the room to her. Unsettled by his sudden proximity, threatened by her new awareness of how much she loved him, she collided involuntarily with fiercely intent dark golden eyes.

  ‘But the act of confession must indeed be good for the soul,’ Santino informed her with husky conviction as he stretched out confident hands to ease her into intimate connection with his hard, muscular frame. ‘Or perhaps it is the wealth of compassion you contrive to suggest with those wonderfully eloquent green eyes. Whatever... Dio...I have an overwhelming need to lose myself now in sexual oblivion!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘SANTINO...?’ Frankie gasped breathlessly, taken aback by the volatile charge of sexual hunger in his brilliant gaze.

  ‘You want me too,’ Santino groaned, backing her up against the door without hesitation and dropping his dark head to press his mouth with burning eroticism to the sensitive skin of her throat. He sent a shiver of such electrified heat through her slender length that her legs shook and threatened to crumple beneath her.

  ‘Don’t you, cara?’ he prompted with blatant assurance.

  ‘Yes...’ she muttered unsteadily, painfully conscious of her inability to resist him. ‘Yes...’

  Santino muttered something raw and husky in Italian and closed his hands over the swelling curve of her hips, spreading his muscular thighs to bring her into contact with the rampant thrust of his erection. As he trembled against her, answering fire sprang up low in her belly. Her entire body burned, infused with a surging, desperate need she could not fight.

  He skimmed sure hands down her quivering thighs to part them and raised her dress with summary masculine impatience. Expert fingers teased the heated core of her through the thin barrier of her briefs and he vented a husky sigh of satisfaction as he discovered the dampness she could neither control nor conceal. Frankie shivered and shook with excitement and moaned deep in her throat, clutching helplessly at him for support. And then her dark lashes lifted and over his bent shoulder she focused on a tiny ice-blue handbag sitting like an unexploded bomb on a nearby table.

  ‘Your mother’s left her handbag behind!’ she gasped strickenly.

  Santino abandoned his erotic assault on the molten responsive heat he was engaged in exploring and slowly, very slowly lifted his dark head again. His eyes were as blank and uncomprehending as the blacked-out windows of his parents’ limousine.

  ‘Her bag...over there!’ Frankie raised a shaking hand to point at the offending article. ‘She could walk back in here again at any minute!’

  Santino’s lush black lashes swept down and then up again. He focused on her and his fingers slowly, reluctantly loosened their grip on her dress to let the hem fall again. He snatched in a shuddering breath, dark colour igniting over the taut slant of his superb cheekbones.

  Frankie trembled, embarrassed by what she had almost allowed to happen between them. ‘Maybe we should go upstairs,’ she muttered unevenly.

  Santino stepped reluctantly back. The silence hummed. She opened the door with a fumbling hand and finally worked up the courage to turn her head and look at him again. In a driven motion he looped a punitive hand into her tumbled hair and took her mouth with speaking passionate brevity. As he drew away from her again, eyes ablaze with hunger, his breathing audibly fractured, she very nearly snatched him back into her arms.

  All of a quiver, she started walking across the hall and up the spectacular staircase. A masculine hand closed possessively, impatiently over her clenched fingers. On the semi-circular landing, she stole a glance at him. It was a mistake...or was it? For it was a mistake that made Santino reveal the strength of his own desire all over again. He succumbed to the apparent temptation and encouragement of that one little glance by closing his arms round her so tightly she could barely breathe, crushing her to him and kissing her until her head swam. The merest persistence might well have persuaded her that there was nothing remotely wrong with making love in a corridor.

  But he jerked back from her then with a growling sound of frustration. ‘Only this morning you were a virgin. I should be making allowances for that...I’m not.’

  She met burning golden eyes and knew she was utterly enslaved.

  ‘I want you so much I am in agony,’ Santino gritted unevenly.

  Incapable of speech, she nodded like a submissive marionette.

  In silence, he snatched her up into his powerful arms and strode at speed down the corridor. He set her down in a bedroom but she had no time to absorb the newness of her surroundings. Santino was unzipping her dress, tugging it down her arms, releasing the front catch on her bra, and, without even waiting for either garment to drop away, he brought up his hands to hungrily enclose the pouting swell of her bare breasts.

  She caught their reflection in a tall cheval-glass as she strained helplessly back into the hard, virile heat of his powerful physique. As he massaged her achingly responsive flesh and played with the throbbing pink buds desperate for his attention, she looked wanton, abandoned. And even as she writhed in tormented pleasure she stared, watching his dark, passionately intent face above hers, learning for the first time that she had power too, the power to make Santino crave her like a drug—the power to make him need her...?

  Intoxicated by that knowledge, she twisted round in his arms and blindly sought his sensual mouth again for herself. His tongue stabbed between her lips, flicked over her tender palate and drove her wild. As her knees sagged she clung to him, and he tumbled her down on the bed behind her, following her there without once freeing her swollen mouth.

  ‘Per amor di Dio...you’re a witch...this isn’t how it was supposed to be!’ As Santino wrenched her from the folds of the dress still crumpled round her waist, Frankie flinched from that snarling intonation. Stunning dark eyes alight with splintering hostility clashed with hers. And then, insane even as it seemed to her in that split second of stark confusion, he kissed her again with the kind of drowning erotic thoroughness that plunged her back into sensual oblivion.

  Impatiently dispensing with the silky panties which still clung to her slender hips, Santino wasted no time in rediscovering the unbearably hot, moist welcome awaiting him. With an exultant growl, he pushed back her thighs and came over her like a conqueror to thrust with urgent, forceful hunger into the heart of her yielding body.

  Frankie cried out, her spine arching on a relentless surge of excitement. He was wild for her and she was hopelessly out of control. For tormenting minutes of terrifyingly intense pleasure, he drove her ruthlessly to satisfaction. The explosive, blinding shock waves of climax hurtled through every fibre of her being and totally wiped her out.

  The first thing she noticed after that was the speed with which Santino jerked away from her. A sudden chill cooled her bare damp skin and she was filled with a devastating sense of disorient
ation and loss, because what she craved at that instant was for him to hold her tight. Then the screaming silence registered. Slowly she opened her eyes on an unfamiliar ceiling. Her gaze crept almost fearfully down the walls and found Santino. Disturbingly, he was still fully dressed.

  He moved back to the foot of the bed, where she was spread out like a recently plundered human sacrifice. She was in shock, ravaged by the primal hunger of his possession. Santino was strikingly pale beneath his naturally golden skin. In that awful silence he stared down at her as if he wasn’t quite sure how she had got there, or indeed who had brought her to such a state. And then those beautiful dark eyes filled with a mortifying mix of stark regret and compassion.

  In an impatient movement, he snatched up a silkfringed throw from a nearby chair and covered her shivering body with it. But out of sight was very obviously not out of mind. Dense black lashes screening his gaze, Santino breathed raggedly, ‘I’ll run a bath for you.’

  He got about twelve feet away before Frankie unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth to mutter chokily, ‘Why don’t you try drowning yourself in it?’

  Rolling onto her side, she curled up into a tight ball. All of a sudden she felt like a whore he had picked up and now wanted to throw out. He was ashamed of himself, so therefore she had to be ashamed of herself too. Where had she ever got the stupid idea that his physical desire for her body could be a cause for celebration?

  ‘I’m starting to feel like a split personality,’ Santino confessed in an abrupt and charged undertone. ‘I have never before fallen on a woman like a ravening beast...’

  Nor had his ego rejoiced in the force of his own rapacious sexual hunger for her, she recalled numbly.

  ‘I know you enjoyed it, but—’

  At that undiplomatic reminder, Frankie reared up to face him again. ‘Get out of here!’ she screamed at him full blast.

  Santino surveyed her in frustration and fanned out his long fingers in eloquent emphasis. ‘That won’t solve anything...and it would make me feel worse.’

  ‘Good!’ Frankie shot back, tears erupting without warning to pour down her cheeks.

  On familiar ground with that development, Santino dropped down beside her and framed her distraught face between inexpressibly gentle hands. His vibrantly handsome features were stamped with remorse. ‘I wanted to punish your...I really did want to punish you. But when I looked at you a minute ago I saw the teenager who once loved me, and you really don’t look very much older now. No matter what you have done, it was only money and I am an excessively wealthy man,’ he conceded grimly. ‘But I wish I could go back to that day in the café at La Rocca and freeze time—’

  ‘Y-yes,’ Frankie stammered, shaken that the exact same thought which had occurred to her should now be occurring to him.

  Santino’s eloquent mouth quirked. ‘Although, to be honest, I’m not sure it would’ve helped. It was your lies which enraged me most. I have a terrible temper. I’m not a very forgiving person...yet somehow all that anger has suddenly drained out of me. So I was disappointed in you, deeply disappointed...’ He still felt the need to stress that, but a broad shoulder shifted in a fatalistic shrug of acceptance.

  ‘But what if I wasn’t really guilty of having taken all that money?’ Frankie muttered in an impulsive rush. Having been hanging off his every word, she was on the very brink of confessing the truth, because it really hurt that he should still think of her as a liar, a cheat and a thief. Indeed all she needed to prompt her into telling all was a little sympathetic encouragement. ’S-suppose... I mean, suppose I was just trying to protect Mum?’

  As he listened, Santino’s lean face hardened and darkened again like a threatening thundercloud. ‘Don’t be childish, Francesca. You can’t magically remake my image of you by taking refuge behind more lies,’ he warned her with harsh impatience, misreading her motivation in having asked such loaded questions.

  ‘I know, but I—’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Santino cut in with warning gravity. ‘If it wasn’t for your involvement in that financial deception, I’d have had your precious mother charged with fraud and banged up in custody by now! Believe me, it goes very much against the grain to let her escape that punishment, but I can’t put her in the dock without putting you right up there beside her.’

  Registering that her lie—her false confession of having deliberately conspired with Della to defraud him—was the only thing that appeared to stand between her mother and a probable prison sentence, Frankie dropped her eyes fearfully again and pinned her tremulous mouth shut, grateful she hadn’t said enough to arouse any real suspicion that she might not be guilty as charged. It was dauntingly obvious to her that Santino, assured of her own lack of complicity in the crime, would without hesitation go ahead and prosecute her dishonest parent.

  ‘Wise decision.’ Santino complimented her on her silence. ‘You have to face up to what you did...but that doesn’t mean that you can’t change.’

  Ducking free of his hold and rubbing at her swollen eyes, she sighed heavily. ‘I guess not...’

  ‘You’re still my wife and I am responsible for your well-being,’ Santino continued more gently. “That definitely shouldn’t encompass reducing you to a sobbing heap on my bed. I should’ve controlled my desire for you.’

  ‘Yes... I mean, no... I—’ Meeting the questioning look in Santino’s clear, frighteningly intelligent gaze, Frankie shrank and lowered her eyes again, terrified of revealing too much. What had provoked her distress was his apparent rejection of her in the aftermath of that shatteringly intense bout of intimacy.

  ‘I imagine you’re rather sore,’ Santino murmured ruefully. ‘And sex should always be equally pleasurable for both partners. I should never have put my need ahead of your capacity for enjoyment.’

  ‘Stop talking down to me,’ Frankie urged in growing embarrassment. ‘I knew what I was doing too.’

  ‘But you don’t...that’s the trouble—that’s the problem,’ Santino contradicted her almost fiercely, slapping down her challenge before it could even get off the ground. ‘You just do what you feel like doing at any given moment. I swear that in all your life you’ve never looked more than thirty seconds forward into the future! And that recklessness is like a contagious disease that has spread to afflict me as well...but with me it stops, here and now!’

  Having delivered that character assessment with the speaking incredulity and censure of a male who regarded her impulsive spontaneity as a highly dangerous weakness likely to lead to dire consequences, he sprang fluidly upright and strode away from her with determination. ‘I’ll run you a bath and have an evening meal sent up. You must be hungry...I know I am.’

  Frankie scrambled off the bed, secured the vibrant blue throw with a knot above her breasts and hurried across the room to lodge herself in the doorway of the breathtakingly luxurious bathroom. She watched him turning on the gold taps above a big oval-shaped tub and his every measured graceful movement enthralled her. Indeed every facet of Santino enthralled her quite unashamedly now that she had admitted to herself that she was still head over heels in love with him.

  Had that gorgeous black hair always flopped over his brow like silk when he bent down? Did any other male possess such wondrously shapely and erotically assured hands? She felt the deep, intimate ache of his possession with instinctive pride. Whether he had liked it or not, Santino had needed her, and similiarly, it seemed, Santino could be passion’s slave.

  So he wasn’t exactly happy about that reality just at this moment, but that wild bout of lovemaking had acted like some sort of catharsis on him. That chilling anger and detachment had gone. She had the Santino she remembered back and, dear heaven, he was so perfect it was all she could do to restrain herself from hurling herself ecstatically into his arms. He could be so tender, so caring. There he was, running a bath for her. He had even admitted himself to have been in the wrong. So many men found that impossible.

  She really had picked a winner at sixte
en. If only she could make him feel the same way this time...if only she could make him fall in love with her within the space of three weeks. Please, God, she prayed, fervently promising that if she got to hang onto Santino she would try never to ask for divine intervention again.

  Santino straightened to find himself the sole focus of her utterly mesmerised attention. Slight colour burnished his superb cheekbones, stunning dark eyes veiling fast. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he breathed very, very quietly.

  ‘Like what?’ Frankie was dizzy with the overpowering strength of her emotions and the amount of restraint it took to keep her distance from him.

  Santino expelled his breath in a stark hiss. ‘Having a good time in bed doesn’t naturally mean that I love you or that you love me, piccola mia...’

  Even softly voiced, and couched with that old endearment, the message still went home with the force of an axe attack on a vulnerable target. Frankie went white. Her gaze slewed to the water shimmering in the depths of the tub. ‘I know that,’ she tried to say with a light, dismissive laugh, but somewhere between her throat and her lips the laugh got horribly strangled and emerged like a discordant squeak.

  ‘Right now, you don’t know what you’re feeling,’ Santino informed her arrogantly. ‘A long time ago you were infatuated with me...and now I’ve become your very first lover—’

  ‘There was no stopping you!’ Frankie reminded him helplessly.

  ‘But if I had known you were a virgin, if you had been honest with me, Francesca...I would never have touched you,’ Santino countered with that brand of deadly sincerity that struck like a cobra when it was least welcome. ‘When I believed that you were experienced, demanding the wedding night I had never had did not seem such a big deal.’

  Frankie crossed her arms in a jagged motion, tucking shaking hands out of sight. ‘No big deal... oh?’ Even to her own ears, her voice sounded unnaturally shrill, which wasn’t surprising when she felt as if she was dying by inches with every word he spoke.