The Reluctant Husband Page 9

  Frankie gulped. ‘You think that’s not what I want too?’

  ‘I think you’re programmed to attach yourself to the wrong people, and I really don’t want to pay a second time. This is just the settlement of a long-overdue debt, Francesca. Try to keep that in mind.’

  Frankie stared into the mirror long after Santino had gone, registered the stricken look in her eyes and closed them because she could not bear to see what he might have seen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER lunch, Santino drove Frankie out to the farmhouse. She had spent the entire morning with Teresa and Maddalena, making ceremonial calls on several neighbours. In a village where most of the young people left as soon as they were old enough to seek work there was nothing unusual about the length of her absence, and warm hospitality had greeted her everywhere.

  However, thunderous tension-filled silence reigned between Santino and Frankie as he turned the Landcruiser up the lane to the dwelling which had once so briefly been their home. Everywhere Frankie looked she was stabbed to the heart by memories with a very raw edge. Her first glimpse of the house with its weathered stone walls and red-tiled roof simply choked her up. Determined as she was not to betray a single emotional reaction, her facial muscles locked defensively tight as she climbed out of the car.

  ‘What happened to my hens?’ she enquired stiffly.

  ‘I should imagine someone finally ate them.’

  Careful not to look at him, Frankie breathed tightly, ‘Angela?’

  ‘Went to that great goat heaven in the sky.’

  “Milly and her calf?’ Frankie pressed even more tautly.

  ‘Sold.’

  Frankie was now rigid. ‘Topsy...and Pudding?’ she prompted, half an octave higher. ‘They’ve gone too, haven’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Unable to contain herself any longer, Frankie rounded on Santino. ‘So what did you do with my cats?’ she demanded rawly. ‘Did you eat them, sell them or bury them?’

  Brilliant dark eyes rested on her fearful, accusing face. ‘I took them back to Rome with me.’

  ‘O-oh...’ Reddening with sudden embarrassment and surprise, Frankie folded her arms jerkily and turned away again.

  Trembling, she preceded him into the house and walked straight into the cosy, low-ceilinged lounge with its comfortable twin sofas. From the rear window she looked out in dismay at the garden which she had created five years earlier. It had been swallowed up by brambles and scrub. So what? she asked herself. This is not my home any more; this was never really my home. None of these changes matter to me in the slightest, the inner voice insisted. But, in spite of that sensible voice, pained regret and a strong feeling of resentful loss still washed over Frankie.

  She had adored this house only one iota less than she had once adored Santino. After the cramped and basic confines of her grandfather’s home, this spacious house had seemed like a palace. No sixteen-year-old bride had ever been more deliriously happy with her lot. All that bright, innocent hope and unquestioning trust... She felt such a fool looking back on it now, particularly when she thought of the castello...

  Maids and antique furniture and fancy bathrooms. That was Santino’s true milieu. Yet, five years ago, he had valiantly roughed it every weekend in what to him had to have been the equivalent of a hovel. In keeping with Sard tradition he had bought the house and furnished it before the wedding. He had brought her paint cards, picked her favourite colours, become the first person in Sienta to pay someone else to decorate—an extravagance which had had Gino Caparelli shaking his head with appalled incredulity. But in every other way Santino had done exactly what was expected of a Sard bridegroom.

  ‘I hate you, Santino,’ Frankie breathed unevenly, swallowing the great lump threatening her throat. ‘If I played house, I played house because you encouraged me to do that!’

  ‘What else was I supposed to do with you?’ Santino responded to that accusation levelly. ‘As you were then, you couldn’t have handled my family, and they couldn’t have handled you.’

  Flinching from that blunt stating of fact, Frankie nonetheless spun straight back to him. ‘I don’t think there was ever any question of my meeting your family,’ she challenged in condemnation.

  Santino elevated a smooth ebony brow, his vibrantly handsome features impassive. ‘It’s immaterial now.’

  The unspoken reminder of how much time had passed since then silenced her. She had sounded like a woman scorned, she thought in horror. Bitter, accusing. All over what? A marriage that had never been a normal marriage? A husband who had never been a real husband and who had, understandably, at the age of twenty-four, found celibacy too much of a challenge?

  Twisting away, dismally conscious of how close her turbulent emotions were to the surface and how great would be the self-betrayal if she voiced those raw feelings, Frankie stalked out of the room and started up the narrow staircase. On the landing, however, her deep sense of injustice overcame her. ‘You should’ve just come to see me in London...you should never have dragged me back here!’

  She flashed into what should have been and never had been the marital bedroom. Here she had slept alone. At the foot of the bed rested the carved dower chest presented to her by her great-aunts on her wedding day, filled to the brim with exquisite embroidered linen. Teresa and Maddalena had given the chest with such pride and pleasure. Neither of them had ever married, and no Sard woman of their generation celebrated spinsterhood.

  She stood at the low window, staring sightlessly out. Santino evoked a dangerously explosive mix of hatred and fierce longing inside her. The hatred she wanted to nourish, but the strength of that fierce longing filled her with fear. Dear heaven, Santino was already tearing her apart. He was forcing her to relive so much that she had deliberately buried.

  ‘Francesca...’ Santino murmured from the doorway.

  Her hands closed convulsively in on themselves. ‘I was so happy here,’ she whispered, and then, instantly regretting that lowering admission—for who wanted to admit to having been happy living in a pathetic dreamworld? —she added curtly, ‘You should have told me the truth about our marriage right from the start.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were strong enough to take it,’ Santino countered with devastating frankness. ‘You had too much invested in our relationship.’

  Frankie’s restive fingers coiled into tight fists. ‘That’s not true!’ She flipped round to face him. ‘I’ve had my share of hard knocks in life, but none of them has ever sent me to the wall!’

  Santino surveyed her with steady, dark-as-night eyes, as if he knew that she was lying, as if he knew that he had cruelly ripped her heart out that day in Cagliari and almost destroyed her. ‘You were completely dependent on me and extremely vulnerable. You had the body and the emotions of an adult without the maturity or the experience...’ Unusually, Santino hesitated, his deep, dark drawl roughening as he breathed, ‘After five years of living in such isolation your knowledge of the world barely went beyond the boundaries of this village.’

  Frankie paled and veiled her expressive eyes, appalled by an assessment she could not protest at. Too well did she recall the frightening disorientation she had endured when she had returned to London.

  ‘If you hadn’t caught the train to Cagliari that day, you would eventually have agreed to continue your education in Florence,’ Santino asserted with conviction. ‘I would have been able to watch over you there. You would have outgrown your infatuation with me and found yourself becoming more interested in boys in your own age group.’

  Frankie bit back a sarcastic shout of disbelief but could not resist prompting, ‘And if I hadn’t...what would you have done then?’

  Santino shifted a powerful shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug, brilliant eyes screened by thick black lashes. ‘I would have coped with the situation. I was very fond of you.’

  Fond. A shudder of revulsion and mortification rippled through her taut length. What a lukewarm, milky nothing word, she reflect
ed fiercely.

  ‘But, regardless of that, we couldn’t have gone on living as we were. I didn’t want to risk ending up in bed with you—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there was ever much risk of that!’ Francesca hissed with the sharpness of unforgotten pain as she tried to brush past him.

  Santino snaked out a lean brown hand and closed it round her slender forearm to force her to still. His dark eyes shimmered with flaring gold anger as he gazed down at her. ‘You were as wild as a gypsy. Incredibly beautiful and stunningly sexy. You didn’t even appear to be aware of your sexual power, but it was there and it kept me awake every night I ever spent in this house with you,’ Santino informed her rawly. ‘You were a temptation that tormented me every day of our marriage.’

  Stunned into paralysis by that staggering admission, Frankie stared up at him, green eyes wide with disbelief, even her breathing suspended.

  ‘I walked a tightrope with you,’ Santino recalled grimly, a line of dark colour accentuating the spectacular slant of his hard cheekbones. ‘I knew that if I succumbed I’d plunge us both into an impossible relationship. I deserved a medal for staying out of the marital bed...most particularly when you began reminding me at every opportunity that you were my wife!’

  Oxygen re-inflated Frankie’s lungs as she sucked in a shuddering breath. Shock still rolled over her in heady waves, but a surge of deep and abiding anger followed in its wake. Wrenching herself violently free, she raced down the stairs and out of the back door into the fresh air.

  All that time he had wanted her; all that time and she had never once suspected. A jagged laugh was wrenched from her. She had loved him so much. She had loved Santino with an intensity that had been unashamed and fearless. Unable to imagine a future without him, she hadn’t understood how much damage loving like that could do until it was too late to protect herself. But all along Santino had known...

  In spite of the heat, her skin chilled. ‘You had too much invested in our relationship.’ With those bloodless words of detachment, Santino had acknowledged the reality that she had belonged to him body and soul. So he had been physically attracted to her; so he had been tempted by the body she had been so pitifully willing to offer... it meant so little, she conceded painfully. It was like coming in last of all in a race she had once hoped to win.

  For Santino had withstood sexual temptation with colossal cool and self-discipline. They had cracked the mould when they made Santino. Lust had warred with intellect... and intellect had naturally won. A strong and shrewd instinct for self-preservation had kept Santino out of the marital bed. He had known that he’d have a hell of a job getting rid of her if he slept with her.

  A lean hand came down on her shoulder. Santino turned her round, gleaming dark golden eyes scanning her flushed and expressive face. ‘You are still very intense,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘Still remarkably sensitive to the past. And yet why should I be surprised by that? The Sard blood in your veins fuelled your desire for revenge. I hurt you. And you retaliated in the only way you could. You chose to lie and cheat and steal from me.’

  Paling, Frankie muttered, ‘I...I—’

  Santino’s strong dark features were hard and unyielding. ‘I’ve already explained why I behaved as I did then. And yet still you show no shame. That explanation should’ve been unnecessary. No decent man would’ve bedded an infatuated teenager!’

  Frankie’s temper sparked. ‘No decent man would’ve broken his marriage vows either! You were unfaithful. Where’s your shame, Santino?’ she shot at him, unable to silence that angry demand.

  Disconcerted by that spontaneous counter-attack, Santino breathed slowly, ‘My shame?’

  ‘I was your wife. Age doesn’t come into it. You married me. You made promises to me. You broke them!’ Frankie enumerated with raw bite. ‘Am I supposed to be grateful because you stooped to marrying me in the first place? Well, I’m not grateful. In fact, I blame you for that most of all. You gave me expectations I would never have had otherwise. You allowed me to believe that I had rights when I had no rights! That was cruel and unfair and very short-sighted. How was I supposed to recover from my infatuation when I thought of you as my husband?’

  Her outspoken censure provoked an incredulous flash in Santino’s hard scrutiny. Satisfaction filled Frankie. He was a self-righteous rat, blind to his own errors of judgement. Marrying her hadn’t been a kindness or a damagelimitation exercise. It had been sheer madness to encourage her love and dependency with a wedding ring.

  She lifted her fiery head high, the burden of the past lightening, for she had finally got to put her own point of view and pride had been redeemed. Taking advantage of Santino’s charged stillness, she crossed with a sinuous twist of her hips through a gap in the prickly pear boundary to the rough pasture land beyond. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she announced.

  A long while later, she sank down on a sun-baked rock to stare down at the farmhouse, stubborn resolution etched in every line of her lovely face. At last she felt free of that shadowy teenage self who had been relentlessly haunting her. And she had rediscovered the fighting backbone she needed to deal with Santino. Once he had put her through an emotional wringer, but she would never give him the power to hurt her like that again.

  Matt—whom she absolutely had to phone, she reminded herself in exasperation—well, Matt had suggested that this trip might be therapeutic. And, astonishingly, he had hit a bull’s-eye with that forecast. It was time to move on. It was time she got Santino out of her system. And, since she had always been wildly attracted to Santino, wasn’t it ridiculously old-fashioned to be ashamed of the fact? Everything that drew her to Santino had to have its roots in that physical hunger.

  They would have a passionate affair and nobody would ever know about it. Then they would part and, most importantly, she would be over him. Santino’s indifference had once smashed her ego. That was why she had never been able to put him behind her, where he belonged. That was undoubtedly why she was still so strongly drawn to him. Human nature was perverse. Didn’t people always want what they thought they couldn’t have?

  When curiosity was satisfied, surely she would be completely cured of this hangover from her past? Convincing herself of that cheered Frankie up immensely.

  ‘I’ve started a meal. I thought you might like a drink,’ Frankie said breezily as she strolled into the room across from the lounge which Santino had always used as an office.

  Santino spun round in surprise from the computer, brilliant eyes reflecting the sunlight and momentarily stilling her. Smiling brightly, Frankie set the glass of wine down on the desk, struggling not to cringe at the sight of the large bridal photograph of herself that she had placed on that same desk five years earlier, and which still sat there, an embarrassing rave from the grave.

  ‘Heavens, does nobody ever dump anything around here?’ she complained, lifting the frame and treating it to a disparaging glance before she dropped it with a gentle crash down into the waste-paper bin. ‘Sorry, but it’s really creepy seeing stuff like that still sitting about.’

  Relishing the slight frown drawing Santino’s winged ebony brows together, Frankie walked back to the door, secure in the knowledge that her behaviour was disconcerting him. ‘Dinner won’t be ready for ages yet. I thought I should make this a special occasion,’ she murmured sweetly, casting her dancing eyes down. ‘What a pity you didn’t lay in some champagne...’

  Ten minutes later she was standing beneath the bathroom shower, deciding to wear her bathing pareu and possibly her most abbreviated top in which to dine. Santino wanted to see her in a skirt again? She was feeling generous. Santino wanted revenge? Well, Santino was in for a disappointment there. Frankie was the person planning to be empowered by the night ahead. She was going to wash that man right out of her hair and walk away, strengthened and renewed by the experience.

  Ironically, Santino had greatly revived her self-image with the astonishing confession that he had found her an almost unbearable temptati
on at sixteen. Before she’d got her slight overbite corrected, before she’d got dress sense, before she’d become an independent and surely far more interesting adult woman...

  So he ought to be a push-over for seduction. And she might be inexperienced but she knew all the mechanics, could hardly fail to be aware of them. The British media surfeit of articles on sensual experimentation was thrust at women from every printed page. And surely knowledge was power in the bedroom?

  Downstairs in the lounge she lifted the phone and belatedly tried to ring Matt, but her business partner was out. She left a brief message on the answering machine at the apartment, explaining that so far she had been unable to reach agreement with the owner of the villas. Strictly true, not a lie, she thought ruefully.

  The fridge in the kitchen was crammed with fresh food and the cupboards were fully stocked. Her great-aunts had been wonderfully thorough. Frankie hummed as she baked carta da musica bread, checked the selection of antipasti appetisers and the clear soup she had already prepared and went on to make an asparagus salad, gnocchetti alla sarda for a main course and a pecorino-based cheesecake to be served with Sard bitter honey.

  Gastronomically, Santino would be as putty in her ruthless hands. She had a second glass of wine to fortify herself. Tonight there would be none of last night’s craven uncertainty. Tonight she would hold centre stage and she would be in control. When she had the table prepared, she called him.

  Santino stilled one step inside the dining room. Brilliant dark eyes raked with infuriating impassivity over the candlelit intimacy of the beautifully set table and then lodged on Frankie, where she positively posed, the colourful pareu knotted at her slender waist and arranged to reveal a discreet stretch of one long, fabulous leg. His intent gaze roamed over her flowing mane of vibrant hair and the strappy green T-shirt which revealed rather more than it concealed of her high, full breasts.