The Ranieri Bride

Since he was already climbing the stairs, Freya did not need to ask where. He kicked the bedroom door shut behind them and strode towards the bed.

None of this should be happening—none of it! she told herself as the feverish sensation grew worse.

‘No,’ she protested, only to feel the hard cut of disappointment when he let her feet slip to the floor then took a step back.

His dark head went back. ‘What, then?’ he challenged arrogantly.

‘Explain that—thing you said about Luca,’ she insisted.

She had eyes he wanted to drown in and a body beneath the virginal dress that was seething with wanton lust. Did she think she was fooling him with the stubbornness? Did she think he could not tell that she wanted what he wanted as badly as he did?

His hand went into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope—a gold envelope. He handed it to her then turned and walked across the room to the tallboy.

‘What is it?’

‘Look,’ he suggested, using the key to unlock the wall safe.

The Georgian lady sprang away from the wall while Enrico listened to Freya breaking the envelope seal. His fingers were not steady as he reached inside the open safe.

She’d gone very quiet now. He turned to look at her. As usual her hair was tumbling around her lowered face.

‘We see what we expect to see,’ he fed across the room to her. ‘What do you see, cara?’

She gave a small shake of her head. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she whispered.

‘I cannot say that I readily believed it when I walked into his hotel suite and saw it for myself.’

Freya looked up. Enrico was leaning against the tallboy, all sartorial elegance and sophisticated grace. Her senses leapt. She crushed them down again.

‘You just—walked in?’

‘Luca has always liked to do things the easy way. And using the Ranieri name to gain him the good things in life, including the best in accommodation, has always been expensive—for me. He might have been thrown out of the family, but I have been picking up the tab for his high-life ever since. The hotel he was staying in belongs to me,’ he explained. ‘So access to his suite was relatively easy.’

‘And…’ He watched intently as she moistened her lips. ‘And you caught him—like this?’

‘Exactly like that. Quite revealing, hmm?’

Freya looked back at the photograph she held in her fingers, which showed Luca close up and full in the face. He was sporting a red-haired wig and a beautifully cut slinky black dress. His make-up was simply perfect. He looked—disconcertingly beautiful.

‘I had the foresight to use my phone to take pictures while he was recovering from the shock.’ Enrico had many more of them stashed in Luca’s folder, but the one Freya was holding said it all.

‘He is not gay, in case you are wondering. He simply likes to dress up in women’s clothes. His latest mistress finds it…exciting. But she is not excited about his running costs. So when we appeared in the newspapers he believed he had found himself a new income—just as you had predicted he would.’

‘Blackmail.’

‘With a sense of humour.’ Enrico nodded. ‘Hence the staged appearances as the redhead. He always was a twisted son of a bitch.’

‘Did you already know a-about this?’

Enrico shook his head. ‘None of the family knows, which meant I had stumbled upon the best weapon I had to shoot down his blackmailing plans. He would rather run back down his dark hole and never emerge again than have the Ranieris know his little secret.’

‘But he turned up at the church today in front of the whole Ranieri family!’

Enrico grimaced. ‘I have to confess that I don’t know why he did that unless…’ He pushed out a sigh then straightened up to turn back to the safe. ‘He hates me, cara,’ he said. ‘For being born to inherit the Ranieri power instead of him. I used to turn a blind eye to his envy because, in a way, I understood it and I actually cared about him, but…’

The words stopped but the expression on his face said the rest for him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with loving someone who does not love you back,’ Freya said huskily.

His shoulders flexed. ‘It makes you a weaker person.’