The Forbidden Ferrara

He turned his head too and his eyes fixed on hers.

Both should have looked away but neither of them did.

The inevitability of it was as sweet and sharp as the desire that stabbed through her body.

His hand lifted and his fingers dragged lightly over her jaw. The stroke of his thumb over her lower lip was gentle. When he lowered his head he did it slowly, as if he wasn’t sure he was actually going to follow through. His mouth brushed against hers. A teasing prelude. It was insane and she should have moved, but she couldn’t. Anticipation exploded inside her. For a few thrilling seconds his mouth hovered close to hers and then he lost his grip on control and took her mouth in a hard, devouring kiss that blew every thought from her brain. She tried to hold herself back, not to become involved, but his kiss drew her in until they merged, until she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began, until her whole world centred on what they became together. His tongue was in her mouth, his hands in her hair and they feasted on each other like animals driven wild by deprivation. It was intoxicating, the rush of sexual excitement as heady as any drug and just as dangerous.

Time passed unnoticed and then he gave a growl of self-denial and dragged his mouth from hers, regret visible in every plane of his handsome face. ‘No.’ The raw emotion in his voice reflected her own feelings.

‘No.’ The kiss had shaken her and it was no consolation to know it had shaken him too. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wasn’t trying to tempt him back. She wasn’t trying to instigate a reconciliation.

Her future didn’t include him and yet now everything was stirred up inside her. And even while she was cursing herself a tiny rogue part of her was thrilled at the fact he’d given in to temptation because she knew he exercised ruthless control over his impulses. She’d wanted this encounter to be difficult for him but what they’d just done had made it a thousand times more difficult for herself.

Laurel pulled away, dizzy with the contradictory thoughts that fought for supremacy in her head. She didn’t want him to want her. She didn’t want to want him. How was that going to help? It was just going to make an already difficult situation worse.

Cristiano sprang from the bed, lithe and supremely fit. ‘You’re right. I should sleep on the sofa. If you need a doctor in the night, call me.’ With that terse instruction and not even a glance in her direction, he left the room, leaving her body buzzing and her heart breaking.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘CRISTIANO, are you even listening to me?’

Cristiano turned, disconcerted to realise he hadn’t heard a single word his lawyer had spoken.

He’d left the villa at sunrise, attempting to relieve his rocketing tension levels with a punishing run before the warmth of the new day turned to blistering heat. After that, he’d swum. Then he’d caught up on his emails.

Nothing had deleted thoughts of Laurel from his brain.

He wanted to see her as the heartless bitch who had treated their marriage vows as nothing but instead he kept seeing her, pale and vulnerable as she struggled to breathe, stressed out of her mind by being back with him. Accustomed to handling a variety of emergencies on an everyday basis, he’d been appalled by the panic that had gripped him witnessing her struggle for air. He’d been perilously close to summoning every doctor on the island.

Every doctor except the idiot who had assured him that it was common for a woman to have abdominal cramps and that it was unlikely she’d lose the baby.

Anger shafted through him, but the strongest emotion was one of guilt as he acknowledged the damage he’d done by choosing to prioritise a critical work issue over her well-being. The fact that he’d grossly underestimated the seriousness of the situation didn’t excuse him. The fact that the advice of another had proved ill-founded didn’t excuse him either.

His mind was full of questions, the answers to which should have been of no interest or relevance at this stage of their relationship. He wanted to know since when her asthma had been that bad. Whether she’d been having attacks in the time they had been apart. He knew she’d suffered since childhood. It was one of the few things she’d told him about herself when they’d first met.

He knew that, for her, stress was the trigger.

If last night was anything to go by, she was under monumental stress.

Acknowledging the part his own behaviour had played in the onset of her attack, Cristiano ran his hand over his face. He couldn’t believe his own lack of control. From the moment he’d met her at the airport, his temper had been simmering dangerously. The relationship was over. It had been over for the past two years and yet the moment he’d seen her again the only thought in his mind had been, She’s my wife. Mine.

Until he’d met Laurel he’d considered himself to be a modern male—well, as modern as a Sicilian man could be. The past twenty-four hours had forced a stark rethink of that overly generous self-analysis. Every dark primitive thought that had haunted his brain had taken him right back to his caveman ancestors. Jealous? Yes, he was jealous. Jealous as hell and the knowledge sat in his gut like some thick, sickening poison slowly seeping through his body, contaminating every thought.

He didn’t want her moving on.

He didn’t want her making a new life that didn’t feature him as a central character.

His lawyer cleared his throat and pushed a file across the table to him. ‘I emailed you a document. The fact that you refused to declare a separation of assets on your marriage or a pre-nuptial agreement theoretically leaves you exposed.’ ‘I don’t care about the money.’

‘Well, you’re lucky. Apparently neither does she.’ Carlo pulled another set of documents out of his briefcase. ‘Her lawyer has said that if we can expedite the divorce proceedings, she is happy to walk away with nothing.’

The evidence that she was prepared to sacrifice anything and everything to get away from him exposed another layer of his base masculine instincts. Did she hate him that much? ‘What did you tell him?’

‘Her.’ Carlo flicked through the pages until he found the one he wanted. ‘Her lawyer is a woman. And I told her that in Sicily a couple have to have been separated for three years. Today is really just a formality. An opportunity to talk in person, given that you haven’t seen each other for two years.’

Talk?

When had they talked? Cristiano rubbed his fingers over his forehead but nothing relieved the ugly throb in his head. He’d hurled recriminations at her and she’d reacted in her usual way—erecting more walls and barriers between them. She deflected everything he threw at her.