Ravelli's Defiant Bride

enced. The minute his tongue plunged into the tender interior of her mouth, it sent a wave of violent response crashing through her, and she was lost. Her hands roamed from his broad shoulders up into his luxuriant dark hair while she rejoiced in the taste of him, the unique sexual flavour of a dominant and surprisingly passionate male. His arms tightened round her, long fingers smoothing down her spine to pin her into uncompromising awareness of his erection. She gasped beneath the thrust of his tongue, mind flying free to picture a much more sexual joining and craving that completion with a strength that started an ache between her thighs.

The sheer intensity of what she was feeling totally spooked Belle. With a startled sound of rejection, she pushed him back from her. ‘No, we’re not doing this!’ she told him furiously.

Dark eyes veiled, Cristo stepped back and drew in a long, deep, steadying breath. Maledizione! He was too aroused to be comfortable with the sensation or the woman who had got him into that condition. ‘I seem to recall that I was trying to persuade you not to take private family business into a court of law,’ he murmured flatly.

Belle shot him a disconcerted glance, unable to credit that he could act as frozen as ever in the wake of that passionate kiss. Passion, it seemed, didn’t control Cristo Ravelli. All in the space of a moment she resented his assurance, was insulted by his cool indifference and furious that she hadn’t fought him off. But, my goodness, he could kiss. That mortifying thought crept through her mind no matter how hard she tried to kill it dead.

Belle had done a lot of kissing and not much else as a student, very much hoping to experience a volcanic reaction that would signal that all-important spark of true, overwhelming physical attraction. Now fate was having the last laugh by finally serving up that long-awaited, miraculously special kiss and it was happening with the wrong man. She had no doubt that Cristo Ravelli was wrong in every way for her. He was stuffy and cold and unfeeling and she was a warm, emotional and impulsive individual.

‘I’m sorry. I’m going to do what’s best for my siblings and take this matter to court to get it sorted out,’ Belle told him curtly.

‘You can’t,’ Cristo countered with chilling bite. ‘It will damage other people. You and your siblings are not the only individuals likely to be affected by this.’

‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ Belle admitted truthfully. ‘I want my brothers and sisters to be able to hold their heads high and know who they are without shame.’

‘You want the impossible,’ Cristo derided, turning on his heel.

‘No, I want justice.’

Justice! Cristo reflected contemptuously, a deep sense of frustration ruling him, for Cristo never backed down and never failed to find solutions to problems. Damage limitation was his speciality. How could it be justice that Zarif’s throne would be rocked by the extent of Gaetano’s infidelity and the revelation of his secret family in Ireland? Like father, like son, Zarif’s critics would sneer. Mary Brophy had made her choices when she chose to get involved with a married man and have his children. Her daughter, Belle, had too much pride and her resentment of the Ravelli family, or, more specifically, his father, had persuaded her that she could somehow rewrite history. But washing the family dirty linen in public was not going to make those children feel that they could raise their heads high. No, it was much more likely to shame them by depicting their parents in ways they would never forget. No child of Gaetano’s had ever been proud of him or his name. Gaetano had been a cruelly selfish and uninterested parent.

Ironically, Cristo had always believed growing up that he would be a better man than his father and now he wondered what had happened to that dream and at what point cynicism had killed that honourable goal stone dead. He knew that he had not once considered the plight of Mary Brophy’s children from any viewpoint other than his own. He was a pragmatic man and he knew he was selfish. But even he recognised that Belle Brophy was too young and her grandmother too old to take on full responsibility for Gaetano’s children. Cristo was suddenly very conscious that those kids, right down to the little one with his father’s eyes, were his flesh and blood too, even though he didn’t want to recognise that unwelcome fact.

And then the answer to the problem came to him in a sudden shocking moment of truth. He recoiled from the prospect at first, but as he filtered through the list of challenges he currently faced and that solution ticked every box he began to mull it over as a genuine possibility. It was not as though he were ever likely to fall in love again. Indeed it was a wonder it had happened even once to a male as detached from emotion as he was, he reasoned grimly. Gaetano and Mary’s affair could be decently buried and the children’s antecedents concealed from the media. As for Belle, in the role he envisaged, which was frankly Belle reclining wearing only a winsome smile on his bed in London, well, she would be perfect there, he reflected with the very first flicker of enthusiasm for the challenge of sacrificing his freedom for the greater good.

*

Belle suffered a restless night of sleep. She relived the kiss again and again and got hot and bothered while tossing and turning in guilty discomfiture. Cristo was a Ravelli just like Gaetano and the very last man alive she should enjoy kissing. In the morning, she made breakfast for the children on automatic pilot because her brain felt fuzzy and slow. There had been too much agonising over whether or not going to court was the right thing to do for the children, she decided irritably. She did not have a choice. There had never been a choice and there was no way on earth that she planned to trust in any promises made by Cristo Ravelli, who would undoubtedly be every bit as slippery in such delicate negotiations as his late father had proved to be. Exasperated by the constant parade of anxious thoughts weighing her down, Belle saw the twins off to school and then told her grandmother that she was taking Franco down to the beach.

*

When he reached the beach, Cristo had the pleasure of seeing Belle looking relaxed for the first time. Her wild mane of curls was blowing back from her face in the breeze that plastered her jeans and her blue tee to her lithe, shapely body. She was engaged in throwing a stone into the sea while the leg-clinging toddler bounced up and down in excitement and the dog circled them both barking noisily. Espying Cristo first, the Jack Russell raced across the sand to attack.

‘No!’ Cristo thundered as he strode across the sand.

Tag cringed and rolled over and stuck his four little legs up in the air, beady eyes telegraphing terror.

‘You didn’t need to shout at him,’ Belle criticised, rushing over to crouch down and pet the little animal. ‘Look how frightened he is! He’s very sensitive.’

‘I’m a little sensitive to being bitten,’ Cristo murmured drily.

‘Man!’ the toddler exclaimed and immediately went for Cristo’s left leg. Cristo froze, wondering if he could do it—actually take on the whole bunch of them and survive with his dignity and sanity intact. He wasn’t a family man, he hadn’t a clue how a normal family functioned and didn’t really want to find out.

Belle was looking up at him, her lovely face flushed and self-conscious, clear green eyes wide above her dainty freckled nose, and her vibrant beauty in that instant scoured his mind clean of all such thoughts. She made him think about sex, lots and lots and lots of sex, and on one level that unnerved him and on another it turned him so hard it literally hurt.

Belle stood up. Tag, the terrified dog, was clasped to her bosom, and now giving Cristo a rather smug look. ‘Did Isa tell you where I was?’

‘I could be down here for a walk.’

Belle raised a fine auburn brow, scanning his lean, powerful body with assessing eyes. It amazed her that a man who spent so much time in a business suit could be so well built but there he was: broad of shoulder and chest, lean of hip and long of leg with not even the hint of jowls or a paunch. Clearly, he kept fit. And although she had long thought business suits were boring Cristo’s dark, perfectly tailored designer suit screamed class and sophistication and was cut close to his powerful thighs and lean hips, directing her attention to areas she didn’t normally appraise on men. Her colour heightening, she tore her attention from the prominent bulge at his crotch and dropped it down to his highly polished shoes, which were caked with sand, and she wondered why he couldn’t just admit that he had come looking for her.

‘You didn’t come down here for a walk dressed like that.’

‘Sand brushes off,’ he fielded carelessly as she settled the dog down on the beach and he scampered off.

In silence, Belle studied Cristo’s lean, extravagantly handsome features, heat blossoming in her pelvis and butterflies flying free in her tummy. She felt as clumsy and ill at ease as a schoolgirl in the presence of her idol. But then was it any wonder that she was embarrassed? She had looked at his body and positively delighted in the strikingly strong muscular definition inherent in his build. She could not recall ever doing that to a man before. But the need to look at Cristo felt as necessary as the need to breathe. In reaction to that humiliating truth she flushed to the roots of her hair, mortified by her failure to control her reaction to his looks and dark, charismatic appeal.

Cristo reached down to detach the toddler’s painful grip from his leg. Starved of male attention, he recalled, thinking that he could certainly understand that. Neither in childhood nor adulthood had Gaetano ever touched him or, indeed, enquired after his well-being. ‘We have to talk,’ he said succinctly.