Ravelli's Defiant Bride

‘I’ve got nothing else to do,’ Belle pointed out gently, convinced that a couple of their ilk scarcely qualified for the itinerary or the behaviour of a normal honeymoon couple.

Cristo immediately recognised yet another screaming indictment of his behaviour as a new husband and hurriedly sidestepped that awareness by offering Belle the laptop beside his own and springing upright to ask Umberto to go and find another chair. His conscience reacted as though someone had given it a good hard kick. Marriage, he was learning by slow and painful steps, would demand much more of him than he had imagined and would entail considering Belle’s needs as well as his own.

For the first time, he appreciated that he had had absolutely no right to judge his brother, Nik, for the mess he had made of his marriage to Betsy. After all, he only knew one side of that story and tiny, fragile Betsy weeping out her heartbreak on Cristo’s chest had definitely cornered the sympathy vote as far as appearances went. His lip curled as he skimmed a glance across Belle’s composed and lovely face and he almost smiled in relief. There was nothing helpless about Belle and at least she wasn’t crying hysterically, complaining, condemning…

*

‘Yes, she’s amazing,’ Cristo agreed in Italian with his chief finance officer in the London branch of his investment bank. ‘If I wasn’t married to her, I’d hire her!’

Cristo studied his wife with an involuntary sense of pride. Belle was curled up in a chair with a laptop, long incredible legs in shorts on display, auburn hair spiralling down round her shoulders, enhancing porcelain-pale freckled skin while her fingers flew over the keyboard. It was the pivotal moment when he realised that he had struck literal gold and had seriously underestimated her worth when he married her. For a woman of her beauty to have retained qualities of such natural likeability and unpretentiousness was extraordinary. She was also intelligent, resourceful and hardworking. Not once had she complained over the past three days about the very long hours they were putting in and she had kept pace with him every step of the way. He winced when he recalled the lingerie episode at the fashion show.

Belle stood up to stretch and set the laptop down. The banking crisis was over and she was almost disappointed by that reality since it had acted as a brilliantly positive antidote to the friction between them. They could work together now, talk to each other. He had stopped treating her like some sort of glorified sex doll expected to offer him entertainment and she had learned to her own satisfaction that Cristo was as smart as a whip while being as stubborn and impatient as she was.

Her clear gaze wandered over him while he sprawled back against the edge of the desk, long powerful thighs sheathed in denim splayed, a crisp lemon shirt open at his strong tanned throat. She looked at his wide, sensual lips and recalled the passionate intoxication of his kiss and momentarily felt dizzy. Her mouth ran dry, hunger stirring at the core of her as it had so often in recent days when her body reacted to the presence of his. She leant slightly forward, willing him to make a move to hold her, touch her, kiss her…anything!

‘Put on something fancy. I’m taking you out to dinner, bella mia,’ Cristo volunteered, glancing up to transfix her with spectacular dark golden eyes heavily fringed with lush black lashes.

Belle flushed to her hairline, mortified by her thoughts and drawn up short by the unexpected invitation. ‘Only if you want to.’

‘Dio mio! Of course I want to,’ Cristo countered with a frown.

‘You don’t need to thank me for helping out,’ Belle told him stubbornly.

Cristo expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘Is it so hard for you to accept that I might want to take my beautiful wife out and show her off?’

Belle laughed at the idea. ‘Not when you put it that way, you smoothie!’ she teased.

Cristo winced. ‘Don’t call me that…it makes me think of Gaetano.’

Belle wrinkled her nose in agreement. ‘You don’t remind me of him in any way.’

‘Grazie a Dio…thank God,’ Cristo retorted with visible relief.

Belle collided with Franco on the way into the office. Her little brother pushed past her to throw himself at Cristo with a shout of satisfaction. Although they had been incredibly busy in recent days, Cristo never turned Franco away and she appreciated that, glancing back as Cristo tickled Franco and engaged in the kind of rough, noisy, masculine play that the toddler adored. While she hovered, Cristo answered the buzz of his cell phone.

At supersonic speed she registered that something bad had happened and she moved back into the office because Cristo’s lean, strong face had clenched into rigid lines, his eyes darkening, his mouth compressing as he finished the call in clipped Italian. He released Franco and the little boy scampered off into the hall, already in search of fresh amusement.

Cristo settled dark eyes now flaming accusing gold on Belle and asked harshly, ‘Have you been talking to the press?’

Astonishment furrowed her brow. ‘No, of course not! What on earth are you talking about?’ she parried, instantly cast on the defensive.

‘A friend who’s a journalist in London just called me to warn me that the story of Gaetano, your mother and the kids will be appearing in print some time soon in a British tabloid!’ Cristo bit out furiously.

Belle

paled at that news but rallied fast because her own conscience was clear. ‘Well, that’s very unfortunate.’

Cristo sprang upright, six feet plus inches of enraged, darkly powerful masculinity. ‘Unfortunate? Is that all you think this is?’

Infuriated by his attitude and wounded by the speed with which he had leapt to distrust, Belle squared her slight shoulders against the wall, her lovely face flushed and taut with strain. ‘Keep this in proportion, Cristo, and try to be reasonable.’

‘Reasonable?’ he growled as if he didn’t recognise the word. ‘I married you to keep that sleazy story out of the newspapers!’

And just then, Belle could have done without the reminder of that fact.

‘I always thought it was unlikely that you could prevent that story from ever coming out,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘My mum was with your father for almost twenty years and everyone for miles around, who enjoyed a bit of gossip, knew about their relationship and the children. All it would have taken was for one person to talk to the wrong person, who saw some chance of profit in the information and the secret would have emerged.’

Lean tanned hands clenching into fists by his side, Cristo jerked his arrogant dark head in grudging acknowledgement of that possibility, his innate intelligence warring with his equally natural aggressive instincts to persuade him that she was talking sense.