The Reluctant Husband

Frankie visibly shrank. Disorientatingly, Santino uttered a harsh laugh. He wound one hand into her tousled mane of multicoloured hair and murmured with a cynical twist of his beautifully shaped mouth, ‘I wonder who first told you that what is hidden is infinitely more tantalising to most men?’

Frankie’s teeth ground together. Her green eyes flashed bright with temper and disdain. ‘Right... you want what you paid for...just go ahead and get it over with!’ she urged with supreme scorn. ‘But don’t expect me to join in or pretend I like it!’

Gleaming golden eyes settled on her and flamed with slow-burning satisfaction. ‘I love to be challenged.’

Since that had not been quite the response Frankie had foreseen, her soft mouth dropped open.

‘I’ll make you beg me to take you,’ Santino promised.

‘No...no, you won’t,’ Frankie mumbled in what sounded even to her own ears a very small, seriously rattled voice.

‘You always wanted me,’ Santino countered with drawling, deeply disturbing assurance. ‘I could seduce you with both hands tied behind my back.’

‘No...no,’ she said fearfully, registering too late that that was what she was truly afraid of. Not Santino, not even the act of sex itself, but the infinitely worse threat that he might have the power to make her lose control over her own body.

‘You’re shaking like a leaf,’ Santino whispered, when suddenly she wanted him to shout because whispering sounded far, far too intimate.

‘I’m not—’

‘It’s anticipation,’ Santino muttered thickly. ‘I know it is—’

‘It’s not!’

‘Once you could bum up all the oxygen in the room just looking at me. That kind of animal attraction doesn’t fade without fulfilment—’

‘I grew out of it!’

His ebony brows pleating, his long, lithe body tautening, Santino studied her with sudden flaring intensity. ‘Is it possible that the sight of me snogging the life out of that blonde did turn you off men?’

‘You have the most incredible ego!’ Frankie practically spat at him.

‘Then there isn’t the remotest possibility that you could still be a virgin?’ Santino prompted tautly.

‘What do you think?’ Frankie snarled, at her aggressive and defensive best when it came to falling back on pride for strength. ‘Do you also cherish fond hopes about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?’

At her stinging sarcasm, a tiny muscle jerked at the comer of Santino’s now fiercely compressed lips. ‘Sì...in this day and age you have every reason to greet such a question with incredulity.’

Over-emotional tears smarting behind her eyes, Frankie jerked her head away and blinked rapidly. She had read that it was often difficult for men to know whether or not a woman was experienced. She prayed that that was true. She could not bear Santino to know that she was still such an innocent! Admitting that truth would be horribly humiliating because he would instantly grasp just how deeply he had wounded her self-image with his indifference five years earlier.

Shifting, Santino lowered his dark head, his breath mingling with hers. The clean warn scent of him enveloped her. Her own breath shortened, a nervous tremor racking her.

‘You’re ridiculously tense...’

‘What did you expect?’ Frankie flared accusingly. ‘This is like waiting to be attacked!’

Santino stiffened and then disconcerted her entirely by bursting out laughing. ‘Is it really? And you want me to...what was that wonderful phrase?...sì, “just get it over with”?’

‘What’s so funny about that?’

With a wolfish smile that challenged, Santino gathered her to him with dauntingly sure hands and pushed her bright hair back from her cheekbones. Drawn into the raw heat of him, Frankie shivered violently. He dipped his head and, instead of directing his attention to the rigidly uninviting line of her mutinously closed mouth, he pressed his lips to the tiny pulse beating out her wild tension in the hollow of her collarbone. Frankie jerked in complete shock, bereft of breath and if possible even more alarmed by that unexpected opening move.

‘You will experience only pleasure in my arms. I promise you that. In fact it is a matter of honour that you should rel

ish sharing a bed with me.’ Playing the tip of his tongue erotically across the excruciatingly tender skin of her throat, Santino sent her pulses leaping into sensual disarray. ‘Open your mouth,’ he urged, glittering eyes like scorching shards of pure gold.

Frankie trembled, unyielding as marble, but he brushed her mouth with his and then somehow—and later she genuinely couldn’t understand how—her lips softly parted. And without the slightest warning at all Santino was kissing her with slow, deep, shattering intimacy. Her mind was just as suddenly an astonishing blank; her heart pounded in mad excitement with every rawly intrusive thrust of his tongue. What she had never counted on, and what her treacherous body had never before encountered, was that amount of sheer seductive pleasure. It was the pleasure which bowled her over and overwhelmed her.

‘San—tino...’ she mumbled, coming up desperately for air.