The Reluctant Husband

Flinching from that blunt stating of fact, Frankie nonetheless spun straight back to him. ‘I don’t think there was ever any question of my meeting your family,’ she challenged in condemnation.

Santino elevated a smooth ebony brow, his vibrantly handsome features impassive. ‘It’s immaterial now.’

The unspoken reminder of how much time had passed since then silenced her. She had sounded like a woman scorned, she thought in horror. Bitter, accusing. All over what? A marriage that had never been a normal marriage? A husband who had never been a real husband and who had, understandably, at the age of twenty-four, found celibacy too much of a challenge?

Twisting away, dismally conscious of how close her turbulent emotions were to the surface and how great would be the self-betrayal if she voiced those raw feelings, Frankie stalked out of the room and started up the narrow staircase. On the landing, however, her deep sense of injustice overcame her. ‘You should’ve just come to see me in London...you should never have dragged me back here!’

She flashed into what should have been and never had been the marital bedroom. Here she had slept alone. At the foot of the bed rested the carved dower chest presented to her by her great-aunts on her wedding day, filled to the brim with exquisite embroidered linen. Teresa and Maddalena had given the chest with such pride and pleasure. Neither of them had ever married, and no Sard woman of their generation celebrated spinsterhood.

She stood at the low window, staring sightlessly out. Santino evoked a dangerously explosive mix of hatred and fierce longing inside her. The hatred she wanted to nourish, but the strength of that fierce longing filled her with fear. Dear heaven, Santino was already tearing her apart. He was forcing her to relive so much that she had deliberately buried.

‘Francesca...’ Santino murmured from the doorway.

Her hands closed convulsively in on themselves. ‘I was so happy here,’ she whispered, and then, instantly regretting that lowering admission—for who wanted to admit to having been happy living in a pathetic dreamworld? —she added curtly, ‘You should have told me the truth about our marriage right from the start.’

‘I didn’t think you were strong enough to take it,’ Santino countered with devastating frankness. ‘You had too much invested in our relationship.’

Frankie’s restive fingers coiled into tight fists. ‘That’s not true!’ She flipped round to face him. ‘I’ve had my share of hard knocks in life, but none of them has ever sent me to the wall!’

Santino surveyed her with steady, dark-as-night eyes, as if he knew that she was lying, as if he knew that he had cruelly ripped her heart out that day in Cagliari and almost destroyed her. ‘You were completely dependent on me and extremely vulnerable. You had the body and the emotions of an adult without the maturity or the experience...’ Unusually, Santino hesitated, his deep, dark drawl roughening as he breathed, ‘After five years of living in such isolation your knowledge of the world barely went beyond the boundaries of this village.’

Frankie paled and veiled her expressive eyes, appalled by an assessment she could not protest at. Too well did she recall the frightening disorientation she had endured when she had returned to London.

‘If you hadn’t caught the train to Cagliari that day, you would eventually have agreed to continue your education in Florence,’ Santino asserted with conviction. ‘I would have been able to watch over you there. You would have outgrown your infatuation with me and found yourself becoming more interested in boys in your own age group.’

Frankie bit back a sarcastic shout of disbelief but could not resist prompting, ‘And if I hadn’t...what would you have done then?’

Santino shifted a powerful shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug, brilliant eyes screened by thick black lashes. ‘I would have coped with the situation. I was very fond of you.’

Fond. A shudder of revulsion and mortification rippled through her taut length. What a lukewarm, milky nothing word, she reflect

ed fiercely.

‘But, regardless of that, we couldn’t have gone on living as we were. I didn’t want to risk ending up in bed with you—’

‘Oh, I don’t think there was ever much risk of that!’ Francesca hissed with the sharpness of unforgotten pain as she tried to brush past him.

Santino snaked out a lean brown hand and closed it round her slender forearm to force her to still. His dark eyes shimmered with flaring gold anger as he gazed down at her. ‘You were as wild as a gypsy. Incredibly beautiful and stunningly sexy. You didn’t even appear to be aware of your sexual power, but it was there and it kept me awake every night I ever spent in this house with you,’ Santino informed her rawly. ‘You were a temptation that tormented me every day of our marriage.’

Stunned into paralysis by that staggering admission, Frankie stared up at him, green eyes wide with disbelief, even her breathing suspended.

‘I walked a tightrope with you,’ Santino recalled grimly, a line of dark colour accentuating the spectacular slant of his hard cheekbones. ‘I knew that if I succumbed I’d plunge us both into an impossible relationship. I deserved a medal for staying out of the marital bed...most particularly when you began reminding me at every opportunity that you were my wife!’

Oxygen re-inflated Frankie’s lungs as she sucked in a shuddering breath. Shock still rolled over her in heady waves, but a surge of deep and abiding anger followed in its wake. Wrenching herself violently free, she raced down the stairs and out of the back door into the fresh air.

All that time he had wanted her; all that time and she had never once suspected. A jagged laugh was wrenched from her. She had loved him so much. She had loved Santino with an intensity that had been unashamed and fearless. Unable to imagine a future without him, she hadn’t understood how much damage loving like that could do until it was too late to protect herself. But all along Santino had known...

In spite of the heat, her skin chilled. ‘You had too much invested in our relationship.’ With those bloodless words of detachment, Santino had acknowledged the reality that she had belonged to him body and soul. So he had been physically attracted to her; so he had been tempted by the body she had been so pitifully willing to offer... it meant so little, she conceded painfully. It was like coming in last of all in a race she had once hoped to win.

For Santino had withstood sexual temptation with colossal cool and self-discipline. They had cracked the mould when they made Santino. Lust had warred with intellect... and intellect had naturally won. A strong and shrewd instinct for self-preservation had kept Santino out of the marital bed. He had known that he’d have a hell of a job getting rid of her if he slept with her.

A lean hand came down on her shoulder. Santino turned her round, gleaming dark golden eyes scanning her flushed and expressive face. ‘You are still very intense,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘Still remarkably sensitive to the past. And yet why should I be surprised by that? The Sard blood in your veins fuelled your desire for revenge. I hurt you. And you retaliated in the only way you could. You chose to lie and cheat and steal from me.’

Paling, Frankie muttered, ‘I...I—’

Santino’s strong dark features were hard and unyielding. ‘I’ve already explained why I behaved as I did then. And yet still you show no shame. That explanation should’ve been unnecessary. No decent man would’ve bedded an infatuated teenager!’

Frankie’s temper sparked. ‘No decent man would’ve broken his marriage vows either! You were unfaithful. Where’s your shame, Santino?’ she shot at him, unable to silence that angry demand.