The Reluctant Husband

‘Sí...the wrong son came back down the mountain—’

‘Don’t say things like that,’ Frankie begged with a superstitious shiver. ‘If your parents somehow left you with the idea that you were more expendable than your older brother, that could only have been an accidental result of their grief and—’

Santino dealt her a winging look of contempt. ‘Tell me, were you or were you not present when Sonia was delivering her opinion of my worth in comparison to my late brother’s?’

Frankie couldn’t meet his gaze. She shifted awkwardly.

‘And Rico was a wonderful man. My mother worshipped the ground he walked on. Hell, so did I!’ Santino gritted. ‘He was an unparalleled success at being all things to all people. When he died he left a great yawning hole in our lives and family unity vanished. I found myself being treated like the living dead. My mother could not forgive me for surviving at Rico’s expense.’

Since that was more or less Frankie’s estimate of Sonia Vitale’s feelings as well, she averted guilty eyes from his. Santino would naturally scorn empty protests. And for the first time she understood what might have drawn him so frequently to his great-uncle’s isolated village in Sardinia. Father Vassari had been a kind and practical man. Santino had been treated like a pariah by his parents while he was still only a teenager. He must’ve been comforted by the old man’s continuing affection, and no doubt his reassurance that Rico’s death had been in no way his fault.

She was warmed by that image but troubled and hurt by it too, for once she had eagerly shared her every anxiety and fear with Santino. Yet he had never told her about his brother, never once risked burdening her with anything she might not have been able to handle. More than everything else that underlined how unequal their relationship had been then. He had put her needs and concerns ahead of his own. Always. He had been the giver, she the taker... and the long-overdue acknowledgement shook Frankie to her very depths.

‘All of a sudden you’re very quiet,’ Santino remarked softly.

Squirming with discomfiture, Frankie lifted her bright head again. Santino was already crossing the room to her. Unsettled by his sudden proximity, threatened by her new awareness of how much she loved him, she collided involuntarily with fiercely intent dark golden eyes.

‘But the act of confession must indeed be good for the soul,’ Santino informed her with husky conviction as he stretched out confident hands to ease her into intimate connection with his hard, muscular frame. ‘Or perhaps it is the wealth of compassion you contrive to suggest with those wonderfully eloquent green eyes. Whatever... Dio...I have an overwhelming need to lose myself now in sexual oblivion!’

CHAPTER NINE

‘SANTINO...?’ Frankie gasped breathlessly, taken aback by the volatile charge of sexual hunger in his brilliant gaze.

‘You want me too,’ Santino groaned, backing her up against the door without hesitation and dropping his dark head to press his mouth with burning eroticism to the sensitive skin of her throat. He sent a shiver of such electrified heat through her slender length that her legs shook and threatened to crumple beneath her.

‘Don’t you, cara?’ he prompted with blatant assurance.

‘Yes...’ she muttered unsteadily, painfully conscious of her inability to resist him. ‘Yes...’

Santino muttered something raw and husky in Italian and closed his hands over the swelling curve of her hips, spreading his muscular thighs to bring her into contact with the rampant thrust of his erection. As he trembled against her, answering fire sprang up low in her belly. Her entire body burned, infused with a surging, desperate need she could not fight.

He skimmed sure hands down her quivering thighs to part them and raised her dress with summary masculine impatience. Expert fingers teased the heated core of her through the thin barrier of her briefs and he vented a husky sigh of satisfaction as he discovered the dampness she could neither control nor conceal. Frankie shivered and shook with excitement and moaned deep in her throat, clutching helplessly at him for support. And then her dark lashes lifted and over his bent shoulder she focused on a tiny ice-blue handbag sitting like an unexploded bomb on a nearby table.

‘Your mother’s left her handbag behind!’ she gasped strickenly.

Santino abandoned his erotic assault on the molten responsive heat he was engaged in exploring and slowly, very slowly lifted his dark head again. His eyes were as blank and uncomprehending as the blacked-out windows of his parents’ limousine.

‘Her bag...over there!’ Frankie raised a shaking hand to point at the offending article. ‘She could walk back in here again at any minute!’

Santino’s lush black lashes swept down and then up again. He focused on her and his fingers slowly, reluctantly loosened their grip on her dress to let the hem fall again. He snatched in a shuddering breath, dark colour igniting over the taut slant of his superb cheekbones.

Frankie trembled, embarrassed by what she had almost allowed to happen between them. ‘Maybe we should go upstairs,’ she muttered unevenly.

Santino stepped reluctantly back. The silence hummed. She opened the door with a fumbling hand and finally worked up the courage to turn her head and look at him again. In a driven motion he looped a punitive hand into her tumbled hair and took her mouth with speaking passionate brevity. As he drew away from her again, eyes ablaze with hunger, his breathing audibly fractured, she very nearly snatched him back into her arms.

All of a quiver, she started walking across the hall and up the spectacular staircase. A masculine hand closed possessively, impatiently over her clenched fingers. On the semi-circular landing, she stole a glance at him. It was a mistake...or was it? For it was a mistake that made Santino reveal the strength of his own desire all over again. He succumbed to the apparent temptation and encouragement of that one little glance by closing his arms round her so tightly she could barely breathe, crushing her to him and kissing her until her head swam. The merest persistence might well have persuaded her that there was nothing remotely wrong with making love in a corridor.

But he jerked back from her then with a growling sound of frustration. ‘Only this morning you were a virgin. I should be making allowances for that...I’m not.’

She met burning golden eyes and knew she was utterly enslaved.

‘I want you so much I am in agony,’ Santino gritted unevenly.

Incapable of speech, she nodded like a submissive marionette.

In silence, he snatched her up into his powerful arms and strode at speed down the corridor. He set her down in a bedroom but she had no time to absorb the newness of her surroundings. Santino was unzipping her dress, tugging it down her arms, releasing the front catch on her bra, and, without even waiting for either garment to drop away, he brought up his hands to hungrily enclose the pouting swell of her bare breasts.

She caught their reflection in a tall cheval-glass as she strained helplessly back into the hard, virile heat of his powerful physique. As he massaged her achingly responsive flesh and played with the throbbing pink buds desperate for his attention, she looked wanton, abandoned. And even as she writhed in tormented pleasure she stared, watching his dark, passionately intent face above hers, learning for the first time that she had power too, the power to make Santino crave her like a drug—the power to make him need her...?