The Reluctant Husband

Intoxicated by that knowledge, she twisted round in his arms and blindly sought his sensual mouth again for herself. His tongue stabbed between her lips, flicked over her tender palate and drove her wild. As her knees sagged she clung to him, and he tumbled her down on the bed behind her, following her there without once freeing her swollen mouth.

‘Per amor di Dio...you’re a witch...this isn’t how it was supposed to be!’ As Santino wrenched her from the folds of the dress still crumpled round her waist, Frankie flinched from that snarling intonation. Stunning dark eyes alight with splintering hostility clashed with hers. And then, insane even as it seemed to her in that split second of stark confusion, he kissed her again with the kind of drowning erotic thoroughness that plunged her back into sensual oblivion.

Impatiently dispensing with the silky panties which still clung to her slender hips, Santino wasted no time in rediscovering the unbearably hot, moist welcome awaiting him. With an exultant growl, he pushed back her thighs and came over her like a conqueror to thrust with urgent, forceful hunger into the heart of her yielding body.

Frankie cried out, her spine arching on a relentless surge of excitement. He was wild for her and she was hopelessly out of control. For tormenting minutes of terrifyingly intense pleasure, he drove her ruthlessly to satisfaction. The explosive, blinding shock waves of climax hurtled through every fibre of her being and totally wiped her out.

The first thing she noticed after that was the speed with which Santino jerked away from her. A sudden chill cooled her bare damp skin and she was filled with a devastating sense of disorient

ation and loss, because what she craved at that instant was for him to hold her tight. Then the screaming silence registered. Slowly she opened her eyes on an unfamiliar ceiling. Her gaze crept almost fearfully down the walls and found Santino. Disturbingly, he was still fully dressed.

He moved back to the foot of the bed, where she was spread out like a recently plundered human sacrifice. She was in shock, ravaged by the primal hunger of his possession. Santino was strikingly pale beneath his naturally golden skin. In that awful silence he stared down at her as if he wasn’t quite sure how she had got there, or indeed who had brought her to such a state. And then those beautiful dark eyes filled with a mortifying mix of stark regret and compassion.

In an impatient movement, he snatched up a silkfringed throw from a nearby chair and covered her shivering body with it. But out of sight was very obviously not out of mind. Dense black lashes screening his gaze, Santino breathed raggedly, ‘I’ll run a bath for you.’

He got about twelve feet away before Frankie unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth to mutter chokily, ‘Why don’t you try drowning yourself in it?’

Rolling onto her side, she curled up into a tight ball. All of a sudden she felt like a whore he had picked up and now wanted to throw out. He was ashamed of himself, so therefore she had to be ashamed of herself too. Where had she ever got the stupid idea that his physical desire for her body could be a cause for celebration?

‘I’m starting to feel like a split personality,’ Santino confessed in an abrupt and charged undertone. ‘I have never before fallen on a woman like a ravening beast...’

Nor had his ego rejoiced in the force of his own rapacious sexual hunger for her, she recalled numbly.

‘I know you enjoyed it, but—’

At that undiplomatic reminder, Frankie reared up to face him again. ‘Get out of here!’ she screamed at him full blast.

Santino surveyed her in frustration and fanned out his long fingers in eloquent emphasis. ‘That won’t solve anything...and it would make me feel worse.’

‘Good!’ Frankie shot back, tears erupting without warning to pour down her cheeks.

On familiar ground with that development, Santino dropped down beside her and framed her distraught face between inexpressibly gentle hands. His vibrantly handsome features were stamped with remorse. ‘I wanted to punish your...I really did want to punish you. But when I looked at you a minute ago I saw the teenager who once loved me, and you really don’t look very much older now. No matter what you have done, it was only money and I am an excessively wealthy man,’ he conceded grimly. ‘But I wish I could go back to that day in the café at La Rocca and freeze time—’

‘Y-yes,’ Frankie stammered, shaken that the exact same thought which had occurred to her should now be occurring to him.

Santino’s eloquent mouth quirked. ‘Although, to be honest, I’m not sure it would’ve helped. It was your lies which enraged me most. I have a terrible temper. I’m not a very forgiving person...yet somehow all that anger has suddenly drained out of me. So I was disappointed in you, deeply disappointed...’ He still felt the need to stress that, but a broad shoulder shifted in a fatalistic shrug of acceptance.

‘But what if I wasn’t really guilty of having taken all that money?’ Frankie muttered in an impulsive rush. Having been hanging off his every word, she was on the very brink of confessing the truth, because it really hurt that he should still think of her as a liar, a cheat and a thief. Indeed all she needed to prompt her into telling all was a little sympathetic encouragement. ’S-suppose... I mean, suppose I was just trying to protect Mum?’

As he listened, Santino’s lean face hardened and darkened again like a threatening thundercloud. ‘Don’t be childish, Francesca. You can’t magically remake my image of you by taking refuge behind more lies,’ he warned her with harsh impatience, misreading her motivation in having asked such loaded questions.

‘I know, but I—’

‘Listen to me,’ Santino cut in with warning gravity. ‘If it wasn’t for your involvement in that financial deception, I’d have had your precious mother charged with fraud and banged up in custody by now! Believe me, it goes very much against the grain to let her escape that punishment, but I can’t put her in the dock without putting you right up there beside her.’

Registering that her lie—her false confession of having deliberately conspired with Della to defraud him—was the only thing that appeared to stand between her mother and a probable prison sentence, Frankie dropped her eyes fearfully again and pinned her tremulous mouth shut, grateful she hadn’t said enough to arouse any real suspicion that she might not be guilty as charged. It was dauntingly obvious to her that Santino, assured of her own lack of complicity in the crime, would without hesitation go ahead and prosecute her dishonest parent.

‘Wise decision.’ Santino complimented her on her silence. ‘You have to face up to what you did...but that doesn’t mean that you can’t change.’

Ducking free of his hold and rubbing at her swollen eyes, she sighed heavily. ‘I guess not...’

‘You’re still my wife and I am responsible for your well-being,’ Santino continued more gently. “That definitely shouldn’t encompass reducing you to a sobbing heap on my bed. I should’ve controlled my desire for you.’

‘Yes... I mean, no... I—’ Meeting the questioning look in Santino’s clear, frighteningly intelligent gaze, Frankie shrank and lowered her eyes again, terrified of revealing too much. What had provoked her distress was his apparent rejection of her in the aftermath of that shatteringly intense bout of intimacy.

‘I imagine you’re rather sore,’ Santino murmured ruefully. ‘And sex should always be equally pleasurable for both partners. I should never have put my need ahead of your capacity for enjoyment.’

‘Stop talking down to me,’ Frankie urged in growing embarrassment. ‘I knew what I was doing too.’