The Reluctant Husband

Naturally they wouldn’t be sharing a bed any more, and she wanted to clear her stuff out of his room before he went up to bed later. The less she reminded him of their brief intimacy, the more he would relax with her, wouldn’t he? And she wanted him to relax; she really did. If this next couple of weeks was all the time they were ever to spend together, she wanted to make the most of it.

Frankie had just got into bed in a room across the landing when Santino strode in. With a start, she sat up again. Santino wore only a bathtowel, anchored precariously round his lean brown hips, and he looked really mad. Without a word, he plucked her out of bed and carried her back to his room.

‘What are you doing?’ she gasped. ‘Now that we’re being friends again, we can’t sleep together!’

‘I don’t want another friend. I’ve got plenty of friends. I want you in my bed, where you belong.’ Santino punctuated that announcement by settling her between the sheets, casting aside his towel and sliding in beside her. ‘For the moment, that will suffice. Buona notte, cara.’

Shellshocked, Frankie lay there in the darkness. ‘But we’re on the brink of a divorce; why?’

‘If you’re really lucky these old bones of mine might give out first and you’ll find yourself a very merry and extremely rich widow instead,’ Santino countered sardonically from the far side of the bed. ‘Madre di Dio...is it wise for me to put ideas of that nature into your head?’

‘Don’t you dare say things like that even as a joke!’ It was an appalled and superstitious wail of censure. ‘I’d die if anything happened to you!’

And as soon as those words escaped Frankie she clamped a horrified hand to her open mouth.

‘That sounds just a little extreme to me,’ Santino countered with an incredulous derision that was hugely painful for her to hear. ‘And completely unbelievable coming from a woman who lies, cheats and steals from me for five long years without once succumbing to an attack of conscience—’

‘But I didn’t...it was—’

‘Della, the mother-in-law from hell,’ Santino slotted in, his deep, dark drawl ringing with sizzling selfsatisfaction.

Sitting up, he turned the bedside lamps back on and surveyed her with wry amusement. ‘Don’t you feel better having got that off your chest? I’m sorry I had to get nasty...well, so theatrical, but I know the right imaginative buttons to push with you, cara. Death and disloyalty, an unbeatable combination.’

‘Oh, no...’ Frankie moaned in horror at what she had let slip, aghast on her mother’s behalf.

‘You told me yourself over lunch,’ Santino informed her gently. ‘While you were wittering on with such enormous hurt about Finlay’s dishonest intentions, it finally sunk in on me that there was no way in this lifetime that you would behave in a similiar fashion. And when were you ever able to keep secrets from me? You look so shifty and guilty when you’re lying, a child could find you out. If I hadn’t been in such a rage that day, I’d have seen that for myself.’

‘Mum?’ Frankie muttered shakily, barely able to absorb what he was telling her because he sounded so disorientatingly light-hearted.

‘You should’ve known that there wasn’t the slightest chance that I would prosecute her. Put Della in an open court to star in a sensational trial?’ Santino chided incredulously. ‘I would not expose you or my family to that experience merel

y to punish her.’

Still welded to the mattress by shock, Frankie whispered weakly, ‘You mean, you never planned to—’

‘Never.’

‘But I believed you...you scared me out of my wits!’

Santino shot her a languorous smile, rather like a big predatory cat receiving a very welcome stroking of the ego. ‘Didn’t I just?’

Frankie shot across the big bed like an electric eel. ‘How could you do that to me?’ she raked at him furiously.

‘At the time, with pleasure,’ Santino admitted. ‘After all, while you were industriously protecting a woman who could single-handedly gut a shoal of piranha fish and emerge unscathed from the bloodbath, it never once occurred to you to consider me—’

‘You?’ Frankie echoed in a tone that shook with rage after that highly offensive reference to her mother.

Santino snaked out his arms and entrapped her as she leant over him. ‘Think hard,’ he advised with mocking dark eyes that flared gold as they roamed over her lovely face. ‘It would help me along tremendously. Poor, unfortunate Santino, evidently saddled with a wife who is an unashamed criminal... and who is also potentially pregnant. Nightmare street.’

‘But I’m not an unashamed criminal,’ she mumbled rather unsteadily as he drew her down, crushing her breasts intimately into the hard wall of his hair-roughened chest.

‘Hmm...’ Santino sighed throatily, angling his powerful hips up into thrusting contact with her slight, trembling length and introducing her to the hungry, aroused thrust of his manhood.

‘No, Santino...the divorce,’ Frankie reminded him breathlessly.

Santino rested his arrogant dark head back on the pillows and studied her with deceptively sleepy golden eyes. ‘This intense preoccupation with divorce is beginning to worry me. I am only three days into the three weeks you signed up for. What’s an extra fun encounter here and there...between friends?’ he enquired with husky persuasion.

‘No...’ Hot in places she was too ashamed to acknowledge, Frankie gave him a look of pleading reproach even as her slender thighs somehow drifted slightly apart and she found herself inexplicably rubbing her quivering body with helpless enticement against his.