The Reluctant Husband

‘I only took possession of the castello last year,’ Santino contradicted her. ‘Before that it belonged to my father, and he had leased it out as a hotel for over twenty years.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You told me nothing about yourself—’

‘I told no lies and I gave you as much information as you could cope with. You were perfectly content within your own little world just playing house. Measure the level of your maturity then by recalling how much you ever asked me about what I actually did for a living,’ Santino suggested drily. ‘As I remember it, your sole angle of interest then was that working kept me away from you all week!’

Flames of mortified colour burnished Frankie’s complexion. ‘What was I supposed to ask you? I’d never been in a bank in my life and I just didn’t want to expose my ignorance! Look, where are we going?’ she demanded abruptly. ‘This isn’t the way we came—’

‘We’re heading to Sienta for a long-awaited Caparelli family reunion,’ Santino delivered levelly.

At the news that they were heading for her grandfather’s village, Frankie’s soft mouth dropped open. ‘Sienta?’ she gasped strickenly.

‘I hope your family never learn that you would’ve come to Sardinia and left again without even treating them to a brief visit—’

‘Damn you...don’t you dare turn pious on me!’ Frankie flared back at him in furious reproof. ‘You know better than anyone how miserable I was in that village! My grandfather could’ve written to my mother at any time and she would’ve flown over and taken me home, but she never got the chance because she didn’t know where I was...’

Santino drew the car to a halt again. Then he turned to survey her angry, resentful face. His expressive mouth compressed. ‘I will tell no more lies or half-truths to protect you. You’re old enough to deal with reality. Your mother made no attempt to regain custody of you.’

‘How could she when she didn’t know where I was? My father was always on the move, and naturally she assumed I was with him!’

Santino emitted a pained sigh. ‘After he learnt of his son’s death, Gino gave me his permission to make contact with your mother—’

‘I don’t believe you!’ Frankie cried feverishly.

‘Your grandfather said, “Let my daughter-in-law come here and talk to us and then we will see what is best for the child.” The next time I was in London I visited Della and informed her of Gino’s invitation and your unhappiness. Your mother did nothing.’

‘That’s not true...that can’t be true!’

‘I’m sorry, but it is,’ Santino asserted steadily, his veiled dark gaze meeting her appalled eyes and then skimming with cool diplomacy away again. ‘Your mother had always known where you were because your father phoned her the day he took you, to tell her that he was bringing you to live with his family. Delia has little maternal instinct, and by the time I caught up with her she was out partying every night with her second husband. Even when I told her that Marco was dead, she saw no reason why you shouldn’t stay where you were.’

Frankie twisted her bright head sharply away from him, tears smarting below her lashes. A beautifully shaped masculine hand closed over her convulsing fingers and she tore free of his touch in a stark gesture of repudiation.

Santino released his breath in a raw hiss that sliced through the screamingly tense silence. ‘In telling you the truth I chose the lesser of two evils. At the time, Gino could not bring himself to hurt you with that truth, and his reward was your resentment and bitterness. A

fter your father died, you blamed your grandfather for keeping you in Sardinia. I could not let you return to your family still harbouring that grudge.’

Santino had unveiled the murky core of something Frankie had always secretly feared. Her young and beautiful mother had indeed just got on with her life once her daughter was gone—content, possibly even relieved to be free of the burden of childcare. And ever since Frankie had come home at sixteen that awful truth had been staring her in the face...hadn’t it? Her fond hopes and expectations had never been met by the detached and uninterested parent she had foolishly idealised throughout her years away.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ Frankie breathed, tight-mouthed, falling back on her pride with fierce determination. ‘But I should’ve been told the facts a long time ago.’

Santino drove on. ‘That was not my decision to make.’

A distraught sob clogged up Frankie’s throat. She despised and feared the very intensity of her own emotions. Yet it was a weakness she had learned to live with and conceal. Unfortunately that felt like an impossible challenge in Santino’s presence. And just at that moment it seemed to her that in all her life she had never been loved...

Not by her emotionally cold mother, not by her feckless father, who had stolen her purely in the vengeful hope of punishing his estranged wife, not by her father’s family, who had had no choice but to keep her... and certainly not by Santino, who had already admitted to marrying her because she’d been on his conscience and he’d pitied her.

A tiny gulping sound escaped her compressed lips.

‘Cry... it always makes you feel better,’ Santino suggested, with the disturbing cool of a male who had suffered through countless impassioned sessions of weeping while she was in her volatile teen years.

‘I hate you, Santino...’ And she despised herself even more then, for sounding like a sulky adolescent.

‘But you still look at me like a starving kid in a candy shop. That hasn’t changed.’

A shaken surge of outrage swept over Frankie.

‘What has changed,’ Santino murmured with velvetsmooth emphasis, ‘is that I no longer feel that I will be taking unfair advantage of an innocence which I now assume to be long gone...’

As his imperious dark head turned slightly, as if in question on that point, Frankie snarled, ‘What do you think? Do you fondly imagine that the sight of you snogging the life out of that brassy blonde tart put me off sex for ever?’