The Reluctant Husband
it and her hands clenched into furious fists of frustration by her side.
Five minutes in that bedroom upstairs and Frankie was convinced that she was looking at the smallest bed for two people she had ever seen in her life. It would barely take Santino, never mind her! Indeed, avoiding Santino in that bed would be an absolute impossibility. She pictured the sheer, frivolous nightwear in her case and almost curled up and died on the spot. Beautiful lingerie was her one secret extravagance, but she recoiled from the prospect of surprising Santino with an inviting display of scantily clad female flesh.
Creeping down the narrow passage into Teresa’s bedroom, she extracted a voluminous high-necked cotton nightdress from the comer closet. Only the most ruthlessly determined and lustful male would try to make it past all those billowing folds in a four-foot-wide bed and with the equivalent of in-laws sleeping in the rooms on either side of them. Hugging that comforting conviction to herself, Frankie finally climbed into bed.
About half an hour later, the door opened and the bedside lamp went on. She heard Santino unzip his overnight bag. She breathed in deeply. She opened her eyes just in time to see Santino peel off his shirt. Taut as a bowstring, she studied the long golden sweep of his back, watched the ripple of tightly corded muscles as he stretched. Leaving the door ajar, he strolled barefoot across the passage into the bathroom, and only when she heard the running of water and realised that he was intending to have a bath did she breathe again.
The minutes ticked away, each of them like a saw cutting at her fast-fraying nerves. Frankie lay there getting madder and madder, responding to her own tension with growing rage. Finally the bathroom door opened again. Santino strolled back in and leant lithely against the bedroom door to close it. Frankie studied him like a bristling cat surveying a fully grown tiger invading her patch. Bare-chested, with the button on the waistband of his close-fitting jeans carelessly undone, he lounged there as if he didn’t have a care in the world, long straight legs braced slightly apart.
Her mouth ran dry.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WELL, well, well, at least you’re not still pretending to be asleep,’ Santino commented silkily. ‘Perhaps you are at long last beginning to feel just a little married?’
‘Like heck I am!’ With the greatest difficulty, Frankie dragged her attention from the intimidating breadth of his chest and the intensely masculine triangle of rough dark curls hazing his powerful pectoral muscles.
‘By dawn I assure you that you will no longer be in any doubt that you belong to me.’
At that assurance, Frankie bridled in outrage. ‘I do not belong to you!’
Santino sent her a winging smile that was a shockingly cold threat. ‘For the next three weeks, you do.’
Something deep down inside Frankie shrivelled up under that chill. That distance, that detachment had been concealed in the presence of her family. Now it sprang out at her from his diamond-hard and incisive scrutiny.
‘When you look at me like that, you scare me,’ she muttered, and then would’ve done anything to retrieve that craven admission.
‘You’re a beautiful woman and I want to make love to you. That has nothing to do with either emotion or temper,’ Santino asserted with devastating cool, and ran down the zip on his jeans.
Far from reassured, Frankie sat up with the abruptness of a puppet having her strings jerked. ‘Santino...’
Santino slid out of his jeans in one fluid motion and stood there, quite unconcerned, in a pair of black briefs which did spectacularly little to conceal the overt differences between the male and female anatomy.
Hot colour flamed in Frankie’s cheeks and she hurriedly averted her attention to the bedspread instead. ‘Santino...no!’ she whispered frantically.
‘Why are you whispering?’ he demanded, and with an undeniable lurch of dismay she saw the briefs hit the floor.
‘Please, whisper back,’ she begged, in an agony of embarrassment at the thought of her family hearing him.
The sheet was remorselessly wrenched from her frantically tight hold. ‘I wasn’t planning to do much more talking,’ Santino confessed as he slid into bed with her.
‘Not here...not tonight, please,’ Frankie pleaded from the furthest edge of the mattress.
It wasn’t far enough. Santino reached up with two frighteningly powerful hands and simply tumbled her down on top of him. She landed with a strangled gasp and found herself mercilessly pinned to his uncompromisingly hard male physique, startled eyes on a direct collision course with his questioning scrutiny.
‘What the hell is this all about?’ he enquired grimly. ‘If you think you can default on an agreement with a Vitale, you are very much mistaken. What I said earlier I meant. What I paid for I fully intend to enjoy, however briefly.’
‘But perhaps you’re not thinking very clearly right now,’ Frankie suggested in breathless dismay as the all-pervasive masculine heat of his naked body began to penetrate even that impregnable nightdress. ‘You’re still very angry with me...and you don’t want to do something you might regret—’
‘I want to make love to my wife, Francesca...not commit some violent criminal act,’ Santino incised with considerable irony.
‘If you wait until tomorrow night, I’ll do anything you want!’ Frankie gabbled the wildly impulsive promise in desperation.
Frowning, Santino surveyed her through the veil of his lush black lashes. ‘How many glasses of wine did you have over dinner?’
‘I...I...oh!’ Frankie gasped as he rolled her off him again, tumbled her back onto the mattress and pinned one long thigh over her trembling lower limbs.
‘Madre di Dio...what are you wearing?’ Santino enquired with incredulous volume, registering the full effect of the garment for the first time.