The Reluctant Husband

As he freed her partially of his weight, Frankie yanked her clinging hands from him. That was inappropriate now that the lovemaking was over, she told herself.

Outrageously unfazed by any concept of what was or was not appropriate in the circumstances, Santino rolled her over and contemplated the sheet with impossible cool, not a muscle moving on his vibrantly handsome face. ‘Welcome back, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy,’ he mused softly. ‘Miracles do happen against all the odds.’

Silence stretched and strained like an elastic band drawn to breaking point. With a galling air of expectancy, Santino took in her outraged look and waited.

‘I despise you for this most of all!’ Frankie shot at him, feeling naked inside and out, exposed as a fraud where she had most wished to pose as an equal.

As she attempted to shoot off the edge of the bed, a strong hand restrained her. ‘My bride, the fake seductress. No wonder you got drunk last night. You needed Dutch courage because you weren’t quite sure what to do with me,’ Santino breathed with grim amusement, stunning dark eyes raking over her hot and furious face.

Without even thinking about it, Frankie swung up a punitive hand and tried to slap him. Instead she found herself pressed back to the mattress, shocked by the speed of his reactions even as he glowered down at her. ‘No,’ Santino said succinctly. ‘Lash out with your tongue, not your hands, and comfort yourself with the knowledge that I only hurt you because you lied to me.’

Shock surged back over the edge into sheer ungovernable rage. Frankie struggled to free herself from his strong hands and failed. ‘Let go of me!’ she railed at him, her strained voice breaking.

‘My wildcat wife.’ Santino surveyed her with a disturbing light of understanding in his shrewd assessment. ‘When I crack the surface you are as hopelessly volatile as ever you were. Passion will always betray you—’

‘Damn you, Santino... shut up!’ she hissed.

‘As long as I live, I will never forget you shouting across the lobby that day in Cagliari. “You were mine,” you screamed. “Now I wish you were dead!” And you meant every word of it,’ Santino mused reflectively. ‘If you had had a gun you would have shot me—because if you couldn’t have me nobody else could be allowed to have me. In the space of a heartbeat, love turned to violent hatred...’

Shutting him out with her lashes, all temper quelled by the unbearably painful reminder of her devastation that day, Frankie said unsteadily, ‘I want to get up and pack now.’

‘Good idea,’ Santino conceded, releasing her in a cool, almost careless movement, as if he could not quite understand why he should still have been holding her close. ‘The helicopter should be here soon.’

‘Helicopter?’ she queried, and then she remembered the phone call he had made downstairs and muttered, ‘Yes, of course.’ A helicopter to whis

k them away at speed to the airport, where they would each go their separate ways—for anything else was now impossible. The publicity, the huge furore Della had ignited would follow them both, and Santino naturally wouldn’t want to encourage greater media interest by keeping her with him.

She ran a bath for herself and climbed in, wincing at the unaccustomed soreness she could feel. Herself and Santino? It was over, totally, absolutely and for ever over. She would never see him again. Frankie stared for a long, timeless moment into space, and then her eyes prickled hotly and stung and the tears surged up and gushed like a waterfall. Perfectly natural, grieving for the end of an era, she told herself feverishly, snatching up a towel and burying her face in it as a choking sob swelled up inside her constricted chest.

‘Mourning your lost virginity?’

Startled by the interruption, Frankie dropped the towel in the bathwater. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she demanded strickenly.

‘I need a shower...only one bathroom.’ Making that reminder, Santino gazed down at her, hard dark eyes sharp enough to strip paint. ‘If you want to say goodbye to your family in person, you had better hurry. Otherwise you can call them from Rome.’

‘R-Rome?’ Frankie repeated in a daze, pausing in the very act of plastering the soaking wet towel to her bare breasts. ‘But I’m not going to Rome...’

‘Oh, yes, you are,’ Santino confirmed steadily. ‘Where else did you think you might be going?’

‘I thought...I thought we were heading for the airport and then splitting up... I thought I was going home—’

‘You thought wrong. I haven’t had my three weeks yet...and, by the way, the clock only started ticking when we climbed into bed an hour ago,’ Santino imparted as he reached into the shower cubicle and switched on the water. ‘You get your timesheet docked for nerves and insobriety.’

‘You can’t want to keep me with you after all the publicity there’s been!’ Frankie was reeling with renewed shock, a state that Santino appeared equal to keeping her in almost continually. The pressure of never really knowing what was likely to happen next was starting to wear down her nerves.

Santino shrugged out of his robe and let it fall to the floor, gloriously unconcerned by his nudity. ‘Cara...I don’t care if I have to pitch a tent at the top of Everest. You’re putting in your time...’ He glanced back at her, classic profile hard and implacable. ‘I can only hope that I don’t live to discover that you’re likely to be around even longer...’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Frankie whispered without comprehension.

‘Unless I’m very much mistaken we just had sex without precautions.’ Santino sent her a charged look, obsidian in its chilling gravity. ‘When I asked you if I needed to worry about your fertility, I took your silence for confirmation that I didn’t need to protect us both from that risk.’

‘I don’t remember you asking me anything of the sort!’ Frankie gasped. ‘You mean you didn’t...? No, you didn’t...’ As she answered that question for herself her voice died away, and she shivered in the cold, clammy clasp of the sopping towel, gripped by panic at the threat of an accidental pregnancy by a male who despised her. That she was actually married to that same male didn’t seem remotely relevant.

‘And if your misleading silence was less a mistake than a deliberate attempt to prolong a most profitable association with me... you’ve made a cardinal error which you will undoubtedly live to regret,’ Santino assured her, jawline hard as iron.

An almost hysterical giggle feathered dangerously in Frankie’s dry throat. She surveyed him with huge, unwittingly fascinated eyes. Right then she was wondering if the blood of the suspicious Borgias ran in Santino’s veins. Here she was, still in shock at the realisation that there had been a misunderstanding and that they had made love without contraception, but Santino’s serpentine reasoning processes were infinitely darker and more cynical than her own. He already suspected her of having deliberately deceived him into running that risk.

‘I won’t even dignify that accusation with an answer,’ she returned tightly.