The Reluctant Husband

‘Good friends don’t tell crude lies about each other,’ Santino responded drily.

The reminder made Frankie redden. ‘A couple of months ago, he started trying to change our relationship,’ she confided ruefully. ‘Suddenly he was acting as if he was attracted to me when he never had been before. And then at the farmhouse he said that marrying me would’ve made good business sense...’

‘A wife with money of her own would appeal to an ambitious man, particularly when the agency’s income had dropped and he was having to tighten his belt.’

She almost opened her mouth to tell him that Matt had never been under the impression that she had further funds to dip into after she had bought into the business, but then she remembered that Matt had commented more than once on her mother’s wealthy lifestyle. He might easily have assumed that marrying Della’s daughter would ultimately prove to be well worth his while.

‘How could Matt be that calculating?’ Frankie whispered sickly.

Santino was now studying her intently, hooded dark eyes not missing a single expression that crossed her shaken and hurt face.

‘It’s so upsetting to think of someone I liked and trusted looking on me as a potential piggybank. And it’s so horribly two-faced when all the time Matt was behaving as if it was me he wanted...to think I even worried about hurting his feelings!’ Grimacing, Frankie looked at Santino, wondering when and why he had gone so unusually quiet

Spiky black lashes fanned low on lustrous dark eyes and his shapely mouth slanted into a sudden wolfish smile. ‘Horribly two-faced,’ Santino agreed obediently.

Frankie belatedly registered that she had completely forgotten that she herself had confessed to having spent five years ripping off Santino for every penny she could get. Her fair skin burned and she didn’t know where to put herself or where to look.

Santino stretched a casual hand across the table and briefly enclosed her rigidly knotted fingers. ‘Let’s talk about something more entertaining,’ he suggested lightly. ‘How would you like to spend the next few weeks?’

She was intensely relieved by the change of subject. Extraordinary as it seemed to her, Santino didn’t appear to have twinned her apparent dishonesty with Matt’s.

‘How?’ A look of dreamy abstraction slowly covered her face. ‘I’d love to do Rome...ancient Rome, I mean... The Forum, the Colosseum, the Basilica, the Pantheon...all the places I read about when I took ancient history classes.’ Then she frowned, thinking about all the publicity the news of their marriage had received. ‘Will we be able to go out and about freely?’

‘The paparazzi still think we’re in Sardinia, and there are many other ways of avoiding them,’ Santino informed her with wry amusement. ‘In this instance, I think the wisest move would be to simply release a photograph of us together. That’s really what they all want. Once that is released, it won’t be worth their while to chase after us with the same fervour.’

That afternoon, Santino showed her round the estate. Since it was very large, and Santino demonstrated a surprising eagerness to introduce her to every member of staff and every tenant who crossed their path, they didn’t actually get back to the villa until dinnertime. After their evening meal, he treated her to a tour of the house. Starting at the present day and working backwards in history, he entertained her with fascinating stories about the lives and loves of the previous occupants.

The Villa Fontana had been built to house the flamboyant but much loved mistress of a rich aristocrat.

‘They had seven children together... those soulful little cherubs have their faces.’ Santino indicated the beautiful frescos on the walls. ‘He married her after the birth of their first child. He was an aristocrat and she was a peasant’s daughter—’

‘That sounds like the opening to a sleazy joke,’ Frankie could not resist saying. After exposure to his mother’s snobbery, she was supersensitive to any reference either to the existence of a class divide or that word ‘mistress’.

Santino’s dark eyes stabbed into her with unexpected force. ‘Whatever they didn’t appear to have in common kept them together for well over thirty years!’

‘If that voluptuous blonde is a faithful representation of the lady, we know very well what kept her lover hooked. She looks like a raving sexpot,’ Frankie opined thinly, blondes being a no more welcome subject. ‘And she paid for it, didn’t she? Seven kids in the days when women often died giving birth and there was no pain relief...he was a selfish pig!’

‘I don’t believe I have ever regarded their lifelong love in that light before,’ Santino confessed with sudden intense amusement.

‘Probably not...but then you’re a man, aren’t you? She traded sex for security. If a woman was poor she didn’t have much else to trade in those days, and I bet her family practically sold her to him... although I have to admit that he’s not bad-looking,’ Frankie conceded, studying the gentleman in question. ‘He was a good bit older, though, wasn’t he?’

‘About ten years older,’ Santino supplied, his amusement ebbing.

‘So she had the generation gap to deal with as well.’

Santino tensed. ‘Is that how you feel with me?’

Taken aback by his personal reaction to her facetious comment, Frankie wriggled like a guppy being reeled in. ‘You’re only twenty-nine, Santino—’

‘Take your foot out of your mouth and tell me truthfully,’ Santino gritted, suddenly demonstrating his recent extreme volatility for a usually even-tempered male by backing her up against a pillar. ‘Do you feel a generation gap with me?’

Shaken and confused, she sighed, ‘Santino...to me, you’re just you.’

A surprisingly understanding smile drove the tension from his lean face. ‘Not like anyone else?’

Urgently she nodded in agreement. ‘Unique,’ she added, and then, feeling inexplicably exposed beneath the onslaught of those shrewd golden eyes, she lowered her head. I’m really tired,’ she muttered. ‘I think it’s time I went to bed.’

There was a stark little silence and then Santino withdrew a step.