‘I don’t like,’ she spat back, and, lifting her glass to her mouth, drained the contents.
‘Oh, come on, Lexi, stop this nonsense.’ His voice had a sharp edge. ‘We’re both caught in the same trap. A savage passion we both hate but can’t deny. Why lie, Lexi?’ Jake demanded, an odd bitterness roughening his tone. ‘You’re my wife. We’re here together in one of the loveliest places on earth.’ He glanced around the floodlit gardens and the ocean beyond, his knowing gaze coming back to rest on Lexi. ‘Forget your silly resentment and enjoy yourself.’
‘Silly resentment?’ She almost choked on the words. ‘Is that what you call being blackmailed, having one’s job, one’s life taken over.’
‘I’m your husband,’ he said quietly with an edge of steel. ‘Blackmail apart. I have the right to keep you, and, as for your job, look on it as a learning process. Now you are eminently suitable to take care of my various homes and play hostess to the cosmopolitan collection of business acquaintances I am obliged to entertain occasionally. As my social secretary and mother of my children you will have more than enough to keep you occupied.’
Various homes! And she just bet that included her old home. Social secretary? What a flaming nerve... ‘Won’t that be stepping on your so-faithful Lorraine’s toes?’ she queried derisively, hiding her pain at his mention of the word ‘mother’.
‘Jealous, Lexi?’
‘In your dreams,’ she jeered.
‘Lorraine is a brilliant businesswoman, but does not suffer fools gladly; she is far too outspoken for the social niceties, and a homemaker she is not...’ Jake’s eyes gleamed with latent amusement. ‘Whereas you are perfect for the role. Your upbringing as a diplomat’s daughter has taught you how to mix with anyone. Your gift for languages, your experience looking after the wealthy clientele at the Piccolo Paradiso, all conspire to make you the ideal wife for a man in my position.’
‘I wasn’t aware blackmailers needed a social secretary.’ She gazed at him with utter loathing. What he had said made a horrible kind of sense, and she believed him, but it hurt to finally hear the truth. Jake would carry on as he always had with the lovely Lorraine, while Lexi would be little more than a glorified housekeeper and mother of his children, wheeled out on social occasions as his polite, eminently suitable little wife.
‘Enough.’ Jake slapped his napkin on the table, and, reaching across, he grabbed her hand curving around the wine glass. ‘Stop these foolish recriminations, Lexi. Accept you are my wife.’
‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked dully.
Jake regarded her with unwavering scrutiny, as if searching for something she had no knowledge of, then said with stark cynicism, ‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so.’ Bitterness laced her tone.
‘Let me do the thinking for both of us. Life will be a lot easier.’
The touch of his long fingers, the intensity in his dark eyes stopped the scathing words she was about to utter. Instead, she could only gasp helplessly as he uncurled her fingers from the stem of the glass and raised her hand to his mouth, pressing a soft kiss into her palm before lacing her fingers with his own.
‘Tomorrow we start our holiday.’ Jake stood up, dragging her to her feet. He walked to the top of the table and she had to follow on her side. They met and his other hand grasped her shoulder. He stared down into the pale oval of her face, noting her defiant expression. ‘Forget the past.’
‘And enjoy a holiday?’ Lexi sneered. ‘I’m not that good an actress.’
‘It doesn’t make any difference. You don’t have to act in bed,’ Jake said tautly. ‘I can easily seduce you, and we both know it.’
His confident assertion was true, and she hated him all the more for knowing it. ‘No...’ she muttered.
‘Yes...’ he asserted as his hand left her shoulder and gently touched her mouth, where the soft contours of her lips had swollen at the force of Jake’s kiss. She shivered at his touch.
‘I’m sorry if I hurt you earlier,’ Jake murmured with a faintly sardonic smile, as he noted her involuntary response.
Lexi gasped as the soft pad of his thumb gently caressed her lip, sending tremors up and down her spine. She knew she should stop him, break away, but the deep husky voice, the romantic setting, all conspired against her common sense.
‘You have lovely lips; let me kiss it better,’ he murmured.
His thumb teased her lips and tongue. She trembled and saw no point in denying him; she couldn’t. She was trapped as surely as Jake was by the physical desire that flared between them at the slightest glance. She hated it, and hated him, but she could not stop her body swaying towards him.
‘I’ve eaten, but I’m hungry again for you,’ Jake husked, and without further words he swept her up in his arms and carried her into the house...
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘FOR heaven’s sake, Lexi! Will you hurry up?’
She heard Jake shouting right through the house and, with one last glance at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, she patted her loosely pinned chignon and flinging her bag over her shoulder dashed out of her room. Today they were going to Pompeii, and by the sound of it Jake was in a hurry to get started. It was his fault she was late, she thought mutinously. Instead of Maria delivering her coffee to her room this morning, it had been Jake and before she could drink it he had climbed into bed with her. Her lips were still swollen from his kisses, and the rest of her body still glowed from his loving, though it galled her to have to admit it...
She sighed as she walked down the stairs. Jake was an enigma; from the first night together in the villa when he had swept her up to bed and made passionate love to her and then got out of her bed and returned to his own, she had been trying to figure him out. But without much success. Though in all honesty she had nothing much to complain about. That was, if she discounted the fact that she had lost her job, and was being blackmailed, she told herself drily.
When she had first known Jake she had been young and naïve. Now she congratulated herself that she was mature and sophisticated enough to meet him on his own terms. There was no point in denying the sexual chemistry between them, and she knew Jake was as much a hostage to the passion that flared between them as she was herself. The hatred they felt for each other only lent their passion an added edge, a dark desire, a battle of body and wills that turned the lovemaking into a fight for c