The Sheikh's Innocent Bride

‘But I don’t fancy Steven...and even when you upset me or I get annoyed with you, I still fancy you,’ Jemima confided a little desperately, because he was smiling that wicked smile of his that made her heart beat crazily fast.

‘Is that a fact?’ Luciano teased, shifting off the door to shed his jacket and jerk loose his tie. ‘I had this unrealistic fantasy where I came home and everything would be all right and we would go straight to bed... Don’t know what I thought we’d do with all our guests.’

‘Everything is all right. Our guests are also remarkably good at entertaining themselves,’ she opined. ‘Oh, by the way, I love you...loads and loads...and it’s got nothing to do with your money like Steven thinks.’

‘Honestly...you love me?’ Luciano growled. ‘But why?’

‘That’s the weird bit... I truly don’t know. One minute I was fancying you like mad and the next I was wanting to make your life perfect for you,’ Jemima confided with an embarrassed wince.

‘Equally weird for me from the very first moment. Took me a long time to realise that not wanting to love again was basically a fear of being hurt again, which is cowardly,’ he declared with disdain. ‘And then you were there and I liked just about everything about you and it wasn’t only sex. I should’ve told you the truth about Gigi sooner but I suppose I didn’t want you to think less of me.’

‘How could I think less of you for her bad behaviour?’

Luciano shrugged. ‘I love the way you are with Nicky because she was so cold with Melita. Comparisons are tasteless but...’

‘So, don’t make them.’ Jemima unzipped her dress and shimmied out of it while he watched.

‘Your parents...’ Luciano began, slightly shocked.

‘I think everyone will mind their own business rather than ours,’ Jemima whispered sagely. ‘But you do realise that you still haven’t told me who told you that I was upset?’

Luciano expelled his breath on a slow hiss. ‘Your father.’

Taken aback, Jemima blinked. ‘Say that again?’

‘He thinks I make you happy and he likes the fact that I’m honest with him,’ Luciano told her guiltily, as if he had been consorting with the enemy. ‘I was grateful that he called me.’

Jemima was secretly pleased that the father she loved so much clearly liked and trusted the man she was about to marry. ‘I’ve got no complaints either. We love each other and that’s special.’

‘Simply finding you was special, piccolo mia,’ Luciano told her as she unbuttoned his shirt, undid his waistband, sent her fingers roaming over the prominent bulge at his groin with a daring new to both of them and even more thrilling. ‘Dio mio, I love you...’

‘Me too...so much,’ she managed to say just before his mouth came crashing down on hers with all the passion she adored.

* * *

Jemima walked down the aisle of the little village church in her lace wedding dress and with her hand on her father’s arm. Off the shoulder and styled with tight sleeves and a fitted bodice, her wedding gown made the most of her hourglass figure and the exquisite lace fell to the floor, showing only the toes of the extravagant shoes she wore.

Luciano was so entranced by the sight of her that he couldn’t look away and play it cool. His son, Nicky, sat on his grandmother’s lap near the front of the church and began to bounce and hold out his arms when he laid eyes on Jemima, the closest thing to a mother he would ever know. Luciano smiled, the happiest he had ever been in his chequered life and far happier than he had ever even hoped to be.

Jemima focused on the man she loved and her heart jumped behind her breastbone. All hers at last, officially, finally, permanently hers. As if a wedding ring were the equivalent of a padlock, she scolded herself. It was the love she saw in his beautiful dark eyes that would hold him and she rejoiced in the thought of the future that awaited them and their son.

EPILOGUE

‘IL CAPO!’ AGNESE SIGNALLED Jemima from the door of the castle with a beatific smile that said that all was now right with the housekeeper’s world because Luciano was finally home again after a week away on business.

Jemima thought back four years to the days when the elderly Agnese, Luciano’s fiercest admirer, had still been unsure of her former charge’s second wife. She and Agnese had started out being excruciatingly polite to each other while Jemima had become friendlier with the housekeeper’s daughter, Carlotta, whose English had come on as quickly as Jemima’s Italian during the first year of her marriage. And then Concetta, their first child, had been born and Agnese had crumbled like a meringue at first sight of Il Capo’s daughter to reveal the kindly, loving woman she hid behind her tough little image.