Italian Deception: The Salvatore Marriage / A Sicilian Seduction / The Passion Bargain

‘You’ve had enough—’

The light touch on her shoulder brought Shannon’s limp head lifting from the crisp white sheet that she had not been aware of resting against. Sleep-starved eyes blinked uncomprehendingly up into a determined gaze that was brown flecked with gold.

‘You can do no more here tonight, Shannon,’ Luca said quietly. ‘It is time for us to leave and get some rest now.’

‘I …’ can be here, she was about to insist, but Luca silenced her with a shake of his head.

‘Keira is stable,’ he stated firmly. ‘The people here know where to contact us if they need to. It is time for us to leave.’

The voice of authority, she recognised. Luca was not going to take no for an answer and if she was honest she knew he was right. She was so utterly used up she was barely functioning on any sensible level.

But it felt like desertion when she made herself get up from the chair and she lifted up one of Keira’s hands and pressed a soft kiss to it before leaning over to leave another kiss on her cheek.

‘Love you,’ she whispered, then she was turning to walk away with wretched tears blurring her progress to the door with Luca following close behind.

‘Where are you going?’

She blinked, her sleep-starved brain taking whole seconds to realise they were now outside her sister’s room, the door having been pulled shut so silently she hadn’t even heard it. ‘The baby,’ she murmured, waving a decidedly uncoordinated hand in the direction of the nursery. ‘I want to …’

‘The baby is fine,’ he assured. ‘I have been with her for the last hour while you sat with Keira.’

An hour? Shannon blinked again. Luca had been with the baby for a whole hour? The picture that produced in her head just didn’t correspond somehow with the man she thought she knew.

‘I watched the nurse attend to her, then they let me hold her for a while …’

Something passed over his face, a wave of unchecked emotion that emphasised the ring of pain that was circling at his mouth. Guilt made a sudden clutching grab at her aching heart. This man had just lost his beloved brother but, while she had been selfishly absorbed in her sister’s plight, Luca had been too busy supporting others to find the time to deal with his own loss. She had been existing in a fog since they’d arrived here, but he’d split his time between comforting his grief-stricken mother or one of his two sisters as well as attending to her.

Now here he stood, doing what he did best: being the strong Salvatore male. But when she looked into his eyes she saw the desolation beneath his glossy black lashes. She also witnessed another painful image of him slipping away to go to the nursery to hold a tiny baby girl who was the only link to his brother.

Her heart ached again, everything ached, for Luca as well as herself.

‘Oh, Luca,’ she murmured as impulse made her take a step closer to him with soft words of sympathy trembling up from her throat.

He saw it coming. His face closed up. ‘Here,’ he clipped. ‘Put this on …’

He held out her coat. Shannon stared at it, aware that she’d just had a door slammed shut in her face again. And why not? she asked herself bleakly as she swallowed the words of comfort and felt the tremor that came with them shiver its way to her feet. Her sister was alive but his brother was dead. Accepting comfort from his ex-lover-turned-enemy would be a blow to his dignity he could do without.

So she let him feed her coat sleeves up her arms without uttering another syllable. As the heavy garment settled on her tired shoulders she pushed her hands into its deep pockets to hug the warm wool around her, then walked towards the bank of lifts. The chairs in the foyer were empty now; the rest of the Salvatore family had been sent home to their beds long ago.

The silence between them held as they drove away into the cool dark night. A glance at the clock illuminated on the car dashboard told it was one o’clock in the morning. It felt as if a whole week had gone by since she’d got out of bed yesterday at six in the morning and rushed out to catch the commuter flight to Paris. Such a lot had happened since then. Too much—too much, she thought dully as she rested her head against the soft leather headrest, then closed her hot, tired, gritty eyes.

Luca watched as she slipped into an exhausted slumber and grimaced to himself. He knew the impression he had given her back there in the hospital, but she could not be more wrong about his motives if she’d tried. However, receiving comfort from a warm and sympathetic Shannon right now would have shattered the control he was hanging onto by a thread.

And it was not over yet—though he was aware that Shannon didn’t know that. There was more to come—a battle—he predicted, because she was not going to like it when she discovered where she was staying. Let his defences drop before the fight was won and he would turn himself into a target for someone of Shannon’s fiercely stubborn independent nature.

Dio, he thought tiredly as he drove them through the silent streets of Florence. He was not that sure that he wasn’t already that target. A mere glance at her sitting beside him with her long legs stretched out in front of her, the white oval of her face so exquisite in repose, he experienced that telling needle-sharp sting of Man on the prowl.

She got to him. She always had done. Love or hate her, he always wanted her and it was knowing that that made him such a target. Give her reason to spark and he was going to catch a light. He was so sure of it that he would try anything to keep her asleep until he had her safely ensconced in a bed—and he’d put himself on the other side of the bedroom door.

A sitting duck. Angelo’s words, he remembered starkly. Angelo had said that the two of them were both targets for a pair of Irish witches to enchant at will.

Angelo … A collapse took place inside his chest. It was a sensation he had grown familiar with during this long, miserable day. He missed his brother—already. He wanted Angelo back. Tears stung hot and dry against the backs of his eyes and he felt his skin stretch across his cheek-bones with tension.

His foot hit the accelerator, using a surge of unnecessary bodily power to release the pressure in his chest. Familiar landmarks flashed by the side window. He saw a set of traffic lights ahead glowing red; he aimed for them—felt the burning rush swell inside him, challenging that bastard called death. It was compelling, seductive.

Shannon stirred. He glanced at her, saw beauty personified in his stark eyes and, clenching his jaw tight and gritting his teeth, he forced himself to slow down. One car crash in the family was enough. The moment of madness eased, leaving Shannon still asleep beside him with no idea how close he’d come to putting her safety at risk.

The sensation remained, though, burning like acid in his gut, anger at the waste of his brother’s life overlaying the numbing sense of grief. It was going to need assuaging and he had a grim suspicion he knew by what source.

It was feeling the car swing sharply down a steep incline that stirred Shannon awake. Opening red-rimmed eyes, she sat up to peer out at the lines of cars parked in the basement car park and, as Luca slotted the car into its reserved parking slot, he waited for recognition to spark.

It didn’t happen. Probably too tired to notice anything much, she yawned then opened her door and stepped out. He did the same, eyeing her carefully as she waited in weary silence for him to recover her luggage then walked beside him to the lift.

They stepped into it together. While he used a plastic security card to activate the lift she went to lean against one of the metal cased walls, thrust her hands into her coat pockets, then proceeded to stare at her booted feet.

‘You have access, then,’ she remarked, smothering yet another yawn.

‘Yes, I have access,’ was all he said.

‘Good of them.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Angelo and Keira. It’s good of them to trust you with security access to their apartment.’

He didn’t answer, keeping his expression blank while he wondered if she was even aware that she’d used his brother’s name as if Angelo were still alive.

That anger stirred again; he crushed it down. The lift began to rise. He wanted to hit something and wished he didn’t feel like this.

‘But then, that’s nothing new,’ she added with a sudden tinge of bitterness in her voice. ‘Security access to each others’ homes has always been the norm for the Salvatores.’

‘You think that’s a bad thing?’

‘I think it’s bloody stupid,’ she replied. ‘I know Italian families like to be close, but having the right to walk in and out of each others’ homes when they feel like it is taking family unity to the extreme.’

‘Because you were once caught out by this—extreme perhaps?’

The taunt hit home. She flinched, then lifted her chin to send him a clear cold stare. He countered it with a thin smile. Mutual antipathy began to sing. The lift stopped. She was so busy defying him to take that comment further that when the lift doors slid open she still did not notice where she was.

So he said nothing and merely mocked her with a gesture of his hand to step out of the lift. Head up, eyes like ice, she walked forward, stooping to collect up her bags from where they sat at his feet before saying tightly. ‘Goodnight, Luca. I’m sure you know your own way out again.’

Then she walked—or did she flounce? Luca mused curiously. Whichever, she did it sensationally in her ankle-length coat and flaming red hair; it was almost a shame that reality was about to spoil it.

She was several strides in before she began to take in the décor of rich cream walls and inlaid wood floors on which stood the kind of heavy antique pieces that she would never have connected with Keira’s more homely tastes.

Luca watched her freeze, watched her take stock, watched her pull in a sharp breath before she spun to stare at him as he slid the plastic security card back into his leather wallet while the lift doors closed behind his blocking frame.

‘No,’ she breathed in stricken protest. ‘I’m not staying here with you, Luca. No way.’

It took fewer strides to bring her back to him. Eyes bright with defiance, she snaked a hand over his shoulder to gave the lift-call button a firm press.

‘It won’t come without my authorisation,’ he reminded her gently.

‘Then authorise it.’

She was standing so close that he could feel her breath on his face. She smelled of Chanel and the hospital, and the tumbled untidiness of her hair flamed like a warning around her face. She was trying her best to defy him but underneath the defiance he knew alarm bells were ringing because she did not understand his motives for bringing her here of all places, back to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

He could reassure her that he had nothing sinister on his mind and that she had to stay somewhere and even he wasn’t so brutal that he take her to a dead man’s house then leave her there alone—but it would not be the truth. Something had happened to him during the mad drive here, and he now wanted her so badly that it burned in his gut like a pounding fever. He wanted to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, find the nearest bed and drop her down on it, then follow with some good, hard sex. No preliminaries, just a quick, hot slaking of all this stuff he was struggling to deal with: his brother, her sister—Shannon back here and within his reach. She had made the last two years of his life a misery—the least she could do in reparation was help him assuage his grief!

Shannon knew what he was thinking—it was vibrating all around them like some dark, compelling force. The desire, the old burning attraction, that needle-sharp prick of sexual awareness that made his eyes glow gold and made her need to run the tip of her tongue around the sudden dry curve of her lips.

‘No,’ she breathed in husky denial.

‘Why not?’ He watched that telling little gesture and smiled. ‘For old time’s sake.’

For old time’s sake? Her own affronted gasp almost choked her. She couldn’t believe he was behaving like this! Didn’t it matter to him that there was a life-threatening situation taking place not far away, or that one person had died and another two were fighting a battle with death?

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she told him, then turned on her heel and walked away across the large square entrance hall with all its familiar trappings of wealth, like the exquisite antique chest set against one wall with the magnificent bronze statue of Apollo standing on its top. She strode beneath the wide archway through which she gained access to the rest of the apartment. And she walked with purpose, knowing exactly where she was making for.

The kitchen, which led to the utility room, which in turn led to the rear exit door. A locked rear exit door, she soon discovered. Her heart sank—but not her resolve, she determined as she dropped her bags to the floor then turned, eyes wearing such a hard glint now that they should have turned him to stone where he stood propping up the other door, watching her lazily.

‘I’ll get out,’ she warned, ‘if I have to break windows.’

‘We are four floors up,’ he reminded her.

‘Broken windows upset people,’ she explained, undeterred. ‘They tend to call in the police when glass comes showering down on top of them.’

His hard mouth gave a mocking twist. ‘Well, that might have been fun,’ he drawled. ‘If the glass wasn’t shatterproof.’

Her shoulders sagged; this was getting stupid. ‘Look,’ she snapped. ‘It’s late. I’m tired—you’re tired. We’ve both had a rotten day! Can we just stop this now?’ She tried a bit of pleading. ‘Let me out of here, Luca—please!’

‘I wish it was that simple,’ he grimaced.

‘It is!’ she insisted.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he returned with a snap that altered his taunting mood to the grimly serious. ‘So let’s get a couple of things straight. You are staying here in my apartment, because it is situated so close to the hospital—’

‘I’d rather stay at Angelo and Keira’s place.’

He stiffened suddenly, dark eyes flaring up with a blistering rage. ‘Angelo is dead!’ he barked at her. ‘So will you stop dotting his name into every damn sentence, for goodness’ sake?’

Shannon blinked in surprise, her face turning as white as a sheet. Had she been doing that? She hadn’t been aware of it. When she thought about her sister she automatically put Angelo with her. Angelo and Keira—it had always been that way. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered, not knowing what else to say.

Luca frowned. ‘Forget I said that,’ he dismissed, then sucked in a deep breath. ‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘that Angelo and Keira have moved since you were last here. It is now more than an hour’s drive out of the city to their new home. My mother is not fit to be on her own right now so she has gone to stay with Sophia, which leaves you with a choice, Shannon,’ he offered finally. ‘You either stay here with me, stay with Renata, or you go and stay with my mother at Sophia’s house.’

Which was absolutely no choice at all, she acknowledged heavily. His mother hated her. So did his sisters. Staying with them would be just a different kind of hell. And anyway, his family had a right to do their grieving together and without an unwanted interloper in their midst.

‘There are such things as hotels, you know,’ she pointed out stubbornly.

‘Are you really so selfish that you would go to a hotel knowing that such a choice would not only offend my mother, but would hurt Keira beyond all that is fair if and when she discovers it?’ He sent her a look that stung. ‘She will blame the family, she will blame me for not being man enough to put my own feelings about you to one side for her sake.’

‘But you aren’t putting your feelings aside!’ she cried.

‘I will if you will.’

‘Liar,’ she breathed. But as for the rest he was, oh, so frustratingly right that, on acceptance, her ability to remain standing upright any longer disintegrated and she sank wearily against the locked door behind her and dropped her face into her hands.

It was a surrender. He knew it and well and she knew it. But Shannon could not resist dropping one final comment into the throbbing silence that fell. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered from the all-enveloping shield of her tumbling hair.

‘No, you don’t,’ Luca denied. ‘You still fancy the hell out of me and that, cara, is what you hate.’

‘That’s a lie!’ The hands dropped so she could spit the disclaimer at him.

‘Is it?’ His eyes were cold now, hardened by his arrogant belief in what he was claiming. ‘Cast your mind back to the kiss on the flight over here,’ he suggested. ‘If I had not stopped it you would have gone up in a plume of smoke.’

‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘You conceited devil!’

‘Maybe.’ He gave an indifferent shrug. ‘But I know what I know.’

‘You kissed me, if you remember!’

‘And you fell into it as you always did,’ he declared with contempt.

‘And you didn’t—?’

His grimace conceded that point to her. ‘It is going to be really interesting for us to see if we can both survive the next few days without falling on each other again, don’t you think?’

‘I think you’re disgusting!’

A black brow arched, he ran his eyes down the slender body he could see between the gaping sides of her coat. ‘Are your breasts tight, Shannon?’ he questioned softly. ‘Is that place between your legs getting all hot and anxious because we are talking about it?’

She launched herself away from the door with a need to slap his taunting face!

‘Sex in the utility room, now that’s a new turn-on,’ he drawled as she flew towards him. ‘But then you never did have any inhibitions as to where or with whom you did it so long as you did.’

Each word was aimed to draw blood from its victim, each mocking glint in his dark eyes was meant to drive her over the edge. She stopped a foot away, trying to push down the rage tumbling around inside her because a part of her was aware that he was provoking her deliberately. His eyes were goading her; his whole lazy, taunting stance was just begging her to take that swipe at him.

‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’ she breathed unsteadily.

He laughed; it wasn’t a pleasant sound. ‘Maybe I’m curious as to how much you’ve learned since you moved on to pastures new.’

‘Stop it,’ she whispered.

But he wasn’t going to stop anything. ‘Did you tempt him as you used to tempt me, Shannon?’ he questioned curiously. ‘Did you tease him into showing you yet another way to reach that mind-blowing final thrill?’

Her arm came up between the glare of their eyes, fixed and warring, and she let fly with her hand. He caught it before it landed its blow, hard fingers closing around her slender wrist to keep the hand suspended a small half-inch from his face.

‘We both know that the thrill was all you ever really wanted from me,’ he continued remorselessly, ‘but did you think you’d exhausted all my possibilities? Wrong, darling.’ He dared to kiss the tips of her clawing fingers. ‘We never so much as scratched the surface. You have no idea what delights you have missed out upon.’

‘Shut up!’ she choked. He was twisting the truth around to suit his own version of what he believed and she felt so hurt that she actually began to shake from head to toe in response.

Those unremitting eyes held her captive, and his hand gave a tug to bring her hard up against his solid frame. ‘I still cannot look at your mouth without remembering how it feels to have it fixed on some intimate part of my anatomy,’ he murmured, his deep voice pulsing inside her head. ‘I remember each brush of your lips, each sensuous flick of your sexy tongue. There,’ he said huskily. ‘Does it make you feel better to know that I am still as obsessed with you as you are with me, Shannon, hmm?’

‘I am not obsessed with you—I despise you!’ she hissed. ‘Or am I supposed to have forgotten the way you slaked yourself in me after you alleged my so-called other lover had been there before you, or the way that you slid out of my body still heaving from the whole wild experience only to turn on me like an animal? You spat names at me that I wouldn’t call any woman!’

His face went white, and her heart was pounding, not with desire but with a rage two long years in the festering that was suddenly blazing hotly inside.

‘I apologised,’ he bit back.

Did he really? Well, it can’t have been such a sincere apology because she couldn’t even bring it to mind! ‘What you did to me went beyond apologies,’ she told him. ‘And do you know what made it worse? You didn’t care about me enough to listen to what I had to say before you dealt out your punishment. I was judged and found guilty without even the right to a fair trial! Well, I’ll tell you something …’ Her breasts were heaving, the words shooting from her on the crest of her rage. ‘I will let you right off the hook if you like—because I accept the blame. I did it. I took another man to your bed, Luca, and I can’t tell you how very much I enjoyed the experience!’

‘That’s enough!’ he barked.

He was right and it was. On a sickening wave of dismay Shannon tugged her wrist free from his grasp and reeled dizzily away. She’d spoken lies—all lies. Why had she done that? she asked herself painfully. Why did she always have to tell him what he wanted to hear?

Behind her the silence was throbbing like the heavy beat of a drum. Inside she was quietly tearing apart at the seams. In her heart she was weeping at all the bitterness, and in her head she was feeling so ugly she never wanted to look at herself again.

‘Do I win my pass out of here now?’ she asked with a dullness that saw off her anger.

For an answer he spun on his heel and strode away.

Shannon wilted on a combination of shocked horror at what they had thrown at each other and a sinking sense of relief because she had finally driven him to let her out of here. Pulling herself together, she went to gather up her bags, then took in a deep breath before following him.

The moment she stepped back into the kitchen she knew she had not won anything. Luca was playing the domesticated man again and filling the kettle. His overcoat had gone, and his jacket and tie. As she stood there her eyes couldn’t resist following the ripple of muscle across broad, tense shoulders.

‘Take your coat off, dump the luggage,’ he said without turning.

‘Luca—for goodness’ sake …’ she pleaded yet again. ‘Just let me out of here so I can find a hotel room somewhere.’

‘Tea or coffee?’ was all she got by return.

‘Oh,’ she groaned, covering her now-throbbing eyes with a trembling hand. ‘Can’t you understand?’ she cried in a last-ditch attempt to make him see reason. ‘I just can’t stay in this apartment with you!’

It was no use. The rigid stretch of cotton barely flexed in response as he stood there waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘You’re nothing but an unfeeling monster,’ she told him as her weary body gave up on the whole stupid fight.

‘Tea or coffee,’ he repeated.

‘Oh, choose which you like,’ she sighed, and on an act of surrender sank into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, dropped her bags to the floor, then placed her elbows on the table so she could bury her face in her hands.

Another silence rained down around them after that, broken only by the soothing hiss of the kettle as it came to the boil. Shannon kept her face hidden and Luca—well, she was aware that he was standing there, leaning against the worktop and looking at her, but—what the heck? Let him get his fill of her defeat if that was how he got his kicks these days. She didn’t care any more, didn’t care about anything but getting a warm drink inside then finding a bed she could sleep in.

Observing the weary way she was sitting there with her face buried in her hands, Luca bit his teeth together and angrily asked himself what the hell he’d thought he was doing orchestrating that little scene. Since when did a reasonably sophisticated man of thirty-four taunt an ex-lover with the kind of remarks he had just poured out?