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

One that needed an escape for all the burning grief that was trampling his insides, he acknowledged heavily.

And Shannon was not just an ex-lover. She was the woman he’d loved. The woman he’d believed he could spend the rest of his life with. Walking into his own home and seeing what he had seen was going to burn in his head for ever.

‘I never did manage to discover who the other man was.’

‘What—?’ Her face came out of her hands, red-rimmed eyes staring at him as if he had just spoken to her in Greek. ‘It makes you a sad kind of man that you even bothered to try,’ she threw back in derision. ‘Forget the tea,’ she added, dragging herself to her feet again. ‘I’ll just take the bedroom.’

With that she hauled up her luggage and walked out of the kitchen.

Luca let her go, angry with himself for saying something else he had not meant to say. He stood there listening to her footsteps taking her down the hallway, listened to a door being opened, and a grim smile touched the corners of his mouth because he’d recognised the door as belonging to what she believed was one of the guest bedrooms. She’d picked it out deliberately knowing that their old bedroom was at the other end of the hall.

Standing there tense, hands braced on the worktop, he waited for her to realise the mistake she’d made. Sure enough a few seconds later the door closed and her footsteps continued to the room next door. He hadn’t slept in their old bedroom since the day she’d taken another man to it. He would have walked out of the apartment and never come back if it hadn’t been too big a step for his pride.

A few seconds later and the next door she had chosen shut with a telling slam. Only then did he let the air leave his body.

He must be mad—crazy to continue to let her get to him like this. What had gone should be forgotten. He wanted to forget, so why was he standing here feeling as bad as he’d felt two years ago?

He knew the answer but hell would freeze over before he would admit it.

The kettle boiled. He watched it happen. Watched it switch off and still remained standing there until the steam had died away again. Then, on a growl of frustration that sounded alien even to him, he turned and followed Shannon’s lead by slamming into his own bedroom.

From now on he was going to keep his distance, he vowed grimly. Tomorrow she moved to a hotel. And if they met up again while she was here in Florence then it would be by mistake because he didn’t want it to happen.

With that decision made, he stripped off his clothes then strode into the adjoining bathroom, switched on the shower and stepped beneath it. The jet was powerful, the water hot, and as it sluiced down over him he couldn’t help but notice what was happening in his lower regions. It made him want to push his fist through the tiled wall in front of him because if Shannon was the only woman who could excite this kind of response in him, then she was right and he was the saddest kind of person indeed.

Shannon opened her suitcase and dragged out a pair of pyjamas, then just stood holding the pale blue strips of flimsy silk in fingers that shook. She despised him, she really did—so why were there tears in her eyes? Why was she feeling so unbelievably hurt because he’d dared to remark on something that should no longer matter to either of them?

If she’d been guilty as charged she might have had reason to feel this wretched. Innocence should bring with it a smug sense of self-righteousness. Only it didn’t. Instead it made her want to go and find him, tell the truth and just get it all over with so she could feel comfortable again.

What truth, though? The full truth, warts and all, and other people’s secrets? She had tried offering him that truth two years ago only to be scalded by angry disbelief. As far as Luca was concerned she had been caught red-handed trying to tidy away the evidence of another man’s recent presence in their bedroom. The rumpled bed had spoken volumes. The packet of condoms had said even more. The fact that she’d dared to try and pass the blame onto someone else had been her final crime in his eyes.

If love had to be tried by such painful methods, then their love was certainly judged that day and found to be utterly wanting in both strength and substance.

And the quicker she got herself out of his orbit, the better it was going to be for both of them, because it was as clear as the nose on her face that he wasn’t handling this situation any better than she was.

‘Oh, Keira,’ she sighed. Just wake up and get well so that I can leave here as quickly as the first flight to London can take me.

Then she thought of Angelo, who had not been given the chance to get well.

Dead.

Her eyes burned. It just wasn’t fair. She loved him—everyone loved Angelo. He was that kind of wonderful man.

But no one loved him more than Luca did, she thought painfully. And suddenly she realised she had her reason as to why his behaviour had been so insane.

Remorse raked through her for not realising it earlier. Sympathy followed, along with an aching urge to go and comfort him.

Then she shook on a weary, weary sigh, knowing that the last thing Luca wanted from her was sympathy.

Sex—yes. He’d take the sex as a form of panacea. He’d made that fact only too clear!

On that thought she laid the pyjamas on the bed, removed her clothes, then walked into the adjoining bathroom to step into the shower. The first thing she heard was the sound of water running in the next-door bathroom. It conjured up an image of the naked man in all his god-like proportions, his broad, tanned shoulders, the long golden torso, and the kind of legs built to grip a woman—hard. Her body heated, her breasts grew tight.

Turning on the shower, she forced herself to grimly ignore what was happening on the other side of the wall.

It was bliss to crawl between the cool sheets and put her head down on the pillow, bliss to pull the duvet up to her ears and shut out the rest of the world. Tomorrow I leave here and book into a hotel, was the last thought she remembered having before she dropped like a stone into sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

CRAMP. Shannon knew what it was even as it brought her screaming out of a deep dark pit of exhaustion. She writhed on the bed, kicking back the covers as her hand shot down to cover the ugly knot that had appeared in her left calf. She groaned and began rubbing at the distressed muscle with the flat of her hand.

It made no difference and if anything only seemed to make her writhe all the more. An agitated need to do something about it before the pain tore her apart sent her agony-bright eyes shooting around the darkened bedroom in search of help from something—anything!

But then her cramping muscle twisted a little tighter and she tumbled off the side of the bed to land in a heap on hard, polished wood squirming and whimpering like a wounded animal.

She had never suffered from cramp in her life before, so she had no idea what to do to ease it. She tried shaking the offending leg, then rubbing it again when the shaking did nothing but make her teeth sing. In sheer desperation she tried to stand up on the dizzy idea that if she could manage to reach the bathroom she could apply something warm to the muscle in the hope heat would help release the angry spasm. But she never made it because the moment she placed any weight on the leg the pain became so unbearable that she landed back on the floor amidst a shrill and shaken cry.

The bedroom door suddenly flew open, and light from the hallway poured into the room. ‘What the hell—?’ a harsh voice demanded.

Luca stood there. She stared helplessly up at his lean, dark bulk silhouetted against the light. ‘Cramp,’ she groaned.

It was all she could manage.

To give him credit he didn’t need to be told twice. In a couple of strides he was kneeling beside her and gripping the offending leg with ruthless fingers, then began manipulating the cramped muscle in a way that set her teeth singing again.

‘I should have known something like this would happen,’ he gritted over her whimpered cries of protest. ‘When was the last time you bothered to drink anything? You must be dehydrated, you fool!’

Fool or not, she was beginning to see stars now, tears were streaming down her face. ‘It hurts,’ she cried over and over and kept hitting the floor with a fist while he kept up his grim manipulation of her leg.

Miraculously, though, his form of torture began to ease the other. Sheer relief from the pain brought her out in a shivering cold sweat. ‘Aah!’ she gasped out shakily. ‘That has to be the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.’

But Luca wasn’t listening. His dark face locked with anger, he had twisted to pull the light quilt from the bed and was grimly bundling her shivering body into it. Without a word he gathered her into his arms and stood up to carry her out of the bedroom then down the hall and into the kitchen where he finally dumped her on a chair at the table.

Not quite knowing what had hit her, Shannon sat huddling into the quilt while she stared at him in a state of near shock as he crossed the floor and opened the fridge door. A second later he was placing a clean glass tumbler and a bottle of water down on the table.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

In mute obedience Shannon unscrewed the bottle top and—ignoring the glass—drank straight from the bottle. Ice-cold, the water was like nectar to her parched mouth and burning throat. After drinking down half the bottle she slumped back in the chair and closed her eyes while she tried to grapple with what had just happened. Her leg felt as if someone had kicked it; the pain had left her shaken and weak. Her head ached with one of those dull throbs that came with too much stress and she felt so tired she could fall asleep where she was sitting.

A sound beside her forced her eyes to open. Luca was leaning against the table beside her chair staring down at his own bare feet. He looked tired and pale, the long day’s strain etched into the hard contours of his face.

‘Sorry I woke you,’ she mumbled.

‘I was not asleep,’ he replied, and the way he said it told her that he had been lying there thinking about his brother, loving him, hurting for him, wishing the last twenty-four hours had never been.

Her heart turned over, an aching sympathy curling around it. She wanted to reach out and touch him gently, offer words that might help to ease his grief. But there were no such words and she didn’t dare mention Angelo’s name because whenever she did Luca went ballistic. It was such a helpless, hollow feeling to know that she was not the person he wanted to confide his feelings in.

She would have been, once upon a time. He used to tell her everything. They would lie in bed with limbs tangled and talk and talk and—

‘Drink.’

Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheek-bones, then lifted to find him looking at her. His eyes were dark—dark as ebony, sleepy and sultry, his lashes curved and spiky and just begging her to—

She looked away quickly before the senses she could feel beginning to stir took a dangerous grip. Picking up the bottle, she drank some more, hoping the cold water would cool what was beginning to heat. She didn’t want to want Luca. She didn’t want to remember things about him that she’d learned years before. He was her past. She’d moved on since then.

And just because he was leaning here wearing only a short, hastily tied robe did not mean she had to conjure up memories of the body beneath the robe. So what if this particular man was built to push the female sex drive into meltdown? Sex was sex. These days she looked for deeper things in a relationship like friendship, caring and respect. One day she might even find a man she felt she could trust enough to give him these things. She hadn’t stopped looking because of one bad experience. It was just that she hadn’t found him yet.

Lifting the bottle to her lips, she drank again. The only illumination in the room came from the down-lighters that were integral to the wall units. The light barely reached the centrally placed table but what did manage to reach cast a warm, seductive glow. And it was quiet, so quiet she thought she could hear the unsteady beat of Luca’s heart.

Or was it her heart that was beating unsteadily?

Of course it was her heart. He was too close and she wished that he weren’t. Lifting the bottle again, she kept her eyes carefully averted from him and tried to pretend that they were complete strangers.

But averting her eyes didn’t do anything but give her imagination a chance to list every detail about him. The length of his legs, for instance, the power in his golden thighs. The robe he was wearing could cover what it liked without making much difference to her for she knew every inch of him, the shape of each separate vertebra in his long, supple spine. She knew the wonderful feel of his satin skin and the contrasting crisp coils of hair that covered his chest. She knew how firm his stomach was, how taut the muscles were in his lean behind. She could draw a picture of every sleek detail from his long brown toes to even longer fingers.

Oh, stop it! she railed herself as a sensation she knew only too well made her squirm. Move away from me! she wanted to yell at him, but instead took another gulp at her drink because saying anything of the kind would be tantamount to confessing what she was thinking and she would rather cut out her tongue than let him know what was inside her head.

A sigh shook her. The kind of sigh that was supposed to ease tension, not help to intensify it—yet that was exactly what this particular sigh did. It intensified everything she was thinking and feeling until the atmosphere began to sing. She wanted to run but remained glued to her seat. She wished those legs weren’t right in her field of vision, yet couldn’t make herself look the other way.

‘What time is it?’ she asked with a touch of desperation.

‘Three-thirty,’ he supplied and even his voice worked its own kind of magic on what was happening to her. It was low and deep and dark and gorgeously accented. It tugged at her heartstrings, which in turn tugged at more susceptible things.

She ached on a silent groan. Will I ever get over him? The first love syndrome, she thought helplessly. They say that you never really recover from your first true love.

‘How is the muscle?’

Like a wooden puppet, she put a hand down to rub the offending calf. It still felt tight but it was no longer knotting.

‘OK,’ she replied and drank some more water. It came as a shock to realise that somewhere in the last few minutes he had exchanged her empty bottle for a full one. ‘How many of these do you want me to drink before you’ll let me go back to bed?’

It was said in an effort to lighten the tension, and he dutifully laughed. But the low sound only set her flesh tingling. ‘Keep going until I tell you to stop,’ he replied.

Then the silence came back. Her pulse began to race, the previously even rhythm of her breathing shattering so badly that she shifted restlessly on the chair in an effort to contain it all. The action made one of the thin straps of her flimsy top slide off her shoulder. Finding herself in real danger of exposing a tightly thrusting nipple, she reached up to tug the offending strap back into place again—only to clash with long brown fingers as they went to do the same thing.

Both of them went absolutely still with fingers resting against fingers, while her flesh began to heat. She glanced up. It was instinctive. What she saw sent her heart-rate into overdrive.

He was looking at her body. His dark eyes were hidden beneath those spiky black lashes as they grazed over a smooth white shoulder, then dipped lower to the rounded slopes of her breasts.

He wanted to touch her.

‘No,’ she breathed in shaky rejection and made a clumsy grab at the slipping duvet.

Her denial brought his lashes up. Black heat from his eyes shot towards her and held her trapped in a dark, dark mesh. The duvet remained where it was, lying in a soft, squashy heap on her lap and the sting of desire leapt through her blood, tripping sensual switches as it went.

He knew—he knew. Everything about him was turning dark on the knowledge. Dark eyes, dark heart, a searing dark ardour that coiled itself around the both of them. Nothing about him was light any more, or gentle or soft. He wanted her but didn’t want to want her. She returned the resentful feeling.

His fingers began to trail across her shoulder. Moving with a tantalising slowness until they reached the long column of her neck, then slid sideways, combing her tangled hair away from her nape. Shannon stopped breathing. Luca did the opposite. Pulling a deep, hard breath of air into his lungs, he moved, dipping his dark head to fasten white teeth on the creamy flesh he had just exposed.

Sensation shot through her like a thousand pinpricks; she gasped and quivered, then stroked her cheek against his face. Animal, they were animals, she the purring preening she-cat responding to her demanding mate. His hands slid beneath her arms and lifted her onto her feet. His mouth moved from nape to her mouth and she stood on one foot, favouring her cramped leg as she sank herself into the all-consuming heat of his kiss.

What had been threatening to spark between them from the moment they’d first faced each other across the threshold of her London flat now flared up with spectacular energy. They kissed as they used to kiss, long and deep and holding back nothing. Her arms went around his neck; the duvet lay around her feet. He moved his hands down her slender sides, moulding her fine-boned feminine shape, then gripping her waist to draw her between his legs. He was still leaning against the table but the robe had slid apart at his waist. She felt the heat of him, the powerful thrust of his sex against her stomach, and knew that she was not going to be the one to stop this.

Would he stop it? She moaned against his mouth in horror of it happening. He took the groan to mean something else.

‘No way,’ he muttered, and explained his meaning by shifting his hands again. Her pyjama bottoms slithered downwards to come to rest at her knees. She accepted the force of his thrust between her thighs and held him there while the kiss went on and on and her pyjama top was eased away from her breasts. He touched, she went wild for him. Her fingers clutched at his hair and her thighs tightened their possessive grip. On a dark growl he picked her up and began walking without allowing the kiss to break until he let go of her and she landed in the middle of a rumpled bed.

For a horrible moment she thought he was going to turn and walk away. It would be just punishment in his eyes, she knew that. But, far from walking away, Luca stripped off his robe and came to join her, ridding her of the flimsy scraps of blue silk before sliding his powerful frame over the top of hers and returning his mouth to hers.

They kissed right through the whole tempestuous journey. Not once did either of them attempt to break free. They touched with hands and the sensual shift of their bodies; when they needed more he penetrated her with a single silken thrust. She cried out against his mouth; he answered the cry with a grunt that raked the back of his throat. Her fingers had a tight grip on his hair again, her legs were wrapped around him, like two tight clamps. He moved to a primitive rhythm, his chest rasping against her breasts.

Animal? Yes, it was animal. A hungry coupling of two wild creatures that did not want to think about the past or the present or even the future. They just wanted—needed this.

This came with a power to make her lose contact with reality. Gasps, groans and shudders arrived in unison. Mingled sweat and body-heat and, finally, body fluids that left them wasted and eventually shocked.

He got up the moment he was physically able. Snatching up his robe, he slammed out of the room. Shannon watched him go with her heart in her eyes, then curled into a ball and sobbed her heart out.

He hated her—despised himself for touching her at all.

When daylight came, she opened her eyes to a pale sun seeping through the window and with her body aching like mad and her heart locked into a dull throb. She continued to lie there for a while, reluctant to move when moving meant having to face Luca.

Then she remembered Keira, and was grimly pushing Luca to one side and hurrying into the bathroom.

Choosing the first things out of her case that came to hand, she pulled on her jeans and added a clean blue top, then repacked the case. She wasn’t staying here another night.

As she opened the bedroom door the seductive aroma of fresh coffee teased her senses, the thought that Luca was up and about made those same senses squirm. She didn’t want to see him. If she could get away from here without having to face him she would do.

She never wanted to have to set eyes on him again.

But there he stood, looking very sombre and civilised in beautifully cut black silk trousers and a crisp white shirt. He was standing by a kitchen unit playing the domestic again. Her stomach dipped; she followed it by placing her bags down by the kitchen door.

‘Sit down,’ he invited. ‘This won’t be a minute.’ He indicated the large pot of coffee brewing beside him.

But he didn’t turn to look at her as he said it, which spoke volumes to her. Too ashamed of himself? If so, he wasn’t the only one to feel that way.

‘Did you ring the hospital?’ she asked him stiffly.

He nodded. ‘There is still no change,’ he supplied.

‘Then I would rather be going.’

‘After we have eaten,’ he came back uncompromisingly. ‘I don’t think either of us got around to eating much yesterday.’

We ate each other, Shannon thought bitterly. ‘I don’t—’

‘We played this scene in your kitchen, Shannon,’ he cut in. ‘I see no use in doing it again.’

In other words, shut up. Pressing her lips together, she moved to the table and sat herself down. If he sticks toast under my nose I shall probably throw it back at him, she decided mutinously. Then felt a wave of panic wash over her when he turned suddenly as if she’d said the words out loud.

Not that she was afraid of him—only his expression. She preferred to keep looking at his back. In fact she would prefer it a lot more if she did not have to look at him at all! So she kept her eyes lowered as he crossed to the table, and placed the coffee pot before her.

Then he went still because he’d noticed her bag standing by the door and a new tension began to suck the oxygen out of the air. He was going to say something about last night, she was sure of it. If he did she was out of here even if that meant jumping down the lift shaft.

‘About last night …’

She shot to her feet like a bullet.

‘I want to apologise for—’

She moved on trembling legs towards the door.

‘Shannon …’

‘No!’ She swung on him furiously. ‘Don’t you dare start telling me how much you regret it! Don’t you dare, do you hear me, Luca? Don’t you dare!’

‘I hear you,’ he said very quietly.

She looked at him then, really looked at him and saw exactly what she’d expected to see—his handsome dark features locked into a cold stone wall of self-contempt and regret. A sob caught in her throat. She wanted to hide her shame. She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole!

‘Keira has to be all that matters here,’ she pushed out unsteadily. ‘You—m-me—we don’t matter. I won’t let you force me into running away this time!’

‘I don’t want you to run,’ he sighed out irritably.

The question—Then what do you want from me?—sang in a silence that hung.

She didn’t ask it. Instead she lifted trembling fingers to her mouth, tried to swallow, then lowered them again.

‘I have to move to a hotel—today,’ she told him.

There was a movement of tight male muscle, a flash of black fury hitting his eyes. ‘And I have to claim my brother’s body today!’ he lashed at her harshly. ‘What do you think is more important right now?’