Claimed by the Sicilian

Insults that had been her only hope of getting out of there and actually leaving. Making sure he never came after her; never called her back.

But this…

‘The marriage is legal, then?’

‘Do you doubt it?’

His tone spoke of arrogant disbelief of the fact that anyone should not believe him absolutely. And the way his broad shoulders stiffened, the long spine straightening and his proud head coming up, only reinforced the message of controlled fury in his voice.

‘Do you think I would go to this trouble for a marriage that wasn’t real?’

‘But you said…’

It sure as hell isn’t a real marriage! he’d said. There’s been nothing real about it from the start.

‘I know what I said, Amber, but…porca miseria!’ Guido swore in exasperation so violent that his explosive words echoed around the now empty church. ‘I cannot speak to you like this!’

Coming close again, but soft-footed this time, he hooked his hands under the fall of the veil, taking it between his finger and thumb at either side.

‘Allow me…’

Amber wished she could stop him but she seemed to have lost all strength to act. Her feet were rooted to the ground and she couldn’t force them to move. It was as if the gentleness in his voice had drained all the power from her so that she could only stand there in silence and wait.

‘At least if we can see each other, Amber, mia bella’, Guido murmured, ‘then maybe we can talk…’

She wasn’t his beautiful one, Amber thought frantically; she didn’t want to be anything to him! And why, now, when she was little prepared for it, when it was the last thing she wanted, did he have to say her name in that very special way that he had, with the last R rolled out on his tongue, sounding almost like a deep, deep purr? A tiger’s purr.

Just for a second hysteria threatened again. Her lips trembled, her mind shaking…

And then Guido lifted the veil and their eyes met and suddenly every last thought of laughter, or fight—or anything—went right out of her like air out of a pricked balloon, leaving her limp and lost and unable to think.

Unable to think beyond…

‘Guido…’

Beyond the fact that she remembered those eyes looking down into hers. She remembered the scent of his skin, the touch of his hands. She remembered how it had felt to have that devastatingly sensual mouth on hers, to taste his lips, feel the caressing sweep of his tongue. She remembered it—and she wanted it all over again.

She wanted it so much that she could almost taste it. That when she let her own tongue slide across her parched mouth, she could almost believe that there would be the taste of him lingering there. Even after all this time.

‘Amber…’

And she knew that tone too. Knew the thickness in his voice that meant he had been caught on the raw by the sudden rush of sensuality. The one that had her in its grip too—drying her mouth and changing her eyes as it darkened his, turning them from burning bronze to the blackness of passion. She watched the heavy lids slide half-closed in a way that gave him a slumberous, barely awake look in a way that she knew from experience was deeply deceptive.

When he looked like that, then he was far from sleep. In fact he was at his most vividly awake, most fiercely aroused. His blood was heating with passion, his body waking to need, and if she stood any closer then she would feel the hard, proud force of that hunger pressed against her in evidence of the way he was feeling.

Guido made a rough, raw sound in the back of his throat, and snatched in a breath as if he could hardly make his lungs work to keep himself alive.

‘I have to…’ he said huskily and she could hear the fight he was having with himself in the jagged edge to the words, the way his voice sounded hoarse as if it hadn’t been used for days.

She knew the moment too that he lost the fight. It was there in the momentary way that he closed his eyes, the breath that hissed through his teeth, before, in a moment that was part conquest, part defeat, he lowered his dark head and took her mouth with his.

CHAPTER THREE

IDIOTA! Idiota!

The reproach to himself was a refrain over and over inside Guido’s head.

Corsentino, you are a fool!

He shouldn’t be doing this—it was the last thing on earth that he should be doing! But he couldn’t stop himself.

From the moment that he had lifted the veil and seen Amber’s face, green eyes looking up into his, breathed in the scent of her skin, warm and soft, and vanilla and spice, he had known what was going to happen. His gaze had fixed on her mouth, softly sensual, partly open, and he could remember so vividly how it had tasted, how it had felt under his.

And he wanted to experience that again.

So he gave up the fight to stop himself. Gave in to the impulse that pushed him. Gave himself up to the need that was nagging at him.

‘Amber…’

The sound of her name was a breath between their lips, a moment before they met, before he felt…

A year was a long time. Too long without the taste, the feel, the scent of the woman whose body had once driven him out of his mind with lust.

Once?

Guido’s breath caught in his throat as he almost let the disbelieving laughter escape.

Once, be damned. He had known from the minute he had set eyes on her again—set eyes only on her back, for God’s sake!—that he was lost. Lost again. Caught up in the coils of the hunger that had bound him to her the first time. Burned in the heat of the need she could create just by existing. Drawn by the silent, instinctive signals that her body somehow sent out to his.

That was why he had stayed when everyone else had walked out.

Even her mother had walked out—sweeping past him with her nose in the air and an expression that said he was less than the dirt beneath her feet.

But at least she had looked at him. She hadn’t even spared her daughter a second glance.

She hadn’t looked at Amber, sitting there in a crumpled heap on the altar steps. She hadn’t shown a hint of care or compassion or—anything! She had just walked straight out of the church, following the groom’s mother and father as if they were all that mattered. As if they and not her daughter were her real family.

It had only taken a few moments and then they were alone together, with Amber still curled into a miserable little ball on the marble steps to the altar.

Guido had tried to turn. He had wanted to go—he’d done what he came for, stopped the bigamous and illegal wedding, had the revenge he needed for the way she had treated him, the callous way she had walked out on him when she’d decided that he wasn’t good enough for her. He’d even avenged the way that Rafe St Clair had treated one of his own family not too long before. It was what he’d planned—walk in—blow the proceedings and her hope of an aristocratic marriage to hell—and walk out again.

But his conscience wouldn’t let him.

His conscience and something deeper, harder, more primitive. Something that kicked him hard in the gut—and lower—when he tried to turn round and leave.

Something that had nothing to do with sympathy and caring and everything to do with hunger and need and the eternal, endless fires that burned between men and women from the start of the world until the end of time. And had flamed between him and this woman from the very first moment in which they’d met.

He simply couldn’t walk out on her as she had done to him and that was an end to it.

And he couldn’t walk out without touching her, tasting her—taking her mouth just one more time.

And so he ignored all the warnings that his brain threw at him, listened instead to the most primitive, most male parts of himself, and bent his head and kissed her.

‘Ahh, Amber…’

The scent of her body surrounded him, flooding his head. Those warm pink lips, previously clamped tight to hold back bitter and violent emotions, seemed to tense even further for a second then, slowly, painfully slowly, gave, softened…opened…

His throat clenched, his heart jerking. His body hardened. And the thoughts that filled his mind were definitely inappropriate, positively sinful, given the place where he stood, in the centre of those altar steps.

She was warm and soft against him. Melting pliantly into the hardness of his body. And if he thought that he had known sexual hunger before, that he had desired her in the past, then it was as nothing when compared to the burning hands that took his nerves now and held them tight—twisted them hard.

‘Mia cara,’ he muttered, raw and thick, his hands sliding down from where he had held her arms as he hauled her to her feet. Moving over her back, down the fine line of her spine to the narrow waist.

‘Mia bella…’

He wanted to press her closer, to hold her tight, to feel the delicacy of her slender frame against him, but at the same time wanted his hands to be everywhere. Stroking over the fine silk of her dress, feeling the curves and lines of what lay beneath; closing over the softness of female flesh on her exposed arms; smoothing and cupping the swell of her hips, the neat buttocks.

‘Bella…’

It was a groan of need on his mouth. But even as it escaped him he knew that he didn’t want to talk. That he only wanted to feel, to taste, to enjoy.

Her small pink tongue tangled with his, in much the same way that his restless fingers tangled with a wayward curl of chestnut hair that he had tugged loose at the nape of her neck. The sensual slide of his fingertips against the silky strands, the intimate taste of her warm, moist mouth made him gasp out loud in the same moment that Amber sighed his name, taking the faint sound into her throat and swallowing it down with a moan that drove his already heated senses wild.

She swayed against him, arms hanging limp by her sides, the delicate flowers in her bouquet brushing against his leg, crushing their petals and releasing the odour into the air to float upwards towards his nose. With his senses already inflamed, this new sensation threatened overload, setting up a pounding at his temples that destroyed any attempt at rational thought. His hungry hands clutched rather than stroked, sought the swell of her breasts, warm beneath the silk, soft, yielding…

‘Bellissima—mia moglie…’

‘No!’

That last word had been a mistake. Her spine had stiffened, her tongue stilling, her head pulling just an inch back. So short a distance and yet one that put all the division in the world between them. Because of course Amber knew just enough Italian to understand those two emotive, provoking words, ‘mia moglie’—my wife.

‘No, no, no, no!’

With a brutal effort Amber wrenched her mouth away from his lips, wrenched her body from his constraining hands. Wrenched her mind back from the terrible, dangerous cliff edge over which she had almost, foolishly, crazily tumbled.

‘No! I am not your wife!’

‘Oh, but you are.’

It was low, fast, deadly as a striking snake, and every bit as lethal to her self-control.

‘But I don’t want to be married to you!’

‘Then you should have thought of that before you said “I do” twelve months ago.’

‘This has to be a bad dream!’ she managed, shaking her head in despair.’ The worst possible nightmare…’

‘Believe that if you wish, mia cara, but I assure you that you are wide awake and nothing can make this anything but real. Do you think I would go to all this trouble if it wasn’t?’

You’re just not worth it, his tone implied. He wouldn’t have expended the time and effort to travel all the way from the heat of Sicily to the cool springtime of this little Yorkshire village, if he hadn’t been forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control.

‘And really you should be grateful to me.’

‘Grateful?’

Amber knew that she was gaping, that her jaw had dropped and her mouth was almost as wide open as her eyes. But she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

‘And why, in God’s name, should I be grateful to you for what you’ve done?’ she asked in a voice that was so rigid with shock and distress it actually sounded as coldly distant as she might have wanted had she had the strength of mind to control it properly.

‘Didn’t I just save you from prison?’ Guido drawled with indolent arrogance. ‘So tell me—what is the sentence for bigamy here in England? Five years? Ten?’

‘This—our marriage truly was real?’

She still couldn’t get her head round the appalling facts even though Guido had hammered them home several times since his dramatic arrival in the church.

‘It’s absolutely real—totally legal, watertight and binding. We’re husband and wife whether we like it or not.’

‘Not.’

It was all she could manage. How could she be happy to learn that the marriage she believed was just a con, a ploy to keep her right where Guido had wanted her—in his bed—was actually the genuine thing, and still binding after all this time?

A year ago, she would have been overjoyed to think that she had been wrong and the marriage she’d thought was a sham was in fact the genuine thing, but then she had been naïve as a baby and so desperately in love with this man that she would have lain down on the ground and let him walk all over her if that was what he wanted.

Now the thought of being tied to him, legally, emotionally, in any way, was like an appalling life sentence, a unendurable term handed down by the cruellest of judges—the fates who had her future in their hands.

‘I don’t want this!’

‘And neither do I,’ Guido assured her darkly. ‘But right now it seems that we have no choice. We’re married—linked together for better or for worse and we have to accept that. The only thing we can consider is what we are going to do about it.’

That ‘we’ unmanned her. It took her breath away; made her legs tremble. She had thought that she was going to have to face this all on her own—that he had destroyed everything she believed, had taken everything away and now…

The only thing we can consider is what we are going to do about it.

But she didn’t want it to be ‘we’—because that meant a connection with him and she didn’t want to be with him for any reason whatsoever.

‘We aren’t going to do anything!’ she declared, somehow finding the strength to bring her chin up high, green eyes blazing as she faced him out. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you and I certainly don’t want you interfering in my life ever again.’

‘You left me no choice,’ Guido pointed out with a coolly controlled reasonableness that chilled her blood just to hear it. ‘Someone had to stop you from making the worst mistake of your life.’

‘Oh, no, this wasn’t the worst mistake I’ve ever made.’

Amber shook her head so violently that another set of strands of hair escaped from their elaborate pinning and fell loose around her face.

‘That was when I married you—and unfortunately for me, there was no one around to stop me making such a terrible mistake as I did then. This is small potatoes compared with that.’

If only she could believe that. It would help if she could convince herself, because then she might be able to deliver the words in a tone that would also convince this dark, hard-faced monster standing before her with his arms folded tight across his powerful chest, his heavy-lidded eyes scrutinising her face intently, watching every play of emotion as they came and went across her features.

‘You’ve ruined my life, destroyed my hopes of a future and I most definitely do not want you staying around, making things even worse, and forcing me to endure your hateful presence as an added form of torture. I’ll handle this myself!’

Gathering up the long silken skirts of her dress—her wedding dress, she reminded herself on a choke of bitter distress—she whirled away from him and set off, marching away from the altar and down the aisle, the sound of her heels on the stone flags seeming appallingly loud in the silence.

‘And what do you think you can do?’

He flung the challenge after her with such force that she almost believed she could feel it hitting against the back she had turned on him, running down her spine in a cold, brutal shiver. But she refused to let it, or the scepticism in his tone deter her in the least.

‘I’ll think of something!’ she tossed over her shoulder at him, forcing herself to keep moving, to not let the sudden weakness in her legs slow her or hold her back. ‘I’ll do anything—anything at all.’

‘Even face the divorce courts?’

‘That will be the first place I’ll be heading as soon as I get out of here.’

‘And the papers?’

‘Papers?’

In spite of herself she couldn’t control the sudden tremble of nerves that threatened to make her miss her footing, slowed her furious stride, made it wobble a bit from side to side.

‘What would the papers want with this?’

Try as she might, she couldn’t force herself to go on, stumbling to an abrupt halt before her legs gave way altogether. She had to struggle to make it look as if she had just turned in genuine curiosity, half-leaning against the end of a nearby pew, but keeping her face turned towards the door as much as she could.

‘I can see the headlines now—“Society wedding ends in chaos…”’

Guido’s voice floated down the aisle towards her, the dark vein of mockery making her wince inwardly and clench her teeth tight against the whimper of protest that almost escaped.

’“Baronet’s son jilted at the altar by deceitful fiancée.”’

‘I didn’t…’ Amber began protestingly but Guido ignored her and carried on with his cold-hearted litany, his tone growing harsher, darker, more brutally triumphant with each word.

‘“Bigamous bride outed as she prepares to lie her way into a title and a fortune.”’

‘I wasn’t lying! I didn’t know!’

‘You’re not denying the title and the fortune part, I see.’ The statement stabbed like a stiletto between her ribs.

‘I’m not denying anything—or confirming anything, for that matter.’

Somehow Amber found new strength to make herself move again, putting one foot in front of the other to get herself to the end of the aisle, reach a point where she could put her hand on the door.

‘I’m not even going to talk to you about this any more!’

She had to get out of here! Get away from him and his cruelty and accusations. Away from the tidal waves of bitter memories that swamped her each time she so much as looked at him. Just seeing him had been bad enough—but that kiss…!

Just what had she been thinking of to let him kiss her like that—to respond as she had? Had she no strength, no pride—no…?

All thought died away in a rush as she pulled the heavy door open and, blinking for a moment in the sunlight, saw just what was waiting for her outside.

Or, rather, saw just who was waiting for her.

The small crowd of people who had gathered to watch her arrive for the wedding had grown. There was now what looked like a sea of people milling around at the lych-gate and as soon as they saw her appear in the doorway they started to rush forward.

‘Miss Wellesley! Just a word…’

Something flashed, hard and bright, making her blink desperately, eyes suddenly watering in shock. Another flash followed—and another—so that she put up her hand to shield her face.

‘Is it true that you’re already married, Miss Wellesley—to Guido Corsentino?’

‘Did you really think you could get away with bigamy?’

‘Just how many husbands do you have, Amber?’

Amber reeled back as microphones were pushed at her, almost into her face. The crowd had surged forward, hemming her in, and they were not, she saw now, the friendly, smiling villagers she had waved to on her way into the church. Some had microphones, others notebooks, and everywhere, on all sides, were those flashes that she now saw came from cameras. Cameras that were pointed directly at her and clicking furiously.

‘I…’ she began, but both her mind and her voice failed her in the same minute. Panic clutched at her throat so she couldn’t force any sound from it and the same fear fused her thought processes so that she couldn’t have found a thing to say anyway.

‘I…’ she tried again, only to break off on a squeal of fear as the crowd surged forward, threatening to engulf her.

Her frantic step backwards made the narrow heel of her shoe catch in the hem of her long silk skirt, throwing her off balance, and she would have fallen but for the strength of a hard male arm that came round her, clamping tight about her waist and holding her upright. Another hand reached for the door, pushing it forward so that it formed a barrier against the pushing, shouting mob.

‘No comment!’ a cold, harshly accented voice declared. ‘Not now. You’ll get your story later!’

And the forceful statement was further emphasised by the slamming of the door tight shut right in the face of the most forward photographer. Not troubling to release her, Guido slammed the bolt home on the door and leaned back against it, taking her with him in his imprisoning embrace.

‘I did warn you!’ he declared, burning bronze eyes blazing down into hers. ‘News obviously travels fast around here.’

‘But—how…’

Even as she stammered out the words, Amber knew the answer to the question.

There had already been a lot of newspaper interest in her wedding to Rafe. The marriage of the heir to one of the largest estates in the country, along with an earldom that brought him to one of the highest ranks of the aristocracy, was bound to be news. Add into that the fact that for a long time Rafe had been the subject of stories in the tabloids and magazines, his slender blond looks stirring interest and speculation, and you had the perfect subject for the gossip columns.

Their engagement had created a buzz of interest, their marriage preparations had had the spotlight of attention focused on them.

And now, of course, the debacle of the wedding, the failure of that marriage before it had begun—and the appalling accusation of possible bigamy—had turned a spark of interest into a blazing inferno of gossip in the space of less than an hour.

‘What am I going to do?’

The question wasn’t addressed to Guido, but rather to the malign fate that had brought him back into her life at this particular moment. She still couldn’t believe that it had happened—couldn’t begin to think how it had happened.

She had been so sure that her short, rash and desperately ill-fated marriage to Guido Corsentino had been a fake. He had told her that it wasn’t valid. That their wild, whirlwind romance had just been a fantasy of her imagination; their even more crazy rush to the altar in a Las Vegas chapel only a pragmatic act on his part in order to get what he wanted.

‘It sure as hell wasn’t a proper marriage.’ The sound of the cruel words he had flung at her was so clear inside her head that for a moment she almost thought that he had spoken them out loud here once again. ‘It was a farce from start to finish. But it worked didn’t it? It kept you in my bed, which was what it was intended to do.’

At the time she had thought that that was all the marriage had done. That it had all been a pretence. But now it seemed that she was legally bound to this man and as a result all her hopes for her life, for her future, lay in ruins.

Through the haze that blurred her eyes, part desperation, part tears, Amber struggled to look up into the face of the man who held her, needing—longing—to know just what was in his mind.

What had he meant when he’d said “The only thing we can consider is what we are going to do about it”?

What did he plan for her and her future? And what was his next move going to be? Just the thought of it made her shiver as if she had found herself hiding, cowering in the jungle, frozen with fear, just waiting for the prowling tiger to pounce.