Blackmailed Into The Marriage Bed

Vinn had mentioned the B word. A baby—a family to continue the Gagliardi dynasty. She would have ended up a breeding machine, her career left to wither, while his business boomed.

Her interior decorating business was her baby. She had given birth to it, nurtured it and made numerous sacrifices for it. Having a real baby was out of the question. There were too many unknowns about her background.

How could she give birth to a child, not knowing what sort of bad blood flowed in its veins?

Ailsa swallowed against the barbed ball of bitterness in her throat and cast her gaze back to Vinn’s onyx one. ‘Why do you keep it on your desk?’

He turned the frame back so it was facing him, his expression now as inscrutable as his computer screen in sleep mode. ‘One of the best bits of business advice I’ve ever received is never forget the mistakes of the past. Use them as learning platforms and move on.’

It wasn’t the first time Ailsa had thought of herself as a mistake. Ever since she’d found out the circumstances surrounding her conception she had trouble thinking about herself as anything else. Most babies were conceived out of love but she had been conceived by brute force. ‘What do your new lovers think when they see that photo on your desk?’

‘It hasn’t been a problem so far.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure if he’d answered the question or not. Was he saying he’d had numerous lovers or that none of them had been inside his office? Or had he taken his new lovers elsewhere, not wanting to remind himself of all the times he had made love to her on that desk? Did he wear his wedding ring when he made love to other women? Or did he take it off when it suited him? She glanced at his face to see if there was any hint of the turmoil she was feeling, but his features were as indifferent as if she were a stranger who had walked in off the street.

‘So...the conditions you’re proposing...’ she began.

‘My grandfather is facing a do-or-die liver transplant,’ Vinn said. ‘The surgeon isn’t giving any guarantee he will make it through the operation, but without it he will die within a matter of weeks.’

‘I’m sorry to hear he’s so unwell,’ Ailsa said. ‘But I hardly see how this has anything to do with—’

‘If he dies, and there’s a very big chance he will, then I want him to die at peace.’

Ailsa knew how much respect Vinn had for his grandfather Domenico Gagliardi and how the old man had helped him during the time when Vinn’s father was in jail. She had genuinely liked Dom and, although she’d always found him a bit austere and even aloof on occasion, she could well imagine for Vinn the prospect of losing his grandfather was immensely painful. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel for him during such a sad and difficult time, but she still couldn’t see how it had anything to do with her.

‘I know how much you care for your grandfather, Vinn. I wish there was something I could do to—’

‘There is something you can do,’ Vinn said. ‘I want us to be reconciled until he is safely through the surgery.’

Ailsa looked at him as if he’d told her to jump out of the window, her heart thumping so heavily she could hear it like an echo in her ears. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ The set to his mouth was grimly determined, as if he had made up his mind how things would be and nothing and no one was going to talk him out of it. Not even her.

She licked her parchment-dry lips. He wanted her back? Vinn wanted her to come back to him? As his wife? She opened and closed her mouth, trying to locate her voice. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Not mad. Determined to get my grandfather through this without adding to the stress he’s already going through,’ Vinn said. ‘He’s a family man with strong values. I want those values respected and honoured by resuming our marriage until he is well and truly out of danger. I will allow nothing and no one to compromise his recovery.’

Ailsa got to her feet so abruptly the chair almost toppled over. ‘I’ve never heard anything so outrageous. You can’t expect me to come back to you as if the last two years didn’t happen. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.’

He remained seated with his unwavering gaze locked on hers. Something about his stillness made the floor of her belly flutter like a deck of rapidly shuffled cards.

‘Isaac is talented but that talent will be wasted without my help and you know it,’ he said. ‘I will provide him with not one, not two, but three years of full sponsorship if you’ll agree to come back to me for three months.’

Ailsa wanted to refuse. She needed to refuse. But if she refused her younger brother might never reach his potential. It was within her power to give Isaac this opportunity of a lifetime. But how could she go back to Vinn? Even for three minutes, let alone three months? She clutched the strap of her bag like it was a lifeline and blindly reached for her overnight bag, her hand curling around the handle for support.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I have a career in London. I can’t just pack up everything and relocate here.’

‘You could open a temporary branch of your business here in Milan,’ he said. ‘You could even set up a franchise arrangement. You already have some wealthy Italian clients, sì?’

Ailsa frowned so hard she could almost hear her eyebrows saying ouch at the collision. How had he heard about her Italian clients? Had Isaac told him? But she rarely mentioned anything much to her brother about her work. Isaac talked about his stuff not hers: his golfing dreams, his exercise regime, his frustration that their parents didn’t understand how important his sport was to him and that, since their divorce, they weren’t wealthy enough to help him get where he needed to be, etc. Ailsa hadn’t told Isaac this last trip to Florence was to meet with a professional couple who had employed her to decorate their centuries-old villa. They had come to her studio in London and liked her work and engaged her services on the spot.

‘How do you know that?’

Vinn’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. ‘I’m Italian. I have Italian friends and associates across the country.’

Suspicion crawled across Ailsa’s scalp like a stick insect on stilts. ‘So... Do I have you to thank for the di Capellis’ villa in Florence? And the Ferrantes’ in Rome?’

‘Why shouldn’t I recommend you? Your work is superb.’

Ailsa narrowed her gaze. ‘Presumably, you mean as an interior decorator, not as a wife.’

‘Maybe you’ll be better at it the second time around.’

‘There isn’t going to be a second time around,’ Ailsa said. ‘You tricked me into marrying you the first time. Do you really think I’m so stupid I’d fall for it again?’

He leaned back in his leather chair with indolent grace, reminding her of a lion pausing before he pounced on his prey. ‘I didn’t say it would be a real marriage this time around.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted. Could he have made it any more obvious he didn’t find her attractive any more? Sex was the only thing they were good at in the past. Better than good...brilliant. The chemistry they’d shared had been nothing short of electrifying. From their first kiss her body had sparked with incendiary sexual heat. She had never orgasmed with anyone but him. She hadn’t even enjoyed sex before him. And, even more telling, she hadn’t had sex since him. So why wouldn’t he want to cash in on the amazing chemistry they’d shared?

‘Not real...as in—?’

‘We won’t be sleeping together.’

‘We...we won’t?’ She was annoyed her voice sounded so tentative and uncertain. So...crushed.

‘We’ll be together in public for the sake of appearances. But we’ll have separate rooms in private.’

Ailsa couldn’t understand why she was feeling so hurt. She didn’t want to sleep with him. Well, maybe her traitorous body did, but her mind was dead set against it. Her body would have to get a grip and behave itself because there was no way she was going to dive back into bed with Vinn... She had a sneaking suspicion she might not want to get out of it.

‘Look, this is a pointless discussion because I’m not coming back to you in public or private or even in this century. Understood?’

He held her gaze with such quiet, steely intensity a shiver shimmied down her spine like rolling ice cubes. ‘Once the three months is up I will grant you a divorce without contest.’

Ailsa swallowed again. This was what she’d wanted—an uncomplicated straightforward divorce. He would give it to her if she agreed to a three month charade. ‘But if we’re seen to be living together it will cancel out the last two years of separation according to English divorce law.’

‘It will delay the divorce for another couple of years, but that would only be a problem if you’re intending to marry someone else.’ He waited a beat before adding, ‘Are you?’

Ailsa forced herself to hold his gaze. ‘That depends.’

‘On?’

‘On whether I find a man who’ll treat me as an equal instead of a brood mare.’

He rose from his chair with an expelled breath as if his patience had come to the end of its leash. ‘For God’s sake, Ailsa. I raised the topic back then as a discussion, not as an imperative. I felt it was something we should at least talk about.’

‘But you knew my opinion on having children when you asked me to marry you,’ Ailsa said. ‘You gave me the impression you were fine with not having a family. I wouldn’t have married you if I’d thought you were going to hanker after a bunch of kids before the ink was barely dry on our marriage certificate.’

His expression was storm cloud broody and lightning flashed in his eyes. ‘You have no idea of the word compromise, do you?’

Ailsa gave a mocking laugh. ‘That’s rich, coming from you. I didn’t hear any talk of you offering to stay home and bring up the babies while I worked. You assumed I would gladly kick off my shoes and pad barefoot around your kitchen with my belly protruding, didn’t you?’

His expression locked down into his trademark intractable manner. ‘I’ve never understood why someone from such a normal and loving family would be so against having one of her own.’

Normal? There was nothing normal about her background. On the surface, yes, her family life looked normal and loving. Even since their divorce both her mother and stepfather had tried hard to keep things reasonably civil, but it was all smoke and mirrors and closed cupboards because the truth was too awful, too shameful and too horrifying to name.

On one level Ailsa understood her mother and stepfather’s decision to keep the information about her mother’s rape by a friend of a friend—who’d turned out to be a complete stranger gate-crashing a party—a secret from her. Her mother had been traumatised enough by the event, so traumatised she hadn’t reported it to the police, nor had she told her boyfriend—Ailsa’s stepfather—until it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy that had resulted. Her stepfather had always been against having a DNA test but her mother had insisted on it, saying she needed to know. When Ailsa was fifteen she had come home earlier than normal from school to overhear her mother and stepfather arguing in their bedroom. She’d overheard many arguments between her parents before but this one had been different. Overhearing the awful truth about her origin meant that her life and all her dreams and hopes for her own family had died in that stomach-curdling moment.

Ailsa met Vinn’s flinty gaze. ‘In spite of my refusal to play this game of charades with you, I hope you will still sponsor Isaac. He looks up to you and would be devastated if you—’

‘That’s not how I do business.’

She raised her chin a little higher. ‘And I don’t respond to blackmail.’

His gaze warred with hers for endless seconds, like so many of their battles in the past. It was strange, but this was one of the things she’d missed most about him. He was never one to shy away from an argument and nor was she. She had always secretly enjoyed their verbal skirmishes because most, if not all, of their arguments had ended in bed-wrecking make-up sex. She wondered if he was thinking about that now—how passionate and explosive their sex life had been. Did he miss it as much as she did? Did he ever reach for her in the middle of the night and feel a hollow ache deep inside to find the other side of the bed empty?

No, because his bed was probably never empty.

Ailsa was determined not to be the first to look away even though, as every heart-chugging second passed, she could feel her courage failing. His dark brown eyes had a hard glaze of bitterness and two taut lines of grimness bracketed his mouth, as if, these days, he only rarely smiled.

The sound of his phone ringing on the desk broke the deadlock and Vinn turned to pick it up. ‘Nonno?’ The conversation was brief and in Italian but Ailsa didn’t need to be fluent to pick up the gist of it. She could see the host of emotions flickering across Vinn’s face and the way the tanned column of his throat moved up and down. He put down the phone and looked at her blankly for a moment as if he’d forgotten she was even there.

‘Is everything all right?’ Ailsa took a step towards him before she checked herself. ‘Is your grandfather—?’

‘A donor has become available.’ His voice sounded strangely hollow, as if it was coming through a vacuum. ‘I thought there would be more time to prepare. A week or two or something but... The surgery will be carried out within a matter of hours.’ He reached for his car keys on the desk and scooped up his jacket where it was hanging over the back of his office chair, his manner uncharacteristically flustered, distracted. In his haste to find his keys several papers slipped off the desk to the floor and he didn’t even stop to retrieve them. ‘I’m sorry to cut this meeting short but I’m going to see him now before—’ another convulsive swallow ‘—it’s too late.’

Ailsa had never seen Vinn so out of sorts. Nothing ever seemed to faze him. Even when she’d told him she was leaving two years ago, he’d been as emotionless as a robot. It intrigued her to see him feeling something. Was there actually a heart beating inside that impossibly broad chest? She bent down to pick up the scattered papers and, tidying them into a neat pile, silently handed them to him. He took them from her and tossed them on the desk, where a couple of pages fluttered back to the floor.

‘I can’t let him down,’ he said in a low mumble, as if talking to himself. ‘Not now. Not like this.’

‘Would you like me to go with you?’ The offer was out before Ailsa could stop it. ‘My flight doesn’t leave for a few hours so...’

His expression snapped out of its distracted mode and got straight back to cold, hard business. ‘If you come with me, you come as my wife. Deal or no deal.’

Ailsa was torn between wanting to tell him where to put his deal and wanting to see more of this vulnerable side of him. She could agree to the charade verbally but he could hardly hold her to anything without having her sign something.

‘I’ll go with you to the hospital because I’ve always liked your grandfather. That’s if you think he’d like to see me?’

‘He would like to see you,’ Vinn said and searched through the papers on his desk for something, muttering a curse word in the process.

‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ Ailsa handed him the pages that had fallen the second time.

He took them from her and, reaching for a pen, slid them in front of her on the desk. ‘Sign here.’

She ignored the pen and met his steely gaze. ‘Do we have to do it now? Your grandfather is—’

‘Sign it.’

Ailsa could feel her will preparing for battle. Her spine stiffened to concrete, her jaw set to stone and her gaze sent a round of fire at his. ‘I’m not signing it unless you give me time to read it.’

‘Damn it, Ailsa, there isn’t time,’ Vinn said, slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘I need to see my grandfather. Trust me, okay? Just for once in your life trust me. I can’t let Nonno down. I can’t fail him. He’s depending on me to get him through this. Along with Isaac’s sponsorship, I’ll pay you a lump sum of ten million.’

Ailsa’s eyebrows shot up so high she thought they might hit the light fitting above her head. ‘Ten...million?’

The line of his mouth was white-tight. ‘If you don’t sign in the next five seconds the deal is off. Permanently.’

Ailsa took the pen from him, his fingers brushing hers in the exchange, sending a riot of fiery sensations from her fingertips to her feminine core. The pen was still warm from where he’d been holding it. She remembered all too well his warmth. The way it lit the wick of her desire like a match on dry tinder. She could feel the smouldering of his touch moving through her body, awakening sensual memories.

Memories she had tried so hard to suppress.

She took a shaky breath and ran her gaze over the document. It was reasonably straightforward: three years of sponsorship for Isaac and giving her a lump sum of ten million on signing. While it annoyed her he’d used money as a lure, she realised it was the primary language he spoke. Money was his mother tongue, not Italian. Well, she could learn to speak Money too. Ten million was a lot of money. She was successful in her business but with ten million in her bank account she could expand her studio to Europe.

But then she realised how trapped she would be once she signed that agreement. She would have to spend three months with Vinn. She needed time to think about this. She had rushed into marriage with him in the past. How foolish would it be to rush into this without proper and careful consideration? She left the document unsigned and pushed it and the pen back to him. ‘I need a couple of days to think about this. It’s a lot of money and... I need more time.’

He showed no emotion on his face, which surprised her given how insistent he had been moments earlier. But maybe behind that masked expression he was already planning another tactic to force her to comply with his will. ‘We will discuss this further after we’ve been to the hospital.’ He put the paper under a paperweight and, picking up her overnight bag, ushered her out of his office.

He spoke a few quick words to his receptionist Claudia, explaining what was happening, and Claudia expressed her concern and assured him she would take care of everything back here at the office. Ailsa felt a twinge of jealousy at the way the young woman seemed to be such an integral part of the business. She wondered what had happened to the receptionist who had worked for him during their marriage. Vinn liked surrounding himself with beautiful women and they didn’t come more beautiful than Claudia, who looked as if she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot.

Ailsa waited until they were in Vinn’s car and on their way to the hospital before she brought up the subject. ‘What happened to your other receptionist, Rosa?’

‘I fired her.’

She rounded her eyes in surprise. She’d thought his relationship with the middle-aged Rosa had been excellent. She’d often heard him describe Rosa as the backbone of the business and how he would be lost without her. Why on earth would he have fired her? ‘Really? Why?’

He worked his way through the gears with an almost savage intensity. ‘She overstepped the mark. I fired her. End of story.’

‘Overstepped it in what way?’

He sent her a speaking glance. ‘Could we leave this until another time?’

Ailsa bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry... I know you’re feeling stressed and this must be so upsetting for you with your grandfather so desperately ill...’

There was a long silence.

‘He’s all I have,’ Vinn said in the same hollow-sounding voice he’d used back in his office. ‘I’m not ready to lose him.’

She wanted to reach for his hand or to put her hand on his thigh the way she used to do, but instead she kept to her side of the car. He probably wouldn’t welcome her comfort or he might push her away, which would be even worse. ‘You still have your dad, don’t you?’ she said.

‘No.’ He made another gear change. ‘He died. Car crash. He was driving under the influence and killed himself and his new girlfriend and seriously injured a couple and their two children travelling in the other car.’

‘I’m so sorry...’ Ailsa said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

It pained her to think Vinn had gone through such a tragic loss since she’d left and she’d known nothing about it. She hadn’t even sent a card or flowers. Had he kept his dad’s death out of the press? Not that she went looking for news about Vinn and his family...well, not unless she’d had one too many glasses of wine late at night when she was feeling particularly lonely and miserable.

He shrugged off her sympathy. ‘He was on a fast track to disaster from the moment my mother died when I was a child. Without her steadying influence he was a train wreck waiting to happen.’

Ailsa had rarely heard Vinn mention his mother’s death. It was something he never spoke of, even in passing. But she knew his relationship with his father had never truly recovered after his father was charged with fraud when Vinn was barely out of his teens. The shame on the family’s name and the reputation of the bespoke furniture business had been hard to come back from, but coming back from it had been Vinn’s blood, sweat and tears mission and he had done it, building the company into a global success.

‘I guess not everyone gets to have a father-of-the-year dad,’ she said, sighing as he turned into the entrance of the hospital. ‘Both of us lucked out on that one.’

Vinn had pulled into a parking spot and glanced at her again with a frown. ‘What do you mean? You’ve got a great dad. Michael’s one of the most decent, hardworking men I’ve ever met.’

Ailsa wanted to kick herself. She even lifted one foot to do it, welcoming the stab of pain from her high heel because she was a fool to let her guard slip. A damn fool.

‘Yes...yes, I know. He’s wonderful...even since the divorce he still makes an effort to—’

‘Then why say something like that? He’ll always be your dad even though he’s divorced from your mother.’

‘Forget I said it. I... I wasn’t thinking.’ Ailsa hated that she sounded so flustered and hoped he’d put it down to the emotion of seeing his grandfather under such tense and potentially tragic circumstances. She had a feeling if he hadn’t been in such a rush to see his grandfather before the surgery he might well have pushed her to explain herself a little more. It was a reprieve, but how long before he came back to it with his dog-with-a-bone determination?

It was a timely reminder she would have to be careful around Vinn. He knew her in a way few people did. Her knew her body like a maestro did an instrument. He knew her moods, her likes and dislikes, her tendency to use her sharp tongue as a weapon when she got cornered.

He didn’t know her shameful secret, but how soon before he made it his business to find out?

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