Italian Bachelors: Brooding Billionaires: Ravelli's Defiant Bride / Enthralled by Moretti / The Playboy's Proposition

At that point the blonde appeared in a ravishing set of ruffled turquoise lingerie and Cristo sprang upright and actually approached the catwalk. ‘I want that,’ he spelt out without an ounce of discomfiture in his bearing.

Belle’s cheeks flamed while she noted the manner in which the very leggy blonde was posing for Cristo like a stripper, loving the attention as her breasts jiggled in the bra with her little dance movements, and she spun round to display her almost bare bottom taut in panties that were little more than a thong. Cristo seemed mesmerised by the spectacle, his dark golden eyes veiled, his sinfully seductive bronzed features taut as if he was struggling to conceal his thoughts.

He was attracted to the blonde, Belle decided with a sinking sick sensation in the pit of her stomach, and he couldn’t hide the fact.

‘Thank you, Sofia,’ the saleswoman said loudly as she stood up and the music stopped mid-note, leaving a sudden uncomfortable silence in its wake. Olivia said her goodbyes and took her leave through the rear door of the ballroom.

‘Well, wasn’t that educational?’ Belle remarked freezingly when Cristo finally wandered back to her side.

His winged ebony brows drew together in bewilderment. ‘How so?’

Her generous mouth compressed. ‘You fancied the blonde,’ she told him bluntly.

Cristo frowned.

‘Oh, don’t bother denying it. I saw you,’ Belle told him thinly. ‘You couldn’t take your eyes off her!’

Cristo moved steadily closer in a slow stalking movement that was quite ridiculously sensual. Belle looked up at him, fearless in her condemnation, and collided with smouldering golden eyes so intense in focus that she was rocked back on her heels. All the oxygen in the atmosphere seemed to have dried up and she parted her lips to snatch in air.

‘I have only one point to make. It wasn’t her I was seeing...it was you,’ he spelt out hoarsely, his brilliant eyes pinned to her with mesmerising force. ‘It was you I was picturing in that get-up.’

Disbelief assailed Belle and she flicked him a scornful upward glance of dismissal. ‘Like I’m going to believe that with a half-naked beauty cavorting in front of you!’ she derided.

‘Believe...’ Cristo urged in a roughened undertone that vibrated with assurance in the stillness. ‘When I’ve got a real woman like you, why would I want one with fewer curves than a coat hanger?’

Her mouth fell wide at that less than flattering description of the beautiful model. ‘Not your type?’

‘You’re my type,’ Cristo confided huskily. ‘The erotic image of you bountifully filling those little blue scraps of nothing turns me on fast and hard.’

A real woman? Belle almost laughed out loud at that label. After all, the rigorous dieting she had tried in her teen years had failed to hone an inch off the solid bone structure that gave her defiantly curvaceous hips and voluptuous breasts. Back then she would have given her right arm to be one of the more fashionable ‘skinny-minnies’ at school. But she was not fool enough as an adult to instantly dismiss the idea that some men actually preferred curves to more slender proportions. It simply hadn’t entered her head before that Cristo might be one of those men.

He brushed a straying curl from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear with a casual intimacy that unnerved her. It said that he had the right to touch her, a right she had already denied him. An alarm bell shrieked in her brain, warning her to back off and enforce her boundaries yet again. But he was close, so temptingly close that she could smell the evocative scent of cologne and masculine musk that he emanated. He smelt so unbelievably good to her that her senses swam and she felt light-headed. Her knees wobbled beneath her while warmth snaked down from the breasts straining below her camisole to the very core of her, leaving her feeling hot and achy and dissatisfied. Even staying still in that condition was a challenge.

He touched her face, a long tanned forefinger gently tracing the line of her jaw to the cupid’s bow above her upper lip while a thumb stroked the soft fullness of her lower lip. Belle trembled, scarcely able to breathe for the rush of excitement that had come out of nowhere at her. Her body raced up the scale in reaction, temperature rising, heart pounding, pulse hammering. Her lashes lowered to a languorous half-mast as she gazed up at him in helpless silence, for she had no words to describe what he was doing to her. He was so beautiful, so devastatingly beautiful that she hadn’t even blamed the models for concentrating their attention on him while they displayed their wares. Not only was he the buyer, but also a male so handsome that he made women stare while they struggled to comprehend what it was about those lean, darkly dazzling features that exercised such sinful power and magnetism over their sex. Belle didn’t know; she only knew that the minute she stopped looking at him, she needed to look again. It was a compulsion she couldn’t fight.

‘You can put on that blue set just for me,’ Cristo murmured hungrily, stunning dark eyes flaring wicked gold at that prospect.

‘In your dreams,’ Belle warned him without hesitation, thinking he would wait a very long time if he hoped to see her tricked out in provocative underwear for his benefit. Playing the temptress wasn’t her style and in her opinion he didn’t need the encouragement. That conviction in mind, she walked into the drawing room, where at least their conversation would be unheard by the staff.

‘Don’t tell me that you don’t have the same dream,’ Cristo chided, shifting in front of her to clamp his lean hands possessively to her hips.

Belle was about to hit him, push him away, stamp on his foot, loudly lodge a protest to physical contact of any kind. She really was going to do at least one of those things and then his mouth plunged down hungrily on hers and her hands spread against the hard, warm contours of his chest and slowly fisted into the fabric of his shirt as she fought herself and fought the craving he induced.

In that split second between her thinking and acting, his tongue snaked into her mouth to taste her and she was lost while he nipped and teased at her lips and delved deep. The hot, throbbing sensation between her legs rose in intensity until she was rocking her hips against his, wanting more, needing more with an urgency that unnerved her. She could feel the long, hard ridge of his arousal against her belly and their clothes were an obstruction she couldn’t bear, overwhelming physical hunger surging through her quivering body with a force she couldn’t withstand.

Cristo lifted his handsome head, eyes hot and bright with sexual heat, black hair tousled by the fingers she had dug into the luxuriant strands, an edge of colour accentuating his hard cheekbones. ‘Shall we take this upstairs?’ he murmured thickly.

No was on Belle’s lips but yes was in her heart because her body was drenched with treacherous longing for his. She took in a slow steadying breath and struggled to clear her head, fighting the wanting clawing at her with all her strength.

‘I want you...you want me, cara,’ Cristo said drily. ‘What’s the problem? Are you still suspicious about that model? Do you really think I’d be that crass?’

‘No,’ Belle conceded reluctantly, for she would have used that as an excuse had she been able to do so. Unfortunately, her brain was in free fall. He had spoken the truth: the attraction between them was explosive. Furthermore, had he not been strongly attracted to her in the first place, he probably wouldn’t have offered her marriage. Even so the bond that was being created between them solely on a physical level was too superficial for her to accept and she wanted more.

Cristo elevated a sleek black brow. ‘Then? Are you still judging me as if I’m my late father?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘Or is it something in your own past which makes you so suspicious of men?’

Belle stiffened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’

‘I think you do. You watched Gaetano run rings round your mother and hated him for it,’ Cristo contended. ‘But I’m not him.’

Belle bridled and gritted her teeth. ‘I know that and I didn’t say you were.’

‘Why else would you accuse me of coming on to that model right in front of you?’ Cristo slung back, tension etched along the hard line of his cheekbones and the angle of his strong jawline. ‘What sort of a man would behave like that?’

‘I overreacted. I’m sorry.’ Belle turned her vibrant head away, guilt and mortification piercing her. There was a certain amount of truth to his condemnation. She did distrust men but not all men. During her years at university she had been hurt by boyfriends who were offended by her refusal to get straight into bed with them before she even got to know them. The same boys had deceived her with other girls and let her down but no more so than any of her friends, who had suffered similar wake-up calls from young men who wanted nothing more lasting from a woman than physical release.

‘If you want this marriage to work, this isn’t the way to go about it,’ Cristo delivered in a measured undertone.

‘You said honesty was the best policy,’ Belle reminded him, walking away a few steps and then turning back to face him, her lovely face flushed and tense. ‘Then I’ll be honest. For this to work for me, I want something more than just sex with you. I want us to get to know each other. You can’t build a relationship purely on sex.’

‘I’ve never known anything else,’ Cristo growled.

‘Do you have any female friends?’

When he nodded with a faint frown, Belle smiled. ‘Well, then, you have known something else.’

‘Why didn’t you make these demands before you married me?’ Cristo derided.

‘I didn’t think it through until now,’ Belle confided truthfully. ‘I was desperate to make the children secure and marrying you was the price. I didn’t think beyond that. I didn’t think about how I would feel...’

Marrying you was the price. Not a statement he had expected to hear from Belle, not one he was even sure he could believe, Cristo mused grimly, dark eyes shielded by his lush lashes. She wanted more. Why did women always want more than was on offer? Were they programmed to want more at birth? All this and five children too, he reflected heavily—had he really thought about what he was doing either?

The forbidding look tensing his lean, dark features stirred Belle’s conscience. ‘I realise this is coming out of nowhere at you and you have a right to be irritated.’

‘That’s not quite the word I would’ve chosen,’ Cristo countered curtly.

Belle steeled herself to be more honest than she really wanted to be. ‘I did have thoughts I shouldn’t have had when I agreed to marry you,’ she admitted gruffly, her pale skin suddenly blossoming with mortified colour. ‘But none of those thoughts related to personal enrichment or social advancement.’ Feeling more uncomfortable than ever, she hesitated. ‘Although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I had thoughts of getting revenge for what Gaetano put my family through over the years, I certainly had an inappropriate sense of satisfaction when you offered to marry me and I quite deliberately wore my mother’s wedding dress to get married in. I’m ashamed of those feelings now. After all, it was very unfair that you should have to pay in any way for your father’s mistakes. But then we’re both doing that now,’ she completed ruefully.

Cristo was violently disconcerted by her complete honesty. He hadn’t expected that, hadn’t been prepared for her to admit any reactions that might reflect badly on her motivation in marrying him. Getting a rich and powerful Ravelli to the altar had briefly thrilled her but she had owned up to it and that impressed a male who was rarely impressed by the women he met.

‘La via dell’inferno è lastricata di buone intenzione...the road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ Cristo translated sibilantly. ‘Do you ever do anything for the sheer hell of it?’

‘No.’ Belle stiffened as she made that admission. ‘And it doesn’t have to be hell,’ she pointed out uncomfortably. ‘We can make the best of the situation. You said you wanted to treat me like a proper wife, wanted to show me respect...’

The reminder hung there like a dark cloud between them, with Cristo finally registering that his partiality for that lingerie set had evidently caused offence. Last night he had become her first lover and she had been amazing, he recalled, arousal slivering through him at even the memory. He was expecting too much too soon and he gritted his perfect white teeth together. ‘I’ll try harder,’ he told her in a driven undertone.

‘I’ll try too,’ Belle responded with a tentative smile.

But it was too late because Cristo had already turned away and could not have seen her smile, which had combined both regret at her inability to be the purely sexual object he so clearly wanted her to be and her hope for a better understanding between them in the future. Spirits low, she went upstairs to find her little brother and give Teresa a break. Franco’s warm affection and trusting acceptance that he would be loved back were wonderfully soothing to her troubled state of mind. She played hide and seek with the little boy and the upper floor rang with laughter and thudding feet.

Umberto paused in Cristo’s office doorway to say warmly, ‘It is a joy to hear a child playing here again.’

‘There’s another four of them—a boy and a girl of eight and a pair of teenagers,’ Cristo confided, for he had known the kindly manservant since he was a child.

‘Your late father’s children?’ Umberto prompted.

Cristo’s brows drew together. ‘How did you know?’

‘I heard rumours over the years. My cousin flew Mr Gaetano’s helicopter right up until his retirement,’ the older man reminded him gently.

‘Let’s hope the rumours stay buried,’ Cristo commented wryly.

‘No one in my family will gossip,’ the older man assured him with pride. ‘But Mr Gaetano had other staff who may not be so discreet.’

A current of uneasiness assailed Cristo, who had ensured that his father’s surviving employees were paid off with adequate remuneration for their years of service. Was it possible he had got married for no good reason? And inexplicably, at that point, he thought of Franco, who demonstrated such a desperate need for male attention. Franco definitely needed a father figure, Cristo reflected, his stern mouth softening as the toddler’s gales of laughter echoed down from above.

‘No...no...no, Franco!’ Belle gasped in dismay when she found her little brother picking in delight through the collection of items lying on the dressing table in Cristo’s bedroom. ‘Don’t touch those.’

Jingling the car keys still in his hand, Franco dropped the wallet he had been investigating and it fell to the floor. Belle knelt down to gather up the banknotes that Franco had crumpled, smoothing them out before returning them to the wallet along with credit cards, a couple of business cards and...a tiny photograph. Belle lifted the photo and stared down at it in surprise, recognising Nik Christakis’s estranged wife, Betsy. She was a little blonde sprite of a beauty with delicate features and big blue eyes. Her brow furrowed. Had the photo fallen out of the wallet or had it just been lying there forgotten on the floor? The rug beneath her knees, however, bore the ruffled evidence of recent vacuuming. So, assuming the photo had been inside Cristo’s wallet, why was her husband carrying round a photo of his brother’s wife?

And was she even going to ask him why? Belle came out in a cold sweat at the very prospect of so embarrassing a conversation. After her misjudgement of his behaviour with the model, he would never believe that she had accidentally seen the photograph. He would think she had been snooping in his wallet and he would naturally assume that she was one of those madly jealous, distrustful women, who would always be scheming to check his cell-phone messages and his pockets for evidence of infidelity. Cringing at that likelihood, Belle slotted the photo back into his wallet and returned it circumspectly to the dressing table. No, she wasn’t about to ask him any more awkward questions.

Matters were tense enough between them. And yet so many important things hinged on the success of their marriage, she thought wretchedly. If she and Cristo couldn’t make a go of it, what would happen to her siblings? She had made promises, not least those in the chapel, which she had to, at least, try to keep. Unless she was prepared to let Cristo go free, she had to make more of an effort.

But please, no, she prayed, let not the only avenue to success demand the sporting of saucy underwear....

CHAPTER EIGHT

BELLE SAT ALONE at the breakfast table out on the terrace, which overlooked the glorious gardens and, beyond them, the beautiful panorama of the idyllic Umbrian landscape, and decided that nobody would ever credit how miserable and insecure she was. Here she was, all dressed up in gorgeous surroundings, married to an even more gorgeous man and already she had made a mess of things! Although, to be fair, expecting her to be willing to put on provocative lingerie for his benefit had scarcely been calculated to soothe her misgivings.

Do you ever do anything for the sheer hell of it? Cristo had asked. And the truthful answer would have been, no, never. So, how on earth had she managed to leap into marrying Cristo without fully considering what she was doing? She still couldn’t answer that question to her own satisfaction. Had her treacherous attraction to him destroyed every single one of her brain cells? Why hadn’t she listened to her grandmother’s warnings? After all, nobody knew better than Belle that relationships between men and women were often difficult and prone to unhappiness.

Her mother’s over-hasty marriage at a young age to Belle’s drunken father followed by Mary’s long affair with Gaetano Ravelli had taught Belle to be very cautious and sensible and to carefully reason out every move she made in advance with men, except when it came to the opportunity to marry Cristo when she had—inexplicably to her—jumped right in with both feet. And her current wary attitude to intimacy was creating friction with Cristo. Could she blame him for his outlook?

What, after all, had Cristo gained from their marriage? Her silence, no court case and five pretty needy children he had promised to adopt into the Ravelli family. Her tense mouth down-curved on the discouraging suspicion that he had sacrificed much more than she had and that few people would feel sorry for her having given up her freedom to work and instead live in the lap of luxury with her fancy designer wardrobe. That thought made her eyes sting fiercely with tears because she had very little interest in the luxury and the vast selection of new clothes that had been delivered in garment bags to her room before she even got out of bed. In fact, she had only donned one of the outfits, a silky top and skirt, because she hadn’t wanted Cristo to think that she was ungrateful for the gesture he had made.

But unfortunately, Cristo wasn’t even around to notice what she was wearing. That was the problem of separate bedrooms in a massive house and two people who didn’t know each other’s habits very well, Belle reflected wretchedly. Cristo had been absent at dinner the night before and now he was absent again. Was he avoiding her? Fed up with her immature outlook? It seemed pretty obvious to her that she was getting absolutely everything in their marriage wrong, and to achieve that at such an early stage suggested that she had cherished completely unreasonable expectations of what being married to Cristo would entail. He had assumed she was a gold-digger and, having brooded over that accusation, she wasn’t sure she could blame him for his cynicism. After all, he didn’t know her and possibly connecting on a physical level was the only way Cristo knew how to get to know a woman, so her coming over all prudish and standoffish because he had hurt her feelings wasn’t helping the situation...

And worst of all, Belle knew she couldn’t even phone her grandmother. Isa Kelly’s sensible advice would have been very welcome even though Belle could not have brought herself to mention the bedroom side of things to the older woman. Indeed even the sound of Isa’s voice and those of her siblings would have been a comfort. Belle was horribly homesick and missed the family dog, Tag, almost as much. But Belle knew that if she phoned home within days of the wedding her grandmother would be astute enough to suspect that things weren’t working out and it would be very, very selfish to lay yet another worry on her grandmother’s already overburdened shoulders.

Disgusted at her self-pitying mood and lack of activity, Belle suddenly pushed her chair back and stood up. Sitting here feeling sorry for herself and agonising over her possible mistakes wasn’t fixing anything, was it? It was time to go and find Cristo.

Questioned, Umberto smiled and indicated a door at the foot of a short corridor off the main hall. ‘Mr Cristo has been working round the clock in his office since news of the banking crisis broke...’

What banking crisis? Belle had not seen a television or a newspaper since the morning of her wedding. She had noticed that the nanny, Teresa, had a TV in her room but had drawn a blank when she looked for access to one for her own benefit. Perspiration breaking on her brow, she knocked on the door of Cristo’s office and then opened it.

Dark eyes flying up from his laptop screen, Cristo swung round in his chair. Belle’s appearance shocked him on two levels. Dio mio, he had a wife and he had forgotten about her, and then his next thought was that forgetting about her should have been impossible when she was such a beauty, standing in the doorway, a slender, wonderfully leggy figure taut with uncertainty in a peach-coloured top and skirt that toned in perfectly with her torrent of vibrant spiral curls. Wide grass-green eyes assailed his.

‘I wondered where you were,’ she said awkwardly, transfixed as she always was at first glimpse of his tousled dark head, perfect bronze profile and striking eyes. The fact he hadn’t shaved merely added a raw-edged masculinity to his charismatic appeal and she could feel her face warming up, her tummy flipping, her heart rate skipping upbeat: all standard reactions to Cristo. ‘Then Umberto mentioned a banking crisis of some kind. I’m afraid I haven’t seen a newspaper since I arrived and I didn’t know about it. Do you need any help?’

‘Help?’ Cristo queried, ebony brows rising in surprise. ‘How could you help?’

‘I have a first-class degree in business and economics and I worked as an intern for a year in a Dublin bank as part of the course,’ Belle confided hesitantly.

A line of colour flared across Cristo’s cheekbones as it crossed his mind that he should’ve known such elementary facts about the woman he had married, and rare discomfiture sliced through him. ‘I had no idea.’

Her eyes sparkling with genuine amusement, an involuntary grin slanted Belle’s wide and generous mouth. ‘So, you just assumed you were marrying an uneducated Irish peasant, did you?’

‘If you’re willing to help, I’d be grateful, bella mia,’ Cristo admitted, smoothly, gratefully ducking that issue entirely. ‘I’m trying to work with my London staff remotely and it’s complicated but this is supposed to be our honeymoon.’

‘I’ve got nothing else to do,’ Belle pointed out gently, convinced that a couple of their ilk scarcely qualified for the itinerary or the behaviour of a normal honeymoon couple.

Cristo immediately recognised yet another screaming indictment of his behaviour as a new husband and hurriedly sidestepped that awareness by offering Belle the laptop beside his own and springing upright to ask Umberto to go and find another chair. His conscience reacted as though someone had given it a good hard kick. Marriage, he was learning by slow and painful steps, would demand much more of him than he had imagined and would entail considering Belle’s needs as well as his own.

For the first time, he appreciated that he had had absolutely no right to judge his brother, Nik, for the mess he had made of his marriage to Betsy. After all, he only knew one side of that story and tiny, fragile Betsy weeping out her heartbreak on Cristo’s chest had definitely cornered the sympathy vote as far as appearances went. His lip curled as he skimmed a glance across Belle’s composed and lovely face and he almost smiled in relief. There was nothing helpless about Belle and at least she wasn’t crying hysterically, complaining, condemning...