Mediterranean Tycoons: The De Santis Marriage / The Greek Tycoon's Unwilling Wife / The Sicilian's Virgin Bride

It was such a brief embrace that it had gone before she could even think to react to it.

‘Then let’s go shopping,’ was all he said.

Lizzy knew then that they had just sealed yet another deal between them, though heck if she had enough sense left to work out what this one was about.

And he was back to playing it cool again, being the guy who liked to be in control of everything—including his renegade wife. He drove them into town in a soft-top sports car with the roof firmly in place to keep the heat of the sun off her fair skin. They strolled in and out of small shops painted in different pretty pastel shades, each one carrying the kind of interestingly individual things that made Lizzy want to linger and browse.

He chose her sunhat while she wasn’t looking, a wide, floppy-brimmed thing made of bright pink straw that he paid for, coolly put on her head, then walked her out of the shop without giving her the chance to object about the colour and the way it had to be clashing with the colour of her hair.

‘Arrogant,’ she muttered.

‘All of my life,’ he answered smoothly, and walked her into a pharmacy and proceeded to pick out the highest factor sun screen he could find and Lizzy let him because—

Well, why not? she told herself. He’d taken command of every other decision in her life, like her clothes, her wedding—her wedding night. So she left him to it and went off to find the other female-type items she’d wanted to buy that she’d left off her list back at the gazebo.

He paid the bill.

And she began to feel like a very mute, very pampered female with just enough resentment burning inside her to stop her from liking it.

As he walked beside her his hand was always in touch with her somewhere—her hand, her arm, the base of her spine—until they bumped into some people he knew, when his arm became that angled pressure across her back and the hand a long fingered clamp in the indentation of her waist that drew her in very close to his side.

Making a silent statement as he’d done at the wedding or being protective of his new bride? Lizzy didn’t know but she leant into him anyway for protection as he introduced her as, ‘My wife, Elizabeth.’

She could tell from their expressions that the news about their scandalous marriage had even reached as far as this tiny island in the Caribbean.

‘Cara, this is Elena and Fabio Romano, friends of mine,’ he completed the introductions.

Elena Romano was young and slender and extremely beautiful, but she wore the kind of curious gleam in her dark eyes that made Lizzy think of a black-eyed witch with long sharp nails. Fabio Romano was tall and tanned and middle-aged with a languid boredom about him that had her wondering if that was where Luc was going to be by the time he reached his middle years.

They said they were cruising the Caribbean on their yacht and invited Luc and Lizzy to join them for the afternoon. Luc was beautifully suave and gracious with his refusal. Fabio Romano was beautifully suave and gracious in his acceptance of it. His lovely wife was not. Her black eyes sparked with irritation, which she vented on Lizzy.

‘Such a sweet hat, cara,’ she murmured, ‘very cute and—pink. How do you dare to wear that shade with your hair colouring?’

‘Luc chose it,’ Lizzy answered smoothly. ‘He likes cute and pink.’

Elena’s light laugh tinkled off into the sunlight. Lizzy felt the press of Luc’s fingers as they bit into her waist.

‘Ah,’ Elena hadn’t finished, ‘that explains your wedding photograph in this morning’s papers—’ she nodded ‘—and the positively dramatic image you made of the pale young virginal bride standing next to her sternly reformed rake.’

Well, the cruelly perceptive bitch, Lizzy thought breathlessly. ‘My style team managed to get it just right, don’t you think?’ She smiled through gritted white teeth.

She hadn’t been around Bianca for years without learning how to respond to such a woman. And even if the floppy brim to her cute pink hat hadn’t been blocking him off from the shoulders upwards, nothing on earth would have made her look up at him as she felt Luc’s fingers bite into her again.

‘And with so little notice.’ Elena slid her eyes down to Lizzy’s stomach, the suggestion she was implying shocking Lizzy into releasing a gasp.

‘Gosh,’ she rallied. ‘It never entered my head that people would think poor Luc had been forced into marrying me!’

‘They don’t.’ Surprisingly it was Fabio Romano who pulled himself out of his boredom to put a stop to this. ‘Elena is fishing for information. She is always fishing for information—it is the staple diet for a professional bitch.’

Well, he said it, Lizzy’s eyes told the other woman while Elena flushed. A few minutes later they’d made their polite farewells and were walking back to where they’d left the car.

‘You were a great help,’ Lizzy said, stiff with anger and a very bruised pride.

Luc, on the other hand, was coolly indifferent. ‘You will learn soon enough that it is safer to say nothing at all around people like Elena.’

Well, Lizzy didn’t want to learn to be quiet. If that was a brief taster of what was waiting for her when they returned to Italy, then she didn’t want any part of it.

‘She’s attracted to you, which is why she got her nails into me.’

‘Now you are being fantastical.’

‘An ex-lover, then, with a grudge because she didn’t end up your dramatically pale virginal bride.’

‘You would have to go back a long way into Elena’s past to find the virgin,’ he laughed. ‘And why are you angry with me when you were more than capable of handling the situation without any help from me?’

‘I don’t like your lifestyle,’ she muttered.

He didn’t say anything to that one. He just opened the car door for her and waited for her to get in. Lizzy pulled off her hat and placed it on her lap, then watched in simmering silence as he dropped her purchases at her feet before he shut her door and strode round the car bonnet to get in beside her.

‘I want to see the photograph she was talking about,’ she told him.

‘No.’ The engine vibrated beneath her on a low growling leap into life.

‘Why not?’ she persisted. ‘Have you seen it?’ she then demanded sharply.

All she got back was a view of his profile set in stone. Her head suddenly began to buzz as he swept them back up the hill towards the villa. Like little pieces of a jigsaw falling into place, Lizzy began to link that ugly scene he’d orchestrated this morning with what Elena Romano had said.

‘You have seen it,’ she declared in a hot, husky voice filled with fizzing resentment. ‘It was the reason why you were so nasty to me this morning. You saw that photo and didn’t like what it fed out there for everyone else to see—namely me, looking all pale and interesting, and you, looking like some poor rich guy who’d been caught by the oldest trick in the book.’

‘You possess a wild imagination,’ he drawled casually.

‘I want to see it,’ Lizzy repeated.

He said nothing, just pulled the car to a stop outside the sugar pink plantation house and climbed out of it. Lizzy did the same thing, glaring at him across the car’s soft top. He was frowning, grimly ignoring her as if she were an irritating fly he would like to swat away with his hand.

Well, that was fine, she told herself as she stalked around the car and into the house. She wasn’t a complete air-head. She knew a man like Luc didn’t go anywhere unless he had a reliable connection to the internet.

So she began stalking the huge hallway, opening doors and glancing inside them before she moved on to the next.

‘If you want to see over the whole house, cara,’ his hateful voice murmured, ‘I am happy to show you around without risking the paintwork on all the doors. Go away, Nina,’ he added as a mere calm aside.

Lizzy turned in time to see the housekeeper disappearing towards the back of the house. He was standing in the middle of the pale marble floor looking so darn together against her sizzling anger that she wanted to fly at him with her nails unsheathed.

Instead she balled her fingers into tense fists by her sides. ‘If you and the rest of the world can see a picture of me at my own wedding, then I want to see it!’ she insisted furiously.

‘I assure you, you don’t,’ he said, smiled, then dropped the smile and shot out an impatient sigh when all she did was to spin her back to him and move on to fling open the next door. ‘Why is it,’ he snapped out, ‘that everyone else gets to enjoy your placid side while I only get the—?’

His voice just stopped. Lizzy didn’t notice. She was too busy taking in the room she had just stepped into filled with the softest light and gentle shadows—and a huge gold-framed portrait hanging from one of the pale blue walls.

‘The virago,’ she murmured, just too stunned to remember that she was supposed to be hunting down some kind of office in this many-roomed mansion. ‘Dear God,’ she added on a thick shaken swallow as her feet took her further into the room.

‘La Contessa Alexandra De Santis,’ Luc’s deep dry voice fed to her from behind. ‘Grande Dame, matriarch, bad mother, wonderful grandmother, and my other virago inglese.’

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