Convenient Brides: The Italian's Convenient Wife / His Inconvenient Wife / His Convenient Proposal

By the time he reached the bed again, he was as naked as she was. And, like her, he’d changed over the years. The younger playboy son of the almighty Salvatore Rainero had matured into a man of impressive stature, and she was mesmerized by the magnificence of him.

He’d always been classically tall, dark and handsome, but at twenty-four there’d been a hint of softness in his build, an indication of too much fast living, coupled with a distinct lack of self-discipline. He’d worn too much jewelry. A heavy gold chain hung around his neck. Diamonds rimmed the dial of his gold watch. Another diamond graced the signet ring on his little finger. Smitten though she’d been at the time, she’d found such a conspicuous display of wealth somewhat tasteless.

Now, he wore only a slim gold watch which he discarded along with his clothes, and a simple chain that glimmered softly against his deep olive skin. His chest had deepened, his shoulders broadened with muscle more cleanly defined than before. His limbs were strong, his flanks lean, his belly flat and hard. And his masculinity…?

“Will I do?” he asked, standing close enough for her to reach out and touch him.

Heavenly days, but he was fearsomely endowed, impressively aroused! “I think you’ll do very well indeed,” she managed to say, drawing her legs under her until she knelt before him, “and not just for tonight.”

“What are you saying, Caroline?”

She drew in a tortured breath, and ran her tongue over her lips. “Yes. I’m saying, yes, I will marry you.”

A light flared in his dark eyes, a mixture of triumph and relief. “Then let me say this. Look at me now and see that I am far from perfect. Know that I will make mistakes, and there will be times when I might do or say things that make you wish you’d never agreed to become my wife.”

Lowering himself next to her, he pinned her in that forthright stare which had become so much his trademark, and continued, “It would be very easy for me to tell you that I love you, Caroline. But they are not words to be spoken lightly, and although you and I go back a long way, we have spent but a few days in each other’s company. So I will save such a declaration for a later time, when they will carry true meaning, and for now say instead, without reservation, that I admire you, and I desire you.”

He took her hand and placed it flat against his chest. “With every beat of this heart, I promise I will never deliberately cause you pain. I will never lie to you, and I will never betray our married covenant. Your honesty and gentleness…they inspire me, tesoro, and give me hope for the future.”

This time, conscience clamored to be heard, deafening her with pleas to come clean. This beautiful man was offering himself to her just as he was, unembellished by any false declarations brought on by spur-of-the-moment euphoria, but with a sincere, straightforward commitment to be the best that he could be, as her partner, as her husband.

And what had she to give him in return? A secret grown so burdensome that she didn’t know how to divulge it with-out ruining everything. She’d let chance after chance pass her by, because she’d believed hoarding the truth about the children was her only weapon against the man she’d viewed for so long as her enemy. Now, her silence stood to rob her of her most powerful ally.

One way or another, she had to tell him the truth—and soon. To wait to do so until they were husband and wife would strike at the very foundation of what their marriage was all about.

Do it now! her conscience urged. Tell him, and beg his forgiveness for waiting so long! It’s not too late. Together you can make this work. He’s not the same man anymore. He’ll understand. See how he’s looking at you…feel the tenderness in his touch. Do it now, before you lose your nerve.

“Paolo,” she began, her voice quivering with apprehension, “I’m not exactly perfect myself. There are…things about me that you don’t know about. Secrets you deserve to—”

“I long since guessed as much, Caroline,” he said, stopping her with a finger to her lips, “but nothing you have to tell me will change the fact that you are a good woman who will make a fine surrogate mother to Clemente and Gina. And isn’t that what our marriage is really all about?”

“Yes, but—”

“No ‘buts.’” He drew her hand down his chest until it nested against his groin. “We sit here naked beside each other, on a bed large enough to hold both of us and impatient passion yearning to be fulfilled, yet we squander our time with talking? No, la mia bella, the talking can wait for another day.”

His erection had diminished somewhat, but at her touch, it sprang up with renewed vigor. Hot, silken, urgent, it throbbed against her palm, and no amount of guilty conscience could hold her back from cradling him possessively.

“Yes,” he whispered, cupping her breasts and lowering his head to adore them with his mouth and his tongue. “Just so do we forge the bonds that will unite us.”

How could she disagree, when her blood surged with excitement, and her heart cartwheeled madly behind her ribs? How pretend she was unmoved by his attention, when his tongue dipped lower and slipped between the folds of her flesh to find her wet with need? And how in the world silence her smothered, frantic exclamations as the climax she’d denied herself for so long swept over her in a storm so violent that she almost screamed?

I love you…I love you…!

The words rang in her head, fighting to be aired aloud. “I want you,” she begged instead. “Paolo, I want you now, inside me…please!”

He reached for a small foil packet he’d tossed on the dresser, along with the door key, and the reason he’d briefly left the room finally hit home. “Give me a moment,” he replied, his chest heaving. “We have enough to cope with. Let’s not muddy the waters with a pregnancy neither of us wants or needs. If we remain married, it has to be from choice, not obligation.”

Too late, she thought, the ecstasy he’d so easily induced evaporating in the dismal knowledge that he’d just made confession that much more difficult for her to accomplish.

He put on the contraceptive. Then, oblivious to the real reason he’d cast a cloud on the moment, took her in his arms again. “You look downcast, my lovely. Do you not agree that for us to make a baby would be unfair, both to the child, and to the twins?”

“Of course,” she managed.

She must not have sounded convincing enough because he reared back, the better to search her face. “Yet you remain downcast. You surely don’t believe a condom spoils the pleasure either of us gives to the other?”

“No,” she said miserably.

“Then what?”

“I just want you to make love to me. You said we shouldn’t waste the night in talk, yet that’s what we seem to be doing.”

“Worry not, Caroline,” he murmured, his hands molding her to him, “the night is still very young. We have hours to spend together, and I have come prepared to make use of every one.”

He did stop talking then, and devoted himself to confirming what she’d known for years: that all it took to bring her senses to sizzling life was the right man.

No hurried, impatient seduction this time, but a leisurely, erotic tour of her body conducted with minute attention to every curve, every indentation, every smooth, bare stretch of skin. His eyes, heavy-lidded with barely leashed passion, blazed a trail of heat from her head to her toes. His hands shaped her every contour with the tactile dedication of a blind man. His mouth and tongue left a wicked, heavenly trail of discovery from the outer shell of her ear to the high arch of her instep; from her throat to the back of her knees.

And yet, although with every touch, he stoked her to fever pitch, not once did he trespass between her thighs to the cloistered fold of flesh screaming for his possession. He knew how to tantalize, to torment, until she was begging incoherently—garbled, frantic words of pleading known only to lovers dancing on the brink of destruction.

Beside herself, she dragged his mouth back to hers. Tasted on him the perfume of her body lotion, of herself. Slid her hands down his torso until she found him, pulsing slick and hard and hot within the condom—so close to losing control that the sweat gleamed on his forehead and left his lungs battered with the effort to withhold himself just a minute longer…another second. And in the end, as he’d always known he would, losing the battle.

With the deep, agonized groan of a man in agony, he plunged deep inside her. Held himself immobile, and clenched his jaw so hard, the veins stood out on his neck like ropes. A useless exercise, one he could never win. Because the demons of desire had too strong a hold—on him, on her.

Wrapping her legs around his waist, she imprisoned him and, for the first time since she’d conceived his children, she felt complete. Free to give, free to take, free to love with her whole heart and soul and body.

“Slowly, tesoro,” he whispered harshly, with a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.

But even if she’d been able to obey the plea, he could not. Driven by a hunger too long delayed, his own flesh betrayed him. He rocked against her, fiercely, urgently. Hypnotized by the consuming rhythm, she responded involuntarily and the storm prowling impatiently at the outer limits of her consciousness, let fly with the first distant roll of thunder.

A spasm clutched at her. Released her and retreated, to gather strength for its next onslaught. Clutched again, more tightly…and then again, this time so powerfully that she thought she might die.

Paolo stilled, tense as an overwound spring about to fly apart. “Ah, Caroline, mia bella…mio amore!” he muttered, dragging the words from the very depths of his being, then drove into her one last time, a deep, hard, hungry, merciless thrust.

It spelled the end, of order, of coherence, of life as she knew it. She dissolved, became nothing—a moonbeam caught in a spinning web of sensation. Sound filled her, rushing like the wind, lifting her. She heard a voice that once was hers crying out as sensation rippled over her, carried her forward implacably, and hurled her past the point of no return.

She toppled, would have fallen off the edge of the earth, spun off into eternity, had Paolo not held her fast. His body shuddered, groaned; a mighty ship fighting an impossible sea. He was drowning, and so was she. And it didn’t matter, because they were together, welded limb to limb, body to body, heart to heart.

She surfaced a long time later, a new woman with a new life, in a new world, one composed of serene moonlight slanting through the windows to splash the dark purple shadows of her room with pale blue stripes. Paolo sprawled on top of her, spent and breathless. And she loved it. Loved the damp warmth of his breath against her neck, the exhausted weight of him.

Again, the words fought to escape. I love you…I’ve loved you forever…

He stirred, lifted his head and regarded her from passionsated eyes. “I suppose I should go so that you can sleep in peace.”

“No,” she said, stroking his beautiful face. “You should stay. I want you to stay, Paolo. Don’t ever leave me again.”

“I hoped you’d say that,” he said, a sleepy smile curving his mouth, and still buried inside her, he rolled to his side and drew her close again.

When she next became conscious of time, the moon had slipped beyond the house and left her room in total darkness. But she didn’t need light to know that, in sleep, she and Paolo had lost their intimate connection. Now he lay with his leg flung over her, and the way his palm closed possessively over her breast told her he, too, was awake, and hungry for her all over again.