Claimed by the Sicilian: Sicilian Husband, Blackmailed Bride / The Sicilian's Red-Hot Revenge / The Sicilian's Wife

‘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.