Weddings: The Nights: Virgin on Her Wedding Night / Claiming His Wedding Night / One Wild Wedding Night

‘This is your room,’ he announced, closing the door in Koko’s face before the cat could cross the threshold, making it clear that there were boundaries to his tolerance. The large bedroom was furnished with polished antiques and ornamented with splendid flower arrangements. He pressed open doors, showing her the en-suite bathroom and then a dressing room before opening a third and final door. ‘This is my room. I like my own space, piccola mia.’

Frozen in the middle of the room, Caroline felt more rejected than comforted by that information. It reminded her that he had not wanted to marry her, that she had forced that issue, and that presumably he carried a certain amount of resentment over that fact. It was a suspicion that could only made her shiver. She did not want to go to bed with a man in a bad mood.

A knock sounded on the door and Valente opened it. Umberto entered with champagne and deftly poured the golden liquid into a pair of flutes, while the funereal silence rubbed Caroline’s nerves even rawer than they already were.

‘Not for me,’ she breathed when Valente extended her glass, for she was afraid that in the over-hyped state she was in the alcohol might make her sick.

Valente took only a sip from his own flute before drawing her to him with slow, steady hands and a dark glow of warmth in his gaze that made her tummy flip. ‘Now, show me how to enjoy being married,’ he urged.

It was an invitation that not unnaturally deprived her of speech—and then the force of her feverish tension blew a hole in her armour. ‘I’m going to disappoint you,’ she told him abruptly.

‘That would be impossible,’ Valente contradicted instantly in his dark accented drawl, sliding her jacket off her shoulders so smoothly that she didn’t know it was gone until he set it aside. He turned her round as though she was indeed that doll he had compared her to earlier, and ran down the zip on her dress. He pressed his lips to a slight smooth shoulder and the dress fell.

Caroline stepped out of it, terrifyingly aware of how sexually inviting she had to look in the scanty lingerie he had given her. She heard him expel his breath on a slow hiss of appreciation. ‘You look fantastic.’

‘Just like a fantasy?’ she pressed unevenly.

One lean hand closing over her limp fingers, he spun her round, smouldering black-lashed golden eyes wandering from the pert tilt of her breasts encased in ivory satin to the lace stockings that encased her long slender legs. ‘Si… I can hardly believe that I finally have you here with me, belezza mia.’

He brought his wide, sensual mouth hungrily down on hers. He played with her pouting lower lip and let his tongue dart skilfully beyond. He tasted her with slow deep hunger and she quivered, afraid of his passion and his strength but fighting the fear with all her might. He caught her up unexpectedly in his arms and carried her over to the big bed. Her imagination immediately leapt ahead to the mortification of nakedness awaiting her, the pain and the resentment.

Valente settled shrewd dark eyes on her. Her rigid position on the bed made him think of a doe looking down a double-barrelled shotgun, and he frowned at that illogical image. But there was no denying that Caroline’s behaviour never quite added up in the way he expected. ESP was still sending him messages he could not interpret. She had wanted this marriage, had fought for it. Yet, for a gold-digger, she had put up a very poor fight before she signed the pre-nuptial agreement without protesting a single clause. His lawyers had been ecstatic, and had assured him that his wealth was ring-fenced for eternity as far as she was concerned. Money evidently wasn’t what turned her on most. But if it was social status he now had plenty of that as well, so what was wrong with her?

She was shy, she had always been shy, and she was a little nervous, he reasoned while he shed his jacket, tie and shoes. A woman who had been married for almost four years shouldn’t be that nervous, though, should she?

Caroline fought to keep her breathing even. She was so worked up she wanted to gasp. But she was going to lie back and think of England, as no doubt countless women had over the centuries. Enjoyment wasn’t even on the cards. But it was going to work with him, it was going to work, she told herself over and over again. She took off her shoes and scrambled below the linen sheet while wondering what he would say if she asked him to turn the lights out. Then she finally looked at him as he was ditching his silk boxers and gulped, shocked by the awesome size of his erection, thinking that no, no way would she be able to give him what he wanted.

She was as pale as marble and as still, Valente reflected, dark brows pleated in bewilderment. Willing? Unwilling? Odd how it had never occurred to him that she might genuinely not want him. Was he so vain that he had refused even to acknowledge that possibility? But he had felt the buzz between them again, just as he had five years earlier, the unmistakable reciprocal pulse of sexual desire. Reassured by that conviction, Valente lowered himself down on the bed beside her, six foot plus of daunting masculinity and potency. He let his lean sun-bronzed body lightly connect with hers while he kissed her. And she liked the kiss, in fact she loved the kiss, and a little sound of pleasure escaped her. But then she felt the pulse of his arousal against her thigh, and the loosening of her bra as he released the fastening. It was too much too soon, and panic threatened to take her over.

Matthew’s taunts flooded her mind, and she cringed as a lean hand closed over one tiny mound and a thumb massaged the delicate bud of her nipple. A sort of tingling sensation ran through her, like a sting, and she froze, instinct taking over as she steeled herself for at best discomfort and at worst pain.

‘Your breasts are so beautiful, belezza mia,’ Valente breathed huskily, admiring the porcelain-fine skin of the pouting flesh and the nipple as delicate as a pale pink flower. He lowered his arrogant dark head to explore that sweet flesh with his mouth.

Caroline could not stop herself from raising her hands to push at his shoulders, wide fearful eyes pinned to him. ‘Please don’t….’

Astonishment stilled Valente in his tracks. ‘You don’t like that? Bene … it’s not a problem.’

Caroline shut her eyes tight and dragged in a sustaining breath. Of course it was a problem—everything she was feeling was a problem! His hand was on her thigh and she went rigid, a cold chill spreading through her lower limbs from deep inside her. He wasn’t hurting her, he wasn’t hurting her, she reminded herself fiercely, fighting her apprehension with every atom of her strength, but still she trembled.

In the lamplight, Valente studied her in ferocious confusion. Not only was she pale as marble, she was as unresponsive. He could feel the clamminess of her skin, her mental withdrawal. He had never met with such a reaction from a woman before, and her obvious distress pierced his ego like a knife plunging into his gut. ‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded grittily. ‘Where are you in all this? This is our wedding night, but you’re making me feel like a rapist.’

Her feathery lashes lifted. ‘I’m sorry … I’m just nervous.’

She didn’t want him. She didn’t want him. Valente looked into the misty depths of her grey eyes and willed her to prove otherwise, but neither encouragement nor even recognition energised her blank defensive expression. She didn’t want him. He didn’t want to accept that possibility. He lifted one hand and buried it in the tumble of her silvery blonde hair, cupping her small head with the span of his hand, holding her steady as he brought his sensual mouth back down on hers with all the demanding hunger he had until that moment controlled.

Taking fright at that forcefulness, and feeling trapped, Caroline reacted instinctively, tearing free of him and throwing herself backwards across the bed to slither down onto the floor. She braced her hands on the mattress for an instant before she straightened, because she was dizzy with stress and fear. ‘I can’t …. I just can’t do this with you!’

His darkly handsome features stamped with stunned disbelief, Valente thrust back the bedding and sprang upright. Hugging herself tight with defensive arms, Caroline watched him pull on his boxers. The raw tension in his handsome, dark profile and broad, bronzed shoulders was powerfully apparent to her assessing, anxious gaze. Once again she had upset and hurt him. She felt as if she was bleeding inside and she hated herself.

Valente swung round to settle shimmering golden eyes on her like metal grappling hooks. ‘What the hell is going on here? You wanted me to marry you—’

‘I know … I know. I’m sorry—’

‘Sorry doesn’t cut it in this scenario,’ Valente incised. ‘I want an explanation.’

Her troubled eyes strayed down over his lean, powerful physique and veered away when she realised that the silk boxers could not conceal the bold bulge of his arousal. Guilt assailed her in a choking tide. ‘I told you I was no good at sex …’

‘What just happened in that bed was about more than you not being good at sex,’ Valente flung back at her in condemnation. ‘You turned into a marble statue in my arms, and then you fought free of my arms as if you were being assaulted!’

‘I thought it might be different with you. I’m so sorry.’ Caroline was fighting the buckets of overwrought tears penned up behind her eyes, determined not to stoop to that very feminine plea for sympathy. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

That last phrase was all Valente absorbed: I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’ being his touch and proximity. Dark blood settled over his stunning cheekbones and a shudder rippled through his big body, and coiling his masculine hands into powerful fists.

‘Then why did you marry me?’ he demanded rawly.

Feeling all the more naked and foolish, standing there in front of him with her arms crossed in a protective screen over her breasts, Caroline said, ‘I want to get dressed and then we can … talk.’

‘Maledizione … you will talk now,’ Valente delivered with emphatic force. ‘I have listened to enough nonsense.’

Caroline took him by surprise and backed into the bathroom to her right, slamming shut the door and ramming home the bolt to lock it with trembling urgency. That achieved, she stripped off what remained of the fancy lingerie with frantic hands. She hated those fanciful undergarments which could only remind her of her inadequacies in the seduction field.

‘I’m out of patience. If you don’t come out, I’ll kick the door down,’ Valente warned her dangerously from the other side of the door.

Caroline grabbed the flamboyant turquoise silk robe that hung on the back of the door and put it on. It had been made for someone a good deal taller and carried the exotic scent of another woman’s perfume. Of course he had had other lovers—probably hundreds of them, she thought wildly, and every one of them would have given him more pleasure than she ever could. As the door was struck with savage force she looked desperately round the tiled room for some means of escape, but she was stuck. The bolt broke away from the wood on the second blow and the door swung wide.

Valente focused on her standing there, as straight and defiant as an early Christian martyr while wrapped in his former mistress’s robe. As a picture it was all wrong. Housekeeping, he acknowledged, had fallen down in not removing that garment. It was not a moment when he wanted to be reminded of Agnese’s voluptuous sensuality in the bedroom. Agnese, who hadn’t been able to get enough of him between the sheets. Agnese, who had begged him to keep her on even after his marriage and who had dared to suggest that no wife could replace her. And just this once, Agnese, whose beauty and vanity were legendary, had been proved right.

‘How dare you do that to me.?’ Caroline protested, trembling like a leaf after that demonstration of male aggression. She felt helpless, threatened, for she did not know how to defuse his anger.

‘How dare you pose there, shaking like I’m about to physically hurt you?’ Valente raked back at her, closing a firm hand round her wrist and urging her back into the bedroom. ‘I’m entitled to an explanation from you. Feeling like you obviously do about me, why did you insist on marrying me?’

It was the question she had most dreaded, for she could not defend herself on that score. ‘I couldn’t have cut it as a mistress,’ she pointed out heavily, half under her breath. ‘You wouldn’t have helped my parents or Hales after an experience like this. So it had to be marriage. That’s your fault. You offered me so much to be with you that you made it impossible for me to refuse.’

Outraged condemnation had fired his beautiful eyes to a golden heat that threatened to burn her tender skin. ‘Yet right from the beginning you knew that the only thing I wanted from you was sex. So you deliberately set out to rip me off.’

Caroline tore her guilty gaze from him and studied the carpet. ‘There wasn’t a choice. But I did hope it would work out between us.’

‘Even though you recoiled from me in disgust the first time we kissed again?’ he bit out rawly.

Caroline paled. ‘That’s not what I felt.’

‘How could you possibly have hoped it would work out? I was so hot for you I was blind to all the signals that something was wrong and you knew it. You kept your distance and played me right up to the doors of the church. You’re a liar and a fraud!’

Every word cut into her like a knife, reminding her of failings that she was already all too well aware of. ‘Yes, in that field I was … but I did try to tell you the truth about me at the beginning,’ she reminded him painfully, the intimate conversation tearing off entire layers off her protective skin. Now that he knew her secret, she felt horribly exposed. ‘I’m frigid. It’s my problem, nothing to do with you.’

‘Dannazione! How can it be nothing to do with me? You promised to give me a child. What hope have we now of achieving that ambition?’

Caroline was pale as milk. ‘None, I suppose.’