Blackmailed Into The Marriage Bed

His mouth curved upwards as if he found her anger amusing. ‘Still the same old bad attitude Ailsa.’

‘And why wouldn’t I have a bad attitude where you’re concerned?’ Ailsa said. ‘How do I know you didn’t plant the idea of sponsorship in Isaac’s mind? How often have you been in contact with him since we separated?’

‘My relationship with your brother has nothing to do with my relationship with you,’ Vinn said. ‘That is entirely separate.’

‘We don’t have a relationship any more, Vinn.’

His eyes became obsidian-hard. ‘And whose fault is that, hmm?’

Ailsa was trying to contain her temper but it was like trying to restrain a rabid Rottweiler on a Teacup Chihuahua’s leash. ‘We didn’t have a relationship in the first place. You married me for all the wrong reasons. You wanted a trophy wife. Someone to do little nineteen-fifties wifey things for you while you got on with your business as if my career meant nothing to me.’

A tight line appeared around his mouth as if he too was having trouble reining in his temper. ‘I trust your aforementioned career is keeping you warm at night? Or have you found yourself a lover to do that?’

She put up her chin. ‘My private life is no longer any of your business.’

He made a sound that was suspiciously like a snort. ‘Isaac tells me you haven’t even been on a date.’

Ailsa was going to kill her younger brother. She would chain him to the sofa and force him to watch animated Disney classics instead of the sports channel. She would take away his golf clubs and flush all his golf balls down the toilet. She would force-feed him junk food instead of the healthy organic stuff his sports dietician recommended.

‘Well—’ she gave Vinn a deliberately provocative look ‘—none that he knows about, that is.’

A muscle in the lower quadrant of his jaw moved in and out like an erratic pulse. ‘Any lovers you’ve collected will have to move aside for the next three months as I have other plans for you.’

Plans? What plans? Now it was Ailsa’s pulse that was erratic. So erratic it would have made any decent cardiologist reach for defibrillator paddles.

‘Excuse me?’ She injected derision into every word. ‘You don’t get to make plans for me, Vinn. Not any more. I’m in the driver’s seat of my life and you’re not even in the pit lane.’

He made a steeple with his fingers and rested them against his mouth, watching her with an unwavering gaze that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle at the roots. But then she noticed the gold band of his wedding ring on his left hand and something in her stomach tilted. Why would he still be wearing that?

‘Isaac will never make the professional circuit without adequate sponsorship,’ he said after a long moment. ‘That nightclub incident he was involved in last year has scared off any potential sponsors. I’m his only chance. His last chance.’

Ailsa mentally gulped. That nightclub incident could well have ended not just her brother’s career prospects but his or someone else’s life as well. The group of friends he’d been hanging around with since school attracted trouble and invariably Isaac got caught in the middle. It wasn’t that he was easily led, more that he was a little slow to see the potential for trouble until it was too late to do anything—his approaching Vinn for sponsorship being a case in point. But if he got on the professional circuit he would be away from those troublemaking friends.

‘Why are you doing this? Why are you involving me? If you want to sponsor him then do it. Leave me out of it.’

Vinn slowly shook his head. ‘Not how it works, cara. You’re the reason I’m sponsoring him. The only reason.’

Ailsa blinked. Could she have got it wrong about Vinn? Had he married her because he loved her, not just because he fancied having a glamorous wife to hang off his arm? Was that why he was still wearing his wedding ring? Had he meant every one of those promises he’d made on their wedding day?

No. Of course he hadn’t loved her.

He had never said those three little magical words. But then, nor had she. She had deliberately held back from saying them because she hadn’t liked the feeling of being so out of balance in their relationship. The person who loved the most had the least power. She hadn’t been prepared to give him even more power over her than he already had. His power over her body was enough. More than enough.

He’d reeled her in with his charm and planted her in his life as his wife, on the surface fine with her decision not to have kids, but then he’d changed his mind a few months into their marriage. Or maybe he hadn’t changed his mind at all. He had gambled on his ability to change her mind.

Gambled and lost.

She glanced at the photo frame again. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Vinn turned the frame around so she could see the image of their wedding day. Ailsa hadn’t looked at their wedding photos since their separation. She had put the specially monogrammed albums at the back of her wardrobe under some clothes she no longer wore. It had been too embarrassing to look at her smiling face in all of those pictures where she had foolishly agreed to be a trophy wife. She had agreed to become a possession, not a person who had longings and hopes and dreams of her own. Looking at those photos was like looking at all the mistakes she had made. How could she have been so stupid to think an arrangement like that would ever work? That marrying anyone—especially someone like Vinn—would make her feel normal in a way she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen? Their marriage hadn’t even lasted a year. Eleven months and thirteen days, to be precise.

Vinn had mentioned the B word. A baby—a family to continue the Gagliardi dynasty. She would have ended up a breeding machine, her career left to wither, while his business boomed.

Her interior decorating business was her baby. She had given birth to it, nurtured it and made numerous sacrifices for it. Having a real baby was out of the question. There were too many unknowns about her background.

How could she give birth to a child, not knowing what sort of bad blood flowed in its veins?

Ailsa swallowed against the barbed ball of bitterness in her throat and cast her gaze back to Vinn’s onyx one. ‘Why do you keep it on your desk?’

He turned the frame back so it was facing him, his expression now as inscrutable as his computer screen in sleep mode. ‘One of the best bits of business advice I’ve ever received is never forget the mistakes of the past. Use them as learning platforms and move on.’

It wasn’t the first time Ailsa had thought of herself as a mistake. Ever since she’d found out the circumstances surrounding her conception she had trouble thinking about herself as anything else. Most babies were conceived out of love but she had been conceived by brute force. ‘What do your new lovers think when they see that photo on your desk?’

‘It hasn’t been a problem so far.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure if he’d answered the question or not. Was he saying he’d had numerous lovers or that none of them had been inside his office? Or had he taken his new lovers elsewhere, not wanting to remind himself of all the times he had made love to her on that desk? Did he wear his wedding ring when he made love to other women? Or did he take it off when it suited him? She glanced at his face to see if there was any hint of the turmoil she was feeling, but his features were as indifferent as if she were a stranger who had walked in off the street.

‘So...the conditions you’re proposing...’ she began.

‘My grandfather is facing a do-or-die liver transplant,’ Vinn said. ‘The surgeon isn’t giving any guarantee he will make it through the operation, but without it he will die within a matter of weeks.’

‘I’m sorry to hear he’s so unwell,’ Ailsa said. ‘But I hardly see how this has anything to do with—’

‘If he dies, and there’s a very big chance he will, then I want him to die at peace.’

Ailsa knew how much respect Vinn had for his grandfather Domenico Gagliardi and how the old man had helped him during the time when Vinn’s father was in jail. She had genuinely liked Dom and, although she’d always found him a bit austere and even aloof on occasion, she could well imagine for Vinn the prospect of losing his grandfather was immensely painful. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel for him during such a sad and difficult time, but she still couldn’t see how it had anything to do with her.

‘I know how much you care for your grandfather, Vinn. I wish there was something I could do to—’

‘There is something you can do,’ Vinn said. ‘I want us to be reconciled until he is safely through the surgery.’

Ailsa looked at him as if he’d told her to jump out of the window, her heart thumping so heavily she could hear it like an echo in her ears. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ The set to his mouth was grimly determined, as if he had made up his mind how things would be and nothing and no one was going to talk him out of it. Not even her.

She licked her parchment-dry lips. He wanted her back? Vinn wanted her to come back to him? As his wife? She opened and closed her mouth, trying to locate her voice. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Not mad. Determined to get my grandfather through this without adding to the stress he’s already going through,’ Vinn said. ‘He’s a family man with strong values. I want those values respected and honoured by resuming our marriage until he is well and truly out of danger. I will allow nothing and no one to compromise his recovery.’

Ailsa got to her feet so abruptly the chair almost toppled over. ‘I’ve never heard anything so outrageous. You can’t expect me to come back to you as if the last two years didn’t happen. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.’

He remained seated with his unwavering gaze locked on hers. Something about his stillness made the floor of her belly flutter like a deck of rapidly shuffled cards.

‘Isaac is talented but that talent will be wasted without my help and you know it,’ he said. ‘I will provide him with not one, not two, but three years of full sponsorship if you’ll agree to come back to me for three months.’

Ailsa wanted to refuse. She needed to refuse. But if she refused her younger brother might never reach his potential. It was within her power to give Isaac this opportunity of a lifetime. But how could she go back to Vinn? Even for three minutes, let alone three months? She clutched the strap of her bag like it was a lifeline and blindly reached for her overnight bag, her hand curling around the handle for support.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I have a career in London. I can’t just pack up everything and relocate here.’