Blackmailed Into The Marriage Bed

‘You could open a temporary branch of your business here in Milan,’ he said. ‘You could even set up a franchise arrangement. You already have some wealthy Italian clients, sì?’

Ailsa frowned so hard she could almost hear her eyebrows saying ouch at the collision. How had he heard about her Italian clients? Had Isaac told him? But she rarely mentioned anything much to her brother about her work. Isaac talked about his stuff not hers: his golfing dreams, his exercise regime, his frustration that their parents didn’t understand how important his sport was to him and that, since their divorce, they weren’t wealthy enough to help him get where he needed to be, etc. Ailsa hadn’t told Isaac this last trip to Florence was to meet with a professional couple who had employed her to decorate their centuries-old villa. They had come to her studio in London and liked her work and engaged her services on the spot.

‘How do you know that?’

Vinn’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. ‘I’m Italian. I have Italian friends and associates across the country.’

Suspicion crawled across Ailsa’s scalp like a stick insect on stilts. ‘So... Do I have you to thank for the di Capellis’ villa in Florence? And the Ferrantes’ in Rome?’

‘Why shouldn’t I recommend you? Your work is superb.’

Ailsa narrowed her gaze. ‘Presumably, you mean as an interior decorator, not as a wife.’

‘Maybe you’ll be better at it the second time around.’

‘There isn’t going to be a second time around,’ Ailsa said. ‘You tricked me into marrying you the first time. Do you really think I’m so stupid I’d fall for it again?’

He leaned back in his leather chair with indolent grace, reminding her of a lion pausing before he pounced on his prey. ‘I didn’t say it would be a real marriage this time around.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted. Could he have made it any more obvious he didn’t find her attractive any more? Sex was the only thing they were good at in the past. Better than good...brilliant. The chemistry they’d shared had been nothing short of electrifying. From their first kiss her body had sparked with incendiary sexual heat. She had never orgasmed with anyone but him. She hadn’t even enjoyed sex before him. And, even more telling, she hadn’t had sex since him. So why wouldn’t he want to cash in on the amazing chemistry they’d shared?

‘Not real...as in—?’

‘We won’t be sleeping together.’

‘We...we won’t?’ She was annoyed her voice sounded so tentative and uncertain. So...crushed.

‘We’ll be together in public for the sake of appearances. But we’ll have separate rooms in private.’

Ailsa couldn’t understand why she was feeling so hurt. She didn’t want to sleep with him. Well, maybe her traitorous body did, but her mind was dead set against it. Her body would have to get a grip and behave itself because there was no way she was going to dive back into bed with Vinn... She had a sneaking suspicion she might not want to get out of it.

‘Look, this is a pointless discussion because I’m not coming back to you in public or private or even in this century. Understood?’

He held her gaze with such quiet, steely intensity a shiver shimmied down her spine like rolling ice cubes. ‘Once the three months is up I will grant you a divorce without contest.’

Ailsa swallowed again. This was what she’d wanted—an uncomplicated straightforward divorce. He would give it to her if she agreed to a three month charade. ‘But if we’re seen to be living together it will cancel out the last two years of separation according to English divorce law.’

‘It will delay the divorce for another couple of years, but that would only be a problem if you’re intending to marry someone else.’ He waited a beat before adding, ‘Are you?’

Ailsa forced herself to hold his gaze. ‘That depends.’

‘On?’

‘On whether I find a man who’ll treat me as an equal instead of a brood mare.’

He rose from his chair with an expelled breath as if his patience had come to the end of its leash. ‘For God’s sake, Ailsa. I raised the topic back then as a discussion, not as an imperative. I felt it was something we should at least talk about.’

‘But you knew my opinion on having children when you asked me to marry you,’ Ailsa said. ‘You gave me the impression you were fine with not having a family. I wouldn’t have married you if I’d thought you were going to hanker after a bunch of kids before the ink was barely dry on our marriage certificate.’

His expression was storm cloud broody and lightning flashed in his eyes. ‘You have no idea of the word compromise, do you?’

Ailsa gave a mocking laugh. ‘That’s rich, coming from you. I didn’t hear any talk of you offering to stay home and bring up the babies while I worked. You assumed I would gladly kick off my shoes and pad barefoot around your kitchen with my belly protruding, didn’t you?’

His expression locked down into his trademark intractable manner. ‘I’ve never understood why someone from such a normal and loving family would be so against having one of her own.’

Normal? There was nothing normal about her background. On the surface, yes, her family life looked normal and loving. Even since their divorce both her mother and stepfather had tried hard to keep things reasonably civil, but it was all smoke and mirrors and closed cupboards because the truth was too awful, too shameful and too horrifying to name.

On one level Ailsa understood her mother and stepfather’s decision to keep the information about her mother’s rape by a friend of a friend—who’d turned out to be a complete stranger gate-crashing a party—a secret from her. Her mother had been traumatised enough by the event, so traumatised she hadn’t reported it to the police, nor had she told her boyfriend—Ailsa’s stepfather—until it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy that had resulted. Her stepfather had always been against having a DNA test but her mother had insisted on it, saying she needed to know. When Ailsa was fifteen she had come home earlier than normal from school to overhear her mother and stepfather arguing in their bedroom. She’d overheard many arguments between her parents before but this one had been different. Overhearing the awful truth about her origin meant that her life and all her dreams and hopes for her own family had died in that stomach-curdling moment.

Ailsa met Vinn’s flinty gaze. ‘In spite of my refusal to play this game of charades with you, I hope you will still sponsor Isaac. He looks up to you and would be devastated if you—’

‘That’s not how I do business.’

She raised her chin a little higher. ‘And I don’t respond to blackmail.’

His gaze warred with hers for endless seconds, like so many of their battles in the past. It was strange, but this was one of the things she’d missed most about him. He was never one to shy away from an argument and nor was she. She had always secretly enjoyed their verbal skirmishes because most, if not all, of their arguments had ended in bed-wrecking make-up sex. She wondered if he was thinking about that now—how passionate and explosive their sex life had been. Did he miss it as much as she did? Did he ever reach for her in the middle of the night and feel a hollow ache deep inside to find the other side of the bed empty?

No, because his bed was probably never empty.

Ailsa was determined not to be the first to look away even though, as every heart-chugging second passed, she could feel her courage failing. His dark brown eyes had a hard glaze of bitterness and two taut lines of grimness bracketed his mouth, as if, these days, he only rarely smiled.

The sound of his phone ringing on the desk broke the deadlock and Vinn turned to pick it up. ‘Nonno?’ The conversation was brief and in Italian but Ailsa didn’t need to be fluent to pick up the gist of it. She could see the host of emotions flickering across Vinn’s face and the way the tanned column of his throat moved up and down. He put down the phone and looked at her blankly for a moment as if he’d forgotten she was even there.

‘Is everything all right?’ Ailsa took a step towards him before she checked herself. ‘Is your grandfather—?’

‘A donor has become available.’ His voice sounded strangely hollow, as if it was coming through a vacuum. ‘I thought there would be more time to prepare. A week or two or something but... The surgery will be carried out within a matter of hours.’ He reached for his car keys on the desk and scooped up his jacket where it was hanging over the back of his office chair, his manner uncharacteristically flustered, distracted. In his haste to find his keys several papers slipped off the desk to the floor and he didn’t even stop to retrieve them. ‘I’m sorry to cut this meeting short but I’m going to see him now before—’ another convulsive swallow ‘—it’s too late.’

Ailsa had never seen Vinn so out of sorts. Nothing ever seemed to faze him. Even when she’d told him she was leaving two years ago, he’d been as emotionless as a robot. It intrigued her to see him feeling something. Was there actually a heart beating inside that impossibly broad chest? She bent down to pick up the scattered papers and, tidying them into a neat pile, silently handed them to him. He took them from her and tossed them on the desk, where a couple of pages fluttered back to the floor.

‘I can’t let him down,’ he said in a low mumble, as if talking to himself. ‘Not now. Not like this.’

‘Would you like me to go with you?’ The offer was out before Ailsa could stop it. ‘My flight doesn’t leave for a few hours so...’

His expression snapped out of its distracted mode and got straight back to cold, hard business. ‘If you come with me, you come as my wife. Deal or no deal.’

Ailsa was torn between wanting to tell him where to put his deal and wanting to see more of this vulnerable side of him. She could agree to the charade verbally but he could hardly hold her to anything without having her sign something.

‘I’ll go with you to the hospital because I’ve always liked your grandfather. That’s if you think he’d like to see me?’

‘He would like to see you,’ Vinn said and searched through the papers on his desk for something, muttering a curse word in the process.

‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ Ailsa handed him the pages that had fallen the second time.

He took them from her and, reaching for a pen, slid them in front of her on the desk. ‘Sign here.’

She ignored the pen and met his steely gaze. ‘Do we have to do it now? Your grandfather is—’

‘Sign it.’