Mediterranean Tycoons: The De Santis Marriage / The Greek Tycoon's Unwilling Wife / The Sicilian's Virgin Bride

She shook her head and wished she still had her bra on, because she just might have found the courage to turn around and spit something vile at him. But she didn’t and her breasts felt heavy and throbbed, the fiercely distended tips stinging like aliens with the power to reach down deep inside her and pluck at other senses she wished she didn’t have.

‘You think, then, it is good fun to call a stop when things were becoming—passionate?’

He was angry. It hit Lizzy like a blow that arched her aching spine some more. ‘Y-you don’t understand.’

‘I know a tease when I encounter one,’ he said cynically.

She heard movement behind her to say he was getting off the bed, and like a wild thing she snatched up the only thing she had available—her wraparound top, which she dragged on. He too was pulling his clothes on; she could hear the rustle as she wrapped the top around her and tied it in an angry, tight, finger—trembling knot.

‘A man who can’t honour his promises deserves to be switched on—and off,’ she responded once she felt safer to do it with her upper body covered up.

‘No natural instincts at work in you, then,’ he scorned that.

Snatching up her skirt and shimmying into it, she finally felt brave enough to turn around. He was standing on the other side of the bed, with the bulkhead almost touching his broad shoulders. And he was still so boldly naked she wished her ravished senses would just curl up and die. The soft light from the bedside lamp played across the flexing muscles in his shoulders as he pulled on his trousers, the taut clench of stomach and his hair-roughened chest.

Dragging her eyes away from him, she missed the way he lowered his own eyes to the burgeoning fullness of her breasts moulded by fine knit fabric so the tight peaks of her nipples pushed against the cloth.

‘I’m not going to apologise for calling a stop to what you said was not going to happen,’ she tossed back her hair and said.

He hooded his eyes, the old cold cynicism back with a vengeance. Bending down towards the bed, he picked up something. ‘Here…’ He tossed it at her. ‘You had better put this on before you walk out of here, or my steward will suffer an apoplectic fit.’

With that ruthless cut into her bravery, he pulled the black tee shirt on over his head, then strode towards the door. It didn’t slam—it wasn’t designed to slam, Lizzy realised as she watched it seal into place.

But he’d wanted it to slam, the grim, spoiled, arrogant devil.

Then she looked down at the bra she now held in her fingers, glanced at her body and blushed to the roots of her hair.

They finished the rest of the journey in a state of cool withdrawal from each other scattered with super-polite snatches of conversation now and then. Lizzy ate, he didn’t, instead he drank coffee, and no hint of alcohol in any form put in an appearance.

Eventually he produced a bulging briefcase and settled into his chair to concentrate—Lizzy wished she had something similar so that she could do the same thing.

But she didn’t. She was now the pampered wife of a very rich man and her job as her father’s secretary had gone. Her new role in life was to look the part of a rich man’s wife—learn to look the part, she amended. And to be quiet when the rich husband was concentrating, because the look on his stern profile told her that was what he expected her to do.

Eventually she dozed again, curled into her seat with her shoes slipped off and her feet tucked beneath her and her head resting against the corner of the chair. When she awoke it was to find herself covered with a soft blanket and Luc was still sitting beside her working away.

She watched him for a while, sleepy eyes following the sudden flick on his pen when he scrawled something on the document he was reading, long fingers deft and supple and precise in their link with his brain. It was the same fountain pen she’d used to sign the prenuptial contract, she noticed, black, with a ring of gold circling its slender body, the platinum tipped nib feeding ink onto the paper like liquid silk.

‘You’ve spelt indecisive wrong,’ she murmured without knowing she was going to say it, or even that she’d been reading as he wrote.

The pen stopped and lifted. He turned to look at her, golden eyes not angry any more, just coolly detached. ‘I do not misspell,’ he informed her arrogantly.

‘You’ve used an “i” instead of an “e”,’ she insisted. ‘The sentence says, “This attitude is indecisive and unacceptable.”’ she read aloud. ‘It loses impact with the misspelling.’

‘You can read my writing from right over there?’ Setting his shoulders against the back of his chair, he looked at her curiously. ‘To the point that you can distinguish an “i” from an “e”?’

Lizzy nodded, still curled beneath the blanket. ‘Not if you were writing in Italian,’ she felt she should point out. ‘My Italian spelling isn’t good enough.’

‘Nor is your English.’

Lizzy glanced at his face. There wasn’t a flicker of uncertainty in his expression, yet she hadn’t seen him look down to check if she was right. Which meant that either he was too confident for his own good, or she had made a mistake.

Uncurling her feet from beneath her, she pushed aside the blanket and reached out and took the page from his lap. She read it carefully, then handed it back to him without uttering a single word.

His eyelashes flickered, uncertainty darkening the colour of his eyes, and she laughed softly, couldn’t help it—it felt so very good to be right.

He looked down, couldn’t help himself, then a rueful smile stretched his lips. ‘You aggravating ginger haired witch,’ he said, having to carefully turn an ‘i’ into an ‘e’.

‘My hair’s not ginger,’ Lizzy protested.

‘What is it, then?’ Tossing the work down on the table in front of them, he sat back and looked at her again.

‘Chestnut,’ Lizzy answered, and combed a set of fingers through it to push the curls away from her face. ‘With a will of its own,’ she added as a curl flopped down onto her brow.

‘Much like its owner.’

‘So you noticed.’ She gave the errant curl another hopeless swipe only to watch it spring back down again.

‘I noticed,’ he answered evenly.

‘Have you also noticed yet that I’m a virgin?’ she asked him casually.

CHAPTER SIX

IF LIZZY said it to shock Luc out of his cool composure, then she certainly succeeded, she saw, as burning dark colour swept across his high golden cheekbones and he launched to his feet sending paperwork scattering as he accidentally knocked against the table.

‘Is that your idea of a damn joke?’ His eyes flashed out a blaze of blistering fury that made her reach for and pull up the blanket.

‘I just—thought I should mention it before things go too—heated again,’ she explained, blushing herself because now that she’d said it she felt silly and stupid and—

‘A virgin,’ he snapped out from between his clenched teeth. ‘Where the hell did you get the idea to throw something like that at me from out of nowhere?’

‘Well, what would you have preferred me to do?’ Lizzy reacted hotly. ‘Have it written into that stupid prenuptial contract so you could take your time getting used to the idea?’

He was pale with anger now, not flushed. ‘We just almost made love—’

‘No, I stopped it,’ she reminded him, ‘being such a horrible tease.’

Grabbing the back of his neck, he spun away from her. Lizzy huddled in her seat. ‘I was going to tell you before in—in the bedroom but you turned nasty. Now I wish I hadn’t told you at all!’

‘So do I,’ he muttered, striding off towards the drinks cupboard.

‘Well, if it offends you this much, then why don’t you do your usual trick and chuck this bride out and put another more experienced one in her place?’

‘It does not offend me,’ he denied stiffly. ‘And I did not chuck Bianca out, as you so charmingly put it. She left me.’

‘Wise girl,’ Lizzy choked, fighting hurt tears now because hearing him say that made her remember that she wouldn’t be here having this conversation if Bianca hadn’t walked away from him.

Bianca, his first-choice bride!