Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain

Was he involved in a deeply serious relationship? For some mad reason her skin began to heat. Oh, stop it, she thought crossly. What was the matter with her? She had absolutely no excuse to get so hot and bothered over a man she didn’t even like. She hardly knew him—didn’t want to know him. The Carlo Carluccis of this world were way out of her league and she was happy to keep it that way.

‘We were talking about Rome,’ she pointed out curtly and flipped her eyes towards the set of traffic lights, willing the stupid things to hurry up and change.

‘We were? I thought we had moved on to discuss my objection to sharing,’ he murmured lazily. Teasing her—taunting her, she was sure—but why? ‘Are you prepared to share your lovers, Francesca?’ he dared to ask her. ‘If I was your lover, for instance, would you expect me to be faithful only to you?’

This was stupid—stupid! I hate you, she told the stubborn red traffic light. ‘Since there is no chance of that happening, signor, I don’t see the use in discussing it,’ she announced in her coldest, primmest English voice.

‘Shame,’ he sighed. ‘And here I was, about to test my luck by suggesting that we continue this discussion in more congenial surroundings…’

Congenial…?

It was a clear come-on. Francesca was shocked enough to slew her widened eyes back to his face. It was a mistake. Her breath caught. Those warning prickles began racing up her spine because those dark, hooded eyes were travelling the length of her outstretched leg again. The sun-drenched air was suddenly charging up with sense-invading atoms that made the inner layers of skin covering her leg tingle as if he’d reached out with one of those hands and stroked right along its smooth golden length.

She almost gasped out loud at the electric sensation. The urge to whip her leg out of sight was almost too strong to stop. It took all of her control to keep the leg exactly where it was as she became stiflingly aware of the way her white cotton skirt was stretched taut across her slender long thighs.

Stop it! she wanted to shout at him. Stop trying to do this to me! But she found she couldn’t manage a single stuttered word and those eyes were moving on; heavy-lidded, darkly lashed, they began slowly skimming her little blue sun top where her rounded breasts pushed at the finely woven cloth. Her nipples responded, tightening with piercing speed. The shock of it held her utterly transfixed as those dark eyes lifted higher until—shockingly—their gazes clashed.

He wanted her. The realisation hit her like a violent blow to the chest. Heat enveloped her from feet to hairline. Those eyes told her he knew what was happening to her and, worse, they were doing nothing to hide the fact that the same thing was happening to him. She could feel the sexual tension in his body, could see it burning in his now blacker than black eyes. Messages began leaping across the tarmac road and to her horror that place between her thighs feathered a ripple of pleasure across the sex-sensitive tissue.

It was so awful she shifted her hips with an uncontrollable jerk. In all of her twenty-four years she had never experienced anything as sexually acute as this. For a few more terrible seconds the world seemed to be closing in on her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t—

‘Have coffee with me,’ he murmured suddenly. ‘Meet with me at Café Milan…’

Have coffee with me, she repeated slowly to herself, her brain so sluggish that the invitation made no sense. Then it did make sense with all of its hot and spicy meaning. She grabbed at some oxygen. A car horn sounded. The real world came crashing back in. Dragging her eyes away from his, she looked blankly at the traffic lights, saw they’d turned to green and gunned the Vespa’s little engine and took off down the Corso like a terrified pigeon in flight.

A top-of-the-range Lamborghini could outstrip a Vespa without any effort but, ignoring the protesting car horns behind him, Carlo remained exactly where he was.

His eyes were narrowed and fixed on the racing scooter and its beautiful rider, whose silky hair was blowing out behind her as she fled. He’d scared her out of her wits, Carlo acknowledged. Had he meant to do that? He was not entirely sure what his real motives had been, only that he had been presented with an opportunity and had used it—ruthlessly. Now pretend that I barely exist, signorina, he thought grimly.

The muted sound of Puccini rising to a crescendo began to infiltrate his consciousness. Reaching out, he hit the volume control to fill the air with the music then set the powerful car into motion again. There was a fine film of sweat bathing his torso beneath the fine cloth of his crisp white shirt and he grimaced. Francesca Bernard was the most excitingly sensual woman he had ever encountered and there was no way he was going to let all of that sensuality be laid to waste on a crass, mercenary fool like Angelo Batiste.

As the car built up speed along the Corso the Vespa had already turned off at a junction and by the time Carlo passed that junction neither bike nor rider were anywhere to be seen.

Francesca had pulled into a small piazza, cut the engine then climbed off the machine. She was feeling so shaken up inside that her legs felt like jelly, and she headed for the nearest café so she could sit down. A waiter appeared and she ordered fresh orange juice. She desperately needed a cup of strong coffee to calm her shattered senses but the very idea of drinking coffee was out of the question now that Carlo Carlucci had given the simple pleasure a whole new twist.

She shivered, still gripped by the shock of what had just happened. The whole incident had turned her into such a mess inside she could still feel those hot little frissons chasing across her skin. If he’d actually reached out and touched her she had a horrible feeling she would have gone up in a flaming orgasm. She had no idea where it had all come from. How it had gone from a simple tit-for-tat conversation at a red traffic light to—to what it did!

Her throat felt ravaged. She didn’t think she’d managed to take a single breath all the way from those wretched lights until she sat down on this seat. Her hands were trembling, her legs, her arms—the tips of her stinging breasts!

It wasn’t as if they even knew each other well enough to be anything more than polite nodding acquaintances! They’d met—what—twice before, maybe three times at most? And she didn’t even like him. He had a way of antagonising her with that smoothly sardonic manner of his. Her orange juice arrived. She nodded her thanks to the waiter then picked it up and gulped at it. The cool drink helped to soothe her throat but the rest of her didn’t feel any relief.

Putting the glass down on the table, she hunched forward to sit there frowning into it. It was just beginning to dawn on her how easily she had let him get away with what he’d done. Usually she would know exactly how to deal with a teasing Italian who was only out to fill in a few empty seconds by having a bit of fun with her.

But Carlo Carlucci was no ordinary teasing Italian. He was the thirty-five-year-old head of the famous Carlucci Electronics. That placed him more than a decade ahead of her in years and eons ahead of her in every other way she could think of. Women adored him. He was rarely seen out without some acknowledged beauty hanging on his expensive arm. Put him in a room packed full of his tall, dark, handsome peers and he still managed to overshadow them all.

He was special. Even here in super-sophisticated Rome he was the man other men wanted to emulate. In the way these things should work, a lowly tour-guide like herself should never have come into contact with him at all. But Angelo was the son of one of Signor Carlucci’s business associates, which meant they’d happened to find themselves in the same company while attending the same parties over the last few weeks. Not that this placed them in the same circles because it didn’t, she reminded herself with a frown. Even Angelo only received a cool nod in acknowledgement from Carlo Carlucci’s sleek, dark, sophisticated head. Angelo’s father’s company relied on Carlucci’s for the main thrust of its business and Angelo was only a few years older than herself, which made him very junior and insignificant in the pecking order at these bright and sparklingly sophisticated social events.

But at least Angelo was warm and gentle and easy-going. He preferred fun to passion. It was years since a man like Carlo Carlucci had weaned himself off anything so juvenile as fun.

He was way out of her league, and anyway, she loved Angelo.

Yet when it really came down to the bottom line of it, she hadn’t given a single thought to Angelo while she’d been thinking of Carlo Carlucci at that wretched traffic stop sign.

‘Oh.’ She choked on a fresh wave of frissons, which were quickly doused by a heavy blanket of guilt. How could she—how could she have forgotten about Angelo at that wretched set of lights?

On impulse she reached into her tote bag to fish out her cellphone with the intention of calling up the man she loved. She needed to reassure herself that what Carlo Carlucci had just made her feel was nothing more than a blip on her hormonal calendar. She needed desperately to hear his warm, loving voice!

His cellphone was switched off. It was then that she remembered that he had business in Milan today. He was catching the early flight and had predicted he would be unreachable all day.

Then,’ Milan,’ she repeated and shuddered as the name conjured up a whole new meaning that placed it like coffee in the realms of sin.

Oh, stop it, she thought and tossed her cellphone onto the table then sat back in her seat and closed her eyes to work very hard at building Angelo’s beloved golden image over the top of the darker one that should not have found a way into her head at all!

Angelo didn’t have a dark corner in him. He was all sunlight. Golden skin, golden eyes and fine golden strands streaking in his tawny hair that she so loved to trail her fingers through. When he walked into a room he didn’t cast a long shadow over everyone else, he lit it up with his warm golden temperament that had not yet become hidden beneath a hard, sophisticated shell. When he looked at her she felt warm and loved and beautiful, not—invaded by dark, untrammelled lusts.

Oh, all right, so she admitted it. Sometimes she’d wondered why their relationship wasn’t more passionate. In fact, they had yet to actually make love.

‘Time for that when you’re ready,’ she could hear his gentle voice saying.

And he was right because she wasn’t ready. He’d understoodfrom the beginning that she needed time to get used to the idea of full physical love. It wasn’t that she was frigid, she quickly assured herself, just—wary of the unknown.

It came from being brought up by a deeply religious and straight-laced mother who’d instilled in her daughter standards by which she expected Francesca to live her life. Those standards included the sanctity of marriage coming before any pleasures of the flesh.

Outmoded principles? Yes, of course, principles like those were so out of fashion they could appear almost laughable to some. Indeed Sonya, her best friend and flatmate, did laugh at her—often. Sonya couldn’t believe that a gorgeous masculine specimen like Angelo put up with a shrinking violet from a different century.

‘You must be mad to play Russian roulette with a man like him,’ she’d told her. ‘Aren’t you terrified that he might take his sexual requirements somewhere else?’

Well, yes, sometimes. She’d even confided those concerns to Angelo. He’d just smiled and kissed her, said Sonya was jealous and she wouldn’t recognise a principle if she was staring at one.

Angelo didn’t like Sonya. Sonya could not stand him. They provoked each other like two enemies across a neutral zone. Francesca was the neutral zone. The old-fashioned girl with the old-fashioned principles who loved them both but—more to the point—they loved her.

A smile crossed her mouth again. It wasn’t quite as sunny as the smile she had been wearing before she ran into Carlo Carlucci but at least it was a smile.

Her telephone beeped, she twisted it around to check who was calling and the smile became a rueful grin. ‘Were your ears burning?’ she quizzed.

‘Meaning what?’ Sonya demanded, then sourly before Francesca could offer an answer, ‘I suppose by that you’re somewhere with darling Angelo and he’s slandering my character again.’

‘No,’ Francesca denied. ‘Angelo’s in Milan today so put your claws away and tell me what you’re ringing me for.’

‘Do I only ring you when I want something?’

‘The honest answer to that is—yes,’ Francesca answered drily.

‘Well, not this time,’ her flatmate countered. ‘I got up this morning to find you’d already left the flat. Why are you out so early? This is supposed to be your day off.’

‘And you should be on your way to work by now.’ Francesca took a quick glance at her watch. ‘What time did you crawl into bed this morning?’ It was definitely long after she had fallen fast asleep.

Her answer was a mind-your-own-business tut. ‘Stick to the point,’ Sonya snapped. ‘Where are you going and how long will you be gone for?’