Italian Deception: The Salvatore Marriage / A Sicilian Seduction / The Passion Bargain

This time when she turned she found that his attention had switched back to her again, his hooded gaze moving over her pencil-slim skirt with its natty little kick pleat at the back, which gave her long legs a rather sexy shape. Did he like her legs? Of course he liked her legs; he used to worship them with his hands and his mouth and the teasing lick from his tongue as it trailed upwards on its way to—

Oh, stop it! she told herself. He looked up suddenly, as if she’d said the words out loud. Their eyes connected. Tension erupted to rush screaming round the room on the back of a mutual, intimate knowledge that would never go away no matter how much they both might want it to.

They’d been lovers, gorgeous, greedy, sensually indulgent lovers. They knew every inch of each other, what made the other sigh with pleasure and what would send them toppling over the edge. But those thoughts did not belong here—he didn’t belong here!

Say something, damn you! she wanted to scream at him. But he’d always been good at using silence to whittle down people’s nerves, and he continued to stand there looking at her as if he was waiting for her to say something. Say what? she wondered. Was he expecting her to invite him to sit down?

The phrase about burning in hell first whipped through her head.

Maybe he heard it. Maybe he was still able to tune himself in to what was going on inside her head because the black silk lashes flickered slightly as he shifted his gaze yet again and fixed it on something over her right shoulder.

Shannon didn’t need to look to know what it was that had now caught his attention. It had to be the framed wedding photograph standing alone on a shelf that showed the sweet face of her sister Keira smiling adoringly up at his handsome brother Angelo.

Behind the blissful couple and fortunately out of focus stood Luca, playing the dauntingly sophisticated best man to the groom and herself as the young and self-conscious chief bridesmaid. Luca had been all of twenty-eight years old to her own meagre eighteen at the time, but they’d enjoyed each other’s company that day.

Odd, she thought, that she should remember that now when there were so many bad things about Luca she could be remembering instead.

‘I think it might be best if you sit down.’

Muscles all over her body jerked suddenly, bringing her chin up sharply as her senses leapt in alarm. When someone told you to sit down it could only mean they were about to tell you something that was guaranteed to take the legs from under you, and the only way this man could do that to her was by bringing her bad news about—

‘What’s wrong with Keira?’ she shot at him sharply.

A hand came out; long-fingered and lean, it indicated to one of the sofas. ‘When you sit down,’ he countered, then watched calmly as if he was expecting it as she sparked like a firework.

‘Oh, stop being so bloody sensitive to my feelings, Luca, and tell me what’s happened to my sister!’ she cried. ‘All I got was some static-splashed message telling me that there had been an accident and would I ring a stupid mobile phone number that did not exist!’

‘It exists,’ he murmured.

And like a lightning strike Shannon suddenly realised what a terrible—terrible—mistake she had made. ‘It was your mobile number, wasn’t it?’ she bit out accusingly, struggling to believe that she could ever have mistaken the deep, terse tones of his voice for the warmer tones of his brother Angelo. ‘Poor Luca,’ she mocked with sudden bitterness, ‘being forced to give the wicked witch his new number and risk a second flood of unwanted calls.’

His half-grimace acknowledged her right to toss that remark at him. Two years ago she’d tried every which way she could use to get him to talk to her. She’d called him on his cell-phone night and day until suddenly the number had been no longer obtainable. He’d cut off her main source of contact—just as she’d been ruthlessly cut off from everything else that had been important to her.

‘Just speak, damn you,’ she prompted huskily.

With a grim pressing-together of his lips, Luca looked ready to continue holding out until she sat down. Then she saw his eyes make a flickering inventory of the way she was standing there, fine-boned and slender enough that the tremors now shaking her body almost forced her down. Stubbornness held her upright; stubbornness and a defiance that had always been one of her most besetting sins in his eyes—though not her worst sin.

Then—no, she slammed a door shut on that kind of thinking. Stop going there! she told herself angrily. Don’t think about anything. Don’t even bother to notice the way he’s looking at you again with a contempt he believes you deserve. So he hates and despises you. Let him, she invited. I don’t care—I don’t.

He moved then, and on a thick, inner quiver of fear she saw his expression alter from hard to grave. His eyes flicked away. He heaved in a deep breath. The fine hairs on her body started to tingle as he parted his mouth to speak.

Then the words came. ‘There has been an accident—a car crash this morning,’ he told her. ‘People are hurt—badly hurt,’ he then extended grimly.

‘Keira—?’ Her sister’s name arrived as a fragile whisper.

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘And I need you to be strong here, Shannon,’ he warned then, ‘because the prognosis is not good and we need to—Oh, hell—you mad, stubborn idiota!’

Shannon didn’t know she’d swayed until his hands arrived hard on her shoulders and forcibly manoeuvred her into the nearest sofa. She landed with a bump, eyes wide and staring.

‘Why can you never take good advice when it is offered to you?’ he ground out as he came down on his haunches and took a strong grasp on her ice-cold hands. ‘It was a simple request—a wise request. You almost collapsed as I knew you would. You are your own worst enemy, do you know that? I cannot believe you are still such a—’

She tugged her hands free. The action silenced his angry tongue, snapped his lips together and tightened the muscles in his face. In the new silence that developed Shannon struggled to get a hold of what was trampling through her. Her heart was palpitating wildly, her breathing reduced to tight and shallow catches of air. Keira was the only person left in this world that she truly cared about.

Keira, her beautiful Keira, whom everyone loved and wanted a piece of.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she whispered unevenly.

His mouth had developed a white ring of tension around it. She had to look away because she couldn’t bear to see him while he said what he had to say. ‘They were in the fast lane on the main autostradale into Florence when they ran into a heavy downpour of rain,’ he explained. ‘An articulated lorry skidded on the wet surface. It criccoaccoltellato—jackknifed directly in front of them, swerving right across the road. They did not stand a chance,’ he uttered in a voice like thick gravel. ‘With no room or time to take avoiding action they hit head-on and—’

The words stopped when he was forced to swallow. Silence returned, crawling all over the two of them while Shannon sat staring over the top of Luca’s dark head as the whole wretched thing played itself like a macabre action movie in front of her eyes.

‘Is she—?’

‘No,’ he cut in quickly—roughly.

Relief feathered through her, then she tensed again as the next dreaded thought flipped into her head.

‘They. You said they,’ she prompted shakily, and looked at him then, really looked at him and saw for the first time the strain etched into the fabric of his lean, hard features—and the pain burning in the deep, dark depths of his eyes. Realisation dawned, the muscles in her own face began to collapse, tears of a desperate, desperate understanding flooding into her eyes.

‘Oh, no, Luca—no,’ she choked out unevenly. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘not Angelo …’

But the answer she wanted to hear didn’t come, and as a set of her cold fingers jerked up to cover her trembling mouth Luca muttered something thick in Italian, then lowered his head to bury his face in his hands.

Dark mists of shock and grief wrapped around them. For what could have been an age Shannon couldn’t move or think or even feel. Angelo and Keira—Keira and Angelo—the two precious names spun in her head on an ever dizzying spiral while the rain lashed wildly at the window and Luca remained squatting in front of her with his face covered and his wide shoulders taut as he fought his own battle with shock and grief.

Luca and his brother were close. They worked together, played together, laughed and talked together all the time. To think of one without thinking about the other was—

‘Oh Luca …’ Lifting her hand with its trembling fingers, Shannon gently touched them to his rain-dampened hair. ‘I’m so s—’

It came without warning. At the first light brush of her fingers he was thrusting away from her with a violence that left her stunned and shaken as he climbed to his feet, turned his back on her and strode away several paces to then stand still and rigid while he fought a battle with his moment of complete collapse.

When he turned to face her he was back in control again, or as controlled as a man could be who’d just lost the brother he loved. Shannon hadn’t moved, and as his gaze lashed over her she saw the ice, the cold hatred, and knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he did not deserve to lose his brother and she did not deserve to have her sister still.

Yes, she thought, he hated her enough to think like that.

Bitterness returned, and with it came a welcome sense of foggy calmness. Shannon climbed to her feet, wished with all her aching heart that she could just walk away from him, but there were still things she needed to know.

‘Y-you said the prognosis for Keira isn’t good,’ she prompted, feeling the shake in her voice as well as in the fingers she used to smooth down the rucked fabric of her slender skirt. ‘Why isn’t it good?’

The tense shape of his mouth slackened slightly as he parted his lips to speak. ‘Her injuries were extensive. She had to be cut out of the car—’

Shannon flinched and lowered her eyes from him, painfully aware that the they had now changed to she. Did that mean that Angelo had been beyond help? She didn’t ask, didn’t dare, didn’t think she could cope with the answer.

‘By the time they freed her, Keira had lost a lot of blood,’ Luca continued in a low voice like rough sandpaper. ‘Thankfully she was unconscious throughout so was aware of—nothing …’

The nothing broke into uneven fragments, and as her heavy lungs tried their best to breathe for her Shannon wondered if Angelo had been aware of nothing.

Angelo. An ache hit low in her stomach. Never to see his lazy grin again or the teasing gleam in his beautiful eyes—’Oh,’ she choked and her legs went hollow, forcing her to sit down again and cover her face with her hands.