Love's Revenge: The Italian's Revenge / A Passionate Marriage / The Brazilian's Blackmailed Bride

She felt tense and edgy, and kept glancing at the sky, as if she expected to find thunderclouds gathering on the horizon, which would explain this strange tension she was experiencing. But no hint of grey spoiled the perfect blue. In the end she gave up trying to be relaxed when she so obviously wasn’t, and went back indoors to shower the sun-cream from her skin and get dressed with the vague intention of driving herself into Naples in an effort to kill some time.

She had rubbed herself dry, and was just in the process of smoothing body lotion into one of her long slender thighs when the bathroom door swung open. Standing there completely naked and with one foot lifted onto the bathroom stool to make her task easier, she glanced up, saw Vito filling the doorway—and knew in that instant that the storm she had been expecting all day had finally arrived.

It was a storm called desire. Pure and simple, hot and hungry, tense and tight. It raged in the burning intensity of his eyes and pulsed in the tautness of his stance.

He was wearing a casual wine-red shirt and a pair of lightweight black linen trousers, but as his gaze glittered over her she saw his hand lift up and begin unfastening shirt buttons—and the frisson of response which went shimmering through her was electric.

She had to move. It was a point of necessity that she drop her raised foot to the floor so she could squeeze her pulsing thighs together. The shirt fell apart to reveal a wide bronzed breastplate covered in short, crisp devil-black hair.

‘I w-was about to go out,’ she heard herself stammer, really as a vehicle to break the raging tension now filling the space between them. ‘Drive in-into Naples.’

‘Later,’ he murmured as the shirt landed on the bathroom floor. Then he half bent so he could slide off his shoes and socks before moving his attention to his trousers.

This was one hell of a strip show. Catherine clutched the bottle of lotion in one hand and felt her flesh begin to tingle. As the trousers parted to reveal that dark patch of body hair she knew thickened beneath the covering of his briefs panic erupted, though it was a very sexual kind of panic and had nothing to do with any dismay at what he was clearly intending.

Yet something made her put up a protest. Maybe it was the knowledge that the trousers were about to go, as she saw his fingers grip at the waistband in readiness to rake them down his legs.

‘I … Vito, you—I—we c-can’t,’ she mumbled incoherently.

‘Why not?’ he countered.

‘Y-your mother—Santo …’

But he shook his dark head. ‘I’ve waited a full week for you to tell me it is okay for us to do this,’ he said rawly. ‘I am not waiting any longer, Catherine. I cannot wait any longer—’

Was that what had been holding him back for all of this time? Because he had assumed she would be rendered unavailable by the pill-induced menstrual cycle?

Chagrined heat blushed her skin from toes to hairline. Seeing it happen brought his strip show to a taut standstill. ‘Is it okay?’ he then demanded, and his consternation was so great that Catherine almost let out a giggle.

Except that this was no moment for humour. The man in front of her was suffering too badly to appreciate it—as his next gruff statement clearly illuminated. ‘For goodness’ sake, answer me, Catherine,’ he commanded. ‘The tension is starting to kill me, very slowly and very painfully.’

‘It’s okay,’ she whispered.

Honey-gold eyes grew suddenly darker, their heat piercing her in all the right places. The trousers went the same way as the shirt, taking his underwear with them to leave only the man in his full and sexual glory to come walking towards her.

The tip of her tongue came out to moisten her lips as he took the bottle of lotion from her nerveless fingers then set it aside. And, without taking his eyes from her eyes, he bent his dark head to capture the tongue-tip between his own lips and draw it into his mouth in an act so inherently erotic that she whimpered in protest when he withdrew again almost immediately.

But his eyes continued to make love to her eyes as one of his hands slid around her waist while the other hand reached up to release her hair from the knot she had it twisted in for her shower. As her hair tumbled down over his fingers to brush sensually against her naked shoulders, he slowly drew her against him.

The contact was utterly scintillating, a fine brushing of warm flesh against flesh that set every nerve-end she possessed singing. Then he kissed her again, slowly and deeply, while stroking her with featherlight fingertips until she was breathless and trembling.

It was all too much for her to just stand there passive while he did this to her. With a sigh that was about as tactile as a sigh could be, she wound her arms around his shoulders, caught his head in her palms and began kissing him hungrily.

It was all the encouragement he needed to pick her up in his arms and carry her to the bed. The pillows went the way they usually did, to the floor, sent there by his urgent hands while Catherine dragged back the covers.

They came together in a tangle of limbs on the smooth, cool linen. It was all very deep, very unconstrained—very erotic, very definitely them at their most sensuously intense. Nothing was taboo, no means to give pleasure ignored—no words uttered. And their silence in itself was deeply seductive. Only the sounds of their breathing and their bodies moving in unison towards the kind of finale that stripped the soul.

Afterwards they lay just touching and kissing, communicating by all other means than talking, because words were dangerous, and neither of them wanted to spoil the special magic they had managed to create, that enclosed them in this wonderful bubble of tactile contentment. Of course they made love again several times during that long, quiet, lazy afternoon, then eventually slept in a possessive love-knot while the sun died slowly out of the room. This was fulfilment at its most sweetest.

Catherine came awake to find herself lying on the bed with a sheet draped strategically across her. Vito had gone from his sleeping place beside her, but her initial sense of loss was quickly replaced with a gasp of shock when she glanced at the bedside clock and actually saw what time it was!

Seven o’clock—Luisa and Santo would have been home for ages! What must they be thinking of her? What had Vito given as an excuse for her being so lazy? How could he just leave her to sleep like this?

‘You rat, Vito,’ she muttered to herself as she scrambled off the bed, then hurried to find some clothes to drag on.

The thin blue summer dress she had been intending to put on after her shower earlier still lay draped over a chair where she had left it. Scrambling into her underwear, then the dress, she was acutely aware of a series of deep inner aches that offered a good reason why she had slept so heavily. She had never been so thoroughly ravished!

She even felt herself begin to blush as she slid her bare feet into a pair of casual sandals, remembering just what they had done to each other. Or for each other, she then corrected, and on an agitated mix of pleasure and embarrassment she began finger-combing her tumbled hair as she made for the door.

The moment that she stepped out onto the landing she knew something was wrong, when the first thing that she heard was Santo’s voice raised in anger.

What could be the matter? she wondered frowningly as she followed the sound of her son’s angry voice down the stairs and into the main drawing room.

The sight that hit her eyes as she arrived in the doorway sent her still in dismay. Both Luisa and Vito were staring at a surly-faced Santo, who was standing there belligerently facing up to—none other than Marietta.

Of course it had to be Marietta causing all of this mayhem, Catherine grimly acknowledged as she watched the other woman bend at her slender waist to smile sweetly at Santo and say gently. ‘But, darling, you told me that you would like your papà to marry me.’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Santo angrily denied it. ‘Why would I say that when I don’t even like you?’

‘Santino!’ his father cautioned sternly. ‘Apologise—now!’

If Catherine thought Santo had been difficult enough during the week before Vito arrived, when she’d endured some spectacular tantrums from him, she was now seeing he had not even got started.

For his face was hot, his eyes aflame, and his stance was more than ready for combat. Turning his glare on his father, he spat, ‘No!’ with enough force to make Vito stiffen. ‘She’s lying, and I won’t let her!’

‘Oh, please …’ It was Luisa who tried to play peacemaker, by hurrying forward in an attempt to put herself between Santo and Vito. ‘This is just a silly misunderstanding that has got out of hand,’ she said anxiously. ‘Please don’t be alarmed by it, Vito.’

‘Alarmed?’ Vito bit out. ‘Will you explain to me, then, why I walk in this room to the alarming sounds of my son being rude to a guest in this house?’

‘A language thing, obviously,’ his mother suggested. ‘Marietta said something to Santo the last time he was here that he clearly misunderstood, and he said something to Marietta that she misunderstood. Such a silly thing to get fired up about.’

‘I didn’t misunderstand,’ Santo insisted.

‘Santino!’ Vito turned his attention back to his son. Everyone had been talking in Italian until that point, but Vito’s next sentence was delivered in clear, crisp English. ‘You will apologise to Marietta now! Do you understand that?’

The little boy was close to tears; Catherine could see that, even though he was determined to face the whole thing out with an intransigence that was promising to be his downfall.

‘Oh, don’t make him do that, Vito.’ It was Marietta who came to Santo’s rescue. Marietta sounding beautifully placating.

‘He meant no offence. He’s just a little angry because I corrected his Italian.’

‘No, you didn’t!’ the little boy protested. ‘You said I was a nuisance and that when papà married you he wouldn’t want me any more! And I hate you, Papà!’ he turned to shout at his father. ‘And I won’t say sorry! I won’t—I won’t—I won’t!’

Shocked surprise at his son’s vehemence hardened Vito’s face. ‘Then you—’

‘Santo,’ Catherine said quietly, over whatever Vito had been about to say to him, and brought all four pairs of eyes swinging around in her direction.

And if Catherine had never been made to feel like the poor relation in this house before, she was certainly feeling that way now, as she stood there in her scrap of cheap cotton and took in with one brief, cold glance Marietta, looking smooth and sleek and faultlessly exquisite in her shiny black dress and shiny black shoes and with her shiny black hair stroking over one shoulder.