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

Beautiful, he thought, and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Astoundingly, fascinatingly beautiful. The freckles had gone; her body had filled out to take on a shape that was truly spectacular. And instead of teenage awkwardness he’d been faced with a supremely self-confident graduate with a hunger for life and lethal gift for flirtation. She’d plied him with coquettish looks and her plans to start up her own design company with Joshua Soames and take the world by storm. Older, wiser, and as cynical as hell about people with ideals so grand, he’d listened patiently, answered all her eager questions about financial management, and found it was he who was taken by storm.

The first time they’d kissed it had been meant as a brotherly salutation to finish off the evening they’d just spent together listening to Puccini. She had been eager to go to the opera and he had been happy to take her. They’d shared a candlelit dinner at his favourite restaurant afterwards and, even though he had known by then that he was getting in too deep, he had held onto the arrogant belief that he still had control of the situation—until that kiss.

Grimly driving them out of the city now in weather so foul a duck would find shelter, he felt his lips heat at the memory. He had not intended it to be a meaningful kiss, just one of those light exchanges you shared with someone you’d spent a pleasant evening with. But Shannon had fallen into that kiss with the same all-out enthusiasm she threw at life. It had shaken him, sent his libido soaring to a place it had never known was there.

Bringing the car to a halt at a junction, he checked the road either way and used the opportunity to cast a brief glance at her. She was sitting there with her head turned away and that silly little hat pulled down over her ears. Something hot shot from his heart to his loins, then stayed burning there. Only Shannon had ever made that connection, only she had ever been able to turn him into a mass of raging hormones without needing to try.

Ten years his junior, yet divided by almost a millennium’s difference in life experience, she’d caught him, trussed him up and packaged him in a box marked ‘taken’—by the woman with the amazing hair, the stunning face, a fantastic body and an insatiable set of desires that had him balancing on the edge of fear that she might decide to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Well, he’d got his wish, if that was what he had been looking for. And he should have been relieved he’d found out before he’d placed the wedding ring on her finger. Yet oddly he hadn’t been—not once the first flush of anger had worn off, that was. All he’d felt then was regret because at least a wedding ring would have given him a reason to go after her—haul her back by her lovely hair and make her pay for daring to betray him.

Instead he’d enjoyed two years of long, hard, festering about what should have been. And in that time bitterness had turned his view of women so sour he hadn’t been able to touch one since.

A great legacy for her to chew on, if she ever found out she’d rendered him impotent, he grimaced as they drove through rain like sheets of ice.

If he throws me one more nasty look I think I might turn round and hit him, Shannon decided as she sat watching his profile via the side-window reflection. Up to now she had watched him slice her one look of utter blinding derision, several of disgust and two of seething sexual denunciation. The roads were bad enough without him distracting himself from his driving by thinking lewd and hateful thoughts.

A slave to his ever-raging libido, she thought. Sex was all that Luca knew. Not Love but Sex—give me, I need, I want, I have to have. Physical, insatiable, inventive and so good at it that it was no wonder his reputation went before him. Variety—he used to say while grinning unrepentantly when she used to face him with grapevine chatter—is most definitely the spice of life. She should have realised then that she was nothing but a brand new and exciting variety he simply had to try out.

Love? Not this man. He had no idea of the concept if it didn’t attach itself to some physical act. The word? Oh, he’d known how to use the necessary words to gain the required responses. I love you. Ti amo mio per sempre l’innamorato. Whispered words in sensual Italian that could seduce a woman to mush.

Then suddenly she was a slut and a harlot, a woman beneath his dignity to know. One mistake—not even her mistake—and she had been put out in the cold so fast, she was still dealing with the shock of it two years later.

Over him? she asked. No, she wasn’t over him. She was still too angry, bitter and hungry to draw blood to be anywhere near getting over what Luca had done to her.

‘We will never take off in this weather,’ he gritted.

Tears pricked her eyes at the sudden realisation that she had allowed herself to concentrate on Luca instead of on Keira yet again. Oh, may God forgive me, she thought and had to rummage in her bag for a tissue.

‘You OK?’ Luca had heard her telling little snuffle.

‘Fine,’ she said, hating him—hating him with every fiber she was made of.

‘Not far to the airport,’ he said more levelly.

He knew she was crying. But then, he knew her so well. Inside, outside, every which way a man could know a woman he had lived and slept with for half a year before he’d chucked her out. Gritting his teeth together, Luca withdrew inside himself, dark eyes fierce as they pierced the driving rain in his quest to get to the airport and out of close contact with the hate of his life. He had never been more relieved as he was when he saw the lights of the private airport where his plane was waiting for them. He needed some space—air to breathe that wasn’t tainted with the scent of this woman.

The hire-car parking bay was under cover. Getting out, he directed Shannon to the departure lounge, then headed off in the other direction to officially hand back the car keys. By the time he went looking for her, she had removed her hat and coat and was standing in front of the departure lounge viewing window watching the rain pelting down from the sky.

Five feet eight was fairly tall for a woman, but next to him Shannon felt small, frail, delicate. Tonight as he paused to study her slender legs encased in denim and the pale sweater she was wearing he could detect a new fragility in the slender lines of her figure. It was a frailty caused by vulnerability and fear, and realising it made him feel the worst kind of lout for letting his feelings towards her get the better of him.

Smothering the urge to heave out a self-aimed angry sigh, he decided to make it easy on both of them and give her a wide berth. Walking over to the bar, he ordered a stiff drink then remained leaning there staring down at it without drinking, unaware that Shannon had watched his reflection in the window, every grim step of the way.

He hates being here with me as much as I hate him being here, she was thinking heavily, and wished she understood why knowing that caused such a terrible ache deep down inside. She didn’t love him—didn’t even want to be near him any more, so she was glad when he remained by the bar instead of coming near her—wasn’t she?

Forcing her eyes to focus further out into the night, she concentrated on watching the rain hitting the airport lights with almost enough power to smash the glass, while the wind buffeted madly at everything. And inside she prayed fervently that the weather would clear so they could be on their way to what really mattered.

Keira, her beloved Keira, the new baby—and poor, poor Angelo.

Maybe the fates decided to take pity on them because half an hour later Luca appeared at her shoulder. ‘They think there is a hole coming in the storm,’ he informed her. ‘If we can board and be ready, then we might be given the chance to get away from here.’

Getting away sounded so good to her that Shannon instantly turned and went to collect her belongings from the nearby chair where she had placed them. Shrugging into her coat, she pulled on her hat while Luca pulled on his coat. Five minutes later and they were walking side by side yet a million miles apart in every other way.

Magically, halfway to the Salvatore jet the rain suddenly stopped, the wind died away and glancing up Shannon saw the stars appear through a hole in the scurrying clouds. The break in the weather helped to lift some of her fears about Keira. She was going to be all right, Shannon promised herself firmly—willing it to be so.

‘Choose a seat and belt yourself in,’ Luca instructed as soon as they entered the plane. ‘I am going to check with my pilot.’

Even as he finished speaking he was disappearing through a door at the other end of the cabin and a flight attendant appeared to take her outdoor things. The man must have known that this was no pleasure trip because his expression remained sober, and once he had quietly suggested the best place for her to sit in the plush cream leather interior he disappeared, leaving her to make herself comfortable in peace.

Two minutes later the plane left the ground and shot towards the star-scattered hole in the clouds. An hour after that and Luca hadn’t put in an appearance. Deciding he was deliberately keeping out of her way the same as he had done in the airport departure lounge, Shannon finally felt able to relax the guard she’d been keeping on herself, and almost immediately felt her eyelids begin to droop.

Maybe it was for the best if she slept through some of the journey, she consoled herself after trying to fight the urge for a little while. It might feel as if she was abandoning some kind of vigil she had been maintaining for her sister, but common sense told her that stuck up here she couldn’t be more helpless if she tried to be.

So she let herself go, dreamed of her Keira’s familiar light laughter and of sweet-smelling babies. She held her vigil there in her dreams, where everyone was whole and healthy and no dark forces came to disturb the beauty of it.

Luca sat watching her for a while, feeling oddly disturbed by how peaceful she was. She used to sleep like this, he recalled. Lying so quiet and still beside him that he’d sometimes had to fight the urge to lean over her and check that she was still breathing. A foolish notion when he had been holding her in his arms and could feel her living warmth pulsing softly against him.

Dio, stop thinking about it, he told himself and pushed his head back into the seat cushion, then closed his eyes and tried to relax. But ugly scenes began playing on the backs of his eyelids, forcing him to open them again.

Angelo—Angelo … He shifted restlessly. Men didn’t weep. He wanted to weep. He wanted his brother back so he could let him know one last time how much he meant to him.

Tears began to burn like acid. He got up, hurried down the length of the cabin, then turned to pace restlessly back again. This had been the worst day of his life and it still was not over. He felt as if he had spent the day travelling the world carrying bad news like the grim reaper. He’d broken the news to his mother, to his sisters Renata and Sophia, then taken their disapproval with him to fly to London to break the news to Shannon. Now here he was flying home again with his passenger, who clearly found escape in sleep a better option than staying awake to talk to him.

Did he want to talk to Shannon about anything? he asked himself suddenly.

No, he did not.

Did he want her to wake up?

No, to that question too.

He paced away again, then turned and grimly made his way back to her side. She still hadn’t moved a single eyelash. Her face was relaxed but very pale. Her lips were together, soft and flushed with their usual rose-like bloom, but if she was breathing through her nose then he could see no evidence of it, no hint that her breasts were moving up and down.

Don’t be a fool, man! he told himself harshly. You know how she sleeps—you know! Yet still he found himself leaning over her to place light fingertips against her pale cheek.

Shannon came out of her haven of sleep to find Luca standing over her. He was so close she could feel his breath on her face. Their eyes clashed, two years shot away with the force of a gun crack and she was looking into his face as it had once looked minutes after his loving, one that had shattered her for ever. She saw anger, the contempt and dismay. She saw eyes turned black with the same emotion that had been driving him and felt the full wretched impact of hurt surge up once again.

Tears flooded into her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ she choked and struck out at him on impulse with a trembling clenched fist.

‘Hate?’ he echoed and caught the fist before it could land, closing it inside an iron grip. ‘You do not understand the meaning of the word,’ he bit back harshly. ‘This, cara, is hate—’

With a tug he yanked her up against him, aiming her mouth up to his so that they collided, and he smothered her shrill cry of protest with the demanding thrust of his tongue. He kissed her in anger, he kissed her in punishment, but it was the heat of his passion that set her struggling wildly to break free. An arm snaked around her waist and she found herself standing with the front of her body clamped to his. Her fist was released so that he could claim the back of her head and maintain the pressure of the kiss.

He ravished her mouth; he uttered thick curses deep in his throat. Her hair came loose to tumble around his fingers. He kissed her and kissed her until she stopped fighting and started trembling. Two years of abstinence and the reasons for it didn’t matter any more because they were back where they’d left off, at war with each other and using sex as their weapon. She scraped her nails down his shirt front, she scored them into his hair, their lips moved in a hungry, sensuous feasting—then as suddenly as it had begun it finished.

Luca thrust her away so violently that she landed in a huddle back in her seat. Dizzy and disorientated, shocked beyond trying to think, Shannon watched him spin on his heel and stride down the cabin. When he reached the far end he picked up what looked like a bottle of whisky, poured some liquid into a glass, then tossed it to the back of his throat.

Staring at the rigid set of his shoulders, she wanted to say something—spit insults at him for daring to grab and kiss her just to prove a stupid point. But her lips felt hot and bruised and she was shaking so badly inside that she didn’t think she could make the words coherent. Instead she lowered her face into her hands, let her hair fall around her like a curtain and prayed that he had been too busy punishing her to notice that she had been kissing him back.