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

‘Love you,’ she whispered, then she was turning to walk away with wretched tears blurring her progress to the door with Luca following close behind.

‘Where are you going?’

She blinked, her sleep-starved brain taking whole seconds to realise they were now outside her sister’s room, the door having been pulled shut so silently she hadn’t even heard it. ‘The baby,’ she murmured, waving a decidedly uncoordinated hand in the direction of the nursery. ‘I want to …’

‘The baby is fine,’ he assured. ‘I have been with her for the last hour while you sat with Keira.’

An hour? Shannon blinked again. Luca had been with the baby for a whole hour? The picture that produced in her head just didn’t correspond somehow with the man she thought she knew.

‘I watched the nurse attend to her, then they let me hold her for a while …’

Something passed over his face, a wave of unchecked emotion that emphasised the ring of pain that was circling at his mouth. Guilt made a sudden clutching grab at her aching heart. This man had just lost his beloved brother but, while she had been selfishly absorbed in her sister’s plight, Luca had been too busy supporting others to find the time to deal with his own loss. She had been existing in a fog since they’d arrived here, but he’d split his time between comforting his grief-stricken mother or one of his two sisters as well as attending to her.

Now here he stood, doing what he did best: being the strong Salvatore male. But when she looked into his eyes she saw the desolation beneath his glossy black lashes. She also witnessed another painful image of him slipping away to go to the nursery to hold a tiny baby girl who was the only link to his brother.

Her heart ached again, everything ached, for Luca as well as herself.

‘Oh, Luca,’ she murmured as impulse made her take a step closer to him with soft words of sympathy trembling up from her throat.

He saw it coming. His face closed up. ‘Here,’ he clipped. ‘Put this on …’

He held out her coat. Shannon stared at it, aware that she’d just had a door slammed shut in her face again. And why not? she asked herself bleakly as she swallowed the words of comfort and felt the tremor that came with them shiver its way to her feet. Her sister was alive but his brother was dead. Accepting comfort from his ex-lover-turned-enemy would be a blow to his dignity he could do without.

So she let him feed her coat sleeves up her arms without uttering another syllable. As the heavy garment settled on her tired shoulders she pushed her hands into its deep pockets to hug the warm wool around her, then walked towards the bank of lifts. The chairs in the foyer were empty now; the rest of the Salvatore family had been sent home to their beds long ago.

The silence between them held as they drove away into the cool dark night. A glance at the clock illuminated on the car dashboard told it was one o’clock in the morning. It felt as if a whole week had gone by since she’d got out of bed yesterday at six in the morning and rushed out to catch the commuter flight to Paris. Such a lot had happened since then. Too much—too much, she thought dully as she rested her head against the soft leather headrest, then closed her hot, tired, gritty eyes.

Luca watched as she slipped into an exhausted slumber and grimaced to himself. He knew the impression he had given her back there in the hospital, but she could not be more wrong about his motives if she’d tried. However, receiving comfort from a warm and sympathetic Shannon right now would have shattered the control he was hanging onto by a thread.

And it was not over yet—though he was aware that Shannon didn’t know that. There was more to come—a battle—he predicted, because she was not going to like it when she discovered where she was staying. Let his defences drop before the fight was won and he would turn himself into a target for someone of Shannon’s fiercely stubborn independent nature.

Dio, he thought tiredly as he drove them through the silent streets of Florence. He was not that sure that he wasn’t already that target. A mere glance at her sitting beside him with her long legs stretched out in front of her, the white oval of her face so exquisite in repose, he experienced that telling needle-sharp sting of Man on the prowl.

She got to him. She always had done. Love or hate her, he always wanted her and it was knowing that that made him such a target. Give her reason to spark and he was going to catch a light. He was so sure of it that he would try anything to keep her asleep until he had her safely ensconced in a bed—and he’d put himself on the other side of the bedroom door.

A sitting duck. Angelo’s words, he remembered starkly. Angelo had said that the two of them were both targets for a pair of Irish witches to enchant at will.

Angelo … A collapse took place inside his chest. It was a sensation he had grown familiar with during this long, miserable day. He missed his brother—already. He wanted Angelo back. Tears stung hot and dry against the backs of his eyes and he felt his skin stretch across his cheek-bones with tension.

His foot hit the accelerator, using a surge of unnecessary bodily power to release the pressure in his chest. Familiar landmarks flashed by the side window. He saw a set of traffic lights ahead glowing red; he aimed for them—felt the burning rush swell inside him, challenging that bastard called death. It was compelling, seductive.

Shannon stirred. He glanced at her, saw beauty personified in his stark eyes and, clenching his jaw tight and gritting his teeth, he forced himself to slow down. One car crash in the family was enough. The moment of madness eased, leaving Shannon still asleep beside him with no idea how close he’d come to putting her safety at risk.

The sensation remained, though, burning like acid in his gut, anger at the waste of his brother’s life overlaying the numbing sense of grief. It was going to need assuaging and he had a grim suspicion he knew by what source.

It was feeling the car swing sharply down a steep incline that stirred Shannon awake. Opening red-rimmed eyes, she sat up to peer out at the lines of cars parked in the basement car park and, as Luca slotted the car into its reserved parking slot, he waited for recognition to spark.

It didn’t happen. Probably too tired to notice anything much, she yawned then opened her door and stepped out. He did the same, eyeing her carefully as she waited in weary silence for him to recover her luggage then walked beside him to the lift.

They stepped into it together. While he used a plastic security card to activate the lift she went to lean against one of the metal cased walls, thrust her hands into her coat pockets, then proceeded to stare at her booted feet.

‘You have access, then,’ she remarked, smothering yet another yawn.

‘Yes, I have access,’ was all he said.

‘Good of them.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Angelo and Keira. It’s good of them to trust you with security access to their apartment.’

He didn’t answer, keeping his expression blank while he wondered if she was even aware that she’d used his brother’s name as if Angelo were still alive.

That anger stirred again; he crushed it down. The lift began to rise. He wanted to hit something and wished he didn’t feel like this.

‘But then, that’s nothing new,’ she added with a sudden tinge of bitterness in her voice. ‘Security access to each others’ homes has always been the norm for the Salvatores.’

‘You think that’s a bad thing?’

‘I think it’s bloody stupid,’ she replied. ‘I know Italian families like to be close, but having the right to walk in and out of each others’ homes when they feel like it is taking family unity to the extreme.’

‘Because you were once caught out by this—extreme perhaps?’

The taunt hit home. She flinched, then lifted her chin to send him a clear cold stare. He countered it with a thin smile. Mutual antipathy began to sing. The lift stopped. She was so busy defying him to take that comment further that when the lift doors slid open she still did not notice where she was.

So he said nothing and merely mocked her with a gesture of his hand to step out of the lift. Head up, eyes like ice, she walked forward, stooping to collect up her bags from where they sat at his feet before saying tightly. ‘Goodnight, Luca. I’m sure you know your own way out again.’

Then she walked—or did she flounce? Luca mused curiously. Whichever, she did it sensationally in her ankle-length coat and flaming red hair; it was almost a shame that reality was about to spoil it.

She was several strides in before she began to take in the décor of rich cream walls and inlaid wood floors on which stood the kind of heavy antique pieces that she would never have connected with Keira’s more homely tastes.

Luca watched her freeze, watched her take stock, watched her pull in a sharp breath before she spun to stare at him as he slid the plastic security card back into his leather wallet while the lift doors closed behind his blocking frame.

‘No,’ she breathed in stricken protest. ‘I’m not staying here with you, Luca. No way.’

It took fewer strides to bring her back to him. Eyes bright with defiance, she snaked a hand over his shoulder to gave the lift-call button a firm press.

‘It won’t come without my authorisation,’ he reminded her gently.

‘Then authorise it.’

She was standing so close that he could feel her breath on his face. She smelled of Chanel and the hospital, and the tumbled untidiness of her hair flamed like a warning around her face. She was trying her best to defy him but underneath the defiance he knew alarm bells were ringing because she did not understand his motives for bringing her here of all places, back to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

He could reassure her that he had nothing sinister on his mind and that she had to stay somewhere and even he wasn’t so brutal that he take her to a dead man’s house then leave her there alone—but it would not be the truth. Something had happened to him during the mad drive here, and he now wanted her so badly that it burned in his gut like a pounding fever. He wanted to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, find the nearest bed and drop her down on it, then follow with some good, hard sex. No preliminaries, just a quick, hot slaking of all this stuff he was struggling to deal with: his brother, her sister—Shannon back here and within his reach. She had made the last two years of his life a misery—the least she could do in reparation was help him assuage his grief!

Shannon knew what he was thinking—it was vibrating all around them like some dark, compelling force. The desire, the old burning attraction, that needle-sharp prick of sexual awareness that made his eyes glow gold and made her need to run the tip of her tongue around the sudden dry curve of her lips.

‘No,’ she breathed in husky denial.