Italian Bachelors: Irresistible Sicilians

‘It is not a silly party. It is an important event that you will attend as my devoted wife.’

The way his eyes burned into her left Grace with no doubt as to the meaning laced in his words.

Devoted wife.

Luca might have abandoned the idea of displaying togetherness in front of his family but this did not extend to the wider world.

She would be expected to accompany him and act the docile, dutiful wife.

She would be expected to play the role of lover to a man she hated with every fibre of her being. The consequences of failure would be harsh. Banishment from her daughter’s life.

‘Am I at least allowed a say in the christening? Or is Lily’s entire future to be decided by you?’

His nostrils flared. ‘That all depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether your opinions concur with mine.’

‘So that’ll be never, then,’ she threw at him bitterly.

‘Consider yourself lucky to be here and able to voice an opinion,’ he said, his tone a low, threatening timbre. ‘It’s a sight more than you gave me.’

‘It’s a sight more than you deserved,’ she spat. ‘Now, unless there’s something else you want to tell me, you can leave.’

* * *

Luca clenched his fists by his sides at her defiance, at the folded arms crossed over the slender waist, her hair sprouting in all directions. Since they had returned, the red dye had faded, her natural honey blonde coming through.

He didn’t know if he wanted to wrap his hands around her throat or kiss the defiance from her face.

She had been home for six days. In all that time he had tried to block her from his mind but she was still there, festering in his psyche. He didn’t want to exchange one solitary word more than was necessary with her. Simply looking at her deceitful face made his stomach clench.

‘I am not yet ready to leave. You owe me some answers.’

Her striking features contorted into something feral. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

Every sinew in his body tightened. When she turned her back on him and walked to her workbench, he had to fight the urge to wrench her round and force her to look at him.

‘You damn well do. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. No letter, no phone call, nothing to let me know if you were dead or alive.’

She turned around, leaned against the bench and rolled her eyes. ‘Steady on, Luca—you make it sound as if you were worried about me. Surely a heart is needed to feel worry?’

It was the dripping cynicism that did it for him. The sheer lack of remorse. The implication that her selfish, unrepentant behaviour was somehow his fault.

All the rage he had been smothering since he found her exploded out of him, consuming him in a fury that accelerated when he found his tongue to speak.

‘Worried about you?’ he said, his words coming out in a raging flow. ‘Worried about you? I thought you were dead! Do you hear me? Dead! I imagined you lying cold on a verge. I pictured you cold in a mortuary. For two weeks I could not sleep for the nightmares. So no, I wasn’t worried about you. It was much worse than that.’

For a moment he thought he caught a flicker of distress on her face before her now familiar insouciance replaced it. ‘I apologise if I caused you any distress...’

Slam!

Without conscious thought, the desperate need to purge the storm of emotions acted for him and he punched the wall.

‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ he raged. ‘I thought we were happy. When you went missing, I thought you’d been kidnapped but when I received no ransom I thought you had been killed. I called your mother, I called Cara—neither of them had heard from you. Or so they said. It never crossed my mind you would do something so wicked as to up and leave without a word.’ He threw his arms out, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, ignoring the throb in his fist. ‘You didn’t just leave me, you left everything, all your work, all your clothes...’

In the midst of his fury he saw how white she had become, how she clung to her workbench as if she depended on it to keep her upright.

Taking a deep, ragged breath, he fought for control and forced his voice to adopt a modicum of calm. ‘Two weeks after you went missing, your bank statement arrived. I opened it and found every euro had been transferred into a new account the same day you disappeared. Do you know how I felt then?’

Slowly, she shook her head.

‘Elated. Suddenly there existed the possibility you were alive. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to me to check the safe for your passport.’ When he had discovered it missing, the relief had been so physical he had slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, sitting there for minutes that had felt like hours, his usually quick brain taking its time to process the implications. But once he had processed them...

He had dug up all her bank statements and read them in detail. Apart from the odd splurge on painting materials, Grace had hardly touched the allowance he gave her. Over a two-year period she had accumulated more than two million euros.

Had she been planning her escape from the start?

Whatever the reason, his wife had saved enough money to start over.

From then, it had been a case of following the money trail. Luckily for him, money—his money—was able to lubricate the tightest of lips and within a day he had been in Frankfurt. Unluckily for him, he had been a week too late. She had already gone. It had taken another four months for him to find her latest location but he had been too late then too.

In the meantime, Pepe had come up trumps with Cara’s phone, through which they’d determined what they had good reason to believe was Grace’s number. That same number had remained inactive until barely a fortnight ago.

‘You put me through hell,’ he said flatly. ‘I would have gladly traded my life for yours and you let me believe you were dead. Now tell me why I don’t deserve some answers.’

‘I was going to leave you a note,’ she said. For the first time he detected a softening in her voice. ‘But I couldn’t risk you coming home early and finding it before I had a chance to leave Sicily. I knew you would never let me go.’

‘What kind of a monster do you think I am?’ he asked, throwing his arms back in the air. ‘That argument we had before you disappeared? Was that the cause of it?’

‘No! That row—as horrible as it was, I would have forgiven it in time...’

‘So tell me! When, exactly, did I frighten you so much that you believed I would stop you doing anything?’

‘That’s just it! You never let me do anything.’ She threw her own arms in the air. ‘You promised I could exhibit my work in Palermo and it came to nothing—every time I found the perfect venue you found the perfect excuse to keep me from buying it. I wasn’t allowed to drive my own car, I had to travel everywhere with armed guards—I couldn’t even buy a box of tampons without one of your goons hovering over me. I would insist he stay outside the shop door but I couldn’t be certain he didn’t have his binoculars out spying on me, ready to report back to you.’

‘My men were assigned for your own protection, not to spy on you,’ he roared. ‘They were there to keep you safe. This isn’t England. You knew when you married me that you were marrying into—’

‘I most certainly did not! I took you at face value. I thought everyone in Sicily carried guns for their personal protection. If I had so much as suspected the kind of monster you really were...’ Her vicious tongue suddenly stopped, her eyes widening, fixing on his shoulder. ‘Luca, you’re bleeding.’

Sure enough, when he followed her line of sight down to his shoulder, a dark stain had appeared. Immediately he became aware of the accompanying ache.

Now he was aware of it, his knuckles throbbed too.

Grace stared for a moment longer, then turned and dragged a paint-splattered chair over to him. ‘Sit down and take your top off,’ she ordered in short, clipped tones. ‘I’ll get the first-aid kit.’

‘Stop trying to change the subject,’ he said. With all the bitterness and acrimony flying around, a sour taste had formed in his mouth. ‘You were about to explain what you find so abhorrent about me.’