Hot Nights with...the Italian: The Santangeli Marriage / The Italian’s Ruthless Marriage Command / Veretti's Dark Vengeance

Only she didn’t get the chance. Because he was lifting himself off the bed and striding away from her across the room without looking back. And as Marisa sank back, covering her own face with her hands, she heard first the slam of the dressing room door and then, like an echo, the bang of his own door closing.

And knew with total certainty that for tonight at least he would not be returning.

CHAPTER FIVE

EVEN after all this time Marisa found that the memory still had the power to crucify her.

I’d never behaved like that before in my entire life, she thought, shuddering. Because I’m really not the violent type—or I thought I wasn’t until that moment. Then—pow! Suddenly, the eagle landed. Only it wasn’t funny.

So completely not funny, in fact, that she’d immediately burst into a storm of tears, burying her face in the pillow to muffle the sobs that shook her entire body. Not that he could have heard her, of course. The dressing room and two intervening doors had made sure of that.

But why was I crying? she asked herself, moving restively across the mattress, trying to get comfortable. After all, it was an appalling thing to do, and I freely admit as much, but it got him out of my bedroom, which was exactly what I wanted to happen.

And he never came back. Not even after …

She swallowed, closing her eyes, wishing she could blank out all the inner visions that still tormented her. That remained there at the forefront of her mind, harsh and inescapable. Forcing her once again to recall everything that had happened that night—and, even more shamingly, on the day that had followed….

Once she was quite sure that he’d gone, her first priority was to wash the tearstains from her pale face and exchange her torn nightgown for a fresh one—although that, she soon discovered, did nothing to erase the remembered shock of his touch on her bare breast.

So much for his promise to leave her alone until she was ready, she thought, biting her lip savagely.

The way he’d looked at her, the delicate graze of his hand on her flesh, proved how little his word could be trusted.

Yet at the same time it had brought home to her with almost terrifying force how fatally easy it would be to allow her untutored senses to take control, and to forget the real reason—the only reason—they were together.

She’d agreed to this marriage only to repay a mountainous debt and to make life easier for a sick man who’d been good to her. Nothing else.

Lorenzo had accepted the arrangement solely out of duty to his family. And to keep a promise to a dying woman. That was all, too.

‘Oh, Godmother,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘How could you do this to me? To both of us?’

She’d assumed Renzo’s offer to postpone the consummation of their marriage was a sign of his basic indifference. Now she didn’t now what to think.

Because it seemed that Julia’s crude comments about his readiness to take full advantage of the situation might have some basis in truth, after all. That he might indeed find her innocence a novelty after the glamorous, experienced women he was used to, and would, therefore, be able to make the best of a bad job.

‘But I can’t do that,’ she whispered to herself. And as for learning gradually to accustom herself to the idea of intimacy with him, as he’d suggested—well, that would never happen in a million years.

A tiger in the sack, she recalled, wincing. Although she’d tried hard not to consider the implications in Julia’s crudity, the way Renzo had touched her had provided her with an unwanted inkling of the kind of demands he might make.

But then she’d known all along that spending her nights with her bridegroom would prove to be a hideous embarrassment at the very least. Or spending some of her nights, she amended hastily. Certainly not all of them. Maybe not very many, and hopefully never the entire night.

Because surely he would soon tire of her sexual naiveté?

In some ways she knew him too well, she thought. In others she didn’t know him at all. But on both counts the prospect of sleeping with him scared her half to death.

Not, of course, that sleeping would actually be the problem, she thought, setting her teeth.

She’d tried to play down her fears—telling herself that all he required was a child, a son to inherit the Santangeli name and the power and wealth it represented—and had spent time before the wedding steeling herself to accept that part of their bargain, to endure whatever it took to achieve it, assuring herself that his innate good breeding would ensure that the … the practicalities of the situation would be conducted in a civilised manner.

Only to blow her resolution to the four winds when he’d attempted to kiss her for the first time and she’d panicked. Badly.

She had reason, she told herself defensively. The night of her nineteenth birthday had made her wonder uneasily if Renzo might not want more from her than unwilling submission. And the last half-hour had only confirmed her worst fears—which was why she’d lashed out at him like that.

Her relationship with him had always been a tricky one, she thought unhappily. Leading his own life, he’d figured in her existence, when he chose to appear there, as eternally glamorous and usually aloof. Casually kind to her when it suited him, even occasionally coaching her at tennis and swimming, although never with any great enthusiasm, and almost certainly at his mother’s behest—as she’d realised later.

But all that had ended summarily when, longing for him just once to see her as a woman instead of a child, she’d made a disastrously misguided attempt to emulate one of the girls who’d stayed at the villa as his guest by ‘losing’ her bikini top when she was alone with him in the swimming pool—only to experience the full force of his icy displeasure.

‘If you think to impress me by behaving like a slut, you have misjudged the matter, Maria Lisa.’ His words and tone of voice had flayed the skin from her. ‘You are too young and too green to be a temptress, my little stork, and you dishonour not only yourself, but my parents’ roof with such ridiculous and juvenile antics.’ He’d contemptuously tossed the scrap of sodden fabric to her. ‘Now, cover yourself and go to your room.’

Overwhelmed by distress and humiliation, she had fled, despising herself for having revealed her fledgling emotions so openly, and agonising over the result.

She had felt only relief when her visits to Tuscany had gone into abeyance, and in time had even been able to reassure herself that any talk about her being Renzo’s future bride had been simply sentimental chat between two mothers, and could not, thankfully, be taken seriously.

And if I never see him again, she’d thought defiantly, it will be altogether too soon.

Now, when she looked back, she could candidly admit that she must have been embarrassment on a stick even before the swimming pool incident.

But that being the case, why hadn’t he fought tooth and nail not to have her foisted on him as a wife only a few years later?

Surely he must have recognised that there was no chance of their marriage working in any real sense?

On the other hand, perhaps he didn’t actually require it to work in that way. Because for him it was simply a means to an end. A business arrangement whereby her body became just another commodity for him to purchase.

Something for his temporary amusement that could be discreetly discarded when its usefulness was finished.

When she’d had his baby.

This was the viewpoint she’d chosen to adopt, and so, in spite of Julia’s insinuations, she hadn’t really expected him to behave as if—as if he—wanted her …

Or was that just a conditioned reflex? Girl equals bed equals sex? Identity unimportant.

That, she thought with a little sigh, was the likeliest explanation.

For a moment she stood staring at herself in the mirror, studying the shape of her body under the thin fabric of her nightdress. Noticing the length of her legs and the way the shadows in the room starkly reduced the contours of her face, making her features stand out more prominently. Especially her nose …

The stork, she thought painfully, was alive and well once more. And certainly not likely to be the object of anyone’s desire. Renzo’s least of all.

She turned away, smothering a sigh, and made her slow, reluctant way back to the bed, lying there shivering in its vastness in spite of the warmth of the night.

Still listening intently, she realised, for the sound of his return, no matter how many times she promised herself that it wasn’t going to happen. While at the same time, in her head, the events of the day kept unrolling before her in a seemingly endless loop of error and embarrassment.

It was several hours before she finally dropped into a troubled sleep. And for the first time in years there was no bedside alarm clock to summon her into a new morning, so she woke late to find Daniella at her bedside with a tray of coffee, her dark eyes sparking with ill-concealed interest and excitement as she studied Signor Lorenzo’s new bride.

Looking to see how I survived the night, Marisa realised, sitting up self-consciously, aware that her tossing and turning had rumpled the bed sufficiently to make it appear that she hadn’t slept alone.

My God, she thought, as she accepted the coffee with a stilted word of thanks. If she only knew …

And silently thanked heaven that she didn’t. That no one knew, apart from Renzo and herself, what a total shambles her first twenty-four hours of marriage had been.