thought took all the strength from her legs so that she sank back onto the worn wooden seat of the pew, her hand twisting in the fine white silk of her dress. Her wedding dress. For a moment there she had almost forgotten.
‘Well?’ Guido prompted curtly when the thought dried her mouth too so that she couldn’t find any sort of an answer to give him.
‘I…’
Twice Amber opened her mouth to respond and both times her voice failed her completely, fading to a weak croak after the single word. How could she answer? What could she possibly say? It seemed that no matter which way she turned, something terrible and unbearable waited for her. So how did she choose the lesser of all those evils?
‘Così sia!’
Guido flung out his hands in a very Italian gesture, dismissing the whole topic and seeming to fling it from him.
‘If that’s the way you want it, then so be it! You can handle this alone.’
He had turned and headed back to the church door before she quite realised what he was doing. That he was leaving—that he had every intention of just walking out and leaving her here. Alone. And of course when he opened the door then the reporters and cameramen would just pour in…
Panic pushed her to her feet again, holding fast to the end of the pew as she took a couple of frantic steps into the aisle.
‘Wait!’
He actually had his fingers on the big metal door handle, was about to turn it…For the space of half a dozen uneven, fearful heartbeats, she thought that he hadn’t heard or, if he had, then he was determined to ignore her desperate cry. But then, very slowly, Guido stopped. His hand stilled on the big metal ring, then loosened, dropping down to his side again. He spared her just the smallest flick of a glance over his shoulder in her direction. That was all.
‘Wait?’ he said at last. ‘For what?’
‘For—for my answer.’ Amber stumbled over the words in her haste to get them out. Seeing him prepared to walk away like that had focused her mind brutally, She had no doubt at all now what she wanted; which way she had to go. There was only one way she could go.
‘And that answer is?’
Still he kept turned away from her and she wished he would turn round. It was so hard to speak to the long, straight back, to see nothing of his face but just the sleek, shining mane of black hair.
‘My answer is—you know what it is—it’s—Oh, please, won’t you just turn round?’
‘As you wish…’
He took his time about it, turning so slowly that she had time to rethink her request not once but twice while he did so. And when he was at last facing her again, those polished bronze eyes fixed on her face, she had to swallow hard to relieve the agonising tension in her throat. Now she wished she’d kept her mouth shut and let him stay where he was. Surely saying what she had to say to the back of his head couldn’t have been as bad, as nerve-racking as doing it now, to his face. Where all his features seemed to be carved from stone, and those eyes were as cold and hard as ice.
He didn’t speak again but just waited—and watched the play of emotions over her face as she struggled for the strength to speak again. And he wouldn’t say anything until she did, that much was obvious.
But still, could she come right out and say it? Say ‘Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll leave here with you—on your arm—as your wife—making public what for the past year has been my shameful little secret, the one I always prayed that no one would ever find out?’
And so she hedged, moving on to another topic. One that was almost as difficult—but one she sincerely needed an answer to.
‘There—there’s one thing I need to know.’
Guido kept silent when she paused, only the faint lift of his head, the way he tilted it to one side, revealing the fact that he had heard her and was waiting for her to elaborate.
‘I don’t really understand. If we do this—’
When we do this, because what choice did she have?
‘Then what would you get out of it?’
Guido didn’t hesitate and his deep, dark gaze didn’t waver for a second but remained so fixed on hers that she felt it might have the effect of a searing laser, marking her permanently like a brand.
‘I get what I want,’ he said with a calm decisiveness that made her toes curl up inside her white satin shoes.
‘And that is?’
The smile that touched his beautiful mouth was slow and dangerous, making her shiver in the same moment that she felt a rush of heat through her veins, flooding her skin with colour.
‘Oh, Amber, don’t play the naïve innocent, it doesn’t suit you—it never did. Isn’t it obvious? I get you.’
‘Me?’ It was a sound of pure horror and revulsion, one that should have provoked an equally passionate response from the man before her. But Guido just nodded, keeping that burning gaze targeted straight at her face.
‘I get you. I’ve always wanted you and now I’ll get you back in my life—and in my bed.’
Soft as they were, the words seemed to scrape away a much-needed protective layer from Amber’s skin so that she felt weak and vulnerable, dangerously exposed.
‘I only agreed to act as your wife—not really be that!’ she protested vehemently, her voice echoing round the church. ‘It won’t be a real marriage!’
She might have felt that the fervour of her protest would reawaken the dark, flashing anger of moments before but instead it simply made that wicked, dangerous smile—that shockingly seductive smile—grow wider and more devastating.
‘I’ll settle for that—for now.’
‘I won’t sleep with you!’
The subtle emphasis on that ‘for now’ made her shift uneasily from one foot to another, facing the worrying thought that she had well and truly jumped out of the frying-pan and landed right in the heart of the blazing, red-hot fire.
‘If that’s a condition of your help—’
‘It isn’t,’ Guido assured her, but then, just as she was allowing herself to relax just a little, he smiled again and went on, ‘It doesn’t need to be. I don’t have to offer any ultimatums, or make conditions about this—I know you and I know how we are when we’re together.’
The arrogant confidence of that assertion took Amber’s breath away, leaving her gasping in disbelief.
‘You’ll stay with me for as long as is needed to let this whole chiasso over your attempt at a second marriage die down and while we’re together you’ll still be my wife. I’m sure you’ll soon remember that the state of matrimony has its pleasures as well as its ties.’
‘I won’t—I’ll never…’
The
