been totally brainwashed, totally deceived by him. But then the things she had overheard had destroyed the foolish idyll she’d been living in.
She was supposed to have stayed in their hotel room, resting—resting after a particularly long and energetic afternoon of lovemaking—and waiting for him to come back from some meeting he’d had to go to, so that they could make love again. He’d told her that he would only be an hour, and when that hour had turned into two—and then almost another—she had started to worry. Dressing swiftly, she had made her way down into the hotel lobby—and there, hidden behind the large, ornate statue that filled the centre of the hallway, she had overheard Guido paying off the man he had hired to make their wedding look real.
‘It was everything she thought it would be,’ she’d heard him say. He’d even laughed—laughter that went straight through her heart like a brutal sword. ‘But then, she knows no better. Wouldn’t know a real wedding if she was at it.’
At the time she’d just reacted. She hadn’t stopped to think, but had turned and run. By the time Guido had joined her upstairs, she had been almost packed—if flinging clothes haphazardly into a case, not caring which way they fell, could be called packing.
Her mind blanked over at the memory of the huge row that had resulted from that. So now she put all the hurt, all the bitterness of her memories as well as the new misery he’d just inflicted on her into her voice as she rounded on him.
‘Oh, well, I’m glad that you do speak the truth sometimes! Because you certainly didn’t when you married me. When you vowed to be with me for the rest of our lives together. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a fake marriage—then at least I’d really have been free of you when I left. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could actually get an annulment if I could prove just how little you meant those vows, that you were lying—probably even perjuring yourself!’
‘And how would you know?’ Guido flung right back. ‘All you cared about was getting a ring on your finger.’
He’d said the same thing on the day before she’d left him, Amber recalled bitterly. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him what she’d overheard, but she’d accused him of never having loved her, had tried every last desperate trick in the book to get him to say that he did.
‘We never had a marriage!’ she’d screamed at him from the depths of her pain. ‘Not a real one.’
And, ‘You can say that again,’ he’d retaliated. ‘What we have is most definitely not a real marriage—and we never had a real wedding. Not that you would know the difference.’
It was an accusation she couldn’t deny. She had been so nervous at the thought of her wedding, unable to believe that she was actually going ahead with it, that she was really going to marry a man like Guido Corsentino and that he was going to marry her, that she hadn’t even thought about the details, about the legalities. She had left all of that to Guido, let him handle everything, and stayed locked in her own little dream world of happiness, terrified that if she came out of it she might find it had all been a dream.
‘I didn’t want to stop and think about what I was doing! I just wanted it done and over with.’
‘And why was that? Were you worried that Mamma might find out? Or was it just the idea that you were lowering yourself to marry a Sicilian peasant?’
‘I never thought of you like that! I…’
She caught the foolish words back before they could escape her.
I only wanted to hurt you as you’d hurt me, was what she had been going to say, but she couldn’t admit to that. He would see behind it to the truth. And the truth of how much she’d loved him was something she didn’t want him to know. Because the wedding might have been real but Guido’s reasons for marrying her after all had been as cold and calculated as she’d come to realise. He had only wanted to keep her in his bed and he had been prepared to go along with her need for a wedding in order to achieve that end. She might have been married to him but it had never been a marriage of love.
‘No, you only realised how badly I compared to your English aristocrat when he came looking for you and you realised I would never be able to offer you the title of Lady anything.’
When had Guido moved?
She had been so intent on standing up to him, on showing him that he couldn’t just walk all over her, that she hadn’t noticed that he had taken several strides forward, coming so much closer to the bed. Now he towered over her, glaring down into her face, his eyes black as pitch and burning with molten anger.
But it wasn’t the threat in them that dried her mouth, sending her throat into a spasm that killed any chance at all of speaking. It was something as equally primitive as fear but on the opposite end of the scale. It would have helped if he’d troubled to get dressed, but of course he hadn’t. Guido had never given a damn about appearing naked, or semi-clothed, in front of her, his supreme self-confidence driving away any concern for modesty.
So that now, while she still huddled under the crumpled sheet, hiding away from him, he stood tall and proud, the broad expanse of his chest, the bronzed skin lightly hazed with jet-black hair, openly exposed. It was impossible not to remember how it had felt to be held against that chest, how the heat of his skin, the roughness of that hair, had rubbed against her sensitised nipples. Nipples that ached even now with the imprint of his caress, the longing for more.
Her fingers hungered to touch, to stroke over the smooth, satin skin, to feel the strength of muscle and bone. And between her legs heat pooled rapidly, tormenting her senses so that she had to shift uneasily under the light covering of fine white linen.
‘No…’
It was a moan of protest at her own response that escaped her. She’d been burned that way already—burned twice, for God’s sake—so what was she thinking of even being tempted again?
CHAPTER NINE
‘NO?’ GUIDO questioned softly. Too softly.
Amber knew that voice of old. It was the one that he used when he was carefully reining in what he really wanted to say. When he was holding back the rage or the cynicism that in a weaker man would already have escaped, boiling over into dangerous fury.
‘No? If it wasn’t that, then what was it? You hadn’t tired of me. I know it—you know it.’
To Amber’s horror, he lowered himself onto the bed, coming to sit beside her, very close—too close.
Dangerously close.
She didn’t know how to react. She wanted to run but she didn’t dare. It would give too much away about the way she was feeling. She wanted to reach out and touch him, know the sensation of her fingertips on his skin, press her lips to him, taste him. But she didn’t dare to do that either. And so she curled up in a tight little ball, twisting her legs away from him so that they wouldn’t touch. She was afraid that she would feel the heat of him even through the linen of the sheet. That his touch might even burn her skin in spite of its protection.
‘We never tired of each other, did we, Amber?’
‘No…’
It was all that she could manage. She couldn’t deny it after all. He had left her bed to go to that meeting. A bed in which they had just made mad, passionate love.
