Читать книгу The Reluctant Husband - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

MATT FINLAY scanned Frankie’s shocked face and gave her a bracing smile. ‘I happen to think that Sardinia could be a very therapeutic trip for you. You could confront your memories of the love of your life and get it all out of your system—’

‘Santino was hardly the love of my life!’ Frankie countered between gritted teeth, her whole body tense as a drawn bow.

Matt frowned with pretended concentration. ‘I seem to recall that every time you saw the bloke you went weak at the knees and your little teenybopper heart turned cartwheels!’

The evils of alcohol on a loose tongue at the office party, Frankie reflected painfully. One of those times when she had tried a little too hard to be accepted as one of the boys. She should have known Matt would throw that confession back in her face one day when it suited him. ‘I spent five of the worst years of my life in Sardinia. You can’t blame me for not wanting to go back.’

‘You could be off the island again within forty-eight hours and go on to Italy. It wouldn’t need to interfere with your holiday plans. Who else is there? Dan’s still in France and Marty’s wife is due to give birth any day now...’

Frankie wanted to appeal to him again but her sense of fairness would not allow it. Their travel agency, of which she herself owned a sizeable share, specialised in self-catering accommodation abroad, and business had not been that good in recent months. They had lost more than the usual’ number of properties to competitors. Times were tough in the holiday market.

She squared her shoulders, a tall young woman with the sleek, graceful lines of a thoroughbred, dressed in a sharply tailored black trouser suit, quite deliberately chosen to play down her femininity. She had a fine bone structure, with clear green eyes fringed by ebony lashes and set below equally dark brows. Her burnished hair, a fiery combination of red, copper and gold, was worn in a French plait, embellished by a velvet bow clip. That clip was her one concession to being female.

‘And you’re a native,’ Matt mused with satisfaction. ‘That has to be to our advantage.’

‘I’m British,’ Frankie reminded him flatly.

‘Six villas on the Costa Smeralda. You check them out, sign up the owner, go on to Italy and we’re in business. And who knows...? By the time you come home from your holiday, you might even be in the mood to celebrate with me over a romantic dinner for two,’ Matt suggested with a slow, suggestive smile.

Discomfited by that look, Frankie tensed and coloured. They were friends, but Matt had recently strained their friendship by trying to persuade her into a more intimate relationship. She had already told him as tactfully as she could that she wasn’t interested and his persistence was making her increasingly uncomfortable. After all, not only did they work together, they also had to live under the same roof.

‘No chance,’ she told him with a rather forced grin as she walked to the door.

‘Sometimes I hate your brother,’ Frankie informed the smiling blonde manning the counter outside.

Leigh just laughed. ‘Sardinia?’

‘You knew?’ Frankie felt betrayed and knew she was being oversensitive. Neither of her friends could be expected to understand how threatened she felt by the thought of setting foot on the island again. After all, she hadn’t told either of them the full truth of what had happened to her there. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

‘Matt thought you’d take it better coming from him, and you’ll only arrive for your holiday in Italy sooner,’ Leigh pointed out cheerfully as she turned away to answer the phone.

Frankie’s long legs made short work of the stairs up to the spacious two-bedroom apartment which she had shared alone with Matt since Leigh had got married. She had moved in with the Finlay siblings three years earlier. Using the proceeds of an insurance policy which had matured when she was eighteen, she had bought into the business. The agency was on the ground floor of the same building. Since Frankie now spent most of her time travelling, spot-checking the standards of current properties and negotiating for new ones, she found the location very convenient.

Or at least she had until Matt had begun acting up, she conceded ruefully. His recent innuendos and familiarities hadn’t gone unnoticed by their employees either. The office tongues were already wagging and gossip upset Frankie. A long time ago she had learnt to her cost that careless talk could wreck lives. It had, after all, very nearly destroyed hers once. She shook off that memory with an inner shudder. Did Matt see her as some sort of a challenge? She wasn’t even his type. Why were men so infuriatingly contrary? The sooner Matt went back to chasing his trademark tiny blondes, the happier she would be.

She rang her mother’s home. The maid answered and put her through.

‘Mum? I’m going away earlier than expected,’ she said apologetically.

‘Frankie...don’t you think you’re getting rather too long in the tooth to be calling me Mum?’ Della snapped in petulant reproof. ‘It makes me feel as if I should be collecting my pension!’

‘Sorry.’ Frankie bit her lip uneasily, a shard of pain that was all too familiar piercing her as Della brushed off the news of her coming absence without comment or indeed any perceptible interest. ‘I have to go to—’

‘I have an appointment with my manicurist in an hour,’ Della interrupted impatiently. ‘I’ll call you some time next month.’

Frankie replaced the receiver, her hand not quite steady. No matter how many times it happened, it still hurt. All the old excuses came flooding back. Her mother had a very busy social life. She was not a demonstrative person. Those years of separation when Frankie had been in Sardinia had damaged their relationship. But at the back of her mind always lurked the insecure fear that her mother would really not have noticed if her daughter had never come home again. And then she felt deeply ashamed of herself for even thinking such a thing.

Frankie’s eyes flashed with growing exasperation. It was early evening and she was thoroughly fed up. Today she had expected to be on a ferry to Genoa, in Italy, and what was she doing instead? She was cooped up in a hideously noisy little Fiat, travelling along narrow, steep Sardinian roads that forced her to drive at a snail’s pace. Why? Signor Megras, the owner of the villas, had not condescended to meet her at his properties.

She had been given the grand tour by an employee and now she had to travel deep into the mountainous interior of the island to negotiate with the owner at his hotel. The drive had already taken far longer than she had anticipated. Of course, she could have taken advantage of the lift she had been offered by the employee, Pietro—he of the sexually voracious dark eyes and the overly eager-to-touch hands. In remembrance, Frankie grimaced. Welcome back to Sardinia, Frankie, home of the macho male and the child-bride...

As swiftly as that designation slunk into her thoughts, she suppressed it again. She knew what was wrong with her. It was these mountains, the same mountains that had imprisoned her for five unforgettable years. Her flesh chilled at the memories, so why should she let them out? That was the past and it was behind her. She was twenty-one now, and fully in control of her own life again.

But still the memories persisted. The culture shock of being eleven years old, one moment living a civilised life in London and the next being suddenly thrust unprepared into the midst of an almost illiterate peasant family, who didn’t even want her. The horror of being told that she would never see London or her mother again. The desertion of her father within days. The loneliness, the fear, the terrifying isolation. All those feelings were still trapped inside Frankie and she knew she would never be free of them.

Her mother had been an eighteen-year-old model when she became pregnant by a handsome Sard photographer called Marco Caparelli. The resulting marriage had been stormy. Her parents had finally separated when Frankie was eight. Her father had stayed in touch but on a very irregular basis, generally showing up when he was least expected and rarely appearing when he was. Once or twice he had even contrived to talk his way back beneath the marital roof again. Frankie’s desperate hope that her parents would reconcile had seemed like a real possibility to her on those occasions.

So, perhaps understandably, she had been upset when her mother met another man and finally decided that she wanted a divorce. Della’s plans had outraged her estranged husband as well. There had been a terrible argument. One day, shortly after that, Marco had picked Frankie up from school. They were going on a little holiday, he had told her and no, she didn’t need to go home to pack, he had laughed, displaying the small case which he’d explained contained everything that she might need for the wonderful trip he was taking her on.

‘Does Mum know?’ She had frowned.

And then he had let her into the even more wonderful secret. Mum and Dad were getting back together again. It might seem a big surprise to her, but while she had been at school Mum and Dad had made up. Wasn’t she pleased that she wasn’t going to have a stepfather after all? And wouldn’t it be fantastic when Mum joined them in Sardinia at the end of the week?

Bitterly rejecting the memory of that most cruel lie of all, Frankie rounded another corkscrew bend on the tortuous road and saw the sign at the head of a tumbledown bridge. ‘La Rocca’, it said. At last, she thought, accelerating up the hill into the village, braking first to avoid a goat and then two pigs. Her surroundings gave her a bad case of the chills. A clutch of scrawny hens scattered as she climbed out of the car in the dusty square.

The village was so poor you could taste it, and the taste of that poverty made Frankie shiver. She was reminded of another village even more remote from civilisation. Sienta, that particular cluster of hovels had been called. Birthplace of her paternal grandfather. Sienta had been a dot on the map of another world.

The silence grated on her nerves. Where was the hotel? She hoped it was reasonable, since she was probably going to be forced to spend the night there. Twenty yards away, through an open doorway, she saw a café. Her nose wrinkled fastidiously as she peered into the dim interior. The thick-set man behind the bar stared stonily back at her.

‘Could you tell me where Hotel La Rocca is?’ she asked in stilted Italian.

‘Francesca...?’

Gooseflesh broke out on her arms, her every muscle jerking painfully tight. That name she never used, that voice...the soft, mellow syllables as smooth and fluid as honey yet as energising for Frankie as the siren on a police car riding her bumper. There was a whirring in her eardrums. Slowly, very slowly, her feet began to turn, her slender body unnaturally stiff as she fought her disorientation, refusing to accept her instantaneous recognition of that voice.

Santino Vitale fluidly uncoiled his long, lean length from behind the table in the far comer and moved silently out of the shadows. Her tongue welded to the dry roof of her mouth. Her skin felt damp and clammy. For a moment she seriously doubted her sanity and the evidence of her own eyes. In an exquisitely cut silver-grey suit, an off-white raincoat negligently draped across his shoulders, Santino looked shockingly alien and exotic against the shabby backdrop of scarred tables and grimy walls.

‘Would you like to join me for a drink?’ Dark eyes as stunningly lustrous as black jet whipped over her stilled figure. Smoothly he captured her hand, warmth engulfing her fingertips. ‘Ah...you’re cold,’ Santino sighed, shrugging off his coat to drape it slowly and carefully round her rigid shoulders.

Frankie stood there like a wax dummy, so overpowered by his appearance, she could not react. Shattered, she couldn’t drag her gaze from him either. At six feet four, he towered over her in spite of her own not inconsiderable height. Devastatingly handsome, he had the hard classic features of a dark angel and the deeply disturbing sexual charisma of a very virile male. Without warning a tide of remembered humiliation engulfed her, draining every scrap of colour from her cheeks. Everything that Frankie had struggled so hard to forget over the past five years began to flood back.

‘This is the La Rocca hotel,’ Santino murmured.

‘This place?’ Complete bewilderment and the sense of foolishness that uncertainty always brought made Frankie sound shrill.

‘And you are here to meet a Signor Megras?’

‘How do you know that?’ Frankie demanded shakily. ‘Just how do you know that? And what are you doing here?’

‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Sit down?’ she echoed, dazed green eyes scanning him as if he might disappear in a puff of smoke at any moment.

‘Why not? I see no Signor Megras.’ Santino spun out a chair in silent invitation. The proprietor hurried over to polish the ashtray and then retreated again. ‘Won’t you join me?’

A faint shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, highlighting the tattered posters on the wall and the worn stone floor. Every natural instinct spurred Frankie to flight. She reached the door again without the awareness that she had even moved her feet.

‘Are you afraid of me now?’

Frankie stopped dead, nervous tension screaming through her rigidity as a rush of daunting confusion gripped her. For an instant she felt like an adolescent again, the teenager who had once slavishly obeyed Santino’s every instruction. She had been so terrified of losing his friendship, she would have done anything he told her to do. But no, Santino had not taught her to be afraid of him...she had had to learn for herself to be afraid of the frighteningly strong feelings he aroused inside her.

Was it his fault that she hated him now? She didn’t want to think about whether or not she was being fair. Instead she found herself turning to look back at him again, somehow answering a need within herself that she could not withstand. And inexplicably it was like emerging from the dark into the light, heat and energy warming her, quelling that sudden spurt of fear and making her bite back her bitterness. Slowly, stiffly, she walked back and sank into the seat.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked baldly.

‘Signor Megras won’t be coming. The villas belong to me.’

As the silence pulsed, Frankie stared back at him incredulously. ‘I don’t believe you.’

A slashing smile curved Santino’s wide, sensual mouth. ‘It is the truth. I brought you up here. I wanted to see you again.’

‘Why?’ Her head was spinning.

‘You are my wife. It may be a long time since I have chosen to remind you of that fact, but you are still my wife,’ Santino imparted with measured emphasis.

A jerky laugh of disbelief fell from Frankie’s dry lips. ‘Our marriage was annulled as soon as I went back to the UK,’ she scorned, tilting her chin. ‘Didn’t you get the papers?’

Santino merely smiled again. ‘Did you?’

Her brow furrowed, her mouth tightening. ‘Mum has them. Since I was under-age, she dealt with the formalities—’

‘Is that what you were told?’

‘Look, I know that that ceremony was set aside as null and void!’

‘You’ve been had,’ Santino drawled with lazy amusement.

An angry flush washed over her cheeks. His persistence infuriated her. ‘When I get home, I’ll ensure that you’re sent confirmation of the fact. I can assure you that we are no longer married.’

‘But then we never were...in the adult sense,’ Santino conceded.

Attacked without warning by a cruel Technicolor replay of her last sight of Santino, Frankie paled, her stomach giving a violent lurch. Santino with another woman, locked together in the throes of a very adult passion. A beautiful blonde, her peach-tinted nails spearing into his luxuriant black hair as he kissed her, melding every line of her curvaceous body to the lean, muscular strength of his. Frankie had been ripped apart by that glimpse of Santino as she herself had never seen him, and in that same instant she had been forced to see that they had never had a future together. In leaving, she had set them both free.

Dark golden eyes rested intently on her. ‘I deeply regret the manner of our parting. You were very distressed.’

Shattered that he should have guessed what was on her mind, Frankie went rigid. In self-defence, she focused on the table. She couldn’t think straight. Her emotions, usually so wonderfully well-disciplined, were in wild turmoil. She could barely accept that she was actually with Santino again, but even that bewildering awareness was pounded out of existence by the tremendous pain he had cruelly dredged back up out of her subconscious. With fierce determination, she blocked those memories out.

‘Perhaps it was a mistake to mention that so soon but I can feel it standing between us like a wall,’ Santino incised very quietly.

The assurance sent Frankie’s head flying up again, a fixed smile of derision pasted to her lips. ‘And I think you’re imagining things. So I discovered that my saint had feet of clay.’ She shifted a slim shoulder dismissively. ‘All part of growing up, and irrelevant after this length of time. Now, if those villas really are yours, can we get down to business?’

‘You have indeed been away a long while.’ Santino signalled to the proprietor with a fluid gesture. ‘That’s not how we do business here. We share a drink, we talk, maybe I invite you to my home for dinner and then, possibly after dinner, we get down to business.’

Frankie’s expressive eyes flashed. ‘I won’t be coming to your home for dinner, I assure you—’

‘Strive to wait until you’re invited,’ Santino traded gently.

Her cheeks reddened, her teeth gritting as wine arrived. ‘I find this whole stupid charade juvenile!’

‘As I remember it, you love the unexpected.’ Santino lounged back indolently in his seat, unconcerned by her growing anger and frustration.

‘I was a child then—’

‘Yet at the time you kept on telling me that you were all woman,’ Santino reminded her in a black velvet purr of wry amusement.

The worst tide of colour yet crimsoned Frankie’s throat. ‘So tell me,’ she said sharply, absolutely desperate for a change of subject, ‘are you in the tourist trade now?’

‘This and that.’ Hooded night-dark eyes resting on her, Santino lifted a broad shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug and a half-smile played maddeningly about his mobile mouth.

It was ridiculous that she shouldn’t know what business he was in, ridiculous that she should know so very little about this male to whom she had once been married! But years ago all she had known about Santino was that the elderly village priest was his great-uncle and that during the week he worked in a bank in Cagliari, where he also had the use of an apartment.

But, whatever Santino was doing now, he appeared to be doing very well. That magnificent suit simply shrieked expensive tailoring. But then he was a Latin male, and the Latin male liked to look good and was quite capable of spending a disproportionate amount of his income on his wardrobe. Even so, Frankie wasn’t used to seeing Santino in such formal attire. When he had come home to her at weekends, he had worn jeans and casual shirts. He looked so different now, like some big city business tycoon, stunningly sophisticated and smooth. The acknowledgement sharply disconcerted her.

Santino was surveying her with veiled eyes. ‘I had a good reason for arranging this discreet meeting.’

‘April Fool off-season?’ Frankie derided brittly.

‘I understand that you’re on vacation and I would like to offer you the hospitality of my home,’ Santino contradicted her evenly.

Frankie stared back at him wide-eyed and then a choked laugh escaped her. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

Santino pressed her untouched glass of wine towards her. ‘Why should I be?’

‘I’m leaving for Italy immediately,’ she told him, incredulous that he should advance such an invitation. ‘So I’m afraid we do business now or not at all.’

‘I don’t give a damn about the villas,’ Santino countered very drily.

‘It’s my job to give a damn.’ Her sense of unreality was spreading by the minute. Santino here...with her. It felt so fantastically unreal. Why should Santino want to see her again after so long? Simple curiosity? Clearly he had found out where she worked in London. Was that why the villas had been offered to Finlay Travel? But how had Santino discovered where she worked?

From below her lashes she watched him as she drank, easing her parched vocal cords. He was so cool, so controlled... so calculating? Her spine tingled, some sixth sense spooking her. She scanned his gypsy-dark features, absorbing the stunning symmetry of each. The wide forehead, the thin, arrogant blade of a nose, the blunt high cheekbones and the chiselled curve of his sensual mouth. Her attention roved to his thick black hair, the curls ruthlessly suppressed by an expert cut, and the lustrous, very dark eyes which flared gold in emotion, and yet still a nagging sense of disorientation plagued her.

Santino both looked and felt like a stranger, she acknowledged dazedly, more than that even...a disturbingly intimidating stranger, who wore a cloak of natural authority and command as though he had been born to it. He was not Santino Vitale as she remembered him. Or was it that she now saw more clearly without adoration blinding her perception? Adoration? Inwardly she shrank, but there was no denying that that single word most accurately described the emotions which Santino had once inspired in her.

‘Francesca...’

‘Nobody calls me that any more,’ Frankie muttered waspishly, striving to rise above an ever-increasing sense of crawling mortification.

This encounter was a nightmare, she conceded, stricken. At sixteen, she had been so agonisingly, desperately in love with Santino. She had thrown herself at his head and done and said things that no woman in her right mind would want to recall once she reached the age of maturity! She must have seemed pathetic in his eyes, forever swearing undying love and resisting his every move to sidestep the intimacy which she had craved and which he had never wanted. It hadn’t been Frankie who had locked her bedroom door at night... it had been Santino who’d locked his. That particular recollection made her feel seriously unwell.

‘Look at me...’ A lean brown forefinger skated a teasing path across her clenched knuckles. ‘Please, Francesca...’ he urged gently.

It was like being prodded by a hot wire. Her sensitive flesh scorched and she yanked her hand back out of reach, shaken by a sudden excruciating awareness of every skin-cell in her humming body. Oh, dear heaven, no, she thought as she recognised the wanton source of that overpowering physical response. In horror, she lifted her lashes to collide with glittering gold eyes. Her breath tripped in her throat. Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded starkly.

‘Three weeks out of time,’ Santino admitted softly. ‘I want us to spend that time together.’

‘I’m not spending any time with you!’ Frankie jerked upright, wide green eyes alight with disbelief.

Santino rose at his leisure, grim amusement curling his eloquent mouth. In a single fluid step he reached her. Lean hands confidently tugged her out from behind the table into the circle of his arms. Frankie was so taken aback she just stood there and looked up at him in open bewilderment. She could not credit that Santino would make any form of sexual advance towards her and uneasily assumed that he was trying to be fraternally reassuring.

‘Relax,’ Santino urged lazily, brushing a straying strand of bright hair back from her indented brow.

At that careless touch her heartbeat lurched violently, her throat tightening. Suddenly she was struggling to get air into her lungs. He angled his dark head down and she came in conflict with shimmering dark golden eyes. Another wanton frisson of raw excitement arrowed through her. Her head swam. Her knees wobbled. And then, before she could catch her breath again, Santino brought his mouth down on hers with ruthless precision, expertly parting her soft lips to let his tongue hungrily probe the moist, tender interior within.

That single kiss was the most electrifyingly erotic experience Frankie had ever had. Heat flared between her thighs, making her quiver and moan in shattered response. Instinctively she pushed into the hard heat of his abrasively masculine body. He crushed her to him with satisfying strength. Then he lifted his arrogant dark head and gazed down at her, his brilliant gaze raking over her stunned face as he slowly, calmly set her back from him again. ‘All this time I wondered...now I know,’ he stressed with husky satisfaction.

Frankie turned scarlet. Appalled green eyes fixed to him, she backed away fast. ‘You know nothing about me!’ she gasped, stricken.

In a tempest of angry distress, her only desire to escape from the scene of her own humiliation, Frankie stalked out into the fading daylight. There she blinked in bemusement before she raced across the square. It was empty...empty of her car!

‘And now, thanks to you, my car’s been stolen!’ Frankie shrilled back at Santino where he now lounged with infuriating indolence in the doorway of the bar.

He straightened fluidly and strolled towards her. ‘I stole it,’ he informed her, seemingly becoming cooler and ever more dauntingly assured with every second that made her angrier.

‘You did what?’ Frankie enunciated with extreme difficulty.

‘I am responsible for the disappearance of your car.’

The sort of blinding rage Frankie had honestly believed she had left behind in her teens swept over her. That cool, utterly self-possessed tone affected her like paraffin thrown on a bonfire. ‘Well, you just bloody well get it back, then!’ She launched at him, both of her hands closing into fists of fury. ‘I don’t know what kind of a game you think you’re playing here—’

‘I don’t feel remotely playful,’ Santino slotted in smoothly.

Frankie took a seething stride forward and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. ‘I want my car back now!’

‘The Caparelli Curse,’ Santino remarked softly, reflectively, quite unmoved by the spitting frenzy of her fury. ‘To think I thought rumour exaggerated. No longer does it surprise me that your grandfather was so desperate to marry you off.’

And that was it. At the mention of the hated nickname she had acquired in her grandfather’s village Frankie shuddered, and when Santino went on to remind her that he had been virtually forced into marrying her her last shred of control went. ‘You swine!’ she hissed, and drew back a step the better to take a swing at him.

But Santino was faster on his feet than she had anticipated, and as he sidestepped her the heel of her shoe caught on the lining of the long raincoat still hanging from her shoulders. She lost her balance and went down with a cry of alarm, striking her head. There was pain...then darkness, then nothing as she slid into unconsciousness.