Melanie Milburne - The Venadicci Marriage Vengeance

‘I’m prepared to marry you, but that’s as far as it goes,’ she said with a testy look. ‘It’s totally barbaric of you to expect me to agree to a physical relationship with you.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he asked. ‘Two point four million dollars is a high price for a bride, and I expect to get my money’s worth.’

She sucked in a rasping breath. ‘This is outrageous! It’s akin to prostitution.’

‘You came to me for help, Gabriella, and I gave it to you,’ he said. ‘I was totally up-front about the terms, so there is no point in pretending to be shocked about them now.’

‘But what about the woman you were seeing a month or so ago?’ Gabby asked, recalling a photograph she had seen in the ‘Who’s-Out-and-About?’ section of one of the Sydney papers. An exquisitely beautiful woman gazing up at Vinn adoringly.

He gave her a supercilious smile. ‘So you have been keeping a close eye on my love life, have you, mia piccola? ’

She glowered at him darkly. ‘I have absolutely no interest in who you see. But if we are to suffer a short-term marriage, the very least you could do is keep your affairs out of the press.’

‘I don’t recall saying our marriage was going to be a short-term one,’ he said with an inscrutable smile. ‘Far from it.’

Gabby felt her heart give a kick-like movement against the wall of her chest. ‘W-what?’ she gasped.

‘I have always held the opinion that marriage should be for life,’ he said. ‘I guess you could say it stems from my background. My mother was abandoned by the man she loved while she had a baby on the way. She had no security, no husband to provide for her, and as a result she went on to live a hard life of drudgery— cleaning other people’s houses to keep food on the table and clothes on our backs. I swore from an early age that when it came time for me to settle down I would do so with permanence in mind.’

‘But you don’t even like me!’ she blurted in shock. ‘How could you possibly contemplate tying yourself to me for the rest of your life?’

‘Haven’t you got any mirrors at your house any more, mia splendida ragazza? ’ he asked, with another smouldering look. ‘I do not have to like you to lust over you. And isn’t that what every wife wants? A husband with an unquenchable desire for her and her alone?’

Gabby swallowed back her panic, but even so she felt as if she was choking on a thick uneven lump of it. ‘You’re winding me up. I know you are. This is your idea of a sick joke. And let me tell you, I am not finding it the least bit amusing.’

‘I am not joking, Gabriella,’ he said. ‘Love is generally an overrated emotion—or at least I have found it to be so. People fall in and out of love all the time. But some of the most successful marriages I know are those built on compatibility in bed—and, believe you me, you don’t need to be in love with someone to have an earth-shattering orgasm with them.’

Gabby felt her face explode with colour, and was never more grateful for the reappearance of the waiter to take their meal orders.

Hearing Vinn speak of…that word… that experience … made her go hot all over. She had never experienced pleasure with her late husband. The one time Tristan had taken it upon himself to assert “his manly duty”, as he had euphemistically called it, he had left her not cold, but burning with pain and shame.

Once the waiter had left, Gabby drained the rest of her cocktail, beyond caring that it had made her head spin. No amount of alcohol could affect her more than Vinn had already done, she decided. Her body was tingling all over with sensation, and her mind was running off at wayward tangents, imagining what it would feel like to be crushed by the solid weight of his body, his sensual mouth locked on hers, one of his strong, hair-roughened thighs nudging hers apart to—

She jerked away from her thoughts, annoyed that she had allowed his potent brand of sensuality to get under her guard. What on earth was she thinking? He was the enemy. She knew exactly what he was doing and why. He was only marrying her to get back at her for how she had treated him in the past. He knew it would be torture for her to be tied to him. Why else would he insist on it? Never had she regretted her immature behaviour more than this moment. Why, oh why, had she been so shallow and cruel?

Gabby’s older brother Blair had often pulled her up for her attitude towards Vinn, but in a way his relationship with Vinn had been a huge part of the problem. She had felt jealous that her adored older brother clearly preferred the company of the cleaner’s son to hers. Gabby had resented the way Blair spent hours helping Vinn with his studies when he could have been spending time with her, the way he’d used to do before Vinn had arrived with his mother.

When Gabby had accidentally stumbled upon the realisation that Vinn suffered from dyslexia she had cruelly taunted him with it, mocking him for not being able to read the most basic of texts. But for some reason, just as he had when she had led him on so despicably that hot summer afternoon when she was sixteen, Vinn had never spoken to her brother or her parents about her behaviour. He had taken it on the chin, removing himself from her presence without a word, even though she had sensed the blistering anger in him, simmering just below the surface of his steely outward calm.

Gabby could sense that anger still simmering now, in the way he looked at her from beneath that slightly hooded brow. Those grey-blue eyes were like mysteriously deep mountain lakes, icy cold one minute, warm and inviting the next, and they spoke of a man who had nothing but revenge on his mind.

She had seen the way women were looking at him. He had such arrestingly handsome features, and his presence was both commanding and brooding—as if he was calculating his next move, like a champion chess player, prepared to take as long as he needed to move his king, making his opponent sit it out in gut-wrenching apprehension.

Gabby felt another shiver of unease pass through her at the thought of being married to him. He had said he expected their marriage to be permanent. That meant there were issues to consider: children, for one thing. She was twenty-eight years old, and she would be lying if she said she hadn’t heard the relentless ticking of her biological clock in the two years since Tristan had died. Children had not been an option while she had been married to him. She would never have brought children into such a relationship. She hadn’t even brought a pet into the house in case he had used it against her in one of his violent moods.

‘You have gone very quiet, Gabriella,’ Vinn observed. ‘Is the thought of having an orgasm with me too hard for you to handle?’

She gave him a withering look. ‘No, in actual fact I find it hard to believe it possible,’ she said. ‘I can’t speak for the legion of women you’ve already bedded, but I personally am unable to engage in such an intimate act without some engagement of emotion.’

He gave a deep chuckle of laughter. ‘How about hate?’ he asked, reaching for his mineral water. ‘Is that enough emotion to get you rolling?’

She put down her glass and signalled for the waiter to refill it.

‘Do you think that is wise?’ Vinn asked. ‘The amount of alcohol in that drink is enough to cloud anyone’s judgement.’

Gabby put up her chin. ‘In the absence of the engagement of emotion, alcohol and a great deal of it is the next best thing,’ she said.

His eyes narrowed to grey-blue stormy slits. ‘If you think I will bed you while you are under the influence, think again,’ he said. ‘When we come together for the first time I want you stone-cold sober, so you remember every second of it.’