Jennifer Faye - Italian Mavericks - In The Italian's Bed - Leonetti's Housekeeper Bride / Inherited by Ferranti / Best Man for the Bridesmaid

But if they married, a few weeks down the matrimonial road he’d be back to normal, he told himself bracingly. The challenge would be gone. The lust would die once he could have her whenever he wanted her. He would soon be himself again, cooler, calmer, back in control, fully focussed on the bank. How was it possible that just the fantasy of sinking into Poppy’s wet, willing body excited him more than he had ever been excited? What was it about her?

Maybe it was the weird clothes, maybe he had a secret Goth fetish. Maybe it was her argumentative nature, because he had always thrilled to a challenge. Maybe it was her cheeky texts that made him laugh. The fact she could still blush? That was strange. Every time he mentioned sex she went red, as if he had said something outrageous. She couldn’t possibly be that innocent, although he was willing to allow that she might well have considerably less experience between the sheets than he had acquired.

Gaetano shook Poppy awake at the ungodly hour of six in the morning, obstinately and cruelly ignoring her heartfelt moans to insist that she join him for breakfast. After a quick shower and the application of a little make-up, Poppy teamed a black dress enlivened with a red rose print with high heels and sauntered down to the dining room. Gaetano was already ensconced with black coffee, a horrendously unhealthy fry-up and the Financial Times.

She was gloriously conscious of his attention as she helped herself to cereal and took a seat at the other end of the table, her ruby cluster ring catching the light. Gaetano put down the newspaper and regarded her levelly, dark golden eyes steady as a rock and full of an impatience he didn’t need to voice.

‘Yes, I’ll marry you,’ Poppy told him straight off.

‘Does that mean I get to share my bed with you tonight?’ was Gaetano’s first telling question.

‘You are incredibly goal-orientated about entirely the wrong things!’ Poppy censured immediately. ‘You can wait until we’re married.’

‘Nobody waits until they’re married these days!’

‘I haven’t had sex before. I want it to feel special,’ she told him stubbornly.

His expressive dark eyes flared with incredulity. ‘I refuse to credit that. I saw you with Toby Styles...’

‘I hate you!’ Poppy launched at him in a sudden tempest of furious embarrassment, her pale skin flushed to her hairline. ‘Of all the moments I don’t want to be reminded of, you have to bring that one up and throw it at me!’

‘Well, it was one of those unforgettable moments that did seem fairly self-explanatory. I saw you sidling out of the shrubbery covered in blushes and grass stains,’ Gaetano commented with grudging amusement. ‘So, why lie about it? This is purely about sex, bella mia, and I’m all for full bedroom equality. Whether or not you’re a virgin or a secret slut matters not a damn to me.’

Poppy compressed her lips. ‘If you must know—although it’s none of your blasted business—I did plan to have sex that day with Toby but I changed my mind because it wasn’t what I really wanted.’ No, what she had really, really wanted that day, she acknowledged belatedly, was to wander off into the shrubbery and be ravished by Gaetano, who had dominated her every juvenile fantasy. Sadly, however, Gaetano hadn’t been an option.

‘Poor Toby...’ Gaetano frowned.

‘He was very decent about it,’ Poppy muttered in mortification. ‘He’s married to one of my friends now.’

‘But there must have been someone since then?’

‘No.’

Gaetano continued to stare at her as if she were a circus freak. ‘But you’re so full of passion...’

Only with you. The words remained unspoken.

Gaetano lifted his coffee with a slightly dazed expression in his shrewd gaze. ‘I’ll be the first...really?’

Poppy shrugged a shoulder. ‘But if you think it’s likely to be a turn-off I can always go and look for a one-night stand.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Gaetano growled.

‘That was a joke.’

‘It’s not a turn-off, simply a surprise,’ Gaetano admitted flatly. ‘OK, I’ll wait until we’re married if it’s so significant to you. But I think you’re making an unnecessary production out of it.’

Her body was all he wanted from her, Poppy interpreted painfully. At least if she was his legal wife, it would feel less demeaning, wouldn’t it?

‘I’ll organise a gynae appointment for you,’ Gaetano continued briskly. ‘Reliable birth control is important. We don’t want any slip-ups in that department when we’re not planning to stay together.’

‘Obviously not,’ she agreed, sipping with determination at her hot-chocolate drink while thinking for the very first time in her life about having a baby. She had always liked children, always assumed that she would become a mother one day, but she reckoned that day lay a long way ahead in her future.

‘And whatever you do,’ Gaetano warned with chilling precision, ‘don’t go falling for me.’

‘And why would I do that?’ Poppy demanded baldly, her cheeks hotter than hell in fear of him mentioning that so mortifying teenaged crush again. ‘Having sex with you is not going to make me fall in love with you. I know you think you’re fantastic in bed, Gaetano, but you’re not fantastic enough out of bed.’

Infuriatingly, Gaetano did not react badly to that criticism. ‘That’s good because that’s one complication I can do without. I hate it when women fall for me and make me feel that it’s my fault.’

Well, that was frank, and forewarned was forearmed, Poppy told herself squarely. ‘It’s probably your money they’re falling for,’ she suggested in a tone of saccharine sweetness. ‘You have yet to show me a single loveable trait.’

‘Grazie al cielo...thank goodness,’ Gaetano responded in a tone of galling relief. ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me or this marriage.’

‘I won’t. This marriage will be like one of those business mergers. You are so safe,’ Poppy declared brightly. ‘You will merely be the first stepping stone on my sexual path.’

Gaetano was taken aback to discover that he didn’t want to think of a string of other men enjoying her along that particular path. In fact it gave him a slightly nauseated sensation in the pit of his stomach. The acknowledgement bemused him and he put it down to the simple fact that as yet he had not enjoyed her either. He was thinking too much about something relatively unimportant, he reflected impatiently. Sex was sex and his wedding night would provide the cure for what was currently afflicting him. Since when had he ever attached so much consequence to sex? Even so, it had been entirely right to have the conversation with Poppy to ensure that they perfectly understood each other’s expectations.

‘I’ll make a start on the wedding arrangements today,’ Gaetano completed smoothly.

* * *

‘You look beautiful,’ Jasmine Arnold told her daughter warmly as she emerged from her bedroom in her wedding dress.

The older woman was attending her daughter’s wedding with a member of the clinic support staff. Although Poppy could see a big improvement in her mother’s appearance and mood, she knew how hard it was for Jasmine to return to Woodfield Hall where she had been so depressed. And while Poppy had asked her mother to walk her down the aisle, her brother was doing it instead because Jasmine could not face being the centre of that much attention.

Poppy quite understood the older woman’s reluctance because hundreds of guests were attending the wedding being staged to celebrate Gaetano’s marriage at Woodfield Hall. The Leonetti men had always got married in the church in the grounds of their ancestral home and neither Rodolfo nor Gaetano had seen any reason to flout tradition. Indeed Gaetano had expected Poppy to move straight into the main house as though she already belonged there but Poppy had returned to the small service flat where she had grown up, determined to move back and forth as required.