LYNNE GRAHAM: The Reluctant Husband

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.