LYNNE GRAHAM - The Reluctant Husband

Frankie left her room. She emerged into a panelled corridor, lined with dark medieval paintings and beautiful rugs that glowed with the dull richness of age. When she saw a stone spiral staircase twisting up out of sight at the foot of the passageway, she was tempted to explore. Well, why not? If the villas on the Costa Smeralda were not to be made available to the agency, she was now technically on holiday. She really ought to give Matt a call, she conceded absently. He might be wondering why he hadn’t heard from her in three days.

Through the studded oak door at the top of the spiral flight of steps, Frankie stepped out onto the roof...or was it the ramparts? With astonished eyes, she scanned the big square towers rising at either end and then, walking over to the parapet, she gazed down in dizzy horror at the sheerness of the drop, where ancient stone met cliff-face far below her, and then she looked up and around, drinking in the magnificent views of the snowcapped mountains that surrounded the fertile wooded valley.

‘You seem to have made a good recovery.’

Frankie very nearly jumped out of her skin. Breathlessly she spun round. Santino was strolling towards her and this time he looked disturbingly familiar. Faded blue jeans sheathed his lean hips and long, powerful thighs, a short-sleeved white cotton shirt was open at his strong brown throat. He walked like the king of the jungle on the prowl, slow, sure-footed and very much a predator.

Sexy, she thought dizzily, struggling weakly to drag her disobedient gaze from his magnificent physique. Incredibly sexy. He was so flagrantly at home with his very male body, relaxed, indolent, staggeringly selfassured. She reddened furiously as he paused several feet away. He sank down with careless grace on the edge of the parapet, displaying the kind of complete indifference to the empty air and the terrifying drop behind him that brought Frankie out in a cold sweat.

‘I saw you from the tower. I thought you’d still be in bed,’ he admitted.

‘I’m pretty resilient,’ Frankie returned stiffly, thinking that it would mean little to her if he went over the edge but, all the same, she wished he would move.

‘One committed career woman, no less,’ Santino drawled, running diamond-bright dark eyes consideringly over the plain businesslike appearance she had contrived to present in spite of the heat. ‘To think you used to wash my shirts and shrink them.’

Frankie was maddened by the further flush of embarrassment that crept up her throat. It reminded her horribly of the frightful adolescent awkwardness she had once exhibited around Santino. Not that that surprised her. Santino was drop-dead gorgeous. Santino would make a Greek god look plain and homely because he had a quality of blazing vibrance and energy that no statue could ever match. If she hadn’t fancied him like mad all those years ago, there would have been something lacking in her teenage hormones, she told herself.

‘Did I really?’ she said in a flat, bored tone.

‘I always wondered if you boiled them,’ Santino mused, perversely refusing to take the hint that the subject was a conversation-killer.

‘Well, you should have complained if it bothered you,’

‘You were a marvellous cook.’

‘I enjoyed cooking for you about as much as I enjoyed scrubbing your kitchen floor!’ And she was lying; she hated the fact that she was lying and that, worst of all, he had to know that she was lying.

But what else had she known? The formal education she had received from the age of eleven had been minimal, but her domestic training as a future wife and mother had been far more thorough. Between them, her father’s family had seen to that. No matter how hard she had fought to preserve her own identity, she had in the end been indoctrinated with prehistoric ideas of a woman’s subservient place in the home. Endless backbreaking work and catering to some man’s every wish as though he were an angry god to be appeased rather than an equal... That was what she had been taught and that was what she had absorbed as her former life in London had begun to take on the shadowy and meaningless unreality of another world.

Her spine notched up another inch, bitter resentment at what she had been reduced to steeling her afresh. She had sung as she scrubbed his kitchen floor! She had thought she knew it all by then. She had thought that by marrying Santino, who said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and even, amazingly, ‘That’s too heavy for you to carry,’ she had beaten the system, but in truth she had joined it. She had been prepared to settle for whatever she could get if she could have Santino. For the entire six months of their marriage, she would not have accepted a plane ticket out of Sardinia had it been forced on her...

‘I did try to persuade you to resume your education,’ he reminded her drily.

‘Oh, keep quiet...stop dragging it all back up. It makes me feel ill!’ Frankie snapped, spinning away with smarting eyes.

He had wanted her to attend a further education college in Florence. Florence! The Caparellis had been aghast when she’d mentioned it. What kind of a husband sent his wife back to school? She could read, she could write, she could count—what more did he want? And Frankie had been genuinely terrified of being sent away to a strange city where her ignorance would be exposed, where the other students might laugh at her poor Italian and where, worst of all, she would not have Santino.

In her innocence, she had actually asked Santino if he would go to Florence with her, and he had said that he would only be able to visit because the demands of his job would not allow him to live there. Of course, in the kindest possible way, she conceded grudgingly, Santino had been trying to make the first step towards loosening the ties of their ridiculous marriage by persuading her into a separation and a measure of independence. He had known very well that she was so infatuated with him that she was unlikely to make a recovery as long as he was still around.

He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. He had even said that, yes, he would miss her very much but that he felt that she would greatly gain in self-confidence if she completed her education. And she had accused him then of being ashamed of her and had raced upstairs in floods of inconsolable tears. She had refused to eat for the rest of that weekend, had alternately sulked and sobbed every time he’d tried to reason with her. No, she reflected painfully, nobody could ever say that Santino had found marriage to his child-bride a bed of roses... or, indeed, any kind of a bed at all, she conceded with burning cheeks.

‘We have a lot to talk about,’ Santino commented flatly.

Tension hummed in the air. For the first time, Frankie became aware of that thick tension and frowned at the surprising coldness she was only now registering in Santino’s voice. Before, Santino had been teasing her, yet now he was undeniably distant and cool. She didn’t know him in this mood. The awareness disconcerted her and then made her angrily defensive.

‘On a personal basis we have nothing to talk about, but good luck with your fraud case!’ Frankie told him with a ferociously bright smile. ‘However, if you want to discuss the—’

‘If you mention those villas one more time, I will lose my temper. What are they to me? Nothing,’ Santino derided with a dismissive gesture of one lean hand. ‘The bait by which I brought you here, but now no more! Their role is played now.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue what more you expect from me, and nor do I intend to hang around to find out,’ Frankie asserted, colliding with hard golden eyes that were curiously chilling, and, since that was not a sensation which she had ever associated with Santino before, she paled and tensed up even more.