Michelle Reid - Italian Deception - The Salvatore Marriage / A Sicilian Seduction / The Passion Bargain

It made no difference and if anything only seemed to make her writhe all the more. An agitated need to do something about it before the pain tore her apart sent her agony-bright eyes shooting around the darkened bedroom in search of help from something—anything!

But then her cramping muscle twisted a little tighter and she tumbled off the side of the bed to land in a heap on hard, polished wood squirming and whimpering like a wounded animal.

She had never suffered from cramp in her life before, so she had no idea what to do to ease it. She tried shaking the offending leg, then rubbing it again when the shaking did nothing but make her teeth sing. In sheer desperation she tried to stand up on the dizzy idea that if she could manage to reach the bathroom she could apply something warm to the muscle in the hope heat would help release the angry spasm. But she never made it because the moment she placed any weight on the leg the pain became so unbearable that she landed back on the floor amidst a shrill and shaken cry.

The bedroom door suddenly flew open, and light from the hallway poured into the room. ‘What the hell—?’ a harsh voice demanded.

Luca stood there. She stared helplessly up at his lean, dark bulk silhouetted against the light. ‘Cramp,’ she groaned.

It was all she could manage.

To give him credit he didn’t need to be told twice. In a couple of strides he was kneeling beside her and gripping the offending leg with ruthless fingers, then began manipulating the cramped muscle in a way that set her teeth singing again.

‘I should have known something like this would happen,’ he gritted over her whimpered cries of protest. ‘When was the last time you bothered to drink anything? You must be dehydrated, you fool!’

Fool or not, she was beginning to see stars now, tears were streaming down her face. ‘It hurts,’ she cried over and over and kept hitting the floor with a fist while he kept up his grim manipulation of her leg.

Miraculously, though, his form of torture began to ease the other. Sheer relief from the pain brought her out in a shivering cold sweat. ‘Aah!’ she gasped out shakily. ‘That has to be the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.’

But Luca wasn’t listening. His dark face locked with anger, he had twisted to pull the light quilt from the bed and was grimly bundling her shivering body into it. Without a word he gathered her into his arms and stood up to carry her out of the bedroom then down the hall and into the kitchen where he finally dumped her on a chair at the table.

Not quite knowing what had hit her, Shannon sat huddling into the quilt while she stared at him in a state of near shock as he crossed the floor and opened the fridge door. A second later he was placing a clean glass tumbler and a bottle of water down on the table.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

In mute obedience Shannon unscrewed the bottle top and—ignoring the glass—drank straight from the bottle. Ice-cold, the water was like nectar to her parched mouth and burning throat. After drinking down half the bottle she slumped back in the chair and closed her eyes while she tried to grapple with what had just happened. Her leg felt as if someone had kicked it; the pain had left her shaken and weak. Her head ached with one of those dull throbs that came with too much stress and she felt so tired she could fall asleep where she was sitting.

A sound beside her forced her eyes to open. Luca was leaning against the table beside her chair staring down at his own bare feet. He looked tired and pale, the long day’s strain etched into the hard contours of his face.

‘Sorry I woke you,’ she mumbled.

‘I was not asleep,’ he replied, and the way he said it told her that he had been lying there thinking about his brother, loving him, hurting for him, wishing the last twenty-four hours had never been.

Her heart turned over, an aching sympathy curling around it. She wanted to reach out and touch him gently, offer words that might help to ease his grief. But there were no such words and she didn’t dare mention Angelo’s name because whenever she did Luca went ballistic. It was such a helpless, hollow feeling to know that she was not the person he wanted to confide his feelings in.

She would have been, once upon a time. He used to tell her everything. They would lie in bed with limbs tangled and talk and talk and—

‘Drink.’

Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheek-bones, then lifted to find him looking at her. His eyes were dark—dark as ebony, sleepy and sultry, his lashes curved and spiky and just begging her to—

She looked away quickly before the senses she could feel beginning to stir took a dangerous grip. Picking up the bottle, she drank some more, hoping the cold water would cool what was beginning to heat. She didn’t want to want Luca. She didn’t want to remember things about him that she’d learned years before. He was her past. She’d moved on since then.

And just because he was leaning here wearing only a short, hastily tied robe did not mean she had to conjure up memories of the body beneath the robe. So what if this particular man was built to push the female sex drive into meltdown? Sex was sex. These days she looked for deeper things in a relationship like friendship, caring and respect. One day she might even find a man she felt she could trust enough to give him these things. She hadn’t stopped looking because of one bad experience. It was just that she hadn’t found him yet.

Lifting the bottle to her lips, she drank again. The only illumination in the room came from the down-lighters that were integral to the wall units. The light barely reached the centrally placed table but what did manage to reach cast a warm, seductive glow. And it was quiet, so quiet she thought she could hear the unsteady beat of Luca’s heart.

Or was it her heart that was beating unsteadily?

Of course it was her heart. He was too close and she wished that he weren’t. Lifting the bottle again, she kept her eyes carefully averted from him and tried to pretend that they were complete strangers.

But averting her eyes didn’t do anything but give her imagination a chance to list every detail about him. The length of his legs, for instance, the power in his golden thighs. The robe he was wearing could cover what it liked without making much difference to her for she knew every inch of him, the shape of each separate vertebra in his long, supple spine. She knew the wonderful feel of his satin skin and the contrasting crisp coils of hair that covered his chest. She knew how firm his stomach was, how taut the muscles were in his lean behind. She could draw a picture of every sleek detail from his long brown toes to even longer fingers.

Oh, stop it! she railed herself as a sensation she knew only too well made her squirm. Move away from me! she wanted to yell at him, but instead took another gulp at her drink because saying anything of the kind would be tantamount to confessing what she was thinking and she would rather cut out her tongue than let him know what was inside her head.

A sigh shook her. The kind of sigh that was supposed to ease tension, not help to intensify it—yet that was exactly what this particular sigh did. It intensified everything she was thinking and feeling until the atmosphere began to sing. She wanted to run but remained glued to her seat. She wished those legs weren’t right in her field of vision, yet couldn’t make herself look the other way.

‘What time is it?’ she asked with a touch of desperation.

‘Three-thirty,’ he supplied and even his voice worked its own kind of magic on what was happening to her. It was low and deep and dark and gorgeously accented. It tugged at her heartstrings, which in turn tugged at more susceptible things.