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

‘Don’t say that.’ He frowned. ‘You are not your sister. You—’

‘So for us to consider marriage on the slimmest chance of my being pregnant is really stupid,’ she interrupted him. ‘But, even if I am pregnant and did manage to carry the baby full term, I would not marry a man who thinks that not only am I promiscuous but I’m irresponsible with it!’

‘I don’t think you are promiscuous!’ he denied. ‘And we are not getting back into that.’

As far as Shannon was concerned they’d never left it! ‘Can’t trust me to stay faithful, then!’

He thrust out his chin. ‘I can trust,’ he insisted.

Her own chin went up, blue eyes defying the lying swine to prove that statement. ‘Who was I planning to be with the night you came to my London flat?’ she challenged.

His frown dragged the two black bars of his eyebrows together. ‘How should I know?’

‘You heard me make two telephone calls—both of which were to men—and drew some pretty quick assumptions that both of them were my lovers! That makes me pretty sluttish and untrustworthy wife material, don’t you think? Add those two lovers to my irresponsible behaviour regarding sex and either one of them could be the father of this fictitious child!’

He dismissed that line of argument with an impatient flick of one long-fingered hand. ‘One of those calls was to a woman.’

Surprise widened her eyes. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Joshua Soames,’ he replied. ‘He called here the other day to talk to you while you were at the hospital. I asked the question, he set the record straight.’

He’d actually pumped her business partner for information about Alex? ‘And you call that trusting me?’

The frown darkened. ‘Stop this,’ he grated. ‘Do you think I am an idiot? If you are not on the pill then you are not in a relationship. And don’t start going on about slutting,’ he dismissed with another flick of that hand when she opened her mouth to answer him. ‘This is too serious an issue to be bouncing insults off each other. If you are pregnant it will be because I made you so, in which case I want to be there for you. If you have to go through what Keira went through, then I want to be there to support you as Angelo supported Keira. So I am offering you a serious commitment here.’ He began walking towards her, closing a gap Shannon did not want closed. ‘I am offering marriage—now—before the timing of conception can become an issue. I am offering it without any prejudice from the past getting in the way. And I would appreciate an honest and unprejudiced answer from you instead of razor sarcasm.’

Shannon stood through it all, watching his face and his expressive hands in fascination while listening to the slick dynamics of his clever brain as he put together his offer outlining all the positives for marriage and ignoring the negatives such as—no love, no respect, no emotional commitment, no mention of his family’s horrified response.

She felt like a business he was trying to take over. He was being very cool and practical and even a little arrogant, though the arrogance was rather an attractive feature of his sales pitch. His ulterior motive? For the moment she couldn’t think of one, she was too engrossed in the seductive power this man possessed when he turned himself into a trouble-shooter. She’d always liked it, been an absolute sucker for it once upon a time. Get him in professional mode discussing the rudiments of corporate management and she would be stripping him naked as he talked.

She’d seen him work this kind of magic on a room full of hard headed women while giving a talk at a businesswomen’s convention. By the time he’d stepped off the podium to rapturous applause there had not been a woman in the place who had not been fantasising about him. She had been the lucky one to get him alone, though, and tap into the fantasy.

She could feel the same charismatic pull now trying to draw her towards him like a magnet. The voice was seductive, the beautiful accent was seductive, the expressive way he used his hands made you visualise them moving over your skin. The serious mouth that pretended he did not know it was happening was seductive; the serious eyes that waited politely for her to offer her response were seducing her into uttering the response he wanted to hear.

He was lethal, she acknowledged. But she’d also come up with the answer to his ulterior motive.

Sex.

He might be able to keep the mask of his face under control but he was not having the same luck with the rest of his body. He’d said at much before as he lay on the bed watching her as she went to get the box of truffles. ‘I cannot look at you without wanting to be inside you,’ he’d confessed. What they could do for each other was still jumping all over his senses with a desire to do it all again and again.

He was hooked, on the slut who always did have the instinctive sensual expertise to turn him inside out. So—why not marry her? was his very male answer to a nagging problem. If her betrayal with another man had not got in the way two years ago, he would have committed himself to her body and soul then and without a single regret for his lost single status. He was still prepared to do that because, despite all that had happened, the sex was still mindlessly good. And the irresistible little sweetener to his outrageous proposal was that he could have it all without all the old emotional stuff getting in the way.

She called it thinking on his feet, seeing a chance to have his cake and eat it at the same time. Somewhere in the last hour she had been elevated to his idea of the perfect woman. A woman, in other words, who would be absolutely great to have as a permanent fixture in his bed but would not expect or get anything else from him once they were out of that bed.

The bastard, she thought. He hadn’t bothered to mention his darling family or the fact that they had all just lived through the worst seven days of all of their lives and still had the worst day to come. This was a window of opportunity and he was not going to let the chance pass by.

She felt cold—iced over by his calculation, the speed with which he could assess and decide. He had done it to her before—two years ago in this very apartment when he’d walked in on a frankly suspicious scene, assessed and come to a decision with the blinding speed of light. That was the moment that she’d become a slut in his eyes and nothing she said afterwards could change that belief.

She shivered, she felt so cold. Inside—outside—and found herself fighting a battle with her tongue that wanted her to blurt out the truth. What would he do if she brought it all out into the open again? she wondered. Would he respond as he had done the last time by accusing her of daring to soil her sister with her own sins?

And what had Keira done? she then recalled painfully. Her sister had begged her to say nothing. Begged her to understand why she could never confess the truth to Luca, not even for Shannon’s sake. ‘He will tell Angelo. How could he not? If it was the other way round I would have to tell you or I could not live with myself!’

Those words were emblazoned on her heart for ever now. Because despite everything Keira had said she had told Luca, she had tried to save herself at the expense of Keira’s marriage to Angelo.

But Luca had refused to believe.

Keira had been everyone’s vision of the perfect woman, therefore Shannon had to be the sinner.

His opinion was not about to change because he’d discovered he could not keep his hands off her. He was still going to go on resenting her presence in his life and never trusting her alone with any man and probably using the sex as a darn great way of exacting punishment for betraying him.