Buying His Bride of Convenience

by Michelle Smart

  ‘There was nothing in it about us sharing a bed.’

  ‘You want me to put that in?’ he asked, bemused.

  ‘No,’ she said quickly, shaking her head vigorously, her ponytail whipping through the air.

  ‘Are you sure? We can have it spelt out that you and I are to share a bed every night of our married life if you want to hold me to it.’

  She crossed her arms, pulling the new chunky cardigan she was wearing across her chest and covering the new silk shirt that was extremely flattering on her. He wondered if she was aware how the cut and the material clung to the fullness of her breasts. Crossing her arms hid the effect but, Dio, she was one sexy lady and knowing his reward for marrying her meant he got to share a bed with her every night meant there was heady anticipation mingling with his dread at the forthcoming loss of his freedom.

  ‘I just assumed you would put it in the document,’ she murmured.

  ‘It’s a private agreement between us. I assumed I could trust you to stick to your side of it. Are you telling me I can’t?’

  For the first time since he’d met her she seemed genuinely flustered but that didn’t stop her raising her eyes to meet his with defiance. ‘I will stick to my side of our agreement.’

  ‘Then there is nothing else to say on the matter. I’ll tell my lawyer to come here first thing so we can get it signed.’

  She jerked a nod and, keeping her arms tightly crossed around her midriff, walked past him towards the door that led to the castello kitchens.

  ‘When were you going to tell me you’d been married before?’ he asked to her retreating back.

  She stopped in her tracks and slowly turned to face him. Her face was an emotionless mask. ‘You said you didn’t want to know about my past.’

  He kept his response emotionless too, although he acknowledged to himself the truth in her rejoinder. It was something he’d brooded on during her shopping spree. Eva was so cold towards him that he’d allowed himself to believe she was that way with everyone, even when he’d seen the evidence with his own eyes that with people she liked, she had the ability to be warm, like with those kids who’d come running to wave her off in Caballeros. To discover she’d been close enough to someone that she’d actually married them had been disconcerting, although he couldn’t put a finger on why. ‘That you’ve been married is something I should have known.’

  ‘I am not a psychic. I cannot be expected to know what you think you should know when, as I just said, you expressly told me you have no wish to know anything about me.’

  And he thought his sister was quick off the mark. The difference between them was that Francesca would fire her retorts back where Eva kept a veneer of icy calm around her that was both a thing of beauty and disturbingly infuriating. She really could be made of marble.

  Realising his jaw was clenched so tight his teeth could grind wheat into flour, he concentrated on relaxing it to say as politely as he could, to let her know two could play at the icy calm veneer, ‘Is there anything else important about you that I should know?’

  Now her eyebrow rose a touch but she kept her defensive stance. ‘How am I supposed to know what you think is important?’

  Did you marry Johann for love?

  He kept that question to himself. It wasn’t important. So unimportant was it that he couldn’t fathom why he would even have thought of it.

  Instead, he lightened his tone, taking them away from this dangerous territory. ‘Do you have a criminal record?’

  Instead of the instant rebuttal he’d expected, she hesitated before shaking her head.

  ‘You don’t seem very sure about that,’ he said.

  ‘No criminal record,’ she said with more decisiveness, then indicated to the door she’d been heading towards. ‘I’m going to get a coffee. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘I’ll call a member of staff to get it for us.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was anyone here.’

  ‘There’s kitchen staff in.’

  ‘Then I should go and meet them.’ She raised her shoulders. ‘If I’m going to live here for the foreseeable future I need to get to know them and learn my way around this place.’

  ‘Follow the corridor to the second set of stairs then take your first left at the bottom. I’m afraid the service elevator’s out of use. We need to get it repaired, like everything else in this bloody place.’

  She gave a noncommittal shrug. As she reached the door he couldn’t hold back the other question clamouring inside of him.

  ‘What happened to your husband?’

  ‘How did he die?’

  He nodded. If he hadn’t been so shocked to have the man’s death certificate in his hands he would have read it more carefully.

  ‘A brain tumour.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Her chest rose as her lips pulled in together and she gave a sharp nod. ‘Thank you.’

  He paused before asking, ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Four years.’

  ‘You must have been young when you married.’

  ‘We were both eighteen.’

  He winced. Eva was a modern, independent woman. Why would a woman like her marry so young?

  If he asked her she would tell him. The way she stood by the door, her blue stare not flinching from his, he knew she would tell him anything he wished to know. If he asked why she’d hesitated about having a criminal record she would tell him that too. She would answer any question he wished to ask.

  But he didn’t wish to ask. He didn’t need to know anything more than had already been revealed.

  He especially didn’t need to know if she’d married Johann for love.

  * * *

  To Eva’s consternation, the next four days flew by. Every time she looked at the clock, expecting to see ten or twenty minutes had passed since her last look, she would find another hour gone. She didn’t see much of Daniele. He had a host of work to get finished before they exchanged their vows, leaving her to her own devices while he flew to Paris and then Hamburg and then on to somewhere else she didn’t catch the name of. She knew that would all change when they married.

  Francesca took her to the wedding dress shop in Pisa as she’d promised, then surprised her by taking her to lunch where Vanessa Pellegrini, the woman who in a few short days would be her mother-in-law, joined them. Much to Eva’s relief, the elder Pellegrini woman was as warm and hospitable as her daughter and clearly thrilled her remaining son was going to marry. If it concerned Vanessa that her son was paying Eva to be his wife, she kept it to herself.

  Eva spent the rest of her days exploring the castello and the estate grounds. The vineyards in the winter cold were barren and lifeless but she could imagine them packed full of fat, juicy grapes in the hot summer months. At least that was something to look forward to.

  She also visited the castello’s private chapel in which they would marry. She had misgivings about marrying in a religious house, something she had shared with Daniele after they’d signed the prenuptial agreement. His response had been a nonchalant, ‘If we’re both committing to this marriage then there’s no hypocrisy or sacrilege.’

  ‘But we don’t mean it.’

  He’d fixed those green-brown eyes on her. ‘My ancestor, Emmanuelle the third, married his wife Josephine of Breton in the chapel with her father holding her arms behind her back to stop her running away. What we’re doing is tame compared to that and they were married for twenty years.’

  ‘Were they happy for twenty years?’ she’d asked cynically, while her heart twisted for the agony the long-dead Josephine must have lived through. She doubted she would cope with marriage to Daniele for twenty weeks never mind twenty years.

  His laughter had been short but full-throttled. ‘Unlikely. But you don’t have to stay married to me for that long. You are free to leave whenever you like.’

  ‘Which proves my point that we don’t mean it. Why can’t we marry in a registry office?’

  ‘B
ecause I do mean it. You will be my only wife. If you leave then you leave, but it won’t be something I do again. It will make my mother happy to see me married here.’ He’d run his fingers through his hair and stared at the frescoed ceiling. ‘God knows, she could do with some joy in her life right now.’

  And that had been the end of that conversation. After meeting Vanessa, Eva had found herself coming to Daniele’s way of thinking. As warm and amiable as she was, Vanessa Pellegrini had a sadness to her that Eva saw in Francesca’s eyes too. They put their brave faces on but she could see that inside their hearts had been torn over the loss they’d suffered with Pieta’s death. If Daniele felt the loss of his brother as acutely as they did he kept it well hidden but he had to feel it too, didn’t he? She’d seen his anger over Matteo and Natasha’s betrayal of Pieta. She’d seen him, she’d patched him up. She hadn’t witnessed it since though; on the contrary, his mood was generally flirty and affable but that darkness... Yes, there were times when she looked at him and glimpsed it hidden deep inside him.

  * * *

  Midnight struck. Eva saw her bedside clock mark the hour with a constricted chest.

  This was it. She was officially getting married again, that very day. In twelve hours she would forsake Johann’s name and become Mrs Pellegrini.

  The fire in the room burned sporadically and mostly ineffectually. She’d snuggled down deep under the heavy bedsheets and was as warm as she could get in this freezing castello but, try as she might, sleep wouldn’t come.

  The floor was cold under her bedsocked feet as she slipped on her new dressing gown and left her room, intending to get a hot drink. Immediately she was struck with the scene from the condensation-covered windows that lined the corridor and which her heavy drawn bedroom curtains had hidden from her. She wiped a pane to see more clearly. It was snowing.

  In wonder, she perched on the cold windowsill, wiped more condensation with her sleeve and pressed her face to the lead-lined window to stare out at the Pellegrini vineyards and surrounding rolling hills encased in shining white, a magical scene that made her heart ache at the beauty of it all.

  The living-room door opened and Daniele appeared, his dark hair dishevelled, a roll of architectural drawings under his arm.

  Exhaustion lined his face and thick stubble covered his jaw but still her senses leapt with awareness at the sight of him.

  ‘I thought you were in bed,’ he said when he neared her.

  Her heart suddenly battering her ribs, she tightened the sash of her dressing gown. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Excitement about tomorrow?’ he asked drolly.

  ‘The excitement is killing me,’ she replied, matching the drollness by the skin of her teeth.

  Their eyes met. That pulse of electricity she was becoming far too familiar with flashed between them, a hung silence developing, only broken when he said with a glimmer of amusement, ‘You’ll catch a cold if you sit there too long.’

  ‘It’s snowing.’

  He sat on the sill beside her and wiped condensation from a pane of glass. ‘So it is. I can’t remember when we last had snow here.’ He swore as the pane misted up again. ‘These windows are a disgrace.’

  Twisting round so his back was to the window, he stretched his neck. ‘I need an office. I can’t keep working at the dining table.’

  ‘There’s enough rooms to choose from.’ Her words were automatic, spoken without any input from her brain, which was as fixated as her eyes were on the muscular thighs wrapped in heavy denim only inches from her own thighs.

  They were as physically close to each other as they’d ever been, close enough for her to smell the last vestiges of his cologne.

  ‘They’re all full of damp and cold. The living room’s warm.’

  She was no longer cold, she realised. Whether it was his physical proximity or some strange alchemy happening inside her, her body no longer felt the castello’s chill.

  A burst of heat throbbed deep inside her to think that tomorrow night she would lie beside him and benefit from his body heat all night long...

  ‘Why didn’t your brother renovate the family wing first?’ she asked with abrupt desperation.

  Daniele was too attractive, too masculine. He smelled too good. No matter how hard she tried to keep it switched off, there was something about him the base part of her responded to and she had to get a handle on it.

  She needed to keep a distance from this man as much as she could but how could she manage that when she had to share his bed and wake to his handsome face every morning?

  His smile was tight as he answered, ‘He saw it as the castello needing to pay for itself. Pieta renovated the south wing first because the largest state rooms are there and they bring the money in. Corporations hire them out. The bedrooms on that wing are hired out too. People come for romantic weekends and ghost hunts.’

  She shivered but not with cold. ‘Is it haunted?’

  ‘If you believe in that stuff. Do you?’

  ‘No.’ She believed in what she could see and feel before her. But that didn’t stop the gothic atmosphere of the castle from evoking her imagination in a way it hadn’t for a long, long time.

  ‘Good. It’s rubbish. The castello has a bloody history so playing up to that is a good money spinner. I give Pieta credit there. He saw a market for murder mystery weekends and luxury ghost hunts and ran with it.’

  ‘But...?’

  ‘He didn’t think of the family. Being the owner of the castello is like being a guardian. It’s never yours. It’s just in your keeping. My mother won’t stay here any more because it’s too cold for her. Not that she complained to Pieta about it,’ he said with a faint hint of bitterness that he quickly shrugged off. ‘I offered him the money to renovate the family quarters but he turned it down.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  His nostrils flared. ‘He didn’t want my money or my input. The castello was his and he was going to run it how he wanted.’

  Daniele, feeling the old bitterness curdle in his guts, inhaled through his nose to drive the bad feelings out. His brother was dead and their fraternal rivalry dead with him. What did any of it matter any more? He should be above feeling slighted that all the accolades that had rained down on him and all the architectural awards he’d won had been received by Pieta with a patronising smile. Sure, Pieta would often open a bottle of the castello’s finest wine to celebrate Daniele’s success but that had been the actions of a man behaving properly, in the manner expected of him, rather than anything heartfelt. Daniele had celebrated every one of his brother’s successes as if it were his own, even if he always did secretly determine to smash it with his own success. When he’d made the Rich List for the first time, Pieta had murmured that a man should never measure his success in monetary terms but in the good they did in the world.

  That was one area Daniele hadn’t bothered trying to compete with his brother in. Pieta’s philanthropy had been all his, and their family had thought him like a deity for it.

  How could he compete with a deity? It was impossible. And he didn’t want to. In every other aspect of life he used his brother as his benchmark but when it came to charity, Daniele preferred his involvement to entail nothing more than writing out discreet large cheques.

  ‘You can run it how you want to now,’ Eva said softly, cutting through his cynical reminiscences.

  He shouldn’t be thinking like this. For everything that had wound him up about him, Pieta had been a good brother, even if that goodness had always felt as if it were for show, a display of his humility rather than sincere.

  Dio, he was doing it again. He had to stop this.

  ‘Yes, I can. And my priority will be to make our living quarters fit to live in.’ He’d never wanted the responsibility of the castello and the rest of the estate but fate, along with Eva’s consent to marry him, had put it in his hands...

  He looked at the woman he would be marrying in a few short hours, her head resting on the window
pane, intense blue eyes fixed on his. The velvet robe she hugged around herself was a deep indigo blue, setting off the redness of her plaited hair perfectly. She looked ethereal yet substantial. In the dark moonlight he could believe she’d been made to live in this gothic castello. If he were a sculptor, he would strip her naked but keep her in that pose and carve her likeness in marble. And then he would make love to her. He would kiss every part of that creamy skin and bring the marble to life until she was liquid in his arms.

  His loins tightened and burned at his vivid imaginings.

  ‘Just think,’ he murmured, leaning his face close to hers. He could smell her skin, a delicate fragrance that made his blood thicken and his pulse surge. Her pink, sensual lips had parted a fraction, almost begging to be kissed. She really was incredibly beautiful. ‘Tomorrow night you get to share my bed.’

  Her eyes held his starkly, a glimpse of the fire he was experiencing sparking from them before they narrowed, her lips closed into a tight line and she pulled her robe tighter around her.

  He laughed and reluctantly got to his feet. Dio, his groin ached. ‘With that happy thought I bid you goodnight. See you at the chapel, tesoro.’

  He felt her eyes follow him all the way to the bedroom that in one short night she would share with him.

  It was the only bright thought for a day that filled him with dread.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FEELING LIKE THE biggest fraud in the world, Eva took a deep breath and opened her mouth to recite her vows to the kindly priest who was making short work of the ceremony.

  She wondered if they were setting a record, not only for the quickest wedding ceremony in Italian history but for the lowest number of guests.

  There were six of them in the pretty chapel, not including the priest. Her, Daniele, his mother, his aunt, Francesca and Felipe. He’d asked her if she wanted to invite anyone. True to form, he hadn’t questioned her response to the negative.

  She hadn’t invited anyone to her first wedding either. She would have asked Tessel to that one but hadn’t dared to in case her parents had found out. Now, marrying for a second time a decade later, her terror of her parents long done with, she couldn’t ask Tessel for the simple reason that her sister no longer wanted to be contacted.