And she’d tried. She remembered sinking back down into the fluffy clouds of slumber where that dream always waited for her. But he’d moved then, tasted her mouth with the tip of his tongue and the rest had been—
Shameless; totally indefensible.
And, during their phone call, she hadn’t even asked him about Nicky, which was even worse.
With a guilty groan she rolled off the bed and hit redial.
‘You’ve stolen my son again,’ she husked out.
‘Our son is where he always is at this time of the morning—in my crèche with my very efficient care staff looking out for his well-being.’
Freya did not miss a single syllable of who was in possession of all the power.
‘But I didn’t even get to see him before you took him—’
‘I didn’t get to see him for two damn years,’ Enrico said.
‘So this is your idea of punishing me, is it? To separate the two of us and punish Nicky at the same time?’
‘I am punishing no one.’ His voice was heavy. ‘I am merely attempting to make the best of a difficult situation for all of us—and don’t cry, Freya,’ he warned grimly when she tried to stifle her tears with a sniff. ‘Weeping will only infuriate me in the present mood I am in. Our son is fine,’ he assured her. ‘He understood this morning when I explained that you were very tired so we were going to let you sleep. He came in to see you, gave you a kiss on your cheek. You smiled in your sleep, and he laughed because he seemed to recognise that smile in some special way. Then he was happy to let me wash and dress him—under his instruction,’ he added drily. ‘And for Sonny to feed him—with his supervision again. And for Fredo to deliver him to the crèche once we reached here.’
‘I suppose it pleases you to make me redundant to his needs on all fronts,’ she said.
‘Except as a mother,’ Enrico pointed out. ‘For as long as he needs you as a mother, you will be there for him. For as long as he needs a father, so will I be. Get used to it, Freya. For this is how it is going to be from now on.’
‘Hence the marriage announcement in the newspaper? “Enrico Ranieri will marry Freya Jenson, the mother of his two-year-old son, in three weeks—”’
‘Attempt to hide the truth and we risk turning it into a scandalous sensation,’ Enrico cut in. ‘We will present a united front on this,’ he warned. ‘For I will not have Nicolo subjected to taunts and mockery when he grows older because we tried to hide the truth.’
If you believed the truth to be Enrico’s short statement explaining exactly how it had happened—and without Luca’s name thrown in; he had so cleverly turned a twenty-four-hour disaster into the most romantic love lost, love found story.
‘He’s going to be very impressed when he’s old enough to read it,’ Freya muttered. ‘But hear this, Enrico, because I mean it,’ she then lashed angrily at him. ‘You might succeed in possessing me as a wife, but you will never possess me, the person, again!’
Because her heart belonged to Luca? Enrico’s fingers tightened around his telephone handset. ‘And Nicolo need never know that his mother was a thieving, faithless love-cheat,’ he responded coldly, ‘so long as she never tries the same thing again, of course. Console yourself with that.’
Freya was to console herself with that bitter threat many times over the next week, as Enrico demonstrated in every which way he could who was the one in complete control.
Like when she was sent out shopping with Sonny that same morning to refurbish her wardrobe, only to return and discover that Fredo had come back with Nicky at lunch-time—and a nice new nanny for her son.
Her name was Lissa and she was young, dark-haired and fluent in both English and Italian. Lissa, it turned out, had spent the whole morning with Nicky in the crèche so that by the time Freya saw them together they were like two very old friends.
When she discovered the bedroom she’d used the night before had been cleared of her stuff so that Lissa could use it and she was to sleep in the master suite—with the master, of course—Freya consoled herself by freezing Enrico out so totally that she actually shivered as she clung, wide awake, to the edge of the bed, and Enrico paid her back by not reaching for her once throughout the long, cold nights.
Each morning they played happy family across the breakfast table. Each morning Freya smiled nicely as she waved off Nicky, Enrico, Lissa and Fredo as they all trotted off to Hannard’s without her, and only let the hurt ooze out when she was alone.
Nicky, it turned out, was to be weaned away from the Hannard’s crèche and bonded with his new nanny in time for their move to Milan. Fredo always delivered him and Lissa back to Enrico’s Mayfair house by lunch-time, when Freya was allowed to play the mother again.
And whatever else Enrico was trying to wean her son away from, Freya could at least console herself with the knowledge that she was still the first person Nicky wanted when he was tired, hungry or upset because he’d hurt himself.
But how long would that last? How long before her importance to Nicky began to fade?
Each morning Sonny would appear with that day’s list of instructions and off they would go to spend the morning transforming Freya into someone fit to be seen as the wife of Enrico Ranieri—and the mother of his son.
They became good fodder for the tabloids. The paparazzi followed wherever she and Sonny went. They called her a gorgeous and sexy redhead and they tossed questions at her about her past relationship with Enrico that she refused to respond to—until one dared to ask her if she’d been dumped three years ago in the same way that Enrico had dumped Sofia Romano last week?
Sonny was in the process of hustling Freya into a bridal shop when the question was posed.
‘Who is she?’ Freya demanded the moment they had privacy inside the shop. The fact that Sonny stiffened up was enough to make her freeze.
‘Not my question to answer.’ Sonny shrugged, and left it for her to find out the hard way—via the first newspaper she could lay her hands on.
Freya refused to try on any more clothes. She refused to be led around any longer by the nose. When another reporter dared to ask if Enrico was as amazing in bed as her predecessor had said he was, she answered kindly, ‘Perhaps Miss Romano likes to exaggerate.’
They laughed, thought it hilarious. Sonny uttered an under-the-breath groan. Freya sizzled quietly with anger all the way back to the house. The moment that Fredo delivered Lissa and Nicky, she took her son out again—sneaking out the back way and staying out with him all afternoon.
Enrico didn’t laugh when he heard what she’d said. That night he showed her just how amazing he could be when he climbed into their bed and grimly hauled her across the gap.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘SO, THE gorgeous and sexy redhead about to marry Enrico Ranieri has a sense of humour?’
Enrico was quoting directly from a newspaper article, his voice silken, the smile on his lips a circling shark’s kind of smile.
Freya’s pulse quickened. ‘ Romano has a great sense of humour, too,’ she hit back. ‘She made me laugh all the way through my wedding-gown fitting after I read her account of how you fed diamonds around her slender wrist then murmured, “Sorry, but these mean farewell!”’
‘What did you expect me to do—let her read about our marriage in the papers the next day?’
‘Did the farewell and the diamonds come before or after our amazing sex?’
‘You jealous, vindictive witch,’ he gritted.
‘And you are a two-timing rat!’
‘I dumped her! How does that make me a two-timing rat?’
‘You dumped her after you’d had me over your desk!’ Freya lashed at him. ‘That makes you the lowest kind of two-timer there is! Get off me!’
‘I know a worse one.’ Enrico clamped her flat against the silk-sheeted mattress with his impressively naked torso. ‘She two-timed two cousins in the same damn bed!’
‘With your blessing, don’t forget!’
‘Don’t star
t that again,’ Enrico muttered.
‘Then leave me alone,’ she cried, pushing at him with her fists. ‘I hate you. I don’t know why I’m letting you do all of this to me. I don’t even know how I’ve managed to share the same bed!’
‘By clutching at the mattress to stop yourself rolling into me,’ he derided. ‘And I left you alone because I decided to at least attempt to give us both a proper wedding night—but to hell with that.’
In a single swift move he threw back the covers then came to straddle her, all naked rippling muscle and aroused, angry male. His hands went to the hem of her nightdress to tug it upwards; her fingers clutched at it to hold it in place.
‘I won’t let you,’ she spat at him.
‘You will be begging me in seconds.’
‘I will not!’
He bent, becoming nothing more than a seething, dark, passionate blur as he lowered his head and took possession of her mouth.
No one ever said that making love had to be a gently-flowing river which slowly became a flood. Sometimes the raging torrent came first. As it did now, as tempers drove it and the desire to fight each other became as compelling as the desire to drown in each other’s surging swell.
The kiss was their combat, a fight for supremacy over her nightdress, a combat both knew he was eventually going to win. He was rock-hard and she took malicious pleasure in brushing against him with her knuckles and feeling him shudder and suck in his breath. He buried a set of fingers in her hair and tilted her head back so he could delve deeper into her mouth with the sensual stab of his tongue. She wriggled and squirmed and kissed him back, passion for passion. Their hearts were pounding, their breathing fast. When the thin silk slip was wrenched from her fingers, hot skin met with hers and she felt the flash of excitement sting in her blood.
‘You ripped it!’ she gasped as the silk was raked over her head and tossed aside.
‘And you loved me doing it,’ he rasped, before dipping his head lower to devour her pinprick, tingling breasts.
She cried out and scraped her nails down the skin of his back, sending tight muscles into rippling spasm. When he began moving lower she used her nails in his hair instead. The slide of his tongue was pure heaven. Goose-pimples sprang out across her flesh. She tried to arch her body up towards him but he held her flat to the bed, his hands cupping her hips and, with the force of his weight, he pressed her thighs apart.
His fingers stroked her either side of his lapping tongue. He explored her as no other man ever had. She was groaning—she could hear herself—groaning in sensual agony. ‘Enrico,’ she kept on saying as the muscles around her sex flowered and flexed.
He paused to look up, streaks of desire heating the golden skin across his cheekbones and glazing his darker-than-black eyes. She was almost there; he could feel the swelling, pulsing evidence of her climax balancing her right on the edge. Her hair was spread out across the pillows, cut and styled now to a thick and glossy spiralling pelt. Her eyes were shut, her arms thrown up above her head in wanton abandonment, her breasts shifting like two white mounds of female passion with their tight pink peaks urgently begging for his mouth.
Something hot washed right through him: desire for this woman like he’d never felt with anyone else.
‘You want me,’ he husked.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘Like this?’ He licked across her clitoris.
Her whole body arched violently. ‘No—!’ she cried out.
‘Like this, then!’ In a single, snaking movement he arrived over her and with a thrust he probed her prepared flesh with the rounded tip of his shaft.
Her arms wrapped round him. ‘Yes, like that.’
‘You are begging me.’
She opened her eyes, bright green and sparkling with sensual accusation. ‘Is this your ego joining in?’
‘If you say so,’ he responded. ‘But I still want to hear you do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Beg,’ he rasped.
She captured his mouth in a deep, drugging kiss that was almost, almost the finish of his resistance. And she knew it, too; Enrico was sure she did because she timed it to the last, agonising split-second before she broke the kiss then begged softly: ‘Please, Enrico.’
He sank his full length into her hot, wet sheath, then tensed on a teeth-gritting groan as her muscles grabbed hold of him and clung.
‘Dear God,’ she shook out.
‘Madre de Dio,’ he muttered.
He moved and her legs wrapped tight around him. Bright sparks of pleasure hit the backs of his eyes. His skin was alive, fingers of pleasure clawing at every engorged muscle. He eased his hands beneath her hips and lifted her closer, recaptured her mouth, then began the long, deep, thrusting ride with the hard tips of her breasts rasping against his hair-roughened chest, and her fingers locked in his hair.
Time disappeared—space—the sweat-slicked, heaving stroke of their rhythm fusing them together into one pounding, pulsing sexual whole. It seemed to go on and on—the long pleasure before the short, blinding, white-hot pleasure, the glory of building towards the final climax that made the act of physical loving worthy of its name.
She broke first, on a whimper that tore their mouths apart. Her head went back, her fingers shifting from his hair to clutch at bunched muscles in his shoulders, and her small sobs grew louder as her pleasure quickened. Her pulsing muscles tugged and he joined her with long, thick, shuddering thrusts of his hips that left the two of them wasted.
He was lying heavy on top of her but he couldn’t move a single muscle. She was lying so still beneath him he had a sudden image of her slowly melting into the bed.
It had only ever been like this with her—the lethargy that came with this kind of satiation that sapped every bit of his strength.
‘Next time someone asks you how good a lover I am, what do you tell them?’ he prompted on a low, lazy slur.
‘Amazing,’ she answered obediently. ‘A real stallion.’
He grinned. A sudden spark of new-found energy gave him the strength to lever himself up on his forearms. ‘That good, hmm?’
‘A positive tomcat with a stallion’s equipment,’ she tossed up at him. ‘A grand master in the art of sex. Would you like me to relay your performance to the Press?’
He laughed, even though he knew she’d not been joking. ‘You,’ he responded, ‘are a jealous little cat with a very bad temper.’ Then—‘Dio, it’s good to get the wedding night over with,’ he sighed. ‘Now we can have some fun instead of pretending we cannot stand to sleep with each other.’
He suddenly rolled away from her, then stood up and bent to scoop her up off the bed.
‘What are you doing?’ she protested.
‘Continuing our premature wedding night.’ Straddling her legs either side of his hips, he carried her towards the bathroom. ‘You owe me for a week of sexual frustration, and one night in particular when you let me indulge you in totally selfish sex.’
‘I was asleep,’ she insisted primly, ‘so it counts for nothing.’
‘Oh, how very British,’ he mocked. ‘I was asleep, Your Honour, so I am therefore completely innocent.’
Freya couldn’t resist it—she laughed. Enrico stilled in the bathroom doorway. Her slender arms were resting on his wide shoulders and her hair swung down her back. His eyes were steadily darkening as he took in the way the laughter highlighted every perfect feature in her beautiful face.
‘You’re so incredibly sexy when you laugh like that,’ he growled sensuously.
Freya instantly changed the look for a scowl and he laughed, one of those deep-throated, husky sounds that vibrated pleasurably against her breasts.
‘That look doesn’t faze me—your eyes are still laughing.’
‘So are yours,’ she countered then kissed him on the mouth.
Freya didn’t know which of them was more shocked. It had been purely an impulse reaction, one which came directly out of the few moments of relaxed banter
they’d been indulging in. But it was the first time that she had taken the initiative and kissed him without being seduced into doing it.
Dangerous, she told herself even as she stared at him and he stared back, the tension between them tight. Don’t let yourself fall back into the old love-trap you used to share with him once. Enrico is the enemy. He believes you can be like this with any man. It’s your son he really wants. He’s going to hurt you badly again if you don’t watch out.
She went to pull away from him when his arms banded her closer. She sucked in her breath as her breasts crushed into his chest and with a throaty growl he recaptured her mouth. Dangerous or not she was right there with him, pleasure and excitement singing in her blood. Turning back the way they had come, he tumbled her back down on the bed then followed.
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