The Italian's Future Bride

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Th-thank you,’ she mumbled unhappily.

  ‘Quite an unexpected…gift to come out of this mess tonight, which makes me so glad I did not turn away from it when I had the chance…’

  A gift—he saw her as agift ?

  Cynical, Rachel named his half smile, and tensed as the warmth still sandwiched between their two bodies began to chill.

  ‘Well, turn away now, Villani,’ she responded frozenly. ‘Because it’s the lastgift you are going to get from me!’

  She gave a push at his wide shoulders and obligingly he rolled away to lie on his side, watching as she scrambled off the bed, then began hunting the littered floor for something to wear to cover up her nakedness. Catching sight of her dress lying there on the floor in a brazen swirl, she shuddered, hating the sight of it, and made a wild grab for his shirt instead.

  ‘You sound very certain about that.’

  ‘I am.’ Rachel had to fight with the shirt sleeves, which had become tangled inside out.

  ‘We were really great together…’

  ‘Well, you’re such a great lover,’ she flicked back. ‘Better than most, if that gives your ego a boost.’

  ‘Grazie.’

  Get lost!she wanted to scream at him. A gift—agift !

  The shirt slithered over her now shivering body and she dragged the two sides together with fingers clutching at the fine cloth like tense claws.

  Flushed, angry, and aware that any second now she was going to explode on a flood of wild, uncontrollable I-hate-myself! tears, ‘Is there another bedroom I can use?’ she asked, chin up, blue eyes refusing to do anything other than look directly at his smooth, sardonic, lazily curious face because she was determined to get away with at least some small part of pride intact.

  ‘You don’t need one. This bed is easily big enough for the two of us.’ He was supremely content in his languid pose.

  Refusing to get into an argument with him, Rachel turned to walk towards the bedroom door.

  ‘I don’t do one-night stands,’ he fed gently after her.

  She stopped, narrow shoulders tautening inside his oversized shirt. ‘Neither do I…’ she felt constrained to reply.

  ‘Good. So we understand each other.’

  ‘No.’ Rachel swung round. ‘Idon’t understand!’

  He was already off the bed and reaching for his trousers, so casual about his nakedness that she had to fight not to blush. He was incredible to look at: all golden and glossed by hard muscle tone, made all the more blatantly masculine by the triangle of black curls that swirled between his burgeoning pectorals and then drew a line down his torso to the other thick cluster curling around the potent force of his sex.

  The stupid blush broke free when she recalled what that part of him had felt like erect and inside her. She tried to damp it all back down again but it was already too late because, as he was about to thrust a shockingly muscled brown leg into his trousers, he glanced at her and went as still as the dead.

  Her breathing went haywire, her old friend panic rising up from places she did not know it could rise up from—her tender breasts, her taut nipples stinging against the cloth of his shirt and that terrible hot spot still pulsing between her legs, which made her draw in her muscles in an effort to switch it off.

  He dropped the trousers. And she knew why he had. Seeing the way she was looking at him had turned him on like the floodgates opening on a mighty dam. What she’d thought potent before was suddenly downright unbelievable. He started walking towards her and she actually whimpered as she put out a trembling hand in the useless hope of holding him back, while her other hand maintained a death grip on the shirt to keep it shut across her front.

  ‘No, please don’t.’ Her little plea came out all husky. Already her legs were threatening to collapse. ‘We-we’ve made this situation messy enough as it is without adding intimacy to it—please!’ she cried out when he just did not stop.

  ‘I have just come inside you with the most amazing pleasure I have ever experienced,’ his dark voice rasped over her. ‘Intimacyis here,mia bella . It is too late to switch it off.’

  But it wasn’t—it wasn’t! ‘I don’t want—’

  ‘Oh, you want,’ he refuted. ‘It has been vibrating out of you from the first moment we met. And I would be a liar if I did not admit to feeling the same way about you—so quit the denial.’

  ‘Sex for the hell of it?’ Rachel sliced back wildly.

  ‘Why not?’ Capturing her warding hand, he used it to draw her in close. ‘We are stuck with each other for the next few months while this thing plays itself out, so why not enjoy what we do have going here which is not part of the lie?’

  ‘If I walk out of here dressed like this and tell anyone waiting out there that I changed my mind because you just were not good enough—that should finish it,’ she suggested wildly.

  ‘Are you telling me that my finesse is in need of practice?’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Since we both know that you seem to be pretty much a natural sensualist, Carmichael, I give you leave to teach me all you know.’

  ‘What is that supposed to imply?’ Rachel stared up at him.

  He grimaced and she didn’t like the cynical gleam that arrived back on his face. ‘Either someone taught you how to give a man unbelievable pleasure or it just comes naturally to you,’ he enlightened. ‘I was attempting to give you the more honourable benefit of the doubt.’

  He was daring to suggest that she’d been trained like a concubine to pleasure men—?

  First a gift, now a trained whore. Rachel stiffened like a board. ‘How dare you?’ she breathed furiously.

  ‘Very indignant,’ he commended. ‘But I have just had the life essence squeezed out of me by the kind of muscles I did not know a woman could possess and you kiss like a delightful, greedy, well-seasoned Circe,amore —dangerous, but I’m hooked.’

  ‘I think this has gone far enough.’ She went to twist away from him.

  He spun her back, broke her grip on the shirt front and ran his two hands inside it in a sensual act of possession that claimed her slender waist. Two long thumbs stroked the flatness of her lower stomach and her flesh turned into a simmering sensory mass. When she released an agonised breath he watched the way her pale hips swayed towards him as if they could not stop from hunting out closer contact with the burgeoning jut of his sex.

  ‘Look at you,’ he murmured. ‘You cannot help yourself. That deliciously damp cluster of curls I can see crowning your thighs is crying out to feel me there again.’

  ‘No,’ she denied, knowing it was horribly, shamefully true.

  ‘If I do this…’ he eased her in closer and gently speared a path between her thighs ‘…your slender thighs cling to me as if your life depends upon it…’

  And she was clinging. Weak and helpless. He rocked his hips and her arms just lifted, then fell heavily around his neck as she gave herself up to the pure pleasure of it. Her head tilted back, her blue eyes dark and her soft mouth parting and begging for his kiss.

  He did not hold it back. He ravished her mouth while other parts of him ravished the soft folds of warm damp flesh between her legs. It did not occur to her that he was as much a slave to what they were generating between them. To Rachel he was just displaying his contempt for her. Toying with her because the humiliation of being made such an easy victim of her half-sister’s messy marriage still stung his ego and he wanted her to pay for making him feel like that.

  This was payback—sexual payback. And he meant to make her keep on paying for as long as this thing took to pan out.

  She was picked up and tumbled back on to the duvet. He came to lean over her, blocking out the light like a domineering shadow, everything about him so physically superior, strong, mesmerising—overwhelming yet so potently exciting at the same time.

  His eyes glinted down at her, his face a map of hard angles built on arrogant sexual claim. She was about to be ravished a second time and the horror of it was that she knew s
he was not going to say no.

  A telephone started ringing with the shrillness of a klaxon. Staring up into his face, tense and not breathing, Rachel thought for several seconds that he was going to ignore the call and continue with what he had started here.

  Then his face altered, shutting down desire with the single blink of those long eyelashes, and he took hold of his shirt and grimly closed it across her breasts.

  With that he levered himself off the bed, leaving Rachel to sit up and huddle inside the shirt while he went to recover his trousers and this time pulled them on.

  He glanced back at her, nothing lover-like about him anywhere now. ‘Get in the bed. Go to sleep,’ he instructed.

  Then he strode out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him, leaving Rachel coldly aware that she had just been put in her place.

  As thegift in his bed, to use if or when he so desired it.

  The telephone went silent. Unable to stop herself, Rachel got up and went to open the door as quietly as she could, meaning to creep down the hall and listen in on the conversation—just in case it had something to do with them.

  She did not need to take another step from where she was. The door on the opposite side of the hall was open. He was standing in front of a desk with his back towards her and his trousers resting low on his hips.

  ‘You think that ringing me at two in the morning will please me, Daniella—?’ His tone did not sound pleased at all.

  Rachel continued to hover, watching as his naked shoulders racked up tighter the more that his stepsister said.

  ‘Daniella…’he sighed out eventually. ‘Will you give me the opportunity to speak? I am sorry you have been hit by so many telephone calls,’ he said wearily. ‘No, the lady in question is not Elise,’ he denied. ‘She is who she has always been. It is everyone else who made the mistake. ‘

  A lie. Another lie. Rachel felt the weight of every single one of them land upon her shoulders.

  Raffaelle turned sharply, as if he could sense her standing here. She watched his eyes move in a possessive flow from her face to his shirt, then down her legs. The intimacy in the look conflicted with the coldness now in charge of his features. And she knew that not only had he brought himself under control, but she was now looking at the man she’d first met, undeniably attractive but cynical and hard.

  On a wavering grimace Rachel dropped her eyes from him and stepped back into the bedroom. When Elise had picked him to have her rebellious affair with, she had chosen the wrong man, she thought heavily as she closed the door.

  Pushing his free hand into his trouser pocket, Raffaelle suppressed the desire to either curse or sigh as he leant his lean hips against the edge of the desk while Daniella continued to yell in his ear.

  He was angry with the interfering press, who were taking it in turns to call up Daniella in their quest for more information. He was also fed up because the whole thing was now driving itself like a train with no damn brakes.

  And he was achingly bloody aroused and despising himself for feeling like that. Where did he get off, jumping all over a woman—astranger —like some randy, feckless, uncontrolled youth—?

  No wonder she’d looked at him just now as if he had crawled out from beneath a stone. No wonder she had gone back in the bedroom and shut herself away. She knew she was trapped;he knew he was trapped!

  ‘No, Daniella,’ he grimly cut in to her half-hysterical ranting. ‘It isyou who made the mistake two months ago. She wasnever Elise—have you got that?’

  His cold tone alone had the desired effect.

  ‘You mean you want me tosay that I was mistaken?’

  ‘No. I am telling you that youare mistaken.’

  ‘So youhave just got engaged to marry this Rachel Carmichael—the same woman who threw herself at you tonight?’

  ‘Si,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Just like that—?’She was almost choking on her disbelief.

  ‘No, not just like that,’ he sighed out. ‘I have been—courting Rachel over the last few months.’

  ‘Courtingher—?’

  Bad choice of word. ‘Seducingher, then.’

  Her struck silence made him grimace and he couldn’t make up his mind if she was beginning to swallow the lies or simply being sensible for once and taking on board the grim warning in his voice.

  ‘Is she pregnant—?’

  ‘No!’ he bit out, jerking upright from the desk and swinging round as a sting of stark alarm shot down his back.

  Dio,he’d used nothing to stop it from happening, and he had not thought to ask her if she was protected!

  What kind of crass bloody oversexed fool did that make him? Or her for not thinking about it—?

  ‘And, since my personal life is no one’s business but my own,cara , can I suggest a simpleno comment from you would make me happy? Or, better still, Daniella—take the telephone off the hook!’

  He cut the connection and tossed the handset back on its rest, then just stood there, not knowing what to do next.

  Sex without protection with a woman he barely knew. Flexing muscles rippled all over him as he took on board the consequences which could result from such a stupidly irresponsible act.

  With his luck tonight, she could already be in the process of conceiving his baby. Add all the other risks which came along with unprotected sex and he suddenly felt like a time bomb set to go off!

  A growl left his throat as he turned back to the bedroom. Chin set like a vice, he pushed open the door. The room was in darkness. He switched on the overhead light and went to stand at the bottom of the bed.

  She was nothing but a curled up mound beneath the duvet. ‘I did not use protection,’ he clipped out.

  The mound jerked, then went still for a gut-clenching second. Then it moved again and she emerged, sliding up against the pillows, flush-cheeked—wary, defensive—sensationally delectable.

  Dio, he thought.

  ‘Say that again,’ she shook out.

  ‘I did not use protection,’ he repeated tautly. ‘I am not promiscuous and I have never taken such risks before in my life,’ he added stiffly. ‘I like to think that I can respect my…partner’s history in the same way that she can respect mine.’

  Rachel looked at the way he was standing there like some arrogant autocrat caught with his pants down by his bitch of a wife. Only his pants were up; it was his shirt that was missing and the bitch of a wife in this case was thegift he’d been handed and enjoyed thoroughly—before he’d thought to wonder where she had been before she’d landed in his bed!

  As if it wasn’t bad enough that she was sitting in the bed belonging to a man she had only met for the first time tonight, wearing his shirt and his scents and his touch on her skin—she now had to endure the kind of conversation that belonged in a brothel!

  Next he would be asking how much he owed her for her services. Give him half a chance and she knew he would love to denounce her out loud as a whore.

  Well, what did that make him? Rachel wanted to know.

  ‘I am a clean-living, careful, healthy person,’ she snapped out indignantly.

  ‘I am relieved to hear it.’

  He didn’t look it. ‘I don’t sleep around! And if you hit me with one more rotten insult, Villani,’ she warned furiously. ‘I think I am going to physically attack you!’

  ‘My apologies if it sounded as if I was trying to insult you—’

  ‘You did insult me.’ She went to slide back down the bed.

  ‘But we don’t know each other.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Rachel muttered.

  ‘And it is an issue we need to address.’

  ‘Well, you addressed it very eloquently,’ she told him and tugged up the duvet with anow go away kind of shrug.

  If he read it he ignored it. ‘We have not finished with this.’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘No, Rachel, we have not…’

  It was the alteration in his voice from stiff to weary that forced her
to take notice. ‘We still have the issue of another kind of protection to discuss.’

  Another kind…Rachel froze for a second, then slid back up the pillows again, only this time more slowly as she finally began to catch on.

  He put it in simple words for her. ‘I did not protect us against—conception. I need to know if you did.’

  It was like being hit with one hard knock too many; she felt all the colour drain from her face. ‘I don’t believe this is happening to me,’ she whispered.