Loving the Enemy

by Connelly, Clare

  “Very good. And Massimo? The Sangiovese?”

  “Water will be fine.”

  When they were alone, Alessia said quietly, “You can have a glass of wine, Max. Don’t feel you can’t drink because I’m not.”

  “I’m happy with water.”

  “Honestly, I really don’t drink often at all so it’s not like pregnancy has been much of an adjustment.”

  He settled back in his seat, watching her carefully. “I suppose being a doctor, you are best to stay sober?”

  “I’m on call – I was on call – often,” she agreed, lifting her slender shoulders. It was tempting to confide in him, but she didn’t. She’d learned that lesson and she intended to remember it. Max had a skill for making her feel at ease – so that she gave away far too much of herself while he stayed resolutely silent and closed. She’d given him way too much already.

  “You like what you do?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached for a menu, holding it in her fingertips.

  “Fiero says you are very good,” he said, referring to his brother.

  She swallowed, her eyes focussing on the writing without really seeing. “Oh?”

  “He says you were wonderful when Jack cut his forehead.”

  A smile – easy and relaxed – lifted her lips. A natural fondness for the little boy – Fiero’s son and Max’s nephew – was impossible not to react to. “Well, Jack is a perfect patient.”

  “I would have thought he was incredibly difficult, actually,” Max laughed.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he hates to sit still for more than two seconds?”

  “True,” she lifted her eyes then wished she hadn’t when a spark of fire flew between them. She jerked her attention back to the menu.

  “This is when you met Maddie? The day Jack hurt himself?”

  “Yes.” She ran a finger down the page of her menu. “What are you going to eat?”

  “I always have the chef bring what he wants.”

  She lifted a brow. “That seems oddly trusting for someone with your personality type.”

  “And what is my personality type?”

  A smile quirked her lips. “Are you sure you want me to answer that?”

  He dipped his head in a silent invitation.

  A wave of things she could say almost swallowed her whole, but she kept it limited to, “A control freak.”

  He considered that. “I exercise control,” he agreed. “To a normal degree.”

  “No,” she laughed in an automatic rebuke. “I exercise control to a normal degree. You’re a bonafide control freak.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth about our marriage back then?”

  His features tightened. “You didn’t need to know.”

  “I deserved to know,” she said flatly, rejecting his assessment in its entirety. “But you knew that there was a chance – a good chance – that if you were honest with me about the reasons for our marriage, I’d turn you down.”

  His jaw tightened.

  “And you didn’t want to risk that, so you controlled the situation – me – to make sure you got the result you wanted.”

  A waitress appeared now to take their order. “I’ll have the chicken, thank you,” Alessia passed the menu over, purposefully choosing something different to what she’d had the night of her twenty first birthday.

  “Whatever Dominique suggests,” Max’s words were terse – the poor waitress was catching the splashback of Alessia’s argument. “And tell him my wife is pregnant.”

  “Thank you,” Alessia said pointedly, flashing an overbright smile at the waitress.

  Max appeared not to notice. “Fine. I have already accepted your feelings on this – I was wrong. But can you at least do me the justice of seeing why I did so? I couldn’t afford for your father to say ‘no’. Do you have any idea what he was on the brink of doing?”

  Alessia compressed her lips, looking towards the window. “I know he was close to bankruptcy.”

  “And far too proud to admit it,” Max said darkly. “He had been talking to the worst kind of personal lending agent. A loan shark. Not the kind with an office and a computer – more the type with a ledger book and a baseball bat. Would you have preferred I allowed him to say ‘no’ to me and left him to borrow millions of dollars from an organisation such as that?”

  Alessia’s jaw dropped. “No, I don’t believe you.”

  “Does your personality assessment also accuse me of being someone who lies?”

  She fluttered her lashes closed, her eyes focussing on her lap. “You did lie to me,” she whispered.

  “When? How?”

  She opened her mouth to answer that and then shook her head, because in truth, he hadn’t. He’d never said he loved her, he’d never claimed their wedding would be anything more than what it was. He’d left gaps and she’d rushed to fill them in – creating an image of romance and bliss when it had all been so far from that.

  “You knew what I thought.”

  “Yes. Not completely, but yes.” He dipped his head forward. “It suited me,” he said darkly. “I took advantage of your – shall we say…crush? – to force your hand – as well as your father’s. And while I understand that you were hurt by that, I was afraid for him – and how desperate he’d become.”

  She swallowed past a suddenly dry mouth. “I didn’t realise it was so bad.”

  “He’d made some terrible investments,” Max grimaced. “When I came on board as his partner I had to clear out a lot of rotten ‘assets’ and free up the profitable areas of the business to thrive.”

  “That’s how you turned it all around so quickly?”

  “That,” he agreed with a cool tone to his voice. “And a massive influx of capital.”

  A shiver ran down her spine. She didn’t particularly want to contemplate the extent to which Massimo had helped her father. How had Carlo let things get so bad?

  She sighed heavily, a need to defend her father prompting Alessia to say, “He was never the same after mum died.”

  “I know.” Softer now, gentle.

  “He loved her so much and she was so sick, for so long. Then she’d get better and we’d hope…even when there was no hope.” She closed her eyes for a moment, the memories almost too painful to contemplate. “Dad just didn’t cope. He was like a shell.”

  “And he began to drink,” Max said quietly, leaning across the table. He wasn’t touching her but her whole body seemed to brush with awareness, as though his skin was pressed to hers.

  Her eyes widened in surprise at his perceptiveness – she hadn’t known anyone else knew the truth about her father. There was no point in denying it. “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “But even so, if you’d told me all of this back then…”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t have known how you would react. You might have panicked. Or gone to your father and insisted he let me help him – and without our marriage, he would certainly have refused.”

  She couldn’t help it. She met his eyes, a smile on her lips. “Control freak.”

  He answered the smile, and flame seemed to leap from him to her. She looked away, dragging her eyes to the window and the pretty Roman street beyond. Christmas lights twinkled in the trees, and happy passers-by milled on the footpaths.

  * * *

  She was beautiful. He’d known this about her for a long time, but in that moment, her features relaxed, her face tilted away from his so he saw only her autocratic profile and shimmering blonde hair, he felt a rush of undeniable admiration for her classic features. She sipped her water, then placed the glass down carefully in front of her.

  “It wasn’t completely your fault, you know,” she turned back to face him, pinning him with her clear, thoughtful gaze.

  He had been staring at her, losing himself in the line of her face, and couldn’t immediately follow her thinking.

  “I let myself get so caught up in i
t all – the whirlwind proposal, the wedding plans, the idea that I would be married and a part of your family,” she shook her head with a hint of self-condemnation. “How stupid of me not to reflect on it all a little better. Why would a man like you want to marry someone like me? I was – as you keep saying – little more than a child. At twenty I had no experience, I’d been sheltered by my father to a ridiculous degree, I was naïve and gauche –,”

  “You were never gauche,” he interposed quietly. Alessia had always, even as a child, been elegant and sophisticated, her manner somehow intimidating without her having any intention of being so.

  She rolled her eyes, leaning forward a little. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw a movement and flicked his gaze in that direction in time to catch a couple of men watching Alessia with obvious admiration. One leaned to the other, said something, the other one nodded. He ground his teeth and turned back to her. She was his wife, and besides which, the fact other men found her attractive should hardly surprise him. It didn’t surprise him, but the degree to which he resented it did.

  “I think I wanted, so badly, for it to be a fairy tale, that I blocked myself off from doing any kind of analysis. I chose to believe without reason. I let myself be stupid and I let you use me.”

  And she’d been about to do the same with Sam. Sam hadn’t loved her. He’d been going to use her – to marry her simply because of the fortune that would one day be hers.

  He expelled a breath of frustration. Max would never be able to change her view of him. He had used her in their first marriage, and it made no difference that his intentions had been good – he’d wanted to save her father from the decisions he’d been poised to make.

  And as if reading his mind, she reached across and put a hand on his, her eyes softening, so it felt as though an arrow was spearing through his chest cavity. “I’m grateful you didn’t let dad borrow from a loan shark, Max. Honestly, I thought I’d never be able to forgive you for the farce of our marriage.”

  He held his breath without meaning to.

  “But I can at least understand why you did it,” she conceded, finally. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was more than he could have expected. It was a start.

  Chapter Eight

  “YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

  “Why not?”

  Dinner had been surprisingly easy. Once they’d stopped discussing her father, and their first marriage, he’d been able to keep conversation to light enough grounds – mutual acquaintances, travel, topics that were easy and non-controversial. But now, back home, he watched her walk towards her room and something inside of him shifted with frustration.

  “You actually want to use separate bedrooms?”

  “You were the one who insisted on that, first time around.”

  “That was different,” he pointed out, wishing he could latch onto a more concrete way in which to demonstrate that.

  “Not to me.” She glared at him, curving a hand over her belly in a way that drew his gaze, causing something to lodge thick in his throat. She was pregnant – he couldn’t fight with her. It couldn’t be good for the baby. But Christo, why was she being so stubborn about this?

  “Alessia, we both want this marriage to work.”

  “That all depends on how you define a successful marriage.”

  “In London –,”

  “In London I was hurting and angry,” she said quietly, reminding him of the reason for her hurt. She’d presumably been in love with another man, planning to marry him. She’d been jilted. She’d come to him as a salve to that pain, not because she wanted to marry him all over again.

  When he looked at her, he wanted her with an intensity that almost broke him but it was blindingly clear she no longer felt the same. He took a small step backwards and turned away from her, absorbing this reality, wishing he could somehow refute it. But what other explanation was there?

  “I can’t do it.” Her voice had his eyes drawing back to her face, and the sadness he saw in the depths of her eyes twisted something in his gut. “I can’t sleep in your bed, make love to you, pretend this is real, because it’s not, and I know I’ll get burned if I forget that. I need to remember. Okay?”

  “It is real,” he said with a grunt. “We’re having a baby. We’re married.”

  “But we’re not in love,” she murmured. “Don’t you get it? That’s what makes a marriage! Do you really think sexual attraction is enough?”

  “I think it’s a great start,” he said, something lifting in his chest. Because she did want him. Desire was something he could work with – and she was wrong. Marriages weren’t always about love. “I think we have everything we need to make each other happy. And a fulfilling sex life is a huge part of that.”

  He lifted a hand to her breasts, stroking his fingertips across one of her nipples, then the next. Her eyes shut and she sucked in a shuddering breath. “Tell me you want me to stop.”

  She let out a small moan. “I want –,”

  He waited, everything inside of him tensed. “You are fighting yourself, not me,” he said firmly. “You wish you didn’t want me. You wish you didn’t crave me. Do you wake up remembering how it felt when we were together?”

  She groaned again. “It’s just a biological impulse.” Then, swallowing, “How can I want you?” She shook her head, as though angry with herself, but swayed forward so her hips brushed his.

  “So much of me hates you,” she promised darkly, tilting her face to his.

  “I know.” And she had every right to. Hell, she didn’t even know that he’d paid off her undeserving fiancé – if she did? He pushed the thought aside. He’d done the right thing. He’d saved Alessia from a gold digging opportunist. He didn’t want to contemplate how she might feel if she knew.

  She was wrong. Their chemistry was more than a starting point – it was something that would always bind them. If the last five years had taught him anything it was that.

  But he needed to know she wanted him – he had never used desire to manipulate a woman into bed. Desire left room for regret and he needed to know Alessia truly wanted this, that she was surrendering to her own needs and not his.

  “But you want me anyway,” he demanded.

  Her eyes lifted to his, sparking with flashes of anger and need. “What do you think?”

  “Say it,” he insisted. “Tell me what you want me to do to you.” He dropped his mouth to her throat, running his lips over the flesh there, finding the frantic pulse point and flicking it with his tongue. She whimpered against him, the sound so erotic and full of desperation that his arousal strained painfully against the tightness of his pants.

  “I want to feel –,”

  “Si,” he prompted.

  “I want you to make love to me,” she said, and then shook her head. “I want us to have sex.”

  The correction should have pleased him – he wasn’t a fan of florid language and particularly when it came to descriptions of intimacy.

  “Just tonight,” she clarified, her hands pulling his shirt from his waistband, her fingertips beginning their own exploration of his body, finding the ridges of his muscular abdomen and stroking them curiously. It was new – her touching him. Even in London, it had been so quick, driven by years of fantasising – he’d taken her virginity in such a hurried and urgent way. He’d been driven by a need to show her what her body could feel, but she had been too shy to explore his body. Her hands moved now, driven by their own hunger to atone, to learn and discover.

  Just tonight. He ignored that. Sex was addictive. She couldn’t understand that, but she would. It was hard to scratch an itch once and leave it at that. It didn’t matter, anyway. She wanted this. He could ignore the pulling of guilt deep inside of him, a niggling sense that he was doing something wrong. He kissed her as he took a step forward, pushing her backwards, but she shook her head even as their lips melded, their tongues duelling.

  “Not here.” She wrenched her face away, looking over her should
er at the bedroom she’d claimed as hers. “Not here,” she repeated, more urgently.

  He didn’t argue, simply claimed her lips and spun her around, kissing her as he half-pushed, half-pulled her towards his own room. Their urgency overpowered them. They fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, her hands pushing at his clothes as his stripped hers from her body, freeing her from her bra, so her breasts tumbled out for his inspection and touch, so full and creamy. He dropped his mouth, seeking one nipple, flicking it with his tongue so she cried out, arching her back, her beautiful round belly drawing his attention next. It was an overwhelming sight.

  His wife. His baby. Her body so altered by the pregnancy, so beautifully altered. Sex had never really equated to emotion with Massimo but only a man of stone would fail to feel at the sight of her like that. His hands fell to her belly, running over it slowly, worshipping her, it, and suddenly he was nervous!

  “And this is safe?”

  It brought a teasing smile to her lips, but urgency quickly subsumed it. “Perfectly.” Her hands curled around his biceps, pulling him back towards her. He kissed her hungrily, reassured, desperate, but this was all so different. He’d never made love to a pregnant woman before – their bodies fit together differently and in the back of his mind was a need to be gentle with her, to pleasure her slowly, rather than to simply take her with the desperate hunger that was driving through him.

  He let his hands wander her body, finding the apex of curls at the top of her thighs, teasing her there so her eyes widened and her lips parted, and her breathing grew loud and fast, then he pushed a finger inside her warm, moist depths, swirling around to torment her tight muscles until she was calling his name out, pushing her hips upwards, desperate for more.

  His smile was hidden by her body as he pressed his mouth to her womanhood, his tongue finding her most sensitive collection of nerves and flicking them until she was moaning his name over and over and over again, the syllables spilling from her lips as though without her consent, without her knowledge.

  He felt her body tense, her legs lifting, her nails dragging against the fabric of his bed until she was writhing in ecstasy, kicking her feet, her pleasure exploding around them both. He pulled away, kissing his way over her stomach to the soft flesh beneath her breasts, bringing his arousal to her beautiful, warm opening. He savoured the moment, teasing himself now, pushing only the head of his tip into her, groaning as she lifted her hips to draw him deeper, hungry for him in a way that demanded satiation – they spoke this mutual language perfectly, each understanding the other’s needs without words.