Italian Bachelors: Irresistible Sicilians. Michelle Smart

witching hours without guilt and then flop into bed shattered.

      One thing she had always been able to take heart from was that he would always join her if he was in Sicily. Wherever she slept, he would seek her out. Always. She would wake to find herself wrapped in his arms. Invariably, they would make love and she would tell herself that everything between them was fine.

      She was certain she had left the bed unmade.

      The bathroom was dusty but clean, relatively tidy, her toothbrush and other toiletries on display where she had left them. A quick peek in the laundry basket revealed the tatty jeans and paint-splattered jumper she had last worked in.

      Her bittersweet trip down memory lane was interrupted when she heard the front door shut.

      ‘Hello?’ she called, hurrying to the stairs. About to step down, she paused when she saw Luca leaning against the front door staring up at her.

      ‘What do you want?’ They were alone for the first time since he had found her. Now there was no Lily to temper the tone of her voice for, she made no attempt to hide her hostility.

      The first thing she noticed was his lack of a sling. Dressed in black jeans and a light blue sweater, his arms folded across his broad chest, his jawline covered in dark stubble, he carried a definite air of menacing weariness.

      ‘We’ve been invited to Francesco Calvetti’s birthday party in Florence next Saturday,’ he said without any preamble.

      ‘Why’s he holding it in Florence?’ Francesco Calvetti was as big a gangster as her husband. It was only after Luca had invested in a couple of casinos and nightclubs with him that the cracks in their marriage had appeared and he had begun to change...

      ‘He bought a hotel there. I’ve accepted the invitation for us.’

      ‘It’s far too short notice.’

      ‘I wasn’t asking your opinion on the matter. I was telling you.’

      ‘And what about Lily?’

      ‘I have spoken to my mother and she has agreed to care for her overnight.’

      ‘Absolutely not.’ No way was she going to leave her baby to attend that man’s party.

      ‘I have also seen the local priest about having Lily baptised,’ he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I have booked her in for the first Sunday of the new year.’

      ‘Well, that’s telling me,’ she said, stomping down the stairs. ‘We can argue about the christening in a minute. I am not leaving Lily to attend a silly party.’

      ‘It is not a silly party. It is an important event that you will attend as my devoted wife.’

      The way his eyes burned into her left Grace with no doubt as to the meaning laced in his words.

      Devoted wife.

      Luca might have abandoned the idea of displaying togetherness in front of his family but this did not extend to the wider world.

      She would be expected to accompany him and act the docile, dutiful wife.

      She would be expected to play the role of lover to a man she hated with every fibre of her being. The consequences of failure would be harsh. Banishment from her daughter’s life.

      ‘Am I at least allowed a say in the christening? Or is Lily’s entire future to be decided by you?’

      His nostrils flared. ‘That all depends.’

      ‘On what?’

      ‘On whether your opinions concur with mine.’

      ‘So that’ll be never, then,’ she threw at him bitterly.

      ‘Consider yourself lucky to be here and able to voice an opinion,’ he said, his tone a low, threatening timbre. ‘It’s a sight more than you gave me.’

      ‘It’s a sight more than you deserved,’ she spat. ‘Now, unless there’s something else you want to tell me, you can leave.’

      * * *

      Luca clenched his fists by his sides at her defiance, at the folded arms crossed over the slender waist, her hair sprouting in all directions. Since they had returned, the red dye had faded, her natural honey blonde coming through.

      He didn’t know if he wanted to wrap his hands around her throat or kiss the defiance from her face.

      She had been home for six days. In all that time he had tried to block her from his mind but she was still there, festering in his psyche. He didn’t want to exchange one solitary word more than was necessary with her. Simply looking at her deceitful face made his stomach clench.

      ‘I am not yet ready to leave. You owe me some answers.’

      Her striking features contorted into something feral. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

      Every sinew in his body tightened. When she turned her back on him and walked to her workbench, he had to fight the urge to wrench her round and force her to look at him.

      ‘You damn well do. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. No letter, no phone call, nothing to let me know if you were dead or alive.’

      She turned around, leaned against the bench and rolled her eyes. ‘Steady on, Luca—you make it sound as if you were worried about me. Surely a heart is needed to feel worry?’

      It was the dripping cynicism that did it for him. The sheer lack of remorse. The implication that her selfish, unrepentant behaviour was somehow his fault.

      All the rage he had been smothering since he found her exploded out of him, consuming him in a fury that accelerated when he found his tongue to speak.

      ‘Worried about you?’ he said, his words coming out in a raging flow. ‘Worried about you? I thought you were dead! Do you hear me? Dead! I imagined you lying cold on a verge. I pictured you cold in a mortuary. For two weeks I could not sleep for the nightmares. So no, I wasn’t worried about you. It was much worse than that.’

      For a moment he thought he caught a flicker of distress on her face before her now familiar insouciance replaced it. ‘I apologise if I caused you any distress...’

      Slam!

      Without conscious thought, the desperate need to purge the storm of emotions acted for him and he punched the wall.

      ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ he raged. ‘I thought we were happy. When you went missing, I thought you’d been kidnapped but when I received no ransom I thought you had been killed. I called your mother, I called Cara—neither of them had heard from you. Or so they said. It never crossed my mind you would do something so wicked as to up and leave without a word.’ He threw his arms out, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, ignoring the throb in his fist. ‘You didn’t just leave me, you left everything, all your work, all your clothes...’

      In the midst of his fury he saw how white she had become, how she clung to her workbench as if she depended on it to keep her upright.

      Taking a deep, ragged breath, he fought for control and forced his voice to adopt a modicum of calm. ‘Two weeks after you went missing, your bank statement arrived. I opened it and found every euro had been transferred into a new account the same day you disappeared. Do you know how I felt then?’

      Slowly, she shook her head.

      ‘Elated. Suddenly there existed the possibility you were alive. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to me to check the safe for your passport.’ When he had discovered it missing, the relief had been so physical he had slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, sitting there for minutes that had felt like hours, his usually quick brain taking its time to process the implications. But once he had processed them...

      He had dug up all her bank statements and read them in detail. Apart from the odd splurge on painting materials, Grace had hardly touched the allowance he gave her. Over a