Italian Bachelors: Irresistible Sicilians. Michelle Smart

sounds like a threat.’

      ‘Not at all, bella. As you should know, I never make useless threats, only promises. If you keep challenging me I will have no option but to shut you up the only way I know that works with you.’

      ‘Oh, yes? And how’s that, Gangster Boy?’ Why was she antagonising him so? Why could she not simply keep her mouth shut and walk away?

      He studied her for an age, the fury in his eyes dispersing and being replaced by a gleam that frightened her a whole lot more than mere anger. Suddenly she was all too aware of the shortness of her nightdress—in her rush to find Lily she’d forgotten to put on her dressing gown.

      His olive throat moved; his magnificent chest rose.

      She could hear the heaviness of her own breathing, knew he was close enough to hear it too. He was too close. She could smell the musky scent of his skin...

      ‘By kissing you.’

      ‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’

      He took another step towards her, stopping just short of touching her. But it was enough. The heat of his naked skin so close to hers was enough to make her traitorous body, already wholly aware with her skin tingling and her blood thick and warm, spring alive.

      ‘Ridiculous?’ His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘Do you not remember how good it used to be between us?’

      She shivered, unwanted yet, oh, so potent images of just how good they had been together flittering in her head. ‘I thought you were on the hunt for a mistress.’

      ‘So did I.’ His eyes were stark with a desire she recognised from old, his voice barely audible. ‘But you are the only woman who can make me hard with a single look. And you want me too—I can see it in your eyes. I know you, Grace. And I know when you want me. If Lily wasn’t in your arms we would already be on that bed screwing each other’s brains out.’

      The air thickened with the same tightening as in her core. Struggling for oxygen, she fought to make her vocal cords work. ‘Don’t say another word. You can keep hunting because there is no way I’m ever sharing a bed with you again. I don’t want you—I hate you.’

      She turned on her heel and fled, hurrying all the way back to the hateful blue room, a room she loathed almost as much as she loathed her husband. She let the door shut with a slam.

      Holding Lily to her, she sat on the bed and waited for her thundering heart to slow to at least near normal levels, berating herself for her stupidity.

      Thank God she’d had Lily in her arms. There had been a moment when her fingers had itched to slap him while her lips had tingled to kiss him.

      To do more than kiss him.

      Why had she not had the good sense to take Lily back to her room immediately, without striking up a conversation with him, without antagonising him?

      Deep down, she knew why.

      Seeing Luca and Lily together had disturbed her on so many levels she’d had to fight, lest the softening in her bones became a permanent thing.

      They had looked so...so...perfect together. Seeing them like that... The guilt had almost split her in two.

      Then, when Luca had woken, his defences against her down, his hatred still sleeping, he had looked exactly like the man she had married.

      She didn’t want to remember anything good about him. She didn’t want to remember how convinced she had once been that he would make a fantastic father, even if his offspring would be unable to breathe without his knowledge.

      He had been more of a father to Lily in one night than her own father had been to Grace in her entire lifetime.

      It had been hard enough to leave Luca the first time. How easy would it be to leave if Lily fell in love with him too? She had to remember the man he had become by the end of their marriage. The man she had run away from.

      She cast her mind to the cheap phone currently stuffed in a pair of boots in her wardrobe.

      She didn’t know how it could help in her escape plan but just having something that was hers and untraceable felt precious.

      If Luca found it, she would be thrown out on the streets. It made no difference that he still wanted her. That was just chemistry. He didn’t love her. He would cast her out as if she were nothing more than uneaten food.

      She couldn’t quite believe she’d been able to acquire it. She hadn’t gone shopping with the intention of buying a phone—her only intention had been to buy her mum and Cara a Christmas present each; something to let them know how special they were to her. To make amends.

      Not that Billie thought there was anything to make amends for. When she’d spoken to her mum, it was as if she’d never been away—Billie had made some appropriate-sounding noises of relief and appropriate squeals at being a grandmother before discussing, in great detail, her latest commission. By all accounts Grace’s dad was somewhere in Africa with no plans to return any time soon. If he knew or cared that she’d been missing, she didn’t know. And she didn’t ask. Some questions were better left unasked.

      Cara’s reaction to Grace’s reappearance had been somewhat different. Other than a couple of vague text messages, her best friend was being decidedly elusive. She couldn’t blame her, not after she’d been so flippant about Cara’s fright the day they’d first met Luca. Cara had been the one with the sense to be frightened of a man with a gun. And somehow Cara had been the one tricked into giving up her phone so the secrets contained within it could be revealed.

      Her three bodyguards had been glued to her side for the whole trip until she had come to a bustling market. One stall had sold scarves. Out of the corner of her eye she had noticed a row of cheap phones behind the busy seller’s table.

      Snatching the opportunity, she had grabbed a scarf, given the pram to her bodyguards and dived into the throng. When she had reached the front of the table, the crowd thick behind her, she could only hope her guards didn’t have X-ray vision. She’d quickly wrapped the phone inside the scarf and, acting as casual as a woman whose heart rate had quadrupled could, placed her purchases in Lily’s large baby bag.

      She could only pray Luca never found it.

      * * *

      Luca knocked on the door to the blue room. He was confident that, given a little more time, he would start thinking of it as Grace’s room. He was also confident that, given a little more time, he would stop thinking of the master bedroom as their room.

      He ignored the thought that he’d had well over ten months to stop thinking of it as theirs.

      When there was still no response, he pushed the door open. Neither Grace nor Lily were anywhere to be found. A small suitcase lay closed on the bed, the dress he had bought her draped over it as if it had been thrown there without any thought. The fancy box it had been perfectly folded into at the boutique had been thrown in the waste bin.

      She hated that dress. Really hated it. It had given him a perverse pleasure buying it for her, knowing she would have to obey his wishes and wear it. He had seen it as a fitting punishment for a woman who thrived on colour and light, one of many punishments she would have to endure.

      Turning to leave, he caught sight of his reflection in the full-length mirror and stopped short, suddenly certain he had seen a pair of horns sprouting from his head. He blinked to clear the image.

      It was just him. Luca.

      Not the monster Grace was adamant he had become.

      For a moment though...

      What did she see when she looked at him?

      Did she really see a man with horns on his head?

      An image of his tiny, defenceless daughter floated into his head. Lily was an innocent, dependent on the adults who cared for her. She had no voice.

      But one day she would.