Blackmailed Into The Marriage Bed. Melanie Milburne

      He’d reeled her in with his charm and planted her in his life as his wife, on the surface fine with her decision not to have kids, but then he’d changed his mind a few months into their marriage. Or maybe he hadn’t changed his mind at all. He had gambled on his ability to change her mind.

      Gambled and lost.

      She glanced at the photo frame again. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

      Vinn turned the frame around so she could see the image of their wedding day. Ailsa hadn’t looked at their wedding photos since their separation. She had put the specially monogrammed albums at the back of her wardrobe under some clothes she no longer wore. It had been too embarrassing to look at her smiling face in all of those pictures where she had foolishly agreed to be a trophy wife. She had agreed to become a possession, not a person who had longings and hopes and dreams of her own. Looking at those photos was like looking at all the mistakes she had made. How could she have been so stupid to think an arrangement like that would ever work? That marrying anyone—especially someone like Vinn—would make her feel normal in a way she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen? Their marriage hadn’t even lasted a year. Eleven months and thirteen days, to be precise.

      Vinn had mentioned the B word. A baby—a family to continue the Gagliardi dynasty. She would have ended up a breeding machine, her career left to wither, while his business boomed.

      Her interior decorating business was her baby. She had given birth to it, nurtured it and made numerous sacrifices for it. Having a real baby was out of the question. There were too many unknowns about her background.

      How could she give birth to a child, not knowing what sort of bad blood flowed in its veins?

      Ailsa swallowed against the barbed ball of bitterness in her throat and cast her gaze back to Vinn’s onyx one. ‘Why do you keep it on your desk?’

      He turned the frame back so it was facing him, his expression now as inscrutable as his computer screen in sleep mode. ‘One of the best bits of business advice I’ve ever received is never forget the mistakes of the past. Use them as learning platforms and move on.’

      It wasn’t the first time Ailsa had thought of herself as a mistake. Ever since she’d found out the circumstances surrounding her conception she had trouble thinking about herself as anything else. Most babies were conceived out of love but she had been conceived by brute force. ‘What do your new lovers think when they see that photo on your desk?’

      ‘It hasn’t been a problem so far.’

      Ailsa wasn’t sure if he’d answered the question or not. Was he saying he’d had numerous lovers or that none of them had been inside his office? Or had he taken his new lovers elsewhere, not wanting to remind himself of all the times he had made love to her on that desk? Did he wear his wedding ring when he made love to other women? Or did he take it off when it suited him? She glanced at his face to see if there was any hint of the turmoil she was feeling, but his features were as indifferent as if she were a stranger who had walked in off the street.

      ‘So...the conditions you’re proposing...’ she began.

      ‘My grandfather is facing a do-or-die liver transplant,’ Vinn said. ‘The surgeon isn’t giving any guarantee he will make it through the operation, but without it he will die within a matter of weeks.’

      ‘I’m sorry to hear he’s so unwell,’ Ailsa said. ‘But I hardly see how this has anything to do with—’

      ‘If he dies, and there’s a very big chance he will, then I want him to die at peace.’

      Ailsa knew how much respect Vinn had for his grandfather Domenico Gagliardi and how the old man had helped him during the time when Vinn’s father was in jail. She had genuinely liked Dom and, although she’d always found him a bit austere and even aloof on occasion, she could well imagine for Vinn the prospect of losing his grandfather was immensely painful. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel for him during such a sad and difficult time, but she still couldn’t see how it had anything to do with her.

      ‘I know how much you care for your grandfather, Vinn. I wish there was something I could do to—’

      ‘There is something you can do,’ Vinn said. ‘I want us to be reconciled until he is safely through the surgery.’

      Ailsa looked at him as if he’d told her to jump out of the window, her heart thumping so heavily she could hear it like an echo in her ears. ‘What?’

      ‘You heard me.’ The set to his mouth was grimly determined, as if he had made up his mind how things would be and nothing and no one was going to talk him out of it. Not even her.

      She licked her parchment-dry lips. He wanted her back? Vinn wanted her to come back to him? As his wife? She opened and closed her mouth, trying to locate her voice. ‘Are you mad?’

      ‘Not mad. Determined to get my grandfather through this without adding to the stress he’s already going through,’ Vinn said. ‘He’s a family man with strong values. I want those values respected and honoured by resuming our marriage until he is well and truly out of danger. I will allow nothing and no one to compromise his recovery.’

      Ailsa got to her feet so abruptly the chair almost toppled over. ‘I’ve never heard anything so outrageous. You can’t expect me to come back to you as if the last two years didn’t happen. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.’

      He remained seated with his unwavering gaze locked on hers. Something about his stillness made the floor of her belly flutter like a deck of rapidly shuffled cards.

      ‘Isaac is talented but that talent will be wasted without my help and you know it,’ he said. ‘I will provide him with not one, not two, but three years of full sponsorship if you’ll agree to come back to me for three months.’

      Ailsa wanted to refuse. She needed to refuse. But if she refused her younger brother might never reach his potential. It was within her power to give Isaac this opportunity of a lifetime. But how could she go back to Vinn? Even for three minutes, let alone three months? She clutched the strap of her bag like it was a lifeline and blindly reached for her overnight bag, her hand curling around the handle for support.

      ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I have a career in London. I can’t just pack up everything and relocate here.’

      ‘You could open a temporary branch of your business here in Milan,’ he said. ‘You could even set up a franchise arrangement. You already have some wealthy Italian clients, sì?’

      Ailsa frowned so hard she could almost hear her eyebrows saying ouch at the collision. How had he heard about her Italian clients? Had Isaac told him? But she rarely mentioned anything much to her brother about her work. Isaac talked about his stuff not hers: his golfing dreams, his exercise regime, his frustration that their parents didn’t understand how important his sport was to him and that, since their divorce, they weren’t wealthy enough to help him get where he needed to be, etc. Ailsa hadn’t told Isaac this last trip to Florence was to meet with a professional couple who had employed her to decorate their centuries-old villa. They had come to her studio in London and liked her work and engaged her services on the spot.

      ‘How do you know that?’

      Vinn’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. ‘I’m Italian. I have Italian friends and associates across the country.’

      Suspicion crawled across Ailsa’s scalp like a stick insect on stilts. ‘So... Do I have you to thank for the di Capellis’ villa in Florence? And the Ferrantes’ in Rome?’

      ‘Why shouldn’t I recommend you? Your work is superb.’

      Ailsa narrowed her gaze. ‘Presumably, you mean as an interior decorator, not as a wife.’

      ‘Maybe you’ll be better at it the second time around.’

      ‘There isn’t going to be a second time around,’ Ailsa said. ‘You tricked me into marrying you the first time. Do you really think I’m