Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain. Carol Marinelli

A pair of arms came around her from behind and covered her shivering arms where they still folded like clamps across her front. Long brown fingers closed over her icy fingers, a solid male torso became a supporting wall to her trembling back. A dark head lowered, a pair of lips came to rest on her ear.

      ‘Heard enough?’ Carlo asked in a soft, rough voice that scraped over her cold flesh like sand across silk.

      She wasn’t even surprised that it was him who was holding her. In some mad, tortuous way it seemed fitting that he would be the one to witness this—as if the two of them had been building towards this devastating moment for days.

      She was about to attempt a nod in answer to his question when Angelo uttered a thick groan and took fierce possession of Sonya’s lips. Sonya didn’t even try to stop him. The way they kissed, open-mouthed, deep and frantic, their two blond heads locked together. The way they touched, hands moving over each other in hot, tight, convulsive movements that stripped clean to the bone any lingering doubts she might have had that they’d done this many times before. A long, silken thigh was exposed to the hip bone, a small, pale breast was uncovered to receive the hungry clamp of Angelo’s mouth. It only took eyes to see that Sonya was wearing nothing at all beneath the skimpy scrap of silk. She’d come prepared for this, despite all the angry threats and protests she’d just uttered, she’d had no intention of missing out on the sex.

      Sickened, Francesca began to shudder. Carlo responded with a swiftness that caught her breath. The soft hiss of his anger stung her icy, quivering face as he twisted her around then tugged her against him and held her there for a moment while she shivered and shook.

      Then Angelo’s voice came, raw with pleasure. ‘Yes, do that again,’ he groaned.

      For a horrible moment Francesca thought she was going to faint. Carlo Carlucci must have thought so too because the next thing she knew one of his arms had hit the backs of her knees and she was being lifted off the ground.

      ‘I’m all right,’ she choked.

      His lips arrived at her ear again to utter the harsh rasp, ‘Be quiet or they will hear you.’

      The very thought of that happening had her curling into him. He started moving, long, swift strides taking them the full length of that side of the villa. A stunning silence arrived as they turned the corner and it was only then Francesca realised that the whole ugly thing had taken place to a background of music and laughter filtering out from the house.

      He kept on going further and further down this wing, which housed the more private apartments that were not being used for the party tonight. All the windows were shrouded in darkness, the only light coming from the hazed moon hanging in the night sky. He pulled to a stop beside yet another set of French doors. The villa was ringed with them; elegantly styled and evenly spaced, they gave every room on the ground floor its own access onto the wide terraces that flanked all four sides of the house.

      She felt tensile muscles flex as he reached down to try a handle. A door slid open and he swung her inside. It was dark in here too, but she did manage to register that he’d brought her to Mr Batiste’s private study with its heavy, dark pieces of furniture that didn’t blend in with the rest of the house.

      Then she was being dumped on a leather chair by the fireplace with logs neatly laid in the grate ready to light. Still shivering, she instantly wrapped her arms back round her body as Carlo moved to close the door they’d just used. She heard a key turn and quivered, though she didn’t know why she did. Then he was moving swiftly in the other direction and a second later another key turned in the door leading out to the hall.

      ‘Don’t,’ she said when she saw him raise a hand towards the light switch.

      The hand dropped to his side and she tried to relax some of the screaming tension from her body. It didn’t happen. Too many muscles had locked and knotted and she’d never felt so cold in her entire life.

      Still without comment he began to move again. He was nothing more than a shifting shadow in the darkness, and right now she was happy to keep him like that. She didn’t want to see his face—she didn’t want him to look into her own. She felt stripped and raped and bruised and battered.

      This time she heard the chink of glass on glass.

      Angelo and Sonya—Sonya and Angelo. Her eyes drifted shut as that dreadful little litany began playing itself over and over inside her head alongside frame-by-frame images of what she had just seen.

      The open-mouthed kiss that devoured greedily, the slippery blue satin that was so willing to slide away from a silken thigh and hip. She heard the gasps, the groans of passionate agony, and felt sick to her stomach because all she’d ever got was quietly, calmly—briefly wrapped in a light-hearted affection, not the raging fires and animal lust.

      What a perfectly choreographed act they’d put on for her benefit, she thought painfully. What a smooth blinding mask they’d pulled over her eyes as they snipped and sniped at each other the way that they had.

      And what a sick—sick joke the two of them had been enjoying at her expense.

      Humiliation poured through her bloodstream, the power of it grinding her bruised heart against her ribs. Dragging up her eyelids, she stared down at her dress. Angelo had not felt compelled to drag down this bodice and lay bare one of her breasts. He’d never once so much as stroked her thigh. The light touches she’d received that she’d believed were offered with love and tenderness and respect now became touches of idle contempt wrapped up in calculation and necessity.

      He’d intended to marry her and take her to bed only when he had to do it and even then he was going to impose Sonya’s sylph-like image over her to help him get through the ordeal.

      She quivered again, despising him for doing this to her—despising herself for being so gullible and blind.

      A sound reached into her consciousness—people laughing as they walked past the closed study door. The party, she remembered. Her engagement party. Hers and Angelo’s.

      The Gianni heiress and the fortune-hunter, she then thought bitterly.

      But she was no heiress. There was no fortune to be had if she was. And she could not understand why Angelo could believe otherwise when she’d already told him the hard truth about her connection to the Gianni name.

      ‘Here, drink some of this…’

      She hadn’t realised her eyes had closed again until she was forced to open them. The dark shadow was squatting in front of her, she realised, though she hadn’t noticed him arrive there. Only he wasn’t quite a dark shadow any more because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. So she could see the way he was studying her narrowly, the way he was holding his mouth thin and flat. The bright white of his shirt stood out, casting reflected light along the grim set of his chiselled jaw bone as he placed the rim of a glass to her mouth. She sipped without protest. The brandy trickled across her tongue and she forced herself to swallow, leaving warm vapours behind in her mouth.

      He sipped too. She watched with unblinking absorption as he lifted the glass away from her lips to place it against his own. His throat moved as he swallowed, shifting the butterfly collar to his shirt. He held the glass between long brown fingers while her own pale fingers still clutched at her arms, her nails scoring crescents into the icy bare skin.

      ‘H-how much did you overhear?’ she whispered unsteadily.

      For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer, his mouth compressing. Then, ‘Most if it,’ he admitted, and rose to his full height.

      She looked away from him—at the logs piled in the grate—on a sinking sense of dismay that robbed a bit more of her ravaged pride. This tall, dark, sophisticated man of Rome had stood there in the background witnessing the brutal murder of everything she cared about.

      She felt stripped bare again and flayed this time.

      ‘Why were you out there?’ No one else had been out there—or at least she hoped no one else had been there!

      The