Claimed by the Sicilian. Kate Walker

      ‘I told you—I thought it was a fake marriage!’

      She’d succeeded in pulling the sheet up now, wrapping it around her and tucking it tightly under her arms, over her breasts. But the truth was that it didn’t make matters any easier. If anything, it made them worse.

      He could still see the soft pink of her skin through the fine linen, the pout of her breasts was emphasised by the way she’d clamped her arms around herself underneath them, pushing them upwards, and the swell of her hips was an undulating curve to one side of the bed. Imagination combined with memory to act on the gnawing ache in his groin, driving him almost to distraction.

      ‘And what the hell made you think that? Amber…’ he insisted dangerously when she didn’t answer and dropped her gaze to where her narrow fingers pleated the sheet in front of her over and over again. ‘I asked you a question.’

      Just when he thought she wouldn’t answer and took a hasty step forward, almost on the edge of grabbing hold of her, shaking the response out of her, her chin came up and she met his searching gaze with unexpectedly cool defiance. Which was just as well as he knew that if he touched her now, for whatever reason, then he would never stop. It might begin in anger but as soon as he felt her skin underneath his hands then the mood would change. He would have to kiss her—and caress her—and then he wouldn’t be able to stop.

      ‘I heard you!’ she declared, bringing his thoughts back to reality with a rush that jarred his brain painfully. ‘You did what?’

      ‘I heard you paying him—paying the man who’d arranged it all. I heard you thanking him for—for getting everything sorted out so fast.’

      ‘Because that was how you wanted it!’ Guido put in in exasperation. ‘“Can we get married tomorrow?”’ he quoted her own words at her brutally. ‘“Just find a chapel here and—and do it.”’

      But it was obvious that Amber hadn’t heard, or if she had then she was deliberately ignoring him.

      ‘You—were grateful to him, you said…’ she ploughed on, her face as stiff and cold as if it had been the face of a marble statue, the green eyes blank and opaque. ‘Grateful to him for getting this farce of an event organised.’

      Hearing his own words parroted back to him had an effect like being doused in icy water, freezing Guido instantly. His tongue wouldn’t work, wouldn’t let him say anything, particularly when she went on, recalling the conversation with devastating accuracy.

      ‘You said you could only be thankful that this wasn’t your real wedding as it was nothing like the one you’d imagined you would have if you ever were to be married. Not that you ever wanted to be married.’

      ‘And that was the absolute truth. I never wanted to marry.’

      It was only when the cold, controlled words fell into the silence that followed her words that Amber realised just how much—how desperately—she had been hoping for something else.

      Had she really been stupid enough—weak enough—to dream that he might suddenly have recanted all he’d said to the man he was paying off that night in Las Vegas? Was she really that foolish?

      A year ago, perhaps she might have been. For a few glorious, wonderfully happy days of her catastrophically brief marriage she’d been totally brainwashed, totally deceived by him. But then the things she had overheard had destroyed the foolish idyll she’d been living in.

      She was supposed to have stayed in their hotel room, resting—resting after a particularly long and energetic afternoon of lovemaking—and waiting for him to come back from some meeting he’d had to go to, so that they could make love again. He’d told her that he would only be an hour, and when that hour had turned into two—and then almost another—she had started to worry. Dressing swiftly, she had made her way down into the hotel lobby—and there, hidden behind the large, ornate statue that filled the centre of the hallway, she had overheard Guido paying off the man he had hired to make their wedding look real.

      ‘It was everything she thought it would be,’ she’d heard him say. He’d even laughed—laughter that went straight through her heart like a brutal sword. ‘But then, she knows no better. Wouldn’t know a real wedding if she was at it.’

      At the time she’d just reacted. She hadn’t stopped to think, but had turned and run. By the time Guido had joined her upstairs, she had been almost packed—if flinging clothes haphazardly into a case, not caring which way they fell, could be called packing.

      Her mind blanked over at the memory of the huge row that had resulted from that. So now she put all the hurt, all the bitterness of her memories as well as the new misery he’d just inflicted on her into her voice as she rounded on him.

      ‘Oh, well, I’m glad that you do speak the truth sometimes! Because you certainly didn’t when you married me. When you vowed to be with me for the rest of our lives together. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a fake marriage—then at least I’d really have been free of you when I left. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could actually get an annulment if I could prove just how little you meant those vows, that you were lying—probably even perjuring yourself!’

      ‘And how would you know?’ Guido flung right back. ‘All you cared about was getting a ring on your finger.’

      He’d said the same thing on the day before she’d left him, Amber recalled bitterly. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him what she’d overheard, but she’d accused him of never having loved her, had tried every last desperate trick in the book to get him to say that he did.

      ‘We never had a marriage!’ she’d screamed at him from the depths of her pain. ‘Not a real one.’

      And, ‘You can say that again,’ he’d retaliated. ‘What we have is most definitely not a real marriage—and we never had a real wedding. Not that you would know the difference.’

      It was an accusation she couldn’t deny. She had been so nervous at the thought of her wedding, unable to believe that she was actually going ahead with it, that she was really going to marry a man like Guido Corsentino and that he was going to marry her, that she hadn’t even thought about the details, about the legalities. She had left all of that to Guido, let him handle everything, and stayed locked in her own little dream world of happiness, terrified that if she came out of it she might find it had all been a dream.

      ‘I didn’t want to stop and think about what I was doing! I just wanted it done and over with.’

      ‘And why was that? Were you worried that Mamma might find out? Or was it just the idea that you were lowering yourself to marry a Sicilian peasant?’

      ‘I never thought of you like that! I…’

      She caught the foolish words back before they could escape her.

      I only wanted to hurt you as you’d hurt me, was what she had been going to say, but she couldn’t admit to that. He would see behind it to the truth. And the truth of how much she’d loved him was something she didn’t want him to know. Because the wedding might have been real but Guido’s reasons for marrying her after all had been as cold and calculated as she’d come to realise. He had only wanted to keep her in his bed and he had been prepared to go along with her need for a wedding in order to achieve that end. She might have been married to him but it had never been a marriage of love.

      ‘No, you only realised how badly I compared to your English aristocrat when he came looking for you and you realised I would never be able to offer you the title of Lady anything.’

      When had Guido moved?

      She had been so intent on standing up to him, on showing him that he couldn’t just walk all over her, that she hadn’t noticed that he had taken several strides forward, coming so much closer to the bed. Now he towered over her, glaring down into her face, his eyes black as pitch and burning with molten anger.

      But it wasn’t the threat in them that dried her mouth, sending