Claimed by the Sicilian. Kate Walker

else had walked out.

      Even her mother had walked out—sweeping past him with her nose in the air and an expression that said he was less than the dirt beneath her feet.

      But at least she had looked at him. She hadn’t even spared her daughter a second glance.

      She hadn’t looked at Amber, sitting there in a crumpled heap on the altar steps. She hadn’t shown a hint of care or compassion or—anything! She had just walked straight out of the church, following the groom’s mother and father as if they were all that mattered. As if they and not her daughter were her real family.

      It had only taken a few moments and then they were alone together, with Amber still curled into a miserable little ball on the marble steps to the altar.

      Guido had tried to turn. He had wanted to go—he’d done what he came for, stopped the bigamous and illegal wedding, had the revenge he needed for the way she had treated him, the callous way she had walked out on him when she’d decided that he wasn’t good enough for her. He’d even avenged the way that Rafe St Clair had treated one of his own family not too long before. It was what he’d planned—walk in—blow the proceedings and her hope of an aristocratic marriage to hell—and walk out again.

      But his conscience wouldn’t let him.

      His conscience and something deeper, harder, more primitive. Something that kicked him hard in the gut—and lower—when he tried to turn round and leave.

      Something that had nothing to do with sympathy and caring and everything to do with hunger and need and the eternal, endless fires that burned between men and women from the start of the world until the end of time. And had flamed between him and this woman from the very first moment in which they’d met.

      He simply couldn’t walk out on her as she had done to him and that was an end to it.

      And he couldn’t walk out without touching her, tasting her—taking her mouth just one more time.

      And so he ignored all the warnings that his brain threw at him, listened instead to the most primitive, most male parts of himself, and bent his head and kissed her.

      ‘Ahh, Amber…’

      The scent of her body surrounded him, flooding his head. Those warm pink lips, previously clamped tight to hold back bitter and violent emotions, seemed to tense even further for a second then, slowly, painfully slowly, gave, softened…opened…

      His throat clenched, his heart jerking. His body hardened. And the thoughts that filled his mind were definitely inappropriate, positively sinful, given the place where he stood, in the centre of those altar steps.

      She was warm and soft against him. Melting pliantly into the hardness of his body. And if he thought that he had known sexual hunger before, that he had desired her in the past, then it was as nothing when compared to the burning hands that took his nerves now and held them tight—twisted them hard.

      ‘Mia cara,’ he muttered, raw and thick, his hands sliding down from where he had held her arms as he hauled her to her feet. Moving over her back, down the fine line of her spine to the narrow waist.

       ‘Mia bella…’

      He wanted to press her closer, to hold her tight, to feel the delicacy of her slender frame against him, but at the same time wanted his hands to be everywhere. Stroking over the fine silk of her dress, feeling the curves and lines of what lay beneath; closing over the softness of female flesh on her exposed arms; smoothing and cupping the swell of her hips, the neat buttocks.

       ‘Bella…’

      It was a groan of need on his mouth. But even as it escaped him he knew that he didn’t want to talk. That he only wanted to feel, to taste, to enjoy.

      Her small pink tongue tangled with his, in much the same way that his restless fingers tangled with a wayward curl of chestnut hair that he had tugged loose at the nape of her neck. The sensual slide of his fingertips against the silky strands, the intimate taste of her warm, moist mouth made him gasp out loud in the same moment that Amber sighed his name, taking the faint sound into her throat and swallowing it down with a moan that drove his already heated senses wild.

      She swayed against him, arms hanging limp by her sides, the delicate flowers in her bouquet brushing against his leg, crushing their petals and releasing the odour into the air to float upwards towards his nose. With his senses already inflamed, this new sensation threatened overload, setting up a pounding at his temples that destroyed any attempt at rational thought. His hungry hands clutched rather than stroked, sought the swell of her breasts, warm beneath the silk, soft, yielding…

       ‘Bellissima—mia moglie…’

      ‘No!’

      That last word had been a mistake. Her spine had stiffened, her tongue stilling, her head pulling just an inch back. So short a distance and yet one that put all the division in the world between them. Because of course Amber knew just enough Italian to understand those two emotive, provoking words, ‘mia moglie’—my wife.

      ‘No, no, no, no!’

      With a brutal effort Amber wrenched her mouth away from his lips, wrenched her body from his constraining hands. Wrenched her mind back from the terrible, dangerous cliff edge over which she had almost, foolishly, crazily tumbled.

      ‘No! I am not your wife!’

      ‘Oh, but you are.’

      It was low, fast, deadly as a striking snake, and every bit as lethal to her self-control.

      ‘But I don’t want to be married to you!’

      ‘Then you should have thought of that before you said “I do” twelve months ago.’

      ‘This has to be a bad dream!’ she managed, shaking her head in despair.’ The worst possible nightmare…’

      ‘Believe that if you wish, mia cara, but I assure you that you are wide awake and nothing can make this anything but real. Do you think I would go to all this trouble if it wasn’t?’

      You’re just not worth it, his tone implied. He wouldn’t have expended the time and effort to travel all the way from the heat of Sicily to the cool springtime of this little Yorkshire village, if he hadn’t been forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control.

      ‘And really you should be grateful to me.’

      ‘Grateful?’

      Amber knew that she was gaping, that her jaw had dropped and her mouth was almost as wide open as her eyes. But she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

      ‘And why, in God’s name, should I be grateful to you for what you’ve done?’ she asked in a voice that was so rigid with shock and distress it actually sounded as coldly distant as she might have wanted had she had the strength of mind to control it properly.

      ‘Didn’t I just save you from prison?’ Guido drawled with indolent arrogance. ‘So tell me—what is the sentence for bigamy here in England? Five years? Ten?’

      ‘This—our marriage truly was real?’

      She still couldn’t get her head round the appalling facts even though Guido had hammered them home several times since his dramatic arrival in the church.

      ‘It’s absolutely real—totally legal, watertight and binding. We’re husband and wife whether we like it or not.’

      ‘Not.’

      It was all she could manage. How could she be happy to learn that the marriage she believed was just a con, a ploy to keep her right where Guido had wanted her—in his bed—was actually the genuine thing, and still binding after all this time?

      A year ago, she would have been overjoyed to think that she had been wrong and the marriage she’d thought was a sham was in fact the genuine thing, but then she had been naïve as a baby and so desperately