The Venadicci Marriage Vengeance

Gabby shook her head and glanced at the drinks menu. ‘No, I haven’t been out all that much lately.’

‘Have you dated anyone since your husband died?’ he asked, with what appeared to be only casual interest.

She still looked at the menu rather than face his gaze. ‘It’s only been two years,’ she said curtly. ‘I’m in no hurry.’

‘Do you miss him?’

Gabby put the menu down and looked at Vinn in irritation. ‘What sort of a question is that?’ she asked. ‘We were married for five years.’ Five miserably unhappy years. But she could hardly tell him that. She hadn’t even told her parents.

She hadn’t told anyone. Who was there to tell? She had never been particularly good at friendships; her few girlfriends had found Tristan boorish and overbearing, and each of them had gradually moved on, with barely an e-mail or a text to see how she was doing. Gabby knew it was mostly her fault for constantly covering for her husband’s inadequacies. She had become what the experts called an enabler, a co-dependant. Tristan had been allowed to get away with his unspeakable behaviour because she had not been able to face the shame of facing up to the mistake she had made in marrying him. As a result she had become an adept liar, and, although it was painful to face it, she knew she had only herself to blame.

‘You didn’t have children,’ Vinn inserted into the silence. ‘Was that your choice or his?’

‘It wasn’t something we got around to discussing,’ she said, as she inspected the food menu with fierce concentration.

The waiter came and took their order for drinks. Gabby chose a very rich cocktail—more for Dutch courage than anything. It was what she felt she needed just now: a thick fog of alcohol to survive an evening in Vinn’s company.

Vinn, on the other hand, ordered a tall glass of iced mineral water—a well-known Italian brand, she noticed.

‘You’d better go easy on that drink of yours, Gabriella,’ he cautioned as she took a generous mouthful. ‘Drinking on an empty stomach is not wise. Alcohol has a well-known disinhibitory effect on behaviour. You might find yourself doing things you wouldn’t normally do.’

She gave him a haughty look. ‘You mean like enjoying your company instead of loathing every minute of it?’

His grey-blue eyes gave a flame-like flash. ‘You will enjoy a whole lot more than just my company before the ink on our marriage certificate is dry,’ he said.

Gabby took another gulping swallow of her drink to disguise her discomfiture. Her stomach felt quivery all of a sudden. The thought of his hands and mouth on her body was making her feel as if she had taken on much more than she had bargained for. She had held Tristan off for years—except for that one horrible night when he had… She swallowed another mouthful of her drink, determined not to think of the degradation she had suffered at her late husband’s hands.

‘You have gone rather pale,’ Vinn observed. ‘Is the thought of sharing my bed distasteful to you?’

Gabby was glad she had her glass to hide behind, although the amount of alcohol she had consumed had gone alarmingly to her head. Or perhaps it was his disturbing presence. Either way, she didn’t trust herself to speak and instead sent him another haughty glare.

‘That kiss we shared seven years ago certainly didn’t suggest you would find my lovemaking abhorrent— anything but. You were hungry for it, Gabriella. I found that rather interesting, since the following day you married another man.’

‘You forced yourself on me,’ she hissed at him in an undertone, on account of the other diners close by.

‘Forced is perhaps too strong a word to use, but in any case you responded wholeheartedly,’ he said. ‘Not just with those soft full lips of yours, but with your tongue as well. And if I recall even your teeth got into the act at one point. I’m getting hard now, just thinking about it.’

Gabby had never felt so embarrassed in her entire life. Her face felt as if someone had aimed a blowtorch at her. But even more disturbing was the thought of his body stirring with arousal for her—especially with those powerful thighs of his within touching distance of hers.

‘Your recollection has obviously been distorted over time, for I can barely remember it,’ she said with a toss of her head.

His eyes glinted smoulderingly. ‘Then perhaps I should refresh your memory,’ he said. ‘No doubt there will be numerous opportunities to do so once we are living together as man and wife.’

Gabby had to fight to remain calm, but it was almost impossible to control the stuttering of her heart and the flutter of panic deep and low in her belly. ‘When do you plan for this ridiculous farce to commence?’ she asked, with fabricated quiescence.

‘Our marriage will not be a farce,’ he said, with a determined set to his mouth. ‘It will be real in every sense of the word.’

Her eyes widened a fraction before she could counter it. ‘Is that some sort of sick habit of yours? Sleeping with someone you dislike?’

‘You are a very beautiful woman, Gabriella,’ he said. ‘Whether I like you or not is beside the point.’

Gabby wanted to slap that supercilious smile off his face. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap, her eyes shooting sparks of fury at him. But more disturbing was the way her body was responding to his smoothly delivered sensual promises. She could feel a faint trembling between her thighs, like a tiny pulse, and her breasts felt full and tight, her nipples suddenly sensitive against the black fabric of her dress.

‘I’m prepared to marry you, but that’s as far as it goes,’ she said with a testy look. ‘It’s totally barbaric of you to expect me to agree to a physical relationship with you.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he asked. ‘Two point four million dollars is a high price for a bride, and I expect to get my money’s worth.’

She sucked in a rasping breath. ‘This is outrageous! It’s akin to prostitution.’

‘You came to me for help, Gabriella, and I gave it to you,’ he said. ‘I was totally up-front about the terms, so there is no point in pretending to be shocked about them now.’

‘But what about the woman you were seeing a month or so ago?’ Gabby asked, recalling a photograph she had seen in the ‘Who’s-Out-and-About?’ section of one of the Sydney papers. An exquisitely beautiful woman gazing up at Vinn adoringly.

He gave her a supercilious smile. ‘So you have been keeping a close eye on my love life, have you, mia piccola?’

She glowered at him darkly. ‘I have absolutely no interest in who you see. But if we are to suffer a short-term marriage, the very least you could do is keep your affairs out of the press.’

‘I don’t recall saying our marriage was going to be a short-term one,’ he said with an inscrutable smile. ‘Far from it.’

Gabby felt her heart give a kick-like movement against the wall of her chest. ‘W-what?’ she gasped.

‘I have always held the opinion that marriage should be for life,’ he said. ‘I guess you could say it stems from my background. My mother was abandoned by the man she loved while she had a baby on the way. She had no security, no husband to provide for her, and as a result she went on to live a hard life of drudgery— cleaning other people’s houses to keep food on the table and clothes on our backs. I swore from an early age that when it came time for me to settle down I would do so with permanence in mind.’

‘But you don’t even like me!’ she blurted in shock. ‘How could you possibly contemplate tying yourself to me for the rest of your life?’

‘Haven’t you got any mirrors at your house any more, mia splendida ragazza?’ he asked, with another smouldering look. ‘I do not have to like you to lust over you. And isn’t that what every wife wants? A husband with an unquenchable desire for her and her alone?’

Gabby swallowed back her panic, but even so she felt as if she was choking on a thick uneven lump of it. ‘You’re winding me up. I know you are. This is your idea of a sick joke. And let me tell you, I am not finding it the least bit amusing.’

‘I am not joking, Gabriella,’ he said. ‘Love is generally an overrated emotion—or at least I have found it to be so. People fall in and out of love all the time. But some of the most successful marriages I know are those built on compatibility in bed—and, believe you me, you don’t need to be in love with someone to have an earth-shattering orgasm with them.’

Gabby felt her face explode with colour, and was never more grateful for the reappearance of the waiter to take their meal orders.

Hearing Vinn speak of…that word…that experience… made her go hot all over. She had never experienced pleasure with her late husband. The one time Tristan had taken it upon himself to assert “his manly duty”, as he had euphemistically called it, he had left her not cold, but burning with pain and shame.

Once the waiter had left, Gabby drained the rest of her cocktail, beyond caring that it had made her head spin. No amount of alcohol could affect her more than Vinn had already done, she decided. Her body was tingling all over with sensation, and her mind was running off at wayward tangents, imagining what it would feel like to be crushed by the solid weight of his body, his sensual mouth locked on hers, one of his strong, hair-roughened thighs nudging hers apart to—

She jerked away from her thoughts, annoyed that she had allowed his potent brand of sensuality to get under her guard. What on earth was she thinking? He was the enemy. She knew exactly what he was doing and why. He was only marrying her to get back at her for how she had treated him in the past. He knew it would be torture for her to be tied to him. Why else would he insist on it? Never had she regretted her immature behaviour more than this moment. Why, oh why, had she been so shallow and cruel?

Gabby’s older brother Blair had often pulled her up for her attitude towards Vinn, but in a way his relationship with Vinn had been a huge part of the problem. She had felt jealous that her adored older brother clearly preferred the company of the cleaner’s son to hers. Gabby had resented the way Blair spent hours helping Vinn with his studies when he could have been spending time with her, the way he’d used to do before Vinn had arrived with his mother.

When Gabby had accidentally stumbled upon the realisation that Vinn suffered from dyslexia she had cruelly taunted him with it, mocking him for not being able to read the most basic of texts. But for some reason, just as he had when she had led him on so despicably that hot summer afternoon when she was sixteen, Vinn had never spoken to her brother or her parents about her behaviour. He had taken it on the chin, removing himself from her presence without a word, even though she had sensed the blistering anger in him, simmering just below the surface of his steely outward calm.

Gabby could sense that anger still simmering now, in the way he looked at her from beneath that slightly hooded brow. Those grey-blue eyes were like mysteriously deep mountain lakes, icy cold one minute, warm and inviting the next, and they spoke of a man who had nothing but revenge on his mind.

She had seen the way women were looking at him. He had such arrestingly handsome features, and his presence was both commanding and brooding—as if he was calculating his next move, like a champion chess player, prepared to take as long as he needed to move his king, making his opponent sit it out in gut-wrenching apprehension.

Gabby felt another shiver of unease pass through her at the thought of being married to him. He had said he expected their marriage to be permanent. That meant there were issues to consider: children, for one thing. She was twenty-eight years old, and she would be lying if she said she hadn’t heard the relentless ticking of her biological clock in the two years since Tristan had died. Children had not been an option while she had been married to him. She would never have brought children into such a relationship. She hadn’t even brought a pet into the house in case he had used it against her in one of his violent moods.

‘You have gone very quiet, Gabriella,’ Vinn observed. ‘Is the thought of having an orgasm with me too hard for you to handle?’

She gave him a withering look. ‘No, in actual fact I find it hard to believe it possible,’ she said. ‘I can’t speak for the legion of women you’ve already bedded, but I personally am unable to engage in such an intimate act without some engagement of emotion.’

He gave a deep chuckle of laughter. ‘How about hate?’ he asked, reaching for his mineral water. ‘Is that enough emotion to get you rolling?’

She put down her glass and signalled for the waiter to refill it.

‘Do you think that is wise?’ Vinn asked. ‘The amount of alcohol in that drink is enough to cloud anyone’s judgement.’

Gabby put up her chin. ‘In the absence of the engagement of emotion, alcohol and a great deal of it is the next best thing,’ she said.

His eyes narrowed to grey-blue stormy slits. ‘If you think I will bed you while you are under the influence, think again,’ he said. ‘When we come together for the first time I want you stone-cold sober, so you remember every second of it.’

Gabby put her glass down with a sharp little clunk. ‘I am not going to sleep with you, Vinn,’ she said, and hoisting up her chin even higher, added imperiously, ‘For that privilege you will have to pay double.’

Vinn smiled a victor’s smile as he reached inside his jacket for his chequebook. He laid it on the table between them, and the click of his pen made Gabby’s spine jerk upright, as if she had been shot with a pellet from the gold-embossed barrel.

‘Double, you said?’

Gabby felt her stomach drop. Her mouth went dry and her palms moistened. ‘Um…I…I’m not sure. I…this…it…I…don’t…Oh, my God…’

He wrote the amount in his distinctive scrawl, the dark slash of his signature making Gabby’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets. ‘There,’ he said, tearing off the cheque from the book and placing it in front of her on the table. ‘Do we have a deal or not?’

CHAPTER THREE

GABBY looked at the amount written there and felt a shockwave of so many emotions rocketing through her that she felt her face fire up. Each one of them stoked the furnace, although shame had by far the most fuel. But then anger joined in; she could feel it blazing out of control, and not just on her cheeks, but deep inside, where a cauldron of heat was bubbling over, making her veins hot with rage.

Vinn had deliberately made her feel like a high-end prostitute—a woman who would do anything for a price. But Gabby wasn’t going to be bought. She had been a fool before where a man was concerned, allowing duty and blinkered emotions to cloud her judgement. This time things would be different. If Vinn Venadicci thought he could lure her between the sheets of his bed with a bank vault full of dollar bills, he was in for a big surprise.

With a coolness she was nowhere near feeling, Gabby picked up the cheque and, with the tip of her tongue peeping through her lips as she concentrated, she folded it, fold by meticulous fold, until she had made a tiny origami ship. She held it in the palm of her hand for a moment as she inspected it, and once she was satisfied she had Vinn’s full attention she reached for the glass of full-bodied red wine the waiter had recently set down beside him. She dropped her handiwork in, watching in satisfaction as it floated for a second or two, until the density of the wine gradually soaked through the paper and submerged it halfway below the surface.

Gabby met Vinn’s grey-blue gaze across the table with an arch look. ‘I was going to say you could put your cheque in your pipe and smoke it, but then I realised you don’t smoke.’ She smiled a cat’s smile and added, ‘Salute.’

Vinn’s lips twitched, but even so his eyes still burned with determination. ‘You might like me to swallow my offer, but I can guarantee you are going to be the one eating your words in the not so distant future, cara,’ he warned her silkily.

She rolled her eyes and picked up her second cocktail. ‘I will go as far as marrying you to save my family’s business, but I am not going to be your sex slave, Vinn. If you have the urge to satisfy your needs I am sure there are plenty of women out there who will gladly oblige. All I ask is for you to be discreet.’

He leaned back in his chair and surveyed her features for a beat or two. ‘Is that the arrangement you made with your late husband?’ he asked. ‘Or did you see to his needs quite willingly all by yourself?’

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