The Reluctant Husband

Frankie shuddered with retrospective chagrin, only wishing she had found some of that defensive distance in Santino’s arms. But, as for what she had imagined she felt, hadn’t she once been hopelessly infatuated with Santino? Doubtless that adolescent memory had heavily influenced her response. For a few dangerous seconds, the years had slipped back and she had felt like that lovelorn teenager again, a helpless victim of emotions and longings too powerful for her to control.

And if Frankie went back in time she could easily remember a much younger Santino, a tall, graceful, golden-skinned youth, who had looked startlingly akin to some pagan god of myth and legend. He had only been twenty then, still a student. While he was visiting his great-uncle, Father Vassari, the elderly priest had brought him to her grandfather’s house purely because Santino spoke English and nobody else in the village did.

In those early days Frankie had picked up little of the ancient Latin-based dialect her grandfather and his sisters, Maddalena and Teresa, had spoken within their tiny home. After months of isolation, the sound of her own language had released a flood of tears and frantic, over-emotional speech from her. She had begged Santino to find out where her father was and when he was returning to take her back to England.

He had suggested that they go for a walk. ‘I am not going to talk to you as if you are a little girl,’ Santino had told her wryly. ‘I will be frank. Father Vassari believes that you will be happier if you learn to accept that this village is now your home, for the foreseeable future at least.’

Scanning her shocked face, he had emitted a rueful sigh. ‘He understands that this life is not what you have been accustomed to and that you find your lack of freedom stifling, but you too must understand that your grandfather is unlikely to change his attitudes—’

‘I hate him!’ Frankie had gasped helplessly. ‘I hate everyone here!’

‘But you have your father’s blood in your veins, and therefore your grandfather’s too,’ Santino had reminded her, endeavouring to reason her out of her passionate bitterness and homesickness. ‘Gino acknowledges that bond. If he did not, he would not have accepted you into his home. You are part of his family—’

‘They’re not my family!’ she had sobbed wretchedly.

‘Maddalena would be very hurt to hear you say that. She seems to be very fond of you.’

Her shy great-aunt, who was wholly dominated by her sharp-tongued elder sister and her quick-tempered brother, had been the only member of the household to make any effort to ease Frankie’s misery. She had never shouted at Frankie when she heard her crying in the night. She had quietly attempted to offer what comfort she could.

‘I promise that I will try to locate your father, but in return you must make a promise to me,’ Santino had informed her gravely. ‘A promise you must study to keep for your own sake.’

‘What kind of promise?’

‘Stop running away. It only makes your grandfather angrier, only convinces him that you have been very badly brought up and cannot be trusted out of the house. He is a strict man, and your continued defiance makes him much nastier than he would normally be—’

‘Did Father Vassari say Grandfather was nasty?’ Frankie had prompted, wide-eyed.

‘Of course not.’ Santino had flushed slightly. ‘But Gino Caparelli has the reputation of being a stubborn, unyielding man. What you must do is bite your tongue in his presence and appear willing to do as you’re told, even if you don’t feel willing—’

‘I bet the priest never told you to tell me to act like a hypocrite!’

‘You’re smart for a twelve-year-old!’ Santino had burst out laughing when she’d caught him out. ‘My great-uncle is very devout, but he is sincerely concerned by your unhappiness. He wanted me to tell you to respect and obey your grandfather in all things—’

‘But you didn’t say that—’

‘Where there is as yet no affection, I think it would be too much to ask of you.’

‘I just want to go back to London,’ she had mumbled, the tears threatening again. ‘To my mum... my friends, my school—’

‘But for now you must learn to live with the Sardinian half of your family, piccola mia,’ Santino had told her ruefully.

He had been so straight with her and, after long, frightening months of being treated like an impertinent child whose needs and wishes were of no account, she had been heartened by Santino’s level approach. But then he had been clever. He had known how to win a respectful hearing, and the bait he had dangled in reward for improved behaviour had convinced her that he was on her side. She had trusted him to find out where her father was.

When he had brought instead the news of her father’s death in a car crash, she had been devastated. But, in the years which had followed, Santino had become Frankie’s lifeline. He had visited his great-uncle every couple of months, more often as the old man’s health had begun to fail, and Frankie had learnt to live for Santino’s visits for he always made time for her as well.

She had had nothing in common with her father’s family. It had been an unimaginable joy and relief to talk without fear of censure to Santino and just be herself. He had sent her English books and newspapers to read and she had started writing to him. His brief letters had kept her going between visits. Learning to love and rely on Santino had come so naturally to her.

As she dredged herself out of the past, Frankie found poignant memories of Gino, Maddalena and Teresa threatening to creep up out of her subconscious. Stiffening, she closed her Sard relatives out of her mind again. Her grandfather had ignored her letters in the last five years and that hadn’t been a surprise. He could neither have understood nor condoned the actions of a granddaughter who had deserted her husband. Her father’s family had thought the sun rose and set on Santino. In their ignorance of the true state of his marriage, they would have been angry and bitterly ashamed of her behaviour.

Frankie left her room. She emerged into a panelled corridor, lined with dark medieval paintings and beautiful rugs that glowed with the dull richness of age. When she saw a stone spiral staircase twisting up out of sight at the foot of the passageway, she was tempted to explore. Well, why not? If the villas on the Costa Smeralda were not to be made available to the agency, she was now technically on holiday. She really ought to give Matt a call, she conceded absently. He might be wondering why he hadn’t heard from her in three days.

Through the studded oak door at the top of the spiral flight of steps, Frankie stepped out onto the roof...or was it the ramparts? With astonished eyes, she scanned the big square towers rising at either end and then, walking over to the parapet, she gazed down in dizzy horror at the sheerness of the drop, where ancient stone met cliff-face far below her, and then she looked up and around, drinking in the magnificent views of the snowcapped mountains that surrounded the fertile wooded valley.

‘You seem to have made a good recovery.’

Frankie very nearly jumped out of her skin. Breathlessly she spun round. Santino was strolling towards her and this time he looked disturbingly familiar. Faded blue jeans sheathed his lean hips and long, powerful thighs, a short-sleeved white cotton shirt was open at his strong brown throat. He walked like the king of the jungle on the prowl, slow, sure-footed and very much a predator.

Sexy, she thought dizzily, struggling weakly to drag her disobedient gaze from his magnificent physique. Incredibly sexy. He was so flagrantly at home with his very male body, relaxed, indolent, staggeringly selfassured. She reddened furiously as he paused several feet away. He sank down with careless grace on the edge of the parapet, displaying the kind of complete indifference to the empty air and the terrifying drop behind him that brought Frankie out in a cold sweat.

‘I saw you from the tower. I thought you’d still be in bed,’ he admitted.

‘I’m pretty resilient,’ Frankie returned stiffly, thinking that it would mean little to her if he went over the edge but, all the same, she wished he would move.

‘One committed career woman, no less,’ Santino drawled, running diamond-bright dark eyes consideringly over the plain businesslike appearance she had contrived to present in spite of the heat. ‘To think you used to wash my shirts and shrink them.’

Frankie was maddened by the further flush of embarrassment that crept up her throat. It reminded her horribly of the frightful adolescent awkwardness she had once exhibited around Santino. Not that that surprised her. Santino was drop-dead gorgeous. Santino would make a Greek god look plain and homely because he had a quality of blazing vibrance and energy that no statue could ever match. If she hadn’t fancied him like mad all those years ago, there would have been something lacking in her teenage hormones, she told herself.

‘Did I really?’ she said in a flat, bored tone.

‘I always wondered if you boiled them,’ Santino mused, perversely refusing to take the hint that the subject was a conversation-killer.

‘Well, you should have complained if it bothered you,’

‘You were a marvellous cook.’

‘I enjoyed cooking for you about as much as I enjoyed scrubbing your kitchen floor!’ And she was lying; she hated the fact that she was lying and that, worst of all, he had to know that she was lying.

But what else had she known? The formal education she had received from the age of eleven had been minimal, but her domestic training as a future wife and mother had been far more thorough. Between them, her father’s family had seen to that. No matter how hard she had fought to preserve her own identity, she had in the end been indoctrinated with prehistoric ideas of a woman’s subservient place in the home. Endless backbreaking work and catering to some man’s every wish as though he were an angry god to be appeased rather than an equal... That was what she had been taught and that was what she had absorbed as her former life in London had begun to take on the shadowy and meaningless unreality of another world.

Her spine notched up another inch, bitter resentment at what she had been reduced to steeling her afresh. She had sung as she scrubbed his kitchen floor! She had thought she knew it all by then. She had thought that by marrying Santino, who said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and even, amazingly, ‘That’s too heavy for you to carry,’ she had beaten the system, but in truth she had joined it. She had been prepared to settle for whatever she could get if she could have Santino. For the entire six months of their marriage, she would not have accepted a plane ticket out of Sardinia had it been forced on her...

‘I did try to persuade you to resume your education,’ he reminded her drily.

‘Oh, keep quiet...stop dragging it all back up. It makes me feel ill!’ Frankie snapped, spinning away with smarting eyes.

He had wanted her to attend a further education college in Florence. Florence! The Caparellis had been aghast when she’d mentioned it. What kind of a husband sent his wife back to school? She could read, she could write, she could count—what more did he want? And Frankie had been genuinely terrified of being sent away to a strange city where her ignorance would be exposed, where the other students might laugh at her poor Italian and where, worst of all, she would not have Santino.

In her innocence, she had actually asked Santino if he would go to Florence with her, and he had said that he would only be able to visit because the demands of his job would not allow him to live there. Of course, in the kindest possible way, she conceded grudgingly, Santino had been trying to make the first step towards loosening the ties of their ridiculous marriage by persuading her into a separation and a measure of independence. He had known very well that she was so infatuated with him that she was unlikely to make a recovery as long as he was still around.

He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. He had even said that, yes, he would miss her very much but that he felt that she would greatly gain in self-confidence if she completed her education. And she had accused him then of being ashamed of her and had raced upstairs in floods of inconsolable tears. She had refused to eat for the rest of that weekend, had alternately sulked and sobbed every time he’d tried to reason with her. No, she reflected painfully, nobody could ever say that Santino had found marriage to his child-bride a bed of roses... or, indeed, any kind of a bed at all, she conceded with burning cheeks.

‘We have a lot to talk about,’ Santino commented flatly.

Tension hummed in the air. For the first time, Frankie became aware of that thick tension and frowned at the surprising coldness she was only now registering in Santino’s voice. Before, Santino had been teasing her, yet now he was undeniably distant and cool. She didn’t know him in this mood. The awareness disconcerted her and then made her angrily defensive.

‘On a personal basis we have nothing to talk about, but good luck with your fraud case!’ Frankie told him with a ferociously bright smile. ‘However, if you want to discuss the—’

‘If you mention those villas one more time, I will lose my temper. What are they to me? Nothing,’ Santino derided with a dismissive gesture of one lean hand. ‘The bait by which I brought you here, but now no more! Their role is played now.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue what more you expect from me, and nor do I intend to hang around to find out,’ Frankie asserted, colliding with hard golden eyes that were curiously chilling, and, since that was not a sensation which she had ever associated with Santino before, she paled and tensed up even more.

‘You will. Your wings are now clipped. No longer will you fly free,’ Santino retorted with the cool, clear diction generally reserved for a child slow of understanding. ‘We are still married.’

‘Why do you keep on saying that?’ Frankie demanded in sudden flaring repudiation. ‘It’s just not true!’

‘Five years ago you made only a brief initial statement to your solicitor, who has since retired. I spoke to his son yesterday. He checked the files for me. His father advised you in a letter to consult another solicitor, one more experienced in the matrimonial field. No further action was taken,’ he completed drily.

Frankie trembled. There was something horribly convincing about Santino’s growing impatience with her. ‘If there’s been some stupid oversight, I’m sorry, and I promise that I’ll take care of it as soon as I go home again—’

‘Not on the grounds of non-consummation!’ Santino slotted in grimly.

‘Any grounds you like, for goodness’ sake...I’m not fussy,’ Frankie muttered, badly shaken by the idea that they might still be legally married.

‘Five years ago I would have agreed to an annulment.’ Santino surveyed her tense face with cool, narrowed eyes. ‘Indeed, then I considered it my duty to set you free. But that is not a duty which I recognise now. To be crude, Francesca... I now want the wife that I paid for.’

‘That you...what?’ Frankie parroted shakily.

‘I now intend to take possession of what I paid for. That is my right.’

Frankie uttered a strangled laugh that fell like a brick in the rushing silence. She stared at him incredulously. ‘You’re either crazy or joking...you’ve got to be joking!’

‘Why?’ Santino scanned her with fulminating dark golden eyes. ‘Let’s drop the face-saving euphemisms. For a start, you trapped me into marriage.’

Frankie flinched visibly. ‘I didn’t—’

Santino dealt her a quelling glance. ‘Don’t dare to deny it. Well do I recall your silence when you were questioned by your grandfather. I had never in my life laid a finger upon you but not one word did you say to that effect!’

Frankie studied the ground, belated shame rising inexorably to choke her. She had been so furious with Santino that awful night for taking her back to Sienta. She had been running away and, using him as an unsuspecting means of escape, had hidden herself behind the rear seat of his car. It had been an impulsive act, prompted by pure desperation...

Santino’s great-uncle, Father Vassari, had died that week. She had known that Santino would no longer have any reason to come to the village. She had been in disgrace on the home front too. Incapable of hiding her feelings for Santino, she had stirred up the sort of malicious local gossip that enraged her grandfather. Furious with her, he had told her that she could no longer even write to Santino.

Santino hadn’t discovered her presence in his car until he’d stopped for petrol on the coast. It had been the one and only time he had ever lost his temper with her. His sheer fury had crushed her. Deaf to her every plea for understanding and assistance, he had stuffed her forcibly back into the car and driven her all the way back home, but it bad been dawn by the time they got there. In Gino Caparelli’s eyes, her overnight absence in male company had ruined her reputation beyond all possibility of redemption. He had instantly demanded that Santino do the honourable thing and marry her.

‘Grandfather knew nothing had happened,’ Frankie began in a wobbly voice, struggling to find even a weak line of self-defence.

‘And I knew that after what you had done your life would be hell in that house if I didn’t marry you! I let conscience persuade me that you were my responsibility. And what did I receive in return?’ Santino prompted witheringly. ‘A bride who took her teddy bear to bed...’

Frankie’s colour was now so high, she was convinced it would take Arctic snow to cool her down again.

‘Hamish the teddy with the tartan scarf.’ Santino studied her with grim amusement. ‘Believe me, he was a hundred times more effective than any medieval chastity belt.’

Intense chagrin flooded her. Her teeth gritted as she threw her head high. ‘You said...you said that you wanted a wife—’

‘I already have one. I also have custody of Hamish,’ Santino informed her satirically as he rose fluidly upright again. ‘I’d say that makes my claim indisputable.’

‘You don’t have any claim over me!’

‘Have you packed?’ Meeting her stunned scrutiny, Santino repeated his question.

‘Yes, but—’

‘Bene...then, since you are no longer in need of further rest, we will waste no more time.’ Santino opened the oak door and, standing back, regarded her expectantly.

The tip of Frankie’s tongue slid out to wet her lower lip. She continued to stare helplessly at him. ‘Why are you doing this...? I mean, what’s going on?’

‘Really, Francesca...are you always this slow on the uptake?’ Santino chided, an ebony brow elevating with sardonic cool. ‘You really shouldn’t have lied to me.’

‘L-lied?’ Frankie stammered as he pressed her firmly past him and down the spiral stone steps. ‘I haven’t told you any lies!’

‘I would have been far more understanding if you had made a complete confession when I confronted you. But lies make me incredibly angry,’ Santino drawled softly. ‘When I found out the truth this morning, I was very tempted to come upstairs, tip you out of that bed and shake you until the teeth rattled in your calculating, devious little head!’

‘What are you talking about?’ Frankie exclaimed.

‘Your forty-eight per cent share of Finlay Travel.’ Santino shot her a glittering look of condemnation from icy cold dark eyes. ‘You shameless little bitch... You actually fished your lover out of a financial hole with my money!’

Frankie was so taken aback by that insane accusation, she could only gape at him.

‘Now, I didn’t expect to receive my bride back in a state of untouched virginal purity. Nor did I expect to be greeted with open arms, gratitude or any lingering delusion on your part that I could walk on water!’ Santino spelt out with sizzling derision. ‘Indeed, I believed that my expectations were thoroughly realistic. But I was not prepared to discover that for the past five years you’ve been in collusion with that greedy, grasping vixen who brought you into the world!’

CHAPTER THREE

FRANKIE tried to swallow and failed. In shock, she had fallen still. Santino was talking about her mother. He was calling Della a greedy, grasping vixen. Why? For heaven’s sake, he didn’t even know her mother, had never met her!

Why on earth was he making such wild and offensive accusations? It made no sense. She had bought her share of Finlay Travel with the proceeds of an insurance policy. Bewildered green eyes clung to his hard, sun-bronzed features and the cold, steely anger simmering in the depths of his contemptuous gaze.

‘When I think of the lengths I went to in my efforts to protect you from having your illusions about Della shattered, I am even more disgusted by your behaviour!’ He flung wide the door of her bedroom and crossed the floor to lift her case. Emerging again, he curved a powerful arm against her tense spine and carried her towards the stone staircase that wound impressively down into a big hall. ‘Dio mio... I had to pay your mother to take you back. I had to bribe her to welcome you into her home after you left me!’

‘P-pay her...you had to pay her?’ Frankie repeated in disbelief.

Santino released his breath in an audible hiss. ‘I should have insisted on an immediate annulment. I should not have allowed myself to be swayed by the assurance that it would distress you too much to have that last link severed—’

‘Distress me...?’ Frankie broke in even more shakily as she came to a halt on the uneven flagstoned floor of the hall. Her legs felt appallingly weak and hollow. Pay her? He had had to pay her mother? Perspiration dampened her short upper lip. She couldn’t get her thoughts into any kind of order. When she continued to hover, Santino pressed her out through the big oak doors spread wide on the brilliant sunlight. Without that forceful male momentum Frankie would very probably have fallen at his feet.

‘I was a complete fool,’ Santino grated. ‘Without question I paid out a vast amount of money for you to live in comfort and complete your education, and what have I got back? A wife who still speaks Italian like a tourist with a bad phrasebook! But that is the very least of the deception, is it not? You’re so appallingly mercenary, you chose to live in sin with your lover sooner than give me my freedom back!’

‘Santino—’ Frankie mumbled dizzily.

‘Keep quiet. The less I hear out of that lying little mouth right now the better!’ Santino cut in with ruthless bite. ‘I let myself be taken in yesterday. “Are you in the tourist trade now?” Dio mio...give me strength! But I thought, That is so sweet. She still doesn’t know who I am... But that charade about there being a bill for your medical care—that was overkill! You know damned well you married a bloody rich man! Only a bloody rich man could have kept you and your mother in the style in which I have kept you both for the past five years!’

With that final ringing and derisive assurance, Santino yanked open the door of the black Toyota Landcruiser parked in the cobbled courtyard, and while she stood there in a speechless daze at all the revelations being hurled at her at once he swore with impatience. Circling her with strong arms, he swept her bodily off her feet and, after settling her into the passenger seat, he slammed the door on her.

Frankie found herself sucking in oxygen as frantically as someone coming up for air after almost drowning. She pressed trembling fingers to her throbbing temples.

‘So don’t look at me with those big green eyes and tell me I’m joking when I say I intend to have what I paid for!’ Santino continued fiercely as he swung in beside her. ‘One more argument out of you and I pull the rug out from under Finlay Travel and ruin both you and your lover! And then I take Della to court for all the fake bills that have been submitted on your behalf while I was still under the impression that you were a student. By the time I’m finished with you, the sight of a Vitale bank draft with my signature on it will make you feel sick. I’m going to treat you to aversion therapy!’