Page 2 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)

“In the suburbs.” The underground terminated a handy five-minute walk from her flat.

Traffic on the main road they’d joined was heavy, the going slow. Every crawled mile passed like an hour, fraying her nerves that little bit more.

She was doing the right thing, she told herself for the millionth time.

This had to be done. Niccolo couldn’t get married without knowing the truth.

She didn’t care what Georgia said; it wasn’t fair on anyone, especially not fair on Georgia, and if Georgia was in her right mind, she’d know it too.

But Georgia wasn’t in her right mind, veering from screaming rages to hysterical laughter to floods of tears at the drop of a hat.

“You been Italy before?” the driver asked, interrupting thoughts that were as frayed as her nerves.

“No,” she answered shortly before sighing at her terseness and the rudeness she must be emanating.

Her headache and frazzled nerves were not the driver’s fault.

“I’ve always wanted to though.” Maybe she’d have a chance to visit Pompeii, she thought, her gaze fixed on Mount Vesuvius rising majestically in the distance.

That would be something to share with her students.

“You here to see tourist things?”

“Not quite.” Callie had never been good at lying, not even to strangers.

They merged onto a faster, wider road. The driver changed to a higher gear. He had nice hands, a thought that struck her as weird. Who noticed people’s hands ? But he really did have nice hands. Large and tanned like the rest of him, the fingers long and tapered.

And then she thought of her sister, and all thoughts of the driver’s hands disappeared.

Soon, they were travelling an Italian motorway. From the latent energy she sensed straining in him, she had the feeling the driver really wanted to put his foot down .

“Where you work?” he asked in another attempt to strike up conversation.

“In a school. I’m a history teacher.”

Astonished dark eyes briefly landed on her face before he gave his concentration back to the road before them. “I no be rude, but you no look like no history teacher I meet before.”

For some reason, the exaggerated way he said this tickled her funny bone. “Met many of us have you?”

He laughed. He had nice teeth, another thought that struck her as weird.

But he did. And he really was good-looking, or ‘gorgeous’ as she and Georgia would have described him in their teenage years.

But he was that too. Very darkly, gorgeously handsome.

Short, dark brown, messy hair. Thick stubble over a square jaw.

Lively warm brown eyes. Enclosed in the confined space, she could smell his aftershave.

It was nice. He smelled nice. Very nice.

He reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t for the life of her think who.

“When I at school, all history teachers were older than the times they taught.” He shot her another glance, and there was the flash of a wink before he added, “You can only be twenty.”

If this was the famous Italian charm in action, she liked it, Callie decided, and finally, she relaxed.

Let this be the calm before the storm she was going to create when she found Niccolo Martinelli and dropped her bombshell on him. “I’m twenty-six.”

“And not a wrinkle on your face,” he teased. “You must have good students.”

There was something about the driver that told her he’d have been one of those kids who always turned up a couple of minutes late for a lesson with his shirt untucked and with his homework having been eaten by a dog.

“I have a very pronounced frown line on my forehead from all the death stares I throw at them. ”

He tutted. “A nice young lady like you throwing death stares?”

“We’re taught them at teacher training college – I came top of the class in it.”

He laughed again. It was a really nice sound.

But then, the driver had a really nice voice to match it, all deep and smooth, and as he chattered away in his Pidgeon English, throwing questions about her teaching career and generally just being fun, gregarious company, for the first time in so very long, little bubbles of awareness woke inside her.

She could laugh. All these years without the flicker of interest in any of the men her sister, friends and colleagues kept trying to fix her up with, and twenty minutes in a car with a complete stranger was proving she wasn’t dead from the waist down after all.

Oh, the irony that she finally felt stirrings for a man who lived thousands of miles away from her and whom she would never see again…

which was probably why she was feeling the little stirrings, she figured.

Because the distance and her mission to save her sister from herself meant he was safe.

“It is Monday,” he said in that wonderfully deep voice. “Why you no work?”

“It’s the Easter Holidays. I’ve got two weeks off.”

“Lots of time for adventure then.”

She smiled and relaxed even further and, for the first time in a long time, imagined herself on the sort of adventure she’d long ago sworn off.

It wasn’t that Callie didn’t like men, it was that she didn’t like sex.

It left her cold. The few times she’d tried it with her first boyfriend had been horrible experiences.

She’d tried really hard to get into the right head space for it, to relax, to do all the things everyone said would make it enjoyable, but nothing had worked.

When her boyfriend had lost patience at having a ‘frigid’ girlfriend and dumped her, she’d been too relieved to feel upset.

She’d tried again a year later with a nice, sweet, understanding man on the same teacher training course she’d attended, and the effect had been the same.

She hadn’t sworn off men or anything after that, but the thought of having sex with any of them made her clench inside, and not in a good way.

No doubt if the issues with Georgia didn’t exist and if her Italian Stallion taxi driver lived in England and was magically available to her, she’d be clenching inside in a not-good way for him, too.

Realising she could no longer see Mount Vesuvius, Callie craned her neck and saw that it was behind them. “Are we going the right way?”

“ Si .”

“But I thought Vesuvius would be on our left.” And when had they left the motorway…?

“Not where we’re going.”

Before she could question this, he took a sharp turn, and suddenly she found herself being driven over a sprawling field with a structure so enormous and eye-catching that she barely registered the helicopter just a short way in front of it.

“What are we doing here?”

The driver parked close to the helicopter and faced her. “This is for the second part of our journey.”

“But I didn’t book a helicopter ride,” she said, confused.

Something that looked like sympathy flashed over his handsome face. “I know you didn’t. I don’t know how to break this gently to you, so I will just say it – my name is Dante Coscarelli, and I am a good friend of Niccolo Martinelli.”

Callie’s blood went from warm to freezing in a blink.

“That is my helicopter.” All pretence at Pidgeon English had been abandoned. “In a few minutes, it will be taking us to my home in Tuscany, where you will be staying as my house guest until Sunday. ”

Her mouth had dropped open, the heat that had abandoned her body filling her brain, dizzying her.

Dante Coscarelli.

The name echoed in her roaring head.

Now she knew why he looked so familiar – she’d found pictures of him on the Internet when she’d been searching Niccolo’s name.

He was close friends with the bastard and every bit as wealthy and as powerful as him.

She hadn’t put two and two together because it had never entered her head that the taxi driver was anything other than who and what he purported to be.

“Niccolo has tasked me with keeping you hidden away until after the wedding,” he explained before giving a sympathetic smile at her expression. “Yes, I am afraid he knows you intend to sabotage it. Your sister warned him.”

Betrayal slapped her hard, its sting strong enough to pull Callie out of her shock and into the reality of the situation she found herself in.

Dante didn’t have to tell her that getting into the helicopter wasn’t optional.

With escape flashing like a neon sign in her head, she yanked at the handle and flung the door open.

Two men appeared before her feet even hit the ground, not close enough to touch but close enough to catch her if she ran.

And then Dante was at her side, hands up, palms facing her, taller and broader than she’d realised when he’d thrown her suitcase in the boot of his car. “You have nothing to fear, Callie – you are in no danger.”

The casual way he uttered her name added a spark of anger to the melting pot of emotions raging through her. “Those men have guns,” she spluttered.

“For my protection, not to use on you.” He turned to them and spoke in rapid Italian. A moment later, they walked to the helicopter, leaving the two of them alone.

His attention back on Callie, Dante said in perfect, albeit heavily accented, English, “No one is going to hurt you, but you have to come with me.”

“Anything that comes before a but is negated by its use.”

“Not in this instance. For the avoidance of doubt, if you attempt to run, I will carry you onto the helicopter myself, and I will hold you secure until we are in the air, but I will not leave a single mark on your body.”

“Lay a single finger on me, and I’ll scream.” She should be screaming already, but she was reeling too much at her sister’s betrayal.

She would never forgive Georgia for this.

“If you go, I’ll tell Niccolo,” her sister had screamed when she’d walked back into their flat and found Callie’s carry-on case by the front door.

“That’s what I’ve been begging you to do!” Callie had shouted back. “He needs to know!”

“No! Stop trying to run my life for me – this is my business, not yours.”

“Of course it’s my business too!” Callie had disputed, close to despair.

“You have no idea what you’re messing with.

If you leave this flat, then I swear to God I’ll warn him you’re coming and tell him you’re deranged and want to destroy the wedding.

He’ll have you arrested on some trumped-up charge before you’ve landed and deported straight back to England with a restraining order.

You won’t be allowed anywhere near him.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Callie hadn’t believed for a second that her twin would do such a thing.

But she had. Georgia had betrayed her to that pig of a man, but instead of calling the police, that pig of a man had got his best friend to do his dirty work .

That best friend shrugged. “Scream if you want. No one who cares will hear you. Everyone at this hangar works for me, and I pay them too well to ask questions. You have my word that no harm will come to you. You will be treated as an honoured guest in my home, and then on Sunday, you will be returned to England with a first-class flight to compensate you for your troubles. Now get in the helicopter. Per favore .” He added the please as an afterthought.

“You realise that you’re attempting to kidnap me, right?”

“Kidnapping involves a ransom demand,” he disputed blithely. “For the sake of accuracy, I am not ‘attempting’ anything. I am temporarily abducting you, that is all.”

That was all ? “Kidnapping, abduction, whatever you want to call it, you can’t do this.”

“Says who?”

“The law!” Another thought struck her. “How do I know you won’t kill me to stop me reporting you to the police?”

Amusement sparked in his dark eyes. “How melodramatic. You will be free to report me to the police. Whether they believe you without corroboration is another matter; now, for the last time, get in the helicopter.”

But Callie’s feet refused to obey, not in the direction he wanted.

Every cell in her body was still telling her to run, and then, without any warning from her feet to her brain, she spun around and set off…

but had barely taken four paces before a strong arm hooked around her waist. Before she knew it, she was being lifted into the air, twisted around, slung over a broad, muscular shoulder, and carried onto the helicopter, all her punching, kicking and screaming having no effect whatsoever.

Inside, she was unceremoniously dumped, still kicking out, on a leather seat.

Crouching on his haunches before her, utterly unfazed, Dante said, “Can you strap yourself in or do I have to do it for you?”

She kicked him again, and this time had the satisfaction of feeling the toe of her ankle boot connect with his shin.

He didn’t even wince, instead shaking his head with a disappointed smile. “I will not ask the question again.”

Spitting all the fire she could muster at him with her eyes, Callie strapped herself in.

His hateful smile widened. “Good. Now you are learning.”