Page 8 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)

Chapter Four

C allie rolled onto her stomach, pulled one of her four plump pillows over her head and gave a muffled scream of frustration.

She’d escaped to her room hours ago, but her hopes of a good night’s sleep in preparation for her escape had been foiled by the very man she needed to escape.

Once she’d eaten as much of her dinner as she could fit into her knotted belly and said she was going to bed, he’d fixed those horrible dark eyes onto her and wished her a good night’s sleep before saying, “If you hear strange noises in the night, do not be afraid, it is only the plumbing.” And then his eyes had gleamed as he’d added, “Or it might be one of my ancestors, or it could be me – my room is directly opposite yours.”

And so she’d spent the last few hours alert for any sound even though the bed’s drapes were closed around her, cocooning her from noise as effectively as it did from drafts and light, straining for any creak that betrayed an intruder in her room in the form of the six foot plus hunk of a man she so despised, and with a hot, squirmy feeling pulsing deep inside her.

She could still feel his breath in the roots of her hair .

When she wasn’t straining to hear the floor creak, she found her thoughts increasingly trying to force her into imagining crossing the corridor to Dante’s room…

She could still smell him.

Go to sleep , she desperately commanded herself for the hundredth time. She needed to be fully refreshed if she had any chance of escaping and reaching help.

It was many hours before her body finally obeyed.

Callie pressed a hand to her thrumming heart, counted to ten, and then opened her bedroom door.

The door opposite hers was closed.

Summoning all her courage, she slipped into the corridor and headed to the stairs.

“ Signorina Thomas ?”

Damn it.

She turned to face Geppa.

“ Buongiorno ,” the young Italian woman said warmly. “Did you sleep well?”

She nodded even as her insides contracted. Sleep? The little sleep she’d managed to get had been the most tortured sleep of her life, caused by the most tortured, disturbing dream of her life. If she didn’t already know she had to escape this place, that dream would have tipped her over the edge.

It had been Dante. He’d come to her. He’d padded into her room naked and pulled back the drapes of her bed with that lascivious gleam in his eye.

The worst part of it was she’d been waiting naked for him in a state of feverish anticipation.

At the moment he’d pulled the bedsheets off her, she’d yanked herself awake to find her skin as feverish as in her dream and with a deep, aching pulse between her legs.

She’d been awake ever since, completely unable to eradicate the dream from her mind.

“That is good. Let me show you to the dining room – breakfast is being prepared for you.”

“I was thinking I’d go for a walk before I have anything to eat,” she said quickly.

“You are sure? The chefs have made fresh pastries and are happy to cook anything you could wish for.”

Callie couldn’t stop her gaze from darting to Dante’s door. She didn’t know how she could face him.

Spotting the direction of her stare, Geppa smiled. “ Signor Coscarelli has gone to Accardiano.”

“He’s left already?”

“An hour ago.”

Surprisingly, Callie’s chest didn’t lighten with relief at this, nor at the knowledge her wish had been granted and she would never have to face him again. Her empty stomach did, though, and she dredged a smile of her own. “You’ve tempted me. Breakfast would be great, thank you.”

Might as well eat her weight in food while she had the chance. After all, who knew when or where she would have her next meal.

Dante’s return to The Bianchi Hotel meant every single guest of the Martinelli wedding party was now in attendance.

He hadn’t missed much, Niccolo had assured him.

Guests had still been arriving late into the evening.

One of the last to arrive had been the father of the bride, Lorenzo Esposito.

Late to the party he might have been, but his presence was the first Dante had felt when he’d driven through the security checkpoint and into The Bianchi’s exclusive grounds that morning.

The air always felt a little chillier when Lorenzo was around.

If his three sons – Niccolo’s other groomsmen – were with him, it was positively arctic, which, despite the warm sun bathing him, explained the chill on Dante’s bare arms.

That the Esposito family were beloved in Italy was something that never failed to make his hackles rise.

He would never understand why his compatriots were happy to be duped into believing the monster patriarch was a fun-loving guy, and so forgive his myriad faults.

These faults included multiple counts of tax evasion, along with rumours of arms smuggling, violence towards anyone who got on the wrong side of him, and dirty tricks towards anyone he considered a rival.

Dante didn’t doubt for a minute that when the mogul who owned half of Italy’s media made his long-rumoured move into politics, he would be a huge, popular success.

The mogul in question was currently holding court at the poolside, two of his sons and a bevy of bikini-clad women a third of his age fawning at his side.

Dante didn’t doubt, either, that any of those women would happily follow Lorenzo into a suite and let him screw them.

Hell, if the old man asked them to give him a blow job there and then in front of everyone, he estimated at least half would oblige.

And those women were friends of the bride, Lorenzo’s daughter.

The only woman seemingly immune to Lorenzo’s ‘charm’ and who refused to play along with his insatiable desires was his wife of forty years who, so the rumour mill said, had birthed their fourth and final child, a long-wanted daughter, and then declared her vagina closed for business.

Taking a drink of his Manhattan, Dante felt eyes on him and turned his stare to the two women with identically beautiful faces – he guessed they’d had their noses done by the same plastic surgeon and probably their unmoving, overlarge breasts too – sunbathing on the other side of the pool.

They were whispering together whilst blatantly staring at him.

He’d been introduced to them earlier. Cousins of the bride.

Exactly the kind of women he’d been looking forward to getting acquainted with in the run-up to the wedding.

Women interested in a bit of fun and then happy to part ways with no expectation of seeing him again.

Had he turned into an old man overnight, he suddenly wondered. Because he should already be strolling over to those two whispering women.

“Where have you gone?”

Dante blinked himself back to the table he was sat around and grinned. “I was just thinking.”

Niccolo laughed. “About who?”

About the woman currently trying to escape my Castello, who isn’t as beautiful as any of the women here but is sexier and far more intriguing than all of them put together .

Because, while he’d been observing everything happening around him, Callie’s image had been playing in his mind’s-eye. Callie, whose hair smelled of strawberries. Callie, whose presence across the corridor from his room he’d spent the whole night wholly aware of.

Callie would never prance around in a tiny bikini for an old man’s benefit in the belief a quick screw was a shortcut to fame and riches.

Even if she did believe it, she would never degrade herself into acting on it.

It wasn’t just the fact of her being a teacher that made him certain of this; it was the unquantifiable something she carried inside her.

In Dante’s world, women like Callie were vanishingly rare, but this was the world he’d chosen to live in.

He’d left university with a determination to rebuild the Coscarelli fortune and make his family a name again, and he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The richer he’d become, the thinner and smoother of face the women in his world had become.

Other than her hair, Callie, he was convinced, was completely natural.

He wondered, again, why she’d coloured it.

“No one in particular,” he answered .

“Then eyes on the game.”

He looked at the board in front of him and then lifted his gaze back to Niccolo.

Chess was a game the two had played since Dante’s father had taught them when they were eight years old.

As kids, they would finish school and kick a ball around for hours, a big gang of them playing on the narrow Tuscan streets of their home town.

When all the others had been called in by their irate mothers, Niccolo would follow Dante back to his tiny home for a game of chess.

Intellectually and strategically, they were well-matched, their games always going to the wire.

In the twenty-seven years they’d competed against each other, not once had either of them beaten the other in less than thirty moves. Barely ten moves in, and Niccolo was only one move from checkmating him.

Before Dante could put his full focus back on the game and save himself from the worst defeat in his chess history, his phone rang. It was Bernard.

“Everything okay?” Niccolo asked once the call had ended.

“My house guest…” His loins had tightened just to hear Callie’s name spoken. “It appears she has gone missing.”

Niccolo’s horror was immediate and obvious.

“Don’t worry,” Dante assured him. “She’s still on the estate; she can’t leave it, but it transpires that she also managed to steal a maid’s phone earlier – she found the staff room and lifted it out of her jacket pocket.”

“She stole a phone ?”

“It was found on her within minutes. She tried to crack its passcode so it locked itself, so no harm done.” Callie had been found with it before she’d realised she could call the emergency services on a locked phone.

“But they still let her escape?”