Page 18 of Italian Weddings

“ W E NEED TO GET something straight,” Francesco’s voice was grim, as he stood on the other side of Willow’s door, barely glancing at the small suitcase beside her.

Willow blinked quickly. In surprise, at how it felt to see Francesco now, after only a week apart. It was an almost physical reaction, like her body was being flooded with too much electricity.

“Well, hi to you, too,” she said, frowning a little as she took in the serious set of his features. “Are you okay?” She thought back to his call the other night, the tone of his voice, the way she’d thought he’d been about to say something, before Tom had interrupted.

“Of course.”

“Really? Because you look…annoyed.”

“I’m not annoyed,” he countered. “But we need to talk.”

“Yes, you said that,” she murmured, brushing an invisible piece of hair from her sleeve.

“What happened between us last weekend,” he said, eyes briefly raking lower, to her breasts, so heat spun through her body.

“You mean us sleeping together?” she prompted.

His eyes glittered when they met hers. “Yes.”

“What about it?”

“You know what my expectations are,” he said, gruffly. “You know what my relationships are like.”

“Practically non-existent?”

And despite the glowering look on his features, for a moment, a smile lifted his lips, twisting them in a gesture of amusement that was gone again almost straight away.

“Short term. But I also expect monogamy, Willow.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I enjoyed having sex with you. I would enjoy having sex with you again, this weekend, frankly. But if you are sleeping with him, it’s not going to happen with us.”

It took Willow a second to understand his meaning, and then, her eyes widened. The phone call. Dinner with Tom. Francesco actually thought she’d gone home with Tom again? Only days after sleeping with him?

She paled at the idea—and then felt a wave of panic brought on by how implausible she found that.

“We should be on the same page about that, before we leave. So?”

She could only stare up at him.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“Right now?” she murmured, glancing down at her fully dressed frame. “Not that I’m aware of.”

His expression didn’t reflect humour though. “Don’t. I’m not in the mood.”

Her heart lifted. Was it possible he was actually jealous?

Or was something more going on? Again, she thought back to the phone call, her mind ticking over the heavy pauses, the feeling he’d been about to confide something important in her.

“What’s happened?”

“I told you?—,”

“No, it just—,” she reached out, putting a hand on his forearm. “It feels like there’s something more happening here.”

He looked down at her fingers, frowning, his expression impossible to decipher. “Did you fuck him, Willow?”

The blood pounding in her ears sounded like a roaring ocean. There was something in his question that was so elemental and raw, like her answer really mattered to him.

“Are you jealous?” she asked, trying to infuse a teasing tone to her question.

His eyes found hers and seemed to pierce the very fabric of her soul. He took a step forwards then, so they were inside, his big frame easily overshadowing hers, so that the next step he took had her back against a wall, his knee between her legs.

“When you’re mine, you’re mine. I don’t share.”

Her gasp was a soft sound of excitement and heat. She lifted a hand and curled it into his shirt. “And I suppose that goes both ways?”

His eyes roamed her face. “Yes.”

Her heart trembled.

“If we’re sleeping together, that’s exclusive, until we agree otherwise.”

“You mean until we stop sleeping together.”

He nodded once.

“Francesco—,”

But his finger was tracing her lips, making it hard to think straight. “I like you, Willow. You are one of my closest friends. I have no intention of letting this come between us. So, we need to know we’re playing by the same rules.”

Her lips parted on a soft groan, as he moved the knee between her legs, and she pushed down on it hungrily.

“We are,” she said, huskily.

“I do not want you to see him, while we are doing this.”

Her lips parted for a different reason now, indignation bursting through her. “I’ll agree not to sleep with him, but you have no right to tell me who I can and can’t spend time with.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. Last time I checked, I’m my own person.”

“Yes, but you are a person who’s well known, and frequently ends up in the society pages. I would prefer not to have to deal with the fallout of you getting photographed with Tom, for as long as we’re doing this.”

She blinked up at him, ashamed and surprised to realise she hadn’t even thought of that.

“By the same token, if you care about your relationship with him, you should prepare him for the fact he’ll likely see news of our relationship in the papers at some point.”

She was glad for his proximity then. This was all becoming much more complicated than she’d originally thought. Then again, she hadn’t exactly thought it through at all. She’d looked up at his building, blurted out a fake relationship, and the rest was history.

“But more than that, I don’t want to think of him with you,” he muttered, dropping his head then and kissing the flesh in the curve of her neck.

“I do not want to think of him looking at you, wanting to touch you, fantasizing about being with you.” His hand pushed at her shirt, separating it from the slip skirt she wore.

“We both know this won’t last, but for as long as it does, you are exclusively mine, and I intend to remind you of that every chance I get. Capisci ?”

It was at that moment, Francesco stopped lying to himself, pretending that Willow was just another woman, and that this was just sex.

The moment she’d opened the door and he’d looked at her, he’d imagined Tom touching her, and he’d wanted to bust something.

That was a totally unfamiliar experience for Francesco, who’d generally been governed, in relationships, by the maxim, easy come, easy go.

Sleeping with Willow had literally landed in his lap, but that didn’t mean it was easy, and it was starting to feel like the whole letting her walk away thing was going to be more complicated than he’d anticipated.

Only, Francesco had enough experience to know that when it came to women, only a very limited part of himself was available.

No matter what he might want or crave, when the time came to end their fake relationship, he’d end it properly and leave it at that.

Their friendship was too important to risk convoluting things for long.

“This weekend has to be the last time,” he said, pushing at her shirt until he could feel the curve of her breasts and groaning against her mouth before he deepened the kiss, his tongue tangling with hers, his lips hard and insistent. “If we draw this out, it has the potential to get messy.”

“Yes,” she agreed, tilting her head back then thrusting her hands in the air, so he could get her clothes completely dislodged from her body.

He didn’t need to be asked twice. He stripped her shirt off and let himself revel in her near nudity, dragging his mouth from her shoulder, along her collarbone, flicking the point in the middle there, then moving lower, to her breasts, tasting her, wanting her that, to hell with the car waiting outside, he lifted her and wrapped her legs around his waist, carrying her through to the lounge.

He placed Willow on the edge of the sofa, then dropped to his knees, kissing her again, as he pulled her skirt from her body and then unfastened his pants.

“I want you,” he said, unnecessarily, because her hands were reaching for his arousal, wrapping around it, squeezing him.

“Yes,” she panted, her voice high and taut.

But there was something in the back of his mind, something important: a question he needed an answer to. “Did you sleep with him?”

Willow pulled her head back so she could see him clearly, her cheeks all flushed, eyes hooded.

She bit into her lower lip and shook her head.

He told himself the relief he felt was all down to the way it felt to sink into her again, to know the pleasure of her body, and nothing to do with the fact she hadn’t fallen into bed with some other guy.

Willow glanced out at the dusky skies of Italy, the enormous pencil pines that formed an impressive silhouette against the sky and felt a complicated tangle of emotions.

She’d been here before. Often enough to recognize the landmarks of the villa, to experience a sense of coming back, if not exactly coming home.

But, this was different.

This time, she wasn’t with her father, on a family vacation.

She wasn’t coming in the capacity of an old family friend, to spend time with the Santoros en masse .

She was here with Francesco, pretending to be his girlfriend, and as the car slipped through the wrought iron gates and up the long, gravelled drive, towards the villa, she felt a thud of compunction in her chest.

“Are you sure this isn’t a mistake?”

He turned to face her slowly, and even though he was looking at her with just a hint of amusement, she felt a burst of adrenalin overtake her body.

Attraction was a throbbing, twisting ache of need, a yearning that was impossible to ignore.

It terrified her. But in the back of her mind, she clung to the fact they’d both agreed this weekend would be their last hurrah.

Whether they told everyone about their breakup now, or waited a few weeks, or even months, they wouldn’t—and couldn’t—see each other again, in this capacity.

Francesco had been right: there was too much potential here for things to get complicated.

“No,” he said, lip lifting higher on one side. “I think it’s probably a huge mistake, but it’s too late to back out now. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing you.”

Her eyes flew wide. “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“I presumed you wanted honesty.”

“Yeah, well, I did,” she said, fidgeting with her fingers. “But I also wanted reassurance.”