Page 10 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)

The first blackjack table with empty seats was three tables away, and she sank onto the stool with relief and handed over her bank card, exchanging one hundred euros for chips.

She’d worked too hard in not killing Gennaro these last two years to waste the money she did have.

She’d saved virtually every cent of the allowance he transferred into her account each month for her ‘living expenses’; money doled out in the same way her parents had paid her allowance when she’d been an adolescent, a reminder of who was in charge and who held the purse strings.

It was one thing being entirely reliant on your parents as a minor – that was the natural order of the world – but quite another to be a fully grown woman and entirely reliant on your husband.

As part of their contract she’d been forbidden to work lest, heaven forfend, it made her too busy to ask how high when he told her to jump.

Her stomach curdled every time her allowance landed in her account.

And now her stomach was curdling for a whole different reason, and she studiously looked at the two cards she’d been dealt and fought the compulsion to turn her head to the roulette table.

Gennaro didn’t see the ball land in its final pocket of the spinning wheel.

His gaze was on Luisa playing blackjack with a body language so stiff she should be playing poker.

He watched her indicate for her croupier to twist at the same moment his croupier pushed the pile of chips Gennaro had just won to him.

“Cash them in,” he ordered. He’d made a killing on the roulette table and beaten the casino which meant he’d beaten the Espositos and so made his killing taste even sweeter, but his head wasn’t on the gamble of the roulette wheel.

His head was on the gamble of his wife.

Stick or twist…?

Although Luisa’s outward attention was focused on the game she was playing…

she was down to her last two playing chips; enough for only one more hand…

inwardly, everything was Gennaro. The rapid increase of her heartbeats and the sensation of her skin lifting told her he was nearing her even before his hand landed on her shoulder and the scent of his cologne invaded her airwaves.

His deep voice was low. “Come. We have socialising to do.”

She didn’t even pretend to bark like a disobedient dog in her head at this. Her heart wasn’t just thumping in her chest but in the whole of her body, the beats a torpid echo through her veins and skin and a roar in her ears.

Was it any wonder she’d lost every hand she’d played when she’d spent the whole time on tenterhooks for the moment she was required to join herself back to his hip?

She could still feel the mark of his finger on her cheekbone.

It felt like she’d been branded.

Nodding like the good little wife she was, she dropped her remaining playing chips into her clutch bag, swallowed what was left of the scotch she’d ordered for herself, and followed him to the bar area where plump leather armchairs were scattered around an array of low tables.

Niccolo and Siena were crowded around one of the tables with a rowdy group of Siena’s friends.

Efficient staff carried two chairs over for them to join the party.

Their champagne arrived. Luisa downed hers in two swallows without tasting it. Only because she sensed one more glass would tip her over the edge to full-blown drunkenness did she refuse another, but, God, she felt that she could use the oblivion full-blown drunkenness promised .

Gennaro wouldn’t want to socialise for much longer and soon, very soon, they would return to the privacy of their suite and she had no idea what would happen or even what she wanted to happen.

She knew what her body wanted – just to sit beside him as she was now was to burn her from the inside out – but as she’d learned as a young girl, just because the body craved something didn’t mean it should have it.

That lesson had come when she’d been given an enormous slab of Swiss chocolate as a sixth birthday present.

Her parents had allowed her a small portion before she’d gone to bed but she’d laid beneath her sheets consumed with thoughts of the rest of the giant bar.

Her cravings had gotten the better of her when the house had fallen silent.

She’d snuck downstairs and eaten the whole lot.

Within minutes she’d brought it all up again.

Luisa did her best to join in the conversation but her thoughts and feelings were all over the place. When Gennaro casually announced to the group that they were going to retire for the night, she couldn’t remember a single word that had been spoken by anyone.

Her thoughts were as wild as the sensations careering through her when Gennaro steered her out of the casino with his hand on her back, a gesture that felt a thousand times more possessive than the other times he’d done the same.

Outside in the cooling air, his hand slipped away, but there was no mercy to be had, not when she could still feel the heat from it as deeply as any burn.

The walk to their block was conducted in a silence that felt a million times different to all the other silences she’d endured throughout their marriage; the tension a million times different too.

Alone in the suite, she crossed to the bar and came within a fingertip of grabbing the bottle of gin. The fear of full-blown drunkenness had passed but her nerves were too chewed up to tolerate any more alcohol.

She’d never been so fully aware of Gennaro’s presence before. Not like this. Not with every cell in her body.

The sensation of being stared at had never penetrated her skin so deeply.

Silence had never been so loud.

The sickness in her stomach churning violently, she opened a bottle of water with trembling fingers and drank half of it. Only then did she summon the courage to face him.

Back propped against the wall, he made no effort to disguise that he’d been openly staring at her.

Painfully aware of fresh heat rising on her face and of her heart thrashing into her throat, she blithely said, “Tell me something – what’s the end date for your brother’s marriage?”

After the slightest of widenings, his eyes narrowed dangerously. A beat later, he said with clipped precision, “There is no end date. What makes you think there is?”

“It’s hardly a secret that their wedding is a business arrangement.”

His jaw tightened, strong neck extending. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

“Nowhere. I worked it out from my own observations. I just assumed others must know too.”

“There’s nothing to know. Your imagination has led you wide of the mark.”

She laughed without any humour. For two years she’d accepted Gennaro’s stonewalling of any conversation that could slide into the personal – any conversation at all, really…

Luisa had accepted it for those one hundred and three weeks because that had been the safe thing to do.

She saw that now. She’d shied away from confrontation, not out of fear or shyness but out of self-preservation, because she had always felt his presence, had always felt the essence of Gennaro Martinelli in her senses and had always reacted to it by hiding or running from it.

She was too angry to accept it anymore. Angry with Gennaro for treating her like she was a nodding dog for two years and angry with herself for wanting him so desperately despite everything.

“I know it’s always suited you to pretend I’m an ignorant bimbo, but I’m not,” she said, extending her neck in imitation of his.

“And I’m not blind or stupid either. Niccolo and Siena’s marriage is the Espositos way of buying themselves into high society.

Or am I wrong?” There was a dangerous fire blazing in his black eyes but she didn’t care, barely pausing for breath to add, “Your family are old Italian royalty. Lorenzo Esposito is a jacked-up thug whose shady wealth has bought him a load of politicians and adoration from the public, but he’s never had a seat at the table your family belongs to or respect from those who sit on it. ”

“Your family sit there too,” he pointed out so tightly it was a wonder his jaw didn’t snap.

“My family got their seat through your father’s patronage and lost it when my father fell ill.

Your father saw to that – he was the kingmaker in their rise and fall.

” Giuseppe Martinelli was a powerful societal figure whose endorsement others followed.

When he’d distanced himself from the Rossellinis, Luisa’s parents had found themselves ostracised from those they’d regarded as friends.

Invitations to parties and dinners had dried up to nothing practically overnight.

Luisa had often wondered if part of Gennaro’s motivation in marrying her had been to bait the father she was convinced he despised.

“My parents don’t want the seat anymore,” she continued, “but Lorenzo does, and it feels like everything about this wedding and these ridiculous pre-wedding celebrations is designed to flaunt his wealth and connections rather than celebrate a couple pledging their lives together, and while I know that’s the way of weddings in our world, this feels an extreme version of it, and there is nothing in either Niccolo or Siena’s body language to suggest they’re a couple madly in love – if anything, your brother’s body language suggests someone being held hostage and forced to act as if he’s happy about it, which makes me wonder why he agreed to it and what’s in it for him. ”

“Whatever’s in it for him is none of your business, and you had better not have discussed these ridiculous theories with anyone else,” he said, the closest to angry she’d ever seen him.

“As if I would dare! And they’re not ridiculous – when you’ve suffered a loveless marriage, you recognise the signs.

I thought it was an open secret but clearly not, but if you want to dismiss my observations on this like you dismissed my observations on Dante’s disappearance from the wedding and pretend that everything’s the opposite of what it really is, then fine, I can go along with that.

” She injected all the disdain that she could muster into her voice.

“After two years of misery with you, I now consider myself a pro when it comes to pretending.”

Heart pounding in her ears, she stalked away from him without looking back, grabbed her pyjamas, and locked herself in the bathroom.