Page 17 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)
Chapter Nine
L uisa hadn’t realised how frightened she’d been that Gennaro would return to their suite having reverted to his ice-block android self, not until they locked eyes and relief to find only heat in his black stare ripped through her.
After a long, breath-stealing passage where only their eyes spoke, he said, “Is there room for two in there?”
Inexplicably shy in a way she hadn’t been since childhood, she nodded.
“How was it?” she asked once she’d untied her tongue. Silly to feel shy when he’d brought her to orgasm in a room filled with hundreds of people and then screwed her against a wall.
But he hadn’t seen her naked, and though she’d run the huge sunken bath with half a bottle of the foaming liquid currently covering her breasts and pubis, for the first time in all the years she’d known him – her whole life – she was naked in front of Gennaro.
He gave a half-smile and removed his shirt. “All seemed to be going well… Champagne? ”
“That would be nice, thank you.”
He soon returned with a bottle from their bar’s fridge and two champagne glasses, and stretched across the bath to place them on the deep window ledge.
And then he stripped the rest of his clothes, as nonchalant about his nudity as he’d been when she’d watched him dress through the mirror’s reflection.
Her heart bloomed, the beats exponentially increasing in tempo and clashing with the tempest of excitement churning in her stomach.
He was just so utterly and unashamedly masculine that it made her feel the essence of her femininity in a way she’d never done before; made her feel not just human but entirely female.
“Are you going to make room for me?”
Still feeling inexplicably shy, she hid her foam-covered breasts with an arm and lifted herself from her lying position to a seated one.
The water moved as he stepped into it, then rose above her breasts as he sat himself at the other end of the bath facing her, his long legs bending at the knee, calves resting by her thighs.
While Luisa tried to emulate his nonchalance and act as if sharing a bath with him was no big deal, Gennaro poured them both a glass of champagne.
After handing her one, he raised his. “To the end of our marriage.”
She lifted hers in acknowledgement and took a small drink.
Settling back, his feet pressed into her sides as he observed her for the longest time. “You really are extraordinarily beautiful.”
Her heart was thumping too hard for her to form more than the tiniest of smiles.
Luisa had run the bath with the full knowledge she would still be in it when Gennaro returned, but the fantasy in her head and the reality playing out were proving very different.
In her fantasy, she’d been cool and seductive, a Hollywood siren from the bygone age The Bianchi’s lobby so strongly reminded her of, a woman ready to embrace the carnal side of her nature…
And then she’d heard his footsteps approaching the bathroom and her pulse points had gone into overdrive and now she was feverishly aware of his naked body and of his long legs practically enveloping her.
But it was more than carnal desire making her heart beat so hard.
She shouldn’t have been relieved that he hadn’t reverted to an android ice-block. She shouldn’t have cared at all. Not with her heart. She shouldn’t be faking nonchalance. Shouldn’t be feeling shy.
She had a large drink of her champagne and let the bubbles play on her tongue and slide down her throat before saying, “Is that really why you’ve spent our marriage treating me like a carrier of the plague?”
His eyes glimmered and he inclined his head slowly. “There’s something about your particular beauty that affects me in ways that are dangerous.”
And there was something about him that was affecting her in a way she was starting to fear was dangerous too.
She shouldn’t have cared that he hadn’t returned from the ball as an android ice-block.
She shouldn’t have. “Beauty is only skin deep. I had to grow into my looks – I was an ugly child, as you must remember.”
His smile was rueful. “I do remember. That was the Luisa I thought I was proposing marriage to. That’s why I asked for you.”
Her hurt at this was instant. “You wanted to marry me because you thought I was ugly?”
“Yes. By the time I realised the ugly duckling had turned into a swan, it was too late. ”
“Too late for what?”
“To back out. Once I’d made the proposal, the genie had been unleashed and could not be returned. I either went ahead with it or risked your family talking, which could have killed the business deal I needed to marry for.”
Luisa thought of their numerous visits to the Middle Eastern kingdom Gennaro’s business had expanded into. Knowing that if she did anything to cast doubt on the validity of their marriage it would result in the loss of his multi-million investment had made them the hardest trips to endure.
“You were taking a risk even suggesting the marriage. How did you know my family would go along with it?”
“Because your parents had been desperate enough to turn to my father for help. The biggest risk was in securing your agreement. I had to trust the young girl I remembered who’d always clung to her mother’s skirt still loved her family.”
“The ugly young girl,” she reminded him pointedly. She couldn’t understand why that admission hurt so much.
“Yes,” he agreed without shame. “The ugly young girl. That’s who I’d imagined had grown into the woman I would marry. It was both our bad fortune that you’d blossomed into a beauty because it meant I had to keep you at a distance.”
“So if I’d never had dental treatment, you’d have been nice to me?”
“I can’t say that being nice to people is something I strive for,” he said with an ironic lift of a black eyebrow. “I’m not one for cultivating friendships and relationships.”
She drank more of the champagne and let it work its magic in relaxing fears that had sprung from nowhere and so needed to be consigned back to nowhere. “Consider me shocked.”
He grunted a laugh and took another drink.
“To answer your question, it’s likely that if you hadn’t had dental work, I wouldn’t have felt the need to keep you at a distance.
It had been many years since I’d seen you – I think the last time you’d been a young adolescent – and so it is equally likely that I’d have still reacted to you in the same way even if you hadn’t worn braces. ”
“It was a lot more involved than just braces,” she said after another drink. “Close to four years of treatment.” Most of that had been the treatment needed to correct her severe overbite.
He shrugged. “I never met that adult Luisa so I will never know how I would have reacted to her. Your sister is beautiful too, but her beauty does nothing for me.” His black eyes swirled with a meaning that made her pelvis fizz. “Your beauty does.”
“But it doesn’t define who I am. Physical beauty is only a surface thing. It doesn’t mean anything. Another ten or twenty years and any beauty I’ve gained will have faded.” Not that he’d be around to see it fade. Maybe some other man would but not Gennaro.
“My grandmother was a beauty at your age. Now she is approaching eighty and my grandfather still sees her as the woman she was when they pledged their lives together and she still sees him as the man he once was too.”
She drained the last of her champagne. “Maybe that’s why our eyesight fades as we age, so we’re blind to the physical changes in our partners.”
The lines around his eyes creased. “An evolutionary trick to keep us faithful and monogamous?”
She conjured a smile, wondering why two people who’d just drunk a toast to their marriage being only days away from ending were having this conversation. Wondered, too, why she was the one driving it. “My mother’s had laser eye surgery and she still loves my father, so probably not.”
Bath water rose again as he moved to refill her glass. “Does she still love him the same way she did when she married him?”
“I don’t know. I just know that she loves him and is very protective of him, which is a strange thing for me to get my head around because my father was always the protective one; the big bear protecting his women.
” She refocused her stare on Gennaro. “He changed his mind about me marrying you. Did you know that?”
He laid back and had a large drink from his refreshed glass. “It was never said but I did get that impression.”
“The morning we married, he begged me not to go ahead with it.”
“And yet you did.”
“And yet I did,” she echoed. “And I did it for him and for my mother, and for my sister too, because I love them and because none of what was happening to them was their fault.”
“And you hate me for not helping them directly. You think I should have just handed over the cash to bail them out.”
“No, I hate you for using their desperate situation to your own advantage. That was as cruel as the disease he has.”
“I didn’t see it like that. To me, it was a business arrangement. A quid pro quo.”
“A quid pro quo with the family you’d grown up with. You came to my christening – your parents are my godparents. Marisa and I called your parents aunt and uncle.”
“A quid pro quo with my parents’ friends, not my friends.
I never regarded you as family. I never called your parents aunt and uncle.
You all took my family at face value and believed we held the same values as you, but we don’t.
We never have. Just as physical beauty is surface, so too is my parents’ love of family.
They are gracious and welcoming hosts but only if there’s something in it for them.
They were happy to welcome you into their home and treat you like family when you had something they wanted but as soon as that was gone, you’d used up your usefulness to them. ”
“You mean when my father could no longer practise law?”