Page 19 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)
Chapter Ten
I t was the empathy ringing in Luisa’s eyes that twisted the knife in Gennaro’s guts and filled his chest with ice.
What the hell was he doing?
He hadn’t climbed into the bath for a cosy chat – Gennaro didn’t do cosy chats, and he certainly never shared confidences, especially not ones of this magnitude.
He’d never shared what had happened the day he’d tried to kill his father with anyone, so why the hell had he just shared it with the woman he’d spent two years keeping at a deliberate distance?
He'd only breached the distance he’d imposed so they could spend their last days together screwing, not so he could reveal his darkest secrets.
It was those damned doe eyes. They were as capable of ringing with fire as with empathy and softness.
He’d always hated looking into them, had always sensed they saw more than she or anyone had any business seeing, and right then it felt like she was gazing into the very heart of him, a sensation that twisted the knife.
“I did try to warn you about the man I am,” he said in a voice as cold and tight as the ice in his chest. “Be thankful you only have four days left with me.” Water that was considerably cooler than when he’d got in sloshed as he climbed out of the bath.
He dried himself with quick vigour before taking a fresh towel off the heater. Opening it wide for her, he caught her stare. “Are you ready for me to start making amends? Or has my murderous tendencies killed your desire?”
It took a moment for understanding to penetrate and for her cheeks to stain with colour. “Amends? After all that, you want me to get out of the bath so you can have sex with me? Just like that?”
“That is why we’re here and not at the ball, is it not?”
The stain of colour deepened, a line creasing in her forehead as she searched his face, and he experienced that same gut-twisting sensation that she was peering into his heart.
“Do you have to put it quite so bluntly?” she whispered.
He narrowed his stare and sardonically said, “If you want a man to seduce you with fluffy, meaningless words before fucking you then you only have to wait a few more days for that freedom to be yours.”
Her mouth dropped open, eyes widening into orbs before the starkness vanished and she shook her head with a bitter laugh. “Welcome back, Android Gennaro. Looks like your creators have fixed your malfunction.” She rose to her feet like a majestic goddess, bath water pouring off her…
In an instant, his mouth ran dry.
Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe, could only stare at her with his heart smashing through the ice block in his chest and a sense that the world was moving beneath his feet.
He’d believed Luisa semi-naked in a bikini was the pinnacle of beauty, that what was left to be revealed could add only a little enhancement, but the reality of her naked flesh was so much more.
In one swift glance, he took it all in, the high, full breasts that had clearly never seen a second of sunlight, the cherry red colour of her large nipples, the dark V of her pubis…
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen pubic hair on a woman, but, God, the thrills at seeing it, of seeing Luisa in her full feminine glory, was like nothing he’d experienced before, and when he gazed back into her blazing eyes, the world didn’t just move again, it tilted off its axis.
The towel he held out to her was snatched from his hand.
“Did it all get a little too intimate for you?” she snapped, looking him square in the eye as she rubbed her back dry, all earlier shyness vanquished under the weight of her visibly growing anger.
“A little too human? Is that why you felt the need to put me back in my place by insinuating that I’m good enough to fuck but nothing else? ”
It felt like everything inside him clenched. “I never said that,” he refuted hoarsely.
“Oh yes you did,” she spat, rubbing the towel over her stomach and between her legs.
“You said it with your eyes. One minute you were telling me about your bastard father – I could feel actual human emotion coming from you then – the next a shutter came down, and you reverted to the cold arsehole I’ve spent the last two years hating and demanded sex…
although in fairness, you graciously implied you’d let me off if your murderous tendencies had killed my desire.
” Her face contorted with loathing. “The only thing that’s killed my desire is the man standing before me now, not the sixteen-year-old boy he used to be who probably saved his brother’s life.
If your programming is still giving you sexual urges, I suggest you either get a sex doll delivered or use your hand to relieve it because I will not be used as a warm body to get yourself off on, now get the fuck away from me. ”
Angrier than she’d ever been but for reasons she couldn’t even begin to dissect, Luisa dropped the towel then shoved Gennaro out of the way to step out of the bath, water dripping from her calves and feet as she stormed across the tiled floor to the door.
She wasn’t just furious, she realised with an awful sinking feeling. She was hurt. Deeply, deeply hurt. Wounded enough to burst into tears.
If you want a man to seduce you with fluffy, meaningless words before fucking you then you only have to wait a few more days for that freedom to be yours.
She swallowed back the tears and staunchly told herself that there was no hurt; the tears were a side-effect of her anger because only a complete fool could spend two years living with the android who called himself Gennaro Martinelli and give him the slightest bit of power to hurt them…
A hand clasped her shoulder. In an instant she’d been spun around.
Gennaro’s was as tight and as twisted as she’d ever seen it, the only movement a pulse throbbing at the side of his jaw.
“If all I wanted was sexual release then believe me, you’re the last woman I would choose to have it with,” he said tautly, his hands gripping her upper arms, black eyes boring into hers.
“I hate how you make me feel, don’t you understand that, Luisa?
I despise it. I hate that I always have to fight to keep the shutters down around you.
I hate that I can’t be in a room with you without fantasising about the taste and scent of your skin.
I hate that I’m attuned to every word you say.
I hate that every time you move your mouth to speak or eat, all I want is to feel your mouth on mine.
I hate that whenever you leave a room I want to follow you.
I hate that I’ve spent every night of the last two years fighting the craving to crawl into your bed and make you mine because that’s what I hate the most – that I don’t just want to fuck you.
I want to imprint myself into you. I want to imprint myself so deeply that you become mine alone and never look at Dante or any other man again. ”
A stunned silence fell between them. All Luisa could hear was the rapid tattoo of her heart pushing hot blood between her ears and Gennaro’s ragged breaths; all she could see the tortured desire etched in his stare.
After the longest time when it seemed like time itself had stopped moving, he breathed in deeply through his nose, his chest shuddering on the exhale.
“I’ve never wanted to feel like this, not with anyone but especially not with you,” he said starkly.
He slid his hands up and over her shoulders and up the curve of her neck.
“I’ve never regarded you as my family but I remember the ugly little girl who loved to draw and read and who glowed with love for her family…
I envied your family, Luisa. I envied you and I hated you all too.
I would see the way you interacted together and the bonds of love you shared and it made me sick with jealousy that those bonds would never be mine.
” He speared her hair to cradle her head, his face closing in on hers.
“You didn’t need to tell me that you’d only changed on the surface – I already knew it.
You’re much tougher and feistier than you were as a child but there’s still that inherent glow of goodness shining out of you.
All that’s in me is darkness. Everything I feel for you is dangerous and wrong, and I keep fighting it and fighting it, but now…
.” He breathed deeply, the pads of his fingers pressing even tighter into her skull. “I don’t know how to fight it anymore.”
It wasn’t just his words that filled her thrashing heart so completely: it was the raw honesty lacing it, Gennaro laying himself bare to her in a way she knew deep in her core he’d never done before.
“I hate how you make me feel too,” she admitted in a ragged whisper.
She’d always hated how he made her feel, how as a child he’d walk into a room and her cheeks would go all hot and red and she’d lose any ability to string a sentence together.
She’d always hidden behind her mother or a book or stuck her face even lower onto the pages she was drawing on, and prayed he wouldn’t see her or speak to her.
Most of the time her prayers had been answered, but that one real time he’d instigated an interaction between them when he’d gifted her the expensive grown-up art equipment all those years ago – the kindest, most thoughtful and unexpected gift she’d ever received, given without any hope or expectation of reciprocation – she’d been too much of a tongue-tied, red-faced wreck to thank him properly for it.
She still had it. The watercolour pencils were reduced to stubs, the book filled with her colourful drawings, all kept safe in her childhood bedroom, and as her thoughts continued to swirl and she continued to gaze into Gennaro’s tortured black eyes, terror snaked its way through her veins and gripped hold of her heart.
Oh, God, no …
As if he could see right into her mind, his features convulsed and he muttered something incomprehensible before his sensuous mouth came down on hers.