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

“The Bianchi has only two suites with two separate beds. Two. One of those rooms has been given to my grandparents. The other had been assigned to us, but last night Leonardo received a call from Valeria Esposito’s assistant to confirm Valeria’s request that her suite has two beds.”

It wasn’t like talking to a plank of wood, Luisa realised dimly as dread morphed into horror.

It was like conversing with a block of ice.

Gennaro was telling her they had only one bed in their suite with less emotion than the cashier who’d looked through her when Luisa had paid for her art supplies the day before.

“What about adjoining suites?” she suggested, trying not to let panic add itself to the knots, dread and horror. Adjoining rooms would be acceptable under the terms of their contract, surely ?

“Every suite has been allocated. This suite is second only to the honeymoon suite for luxury. It had been allocated to the Espositos, and now it is ours, and I will not allow a scene to be made about it.”

She held her ground. “But the terms of our contract specifically states separate beds.”

“It also states that the true nature of our marriage remains private and that this need trumps all other considerations. Need I remind you that my whole family is here to celebrate my brother’s wedding to Lorenzo Esposito’s daughter?”

Luisa shook her head. Gennaro didn’t need to spell out why Lorenzo’s wife’s wish for separate beds trumped theirs. Lorenzo Esposito was the most dangerous man in Italy.

She made one last attempt. “Separate rooms, then? It could work in our favour by making it more believable when we file for our separation. You do realise that’s only a week away?”

Finally, something that resembled emotion flickered on his immovable face.

“Believe me, I am counting down the days, but no, the idea of separate rooms is out of the question, and not just because there are no free rooms. This week is too important for distractions of any kind to be allowed, and that includes allowing rumours to circulate about our marriage. We part ways next Monday and not a minute before, and if I hear so much as a scintilla of gossip about the state of our marriage before the day we part then I will consider you to be in breach of our contract.”

Even though her insides were quivering, she kept her neck elongated and held his stare. “Any gossip will not come from me.”

His smile was as taut as his jawline. “Then there is nothing further to discuss. Now, excuse me, but I need to find my brother. I will join you for lunch on the sun terrace at one.”

Gennaro digested everything his brother had just confided to their select group.

Namely that Niccolo’s most recent lover’s sister was at that moment on a flight to Naples, travelling with the express intention of sabotaging Niccolo’s wedding.

Niccolo’s idea to counter this was for his best man, Dante, to whisk her off to his secure Tuscan castle and keep her locked up until after the nuptials.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit extreme, though?” Gennaro posited. “She can’t get into the grounds. There is zero chance of the Espositos crossing her path.”

Niccolo grimaced. “She’s a loose cannon.

You’ve seen Georgia’s message. If Callie talks to the press, then God knows what will happen, and I can only thank God she didn’t think of going to the British press first. Siena knows about Georgia – hell, her damned father knows about her.

Neither of them cares, but if Callie spills my affair with Georgia to the world in the run-up to the wedding, then it will humiliate them, and you know how Lorenzo will react to that. ”

Gennaro closed his eyes and bit back calling his brother a fucking idiot.

The message from his brother’s ex-lover stated that her sister had stolen pornographically compromising pictures of Niccolo and the ex-lover and that she was planning to hand them over to the press.

Gennaro knew his brother could be impulsive and reckless, but creating homemade porn with someone who wasn’t his fiancée had to rank as one of the most reckless things he’d done, especially when the fiancée in question was Lorenzo Esposito’s daughter.

That paled though, in comparison to the most reckless thing Niccolo had done, which was getting into bed – in a business sense – with the most dangerous and notorious man in Italy.

And now he was stuck, days away from marrying into Italy’s most dangerous and notorious family, to a woman he felt nothing for, and with no way out.

Because getting into bed with Lorenzo meant Niccolo owed the Esposito patriarch hundreds of millions of euros, and all because he’d been too proud to go to Gennaro for help.

He supposed he could understand why Niccolo had been reluctant to confide his money problems with his older brother, but, damn it, the fool had been too proud to go to Dante or Leonardo for help too.

While the conversation continued, Gennaro worked to keep his temper controlled.

What was done was done. Niccolo had got into bed with Lorenzo Esposito, and the repayment for the debt he owed him was marriage to Siena.

If the marriage failed to go ahead, the financial debt would be called in, and when the Espositos called their debts in, the interest they added wasn’t of a financial kind.

So yes, on reflection, hiding the ex-lover’s trouble-making sister away was probably a wise choice, for the sister’s sake as well.

If Lorenzo or any of his sons got wind of what she was planning, then God alone knew what would happen to her, because nothing – nothing – could be allowed to spoil this wedding.

And it was because nothing could be allowed to spoil this wedding that Gennaro would have to share a bed with his wife for the next six nights.

“Has Dante gone?” Gennaro’s wife asked an hour later when they sat down for lunch on the sun terrace.

“Yes,” he answered shortly. “A business emergency.”

That had been the agreed explanation to account for Dante’s sudden absence from the pre-wedding celebrations.

“Will he be gone long?”

“He will be back in the morning.”

“Oh, good. It wouldn’t feel like a proper celebration without Dante. ”

Pouring them both a glass of iced water, he kept his tone even as he said, “There are times when it seems to me that you have a special interest in Dante.”

The enormous Jackie Onassis-style shades Luisa wore hid her eyes from his view, but her golden cheeks coloured and her wide lips twitched. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“There is no need to be defensive, I have simply noticed you become more animated when he is around.” He’d noticed that about her as a child too.

Where she’d turned the colour of a tomato and hidden behind her mother’s skirts or in a book whenever in Gennaro’s presence, she would poke her head out of her shell for his brother and come out of it completely for his brother’s best friend.

“I didn’t think you noticed anything about me,” she said coolly.

That was because Gennaro spent an inordinate amount of his time making efforts not to notice his wife.

He shrugged. “We live together. I am bound to notice things.” Whether he wanted to notice them or not.

Just as Niccolo had committed to marrying Siena to save his own skin and fortune, so Gennaro had committed to marriage with Luisa to pull off the business deal that would turn him from a multi-millionaire to a billionaire and secure his company’s fortunes for decades to come.

It had all come about when the ruling monarch of a Middle Eastern country had pulled out all the stops to entice Gennaro into expanding his electric car company to his small but fabulously wealthy kingdom.

The kingdom’s riches and its location in the hub of other fabulously rich nations had meant the monarch’s enticement had made perfect business sense and would give Gennaro a huge advantage over his rivals.

The problem had come after Gennaro had invested millions in the construction of the factories and was in the process of getting the necessary permits to start production.

Without any warning, the kingdom’s law changed – for non-citizens to get the necessary permits to do business there, the non-citizen had to be married.

Either Gennaro got married or he could forget the production permits and kiss his investment goodbye.

The monarch had not been in the slightest bit amenable to bending the rules for him.

“Take a wife,” he’d laughed. “It doesn’t have to be forever – once production is up and running and a decent amount of time has passed to stop the rousing of suspicious minds, you can divorce her.

Just make sure none of my family or ministers suspect the truth. ”

Swallowing his rage at this underhand last-minute changing of the goalposts, Gennaro had forced himself to think rationally, and in doing so had thought of the Rossellinis.

Only days before, his mother had mentioned that they’d hit hard times and were on the verge of bankruptcy, something Gennaro’s father, a cruel brute of a man, had dismissed as their own fault.

Despite the extenuating circumstances and Pietro Rossellini dedicating his entire legal career to Giuseppe Martinelli’s service, and despite three decades of close friendship with the Rossellinis, his father had refused to help them.

Gennaro had thought, too, of their ugly, buck-toothed eldest daughter.

A win-win scenario had formed in his mind, and he’d approached the Rossellinis with it.

He would pay off enough of their debts to keep them solvent and in exchange he would marry their eldest daughter.

Once two years of marriage had passed, they would quietly divorce, and he would pay the parents enough money to never have to worry about falling into debt again and pay the bride a substantial amount of money in her own right so she could live in luxury for the rest of her life.

His only proviso was that the nature of the marriage must be kept secret between himself, the bride and the bride’s parents, something he’d subsequently had written into the wedding contract.

The penalty for revealing the truth would result in all monies at the end of the marriage being forfeited.

The Rossellinis would have bitten his hand off to agree but they’d tempered their relief at this potential way out of their money problems by calling their daughter down from her bedroom to present the proposal to her. Up to that point, Gennaro hadn’t even known Luisa was in the house.

Marriage to the ugly duckling Rossellini daughter, he’d thought, would be tolerable for him.

She’d been a shy little girl with an extraordinary talent for drawing whose presence had never irritated him the way others had and, most importantly, there would be no danger of desiring or developing feelings for someone he found physically unattractive.

It had been a good ten years since he’d last seen her.

Intellectually, he’d known the twenty-five-year-old woman he was proposing marriage to would be much different from the shy adolescent he remembered but hadn’t factored in just how different she would be.

Hadn’t factored in that the ugly, buck-toothed duckling would metamorphose into an elegant, beautiful swan.

Short and slimly built with gentle curves, she had a face anyone would take a second look at.

It wasn’t perfect, the mouth being a little too wide and a little too full and the nose being a little too small, but when combined with her large dark brown eyes, oval face and high cheekbones, the effect was breathtaking.

Factor in the long, thick, glossy dark hair that reached down to her high breasts, and she was devastatingly beautiful.

He’d come within a whisker of insulting everyone by demanding marriage to the other daughter instead. If Luisa hadn’t accepted his proposal with a look of cold indifference, he just might have done.

Only seven more sleeps and he would never have to suffer her presence again.

Never have to walk through his home and breathe in her essence.

Never have to keep such tight control of himself and watch his every word and reaction around her.

Never have to retire to his bed and fight his own mind from thinking of her sleeping in the adjoining room.

To reach that end game though, he had to get through six nights spent sharing a bed with her for the very first time…