Page 21 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)
Chapter Eleven
L uisa kept her eyes closed and prayed for the world to stop turning and to never shift back into focus.
She didn’t want this moment to end. Wanted to stay exactly like this forever.
Gennaro was slumped on top of her, his cheek pressed tight against hers. His breaths were heavy. She could feel the thrashing of his heart, the beats so close to hers.
If she kept her eyes closed and kept the world out, she could pretend to herself that they were one and always would be. Her and Gennaro, always.
He lifted his head to gaze down at her, drinking her in as much as she was drinking him in.
Her heart swelled.
His mouth came down on hers in a tender, lingering kiss before he rolled off her and onto his back.
The coldness at the loss of his warmth was immediate, but only lasted seconds for he hooked an arm beneath her and rolled her into him.
With her cheek on his chest and her leg slung over his thigh and both his arms wrapped around her, a sense of contentment like she’d never known before settled in her.
For the longest, longest time they just lay there, Gennaro’s fingers making gentle trails up and down her back, and the world’s focus stayed in the shadows.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked huskily.
She nodded and kissed his chest, inhaling the musky scent of his skin deep into her lungs.
His hold around her tightened.
Her contentment deepened.
Nothing in her whole world had ever felt as right as it did in that moment, but just thinking that was a sign of the world pulling itself out of the shadows, and its focus sharpened when the distant voices of two people shouting at each other drifted into their suite.
They must have been passing their suite’s block for seconds later the voices had melted into the night.
“I wonder who that was,” she whispered.
He sighed, his breath whispering through the roots of her hair. “Right now, I’d prefer not to know.”
She lifted her face to rest her chin on his chest and gazed at him. “In case it’s your brother?”
His features tightened. Closing his eyes, he jerked a nod. Another beat passed before his face softened and he grunted a laugh. “I never thought I’d get to thirty-seven and still have to protect him.”
“He doesn’t want to marry Siena, does he,” she said quietly.
Gennaro gazed into the soft doe eyes and skimmed his fingers up her spine and gently fisted her hair. “No,” he admitted. “And she doesn’t want to marry him. But you’d already intuited that.”
Her lips curved into a small smile. “Then why are they doing it?”
He held her stare and then inhaled deeply. “Niccolo got himself into debt with Lorenzo. I’m talking serious debt. He made a deal with the devil that he couldn’t afford to pay back and the devil’s solution was for Niccolo to marry his daughter as payment for that debt.”
He watched her eyes flicker as her clever brain turned. “So I was right? The marriage really is for Lorenzo to have the prestige of being related to the great, ancient Martinelli family?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Niccolo is the son of a duke and one day will be the brother of one, and is considered a noble in his own right. Lorenzo has created great wealth for himself and by clever manipulation of the media he owns, has the love of a large portion of the population. But he’s not stupid – he knows those in the upper reaches of Italian society look down on him.
The marriage is his way of buying himself into that society. ”
She was silent for a long time. “I’ve never really thought about your family’s duchy before, or that you inherit the title. Not in any real, non-abstract way.”
“And why would you? It means nothing. The title is worthless in all but name but to someone like Lorenzo, it’s priceless.”
“Did he engineer Niccolo’s debt?”
“I am certain of it. Niccolo crossed paths with him in the course of his ordinary business and Lorenzo cultivated his friendship, much like my father cultivated your father’s friendship.
Lorenzo and my father are more alike than either of them realise and Nic was too na?ve or greedy or desperate or whatever was going through his mind at the time to recognise it. ”
There was more silence before she quietly asked, “What will happen if Niccolo doesn’t go ahead with the marriage?”
“Lorenzo will call in the financial debt but he will add interest to it, and it is the interest that means the wedding must go ahead. If it was just money, then I’d pay it off myself – hell, Dante would pay it off for him – but Lorenzo’s interest is never monetary.”
Feeling suddenly cold, Luisa put her cheek back on Gennaro’s chest and pressed herself tighter against him. “Would you be put in danger?”
“Everyone Niccolo loves will be in potential danger. If Niccolo fails to marry Siena then Lorenzo will be humiliated in front of the whole country, and that will only make him more dangerous.”
It wasn’t just Luisa’s body that had turned cold, her erratically beating heart had turned icy with fear, not for herself but for Gennaro. “If it comes to it, will you increase your security?”
“If it comes to it,” he agreed. “I think, though, that if Lorenzo goes for anyone then it will be Georgia.”
“Who’s Georgia?”
“Niccolo’s English lover... His ex-lover,” he corrected himself. “Her sister is in Tuscany with Dante – that’s why he’s not here. He’s keeping her locked in his castle so she can’t destroy the wedding.”
Confused, she lifted her face again. “What do you mean?”
“Georgia’s sister flew to Naples on Monday intending to give intimate photos of Niccolo and Georgia to the press. We only found out about it because Georgia warned Nic. Dante agreed to hide the sister away until after the wedding.”
“Why would the sister do that?”
“That, for me, is the million-dollar question. Why would the ex-lover’s sister come all this way to try and stop a wedding?
There has to be more to it than the reason Georgia gave which is essentially that her sister’s gone crazy.
Crazy or not, surely it would have been simpler and more effective to give those pictures to the British press?
There has to be more to it than what Georgia told Nic.
I’m certain their affair was a lot more serious than he’s admitting, and if my suspicions are correct then Lorenzo will know it too – he has spies everywhere – and he will go for Georgia first. If my suspicions are wrong then he will likely go for Dante first.”
Or Gennaro, Luisa thought with a cold shiver that raced from her toes to the roots of her hair. Niccolo despised his parents, but he loved his brother.
She had to clear her constricted throat to say, “But this is all hypothetical, yes? A hypothetical that could only become a reality if Niccolo jilts Siena?”
His eyes had narrowed almost imperceptibly. “Yes. Purely hypothetical. Lorenzo is dangerous but also unpredictable in his methods of hurting people, so your crush might still be safe even if Nic does take the nuclear option.”
She blinked and was about to ask what he meant by her crush when it came to her that Gennaro had felt her shiver and had thought it was out of fear for Dante.
He was jealous…
Stretching herself over him to bring her face closer, she palmed his cheek and gently rubbed the bristles of his beard.
“Gen… I have never wanted Dante. I like him very much but I’ve never wanted him in that way.”
Black eyes bored into hers with an intensity she felt all the way to the pit of her stomach.
“It was the thought of anything happening to you that made me go cold,” she whispered. “You. Just you. You’re the only man in the world for me. You always have been.”
Those final words came from nowhere but as they fell from her tongue, Luisa knew they were true, and as they spilled out, something broke free inside her and her chest filled with the light of the truth.
And the truth was she loved Gennaro. She’d always loved him.
He’d been a brooding figure who’d loomed over the whole of her life, but he’d elicited fascination as much as terror.
She’d been drawn to him in the way children and adolescents are often drawn to books and films guaranteed to reduce them to terror, a morbid fascination that in her case had always been accompanied by a strong quailing sickness.
She’d hidden behind her mother whenever he’d come into a room but had still peeked between her fingers for a glimpse of him.
As she’d approached adolescence, she’d spent the days before a visit to the Martinelli home unable to sleep or eat properly, and though she’d always believed herself to be frightened of him, she would take her drawing pad or whatever book she was reading and snuggle in the nearest nook to wherever in the house he happened to be…
and she’d always been like a compass able to determine his exact location with pinpoint accuracy.
When he’d come out of the room she’d scurried away like a frightened rabbit. .. but never scurried far.
Her love for him had subconsciously guided everything she’d done since he’d casually gifted the art stuff to her in that unexpected random act of kindness that had stolen her heart.
That gift had determined the course of her life.
Luisa could have gone to art school anywhere but she’d chosen Florence, not for its prestige but because that’s where Gennaro lived.
She’d never consciously sought out the art shop he’d bought her supplies from but she remembered how her heart had thumped the day she’d recognised the name on the shop front.
It had thumped because it had matched the name elegantly printed on the bespoke paper bag his gift to her had been wrapped in and which she’d kept.
She hadn’t bought supplies from any other shop since.
The day he’d passed her on the Piazza della Signoria … that had been the day she’d known it was over with her boyfriend. She’d ended the relationship days later, wracked with guilt for hurting him when he’d done nothing wrong and not even understanding her reasons for needing to end it .