Page 24 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)

He could see by the glint in his father’s mean eyes that his thoughts were ugly, but whatever the ugliness of his thoughts, his father was an expert at controlling his emotions.

It was only in private that he let his cruel, violent side run free.

He’d never let that cruel, violent side run free on Gennaro though, something Gennaro had always assumed was because his father had recognised the same violent streak in his eldest son that lived in himself and knew he would fight back.

“Go and find your new friend and get the hell away from us before you embarrass yourself further,” he added in the same low undertone before sitting back down and picking up his cards.

Now he was the one pretending to study the hand he’d been dealt. Pretend, too, that his heart wasn’t racing.

Gennaro had let his violent side run free only once since his early childhood, decades back when he’d been certain his father would kill his brother. It was one of the few times he’d witnessed a beating. His father had lost control that day believing Gennaro was gone from the villa.

His heart made a sudden flump in his weighted chest.

Hands suddenly shaking, he downed his scotch as a maelstrom of thoughts collided.

His father was frightened of him. That’s why he’d never beaten Gennaro and why he’d saved his beatings of Niccolo for the times Gennaro was absent from the home.

Just as there was something in Niccolo that had always pushed their father’s cruellest buttons, there was something in Gennaro that had always frightened him, and on a subconscious level Gennaro had always sensed this and absorbed it into a fact.

He was violent and cruel like his father, an assumption that had steered the whole of his life.

But just because his father saw something frightening in the eyes of his eldest son didn’t mean that something was there. It didn’t mean that it was an inherent part of him as he’d always believed.

Luisa looked into his eyes and saw something different to what his father saw and different to what Gennaro believed he saw in his reflection.

She’d goaded him, not to provoke him into acting on his worst instincts but to prove his worst instincts didn’t exist, at least not in the way he’d always believed them to.

“Gennaro?”

He looked at his cousin.

“I’ve raised. Match or fold?”

He loosened the cards clenched in his hand. Their pictures swam before his eyes. He’d lost so many hands in the short time they’d been playing that to match his cousin’s raise of the stakes, he’d have to go all in.

Go all in…

He turned his stare to his brother, now just two days away from marrying a woman he didn’t want, let alone love, and forming a marriage that would never be a true marriage and one he would never be able to walk away from.

If Gennaro’s intuition about Niccolo’s English lover was correct then Niccolo would have gone all in with her.

Niccolo, who for all the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of their father, had never lost his ability to charm.

It was a charm he used to keep people at a distance, a talent that stopped people noticing he never gave anything away about himself.

The only close relationship Niccolo had was with Dante.

In their very different ways, both Martinelli brothers had built walls deliberately to repel people .

Georgia had knocked down Niccolo’s walls, he was certain of it.

Luisa hadn’t just knocked down Gennaro’s walls, she’d smashed them.

The ugly little buck-toothed girl whose shyness and unmistakable talent had touched his heart all those years ago had grown into a woman who now only had to look at him to touch his heart.

She was his heart, and he’d sooner drive a stake through it than harm a hair on her head.

Over the last two years she hadn’t just consumed his every waking and sleeping thought, she’d seeped into him and wound herself around his heart to claim it.

He’d been an arrogant fool to believe he could contain the effects of opening Pandora’s Box.

One prise of the lid and everything contained in it had sprung free, but it wasn’t the evils of the world that had been unleashed, it was the light to extinguish the darkness in him. Luisa’s light. Luisa’s love.

“Gennaro?”

Now they were all looking at him waiting for him to make his move.

He threw his cards on the table and shoved the last of his cash into the pile. “All in.”

And then he got to his feet and ran to the lobby.

Luisa sat in the back of the same car that had driven her to The Bianchi and left its exclusive grounds.

Just four days ago she’d expected to make this return journey ready to party like it was a new Millennium.

She’d never expected she would leave with her heart smashed into little pieces.

Her phone buzzed. She turned it off without looking at it.

It would be one of her family. Unable to face them, she’d messaged her sister and given her Gennaro’s version of why she was leaving.

In many ways, it was the truth, except in the real version she wasn’t leaving to give them time to cool down.

She was leaving because Gennaro would rather be lonely and miserable than take a chance on love.

She was such a fool. She’d given the whole of herself and her heart to a man she’d known could never return her feelings.

She’d let him breach her defences; defences she’d only put up to protect herself from exactly what she was feeling now, and now she had to navigate the rest of her life without him.

There was a long beep from the car behind them. It barely penetrated her misery.

She couldn’t go back to Florence. She’d have to go to her parents or check into a hotel.

Yes. A hotel. Somewhere she could spend a few days without any memories of Gennaro in it and grieve the future she’d barely realised she’d spent all her life longing for before it had been snatched away from her.

The horn of the car overtaking them made a series of beeps.

She closed her eyes and wiped away more tears that were immediately replaced with fresh ones. Only when she opened them again did she realise the driver had turned off the road they’d been travelling and was pulling into a layby.

She pressed the buzzer and croaked through her raw throat into the microphone, “Why are we stopping?”

The driver didn’t answer. About to repeat the question, her body jumped when her door flew open and then her heart jumped when Gennaro appeared.

She gazed at him as if he were a mirage. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

His gorgeous features contorted. “Don’t go.”

“What?”

He held out a hand to her. “Don’t go. Please, Luisa, don’t go. ”

She continued gazing at him and dumbly said, “But you told me to go.”

“And now I’m telling you – begging you – not to.”

Feeling like she was in some kind of dream, she gripped the hand extended to her and let him help her out of the car. The hand felt real. The scent of his cologne smelt real.

But her legs felt shaky. Everything felt shaky. She was so wrung out she could barely comprehend what was happening, and she yanked her hand out of his and pressed her back to the side of the car to keep herself upright.

With cars streaming past them, he quietly said, “Please, come back with me. Come back and see out this farce of a wedding and then we can fly anywhere in the world you want to go and retake our vows with the meaning we should have given them when we first made them.”

He looked serious, she thought dazedly.

“You want us to have a proper marriage?” she whispered, needing to be concrete in her certainty of what he was saying.

“With all my heart….”

Her feet had leapt from the ground before he’d finished speaking as she launched herself at him, pummelling his chest with her fists as she screamed at him, “You absolute fucking bastard! I would rather sleep on the streets than go back with you. I hate you.”

Strong arms wrapped around her, pinning her to the chest she was so desperately trying to pummel.

“I know you hate me,” he whispered, pressing his mouth into the top of her head.

“I deserve your hate. I have treated you terribly and if I could wind back time to the day I made my proposal to your parents, I would. I have so many regrets but using their terrible situation to my own advantage is second only to how I’ve spent our marriage treating you.

” There was a crack in his voice. “You were the first person other than my brother to ever touch my heart and now you’ve grown into the woman who owns it.

I love you, Luisa. I think I’ve loved you since you walked into your parents’ living room and agreed to marry me with such contempt in your eyes.

I deserved that contempt. I was a selfish bastard acting in my own self-interests while you were acting out of love. ”

She stopped struggling against him and held her breath.

He pressed another tight kiss to her head and quietly said, “I think you’ve saved my soul, Luisa. I know you deserve so much better than me, but I beg you, please give me the chance to be that man. I swear I will do everything I can….”

His voice tailed off as he sucked in a deep breath of air.

“Say it,” she dredged.

“I want to be the man and husband you deserve but I don’t know how to be.”

It was the starkness in his voice that cut through the last of her desolation and anger and allowed her heart to pump with hope.

Disentangling herself from his tight hold, she lifted herself onto her toes and cupped his face. His eyes were closed. “Look at me,” she ordered quietly.

His chest rose and then his black eyes locked onto hers.

“Do you love me?”

“More than life itself.” If Gennaro hadn’t already known it, the panic that had gripped him when he’d forced Leonardo to chase after the car driving Luisa out of his life would have sealed it. It had been a terror like nothing else on this earth.

She studied him intently for the longest time.

“Gen… The man I fell in love with is the man who out of nothing but kindness bought a shy little girl the best gift she could ever have received. He’s the man so determined to be nothing like his tyrant father that he’s denied himself the best things life has to offer out of fear of hurting others.

He’s the man who is so intensely protective of his brother that he’s given up a week of his life to be amongst a crowd of people he detests for his br other’s sake.

That’s the man I love. That’s the husband I want.

Just you, exactly as you are.” She swallowed.

“It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take time but we can build something special, but for that to happen you’ve got to have faith. ”

“I have faith in you,” he said simply.

She continued studying him, gazing into his eyes, peering into his heart, peering into his soul.

He didn’t take a single breath until her hands slid around the back of his head and cradled him closer to her.

“And I have faith in you, and if we have faith and love in each other then that’s all we need. ”

“I do love you,” he whispered. “More than anything.”

“And I love you. My heart’s been yours since I was a little girl.”

“I will keep it safe,” he promised solemnly. “And protect it always.”

Slowly, the soft smile on the face he found more beautiful every time he looked at it broke into a wide beam and suddenly she was laughing with a joy that was so infectious that the last of the weight in his heart lifted and Gennaro laughed too, and then they were kissing with the same joy, kissing until neither of them had any air left, oblivious to all the drivers beeping their approval as they sped past them.