Page 5 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)

Chapter Three

T here was a chill in the air, a reminder that, despite the balmy daytime temperature they’d enjoyed that day, they were still in spring.

Luisa hugged her arms for warmth. She’d been so desperate to get out of the suite and escape the heat the simple fastening of a zip had induced that she’d forgotten her jacket.

“Are you cold?”

Gennaro’s question startled her. She wouldn’t have thought he’d notice, never mind mention it.

“A bit.”

“Here, take my jacket.”

Heart thumping, she recoiled internally at the unexpected offer. “I’ll be okay. We’ll be back in a minute.”

“I don’t need it.” Without missing a step, he shrugged it off and passed it to her.

Feeling she had no choice but to take it, she murmured, “Thank you,” and slipped her arms into its warmth.

Warmth that came from Gennaro’s body. It dwarfed her small frame and smelt of leather and his cologne, and she experienced an almost irrepressible urge to rub her nose into it and inhale the scent deep into her lungs.

The rest of the short walk was conducted in silence. It seemed to Luisa that it took forever.

Not until they were back in their suite was the silence broken.

“I’ve got work I need to catch up with,” he said. “I’ll take it out on the balcony so as not to disturb you.”

She took the jacket off. “You should wear this. It’ll only get colder.”

He gave a fleeting, almost mocking smile. “You sound like a wife.”

Stung for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, she dredged a smile of her own to mask it. “After two years, it was bound to happen at least once, but don’t worry – we won’t be together long enough for it to happen again.”

A hardness came to his stare. “Good. Because the last thing I have ever wanted is a wife.”

“So it’s not just me you don’t want as a wife, then?” she asked impulsively.

His features tightened. Lifting his chin, his nostrils flared. “Some people are meant for solitude. I am one of them.” Then, with another forced, fleeting smile, he bowed his head. “I will leave you to prepare for bed. Sleep well.”

“You too.”

He’d stepped out onto the balcony with his laptop, jacket and a bottle of scotch before Luisa realised it was the first time he’d ever wished her to sleep well.

Gennaro didn’t actually have any work that needed catching up with. He’d worked until midnight the night before to get caught up and had handed over everything to his team. For the next week, he would only be contacted in the event of an emergency.

Pouring himself another drink in the hope it would help him relax, he tilted his head back and breathed deeply. In the brief time she’d worn it, Luisa’s perfume had transferred onto this jacket.

God, he wished this week could be over already, almost wished Dante hadn’t been successful in kidnapping the English woman who’d travelled to Italy to destroy the wedding.

He wouldn’t wish marrying into the Esposito family on his worst enemy, let alone his brother, but Niccolo had made his bed, and unless he wanted a future where he would never sleep again for fear of a bullet or worse, he had to lie in it.

If only Niccolo had confided his troubles in him or even in Dante. Both men would have dug him out of his hole. Pride could make a man stupid, and it was Niccolo’s pride that had stopped him going to Gennaro for help. Pride inherited from their bastard father.

Sipping his scotch, he thought grimly that at least the distraction of Luisa sitting beside him over dinner had dulled the effect of sharing a table with his father.

The last time he’d seen the bastard had been at his wedding, the invitation sent only for propriety reasons.

Niccolo had invited him on the order of Lorenzo Esposito.

Niccolo had escaped the tyrant of their childhood only to marry the daughter of another.

He took another sip of his scotch and closed his eyes.

It seemed he was destined to spend his whole life worrying about his impulsive brother.

Better to be worrying about him than have a dead brother though.

Gennaro might not do emotion, but Niccolo was the exception.

Deep in his stony-cold heart lived the love he’d carried for him since their mother had brought him home from the hospital at two days old. It was his earliest memory .

A breeze carried another whiff of Luisa’s perfume into his airwaves at the same moment he sensed movement, and he turned his head to find her closing the drapes.

Their eyes met.

She stilled.

His heart pulsed.

She’d changed into cream, long-sleeved silk pyjamas. All her makeup had been removed. She was as breathtaking bare-faced as she was fully made up.

His heart pulsed again, and he had to clench his jaw to nod an acknowledgement before turning away from her.

He wasn’t bloody working, Luisa fumed. He’d lied to her. He hadn’t even bothered opening his laptop! Gennaro found the idea of sharing a bed with her so distasteful that he’d rather sit out on a cold balcony and pickle his liver with scotch.

Well, screw him. She was tempted to take the righthand side of the bed just to piss him off.

She only knew he preferred the righthand side because she’d passed his room on a few occasions when his door had been left open and before the staff had made the bed up, and noticed the bedding bunched over on that side.

She couldn’t fathom why his preferred side of the bed had lodged in her brain, but it had, and if she didn’t prefer the lefthand side herself then she would bloody well sleep on his side.

But that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face.

Knowing perfectly well it would be hours before he came back into the suite and too wired to feel sleepy, she got into bed with her eReader and tried to switch her brain off in an escapist novel.

An hour later, she was still on the same chapter she’d started with.

It was her stupid eyes continually flicking to the balcony door that had her reading the same paragraphs over and over .

The eReader turned off, she nestled into the bedsheets and closed her eyes. Tried to close them. They kept opening to peer through the dark to the balcony door, so she burrowed deeper into the covers until she was practically entombed in them.

At least two more hours must have passed before her body began to feel heavy and a lethargy stole into her mind. She was sinking into the welcome darkness of sleep…

Her eyes sprang open at a muffled noise.

Footsteps treaded quietly over the floor. The bathroom door closed softly.

She swallowed and gripped the sheets, willing her mind back to its sleepy state.

Time stood suspended, every atom in her body on the highest alert… until the bathroom door opened and her atoms went into hyperdrive and her heart thumped into her throat.

Frozen, she heard the muffled sound of clothes being stripped and discarded, and then there was the slightest movement on the firm mattress and the slow rustling of sheets as he drew them over himself.

She knew he’d turned his back to her just as hers was turned to his, and when she was finally able to make a slow, quiet inhalation, the scent of toothpaste and the remnants of his cologne drifted into her airwaves.

She slid her hand quietly to the base of her throat and pressed on the wildly beating pulse.

Did he know she was awake? Was there a way of telling?

Her mother had always known when Luisa was faking sleep, but in those days she’d been a small child who liked to play with her toys in bed rather than sleep and her mother had been an expert on children faking sleep.

Luisa didn’t imagine Gennaro had ever climbed into a bed with a woman and had her fake sleep on him before.

But then, she didn’t imagine he’d ever climbed into a bed with a woman without the express purpose of having sex with her and without the intention of either leaving that bed or making the woman leave it shortly after.

She closed her eyes and willed her thrashing heart to still.

Gennaro woke instantly after the least refreshing sleep of his life.

His willpower was such that it controlled his sleep too, and he was in the exact same position as when he’d first got into bed.

Luisa, though, had moved. It was the first thing he sensed, before he even opened his eyes.

There had been a huge gulf between them when he’d climbed in, both positioning themselves as close to the edge of their respective sides as was practicable without falling out.

Though not so much as a strand of her hair touched him, she felt closer.

Close enough for the arousal he’d spent the night fighting to uncoil into his loins.

Gritting his teeth, he slipped stealthily out of the bed and headed into the bathroom without looking at her.

Showered, a towel around his waist, he opened the door slowly. All he could see of her was the top of her glossy dark brown hair poking out of the top of the sheets she’d cocooned herself in.

He dressed quickly and, in the same stealth mode that he’d climbed out of the bed with, left the suite.

After the worst sleep of her life, Luisa knew before she opened her eyes that she was alone in the bed and that Gennaro had gone. At some point while she’d slept, she’d rolled over and moved close to the centre of the bed. She could only hope she’d done that after he’d left the suite.

Her chest too tight for relief that he’d gone, she dragged herself into the bathroom and was assailed with the scent of Gennaro’s shower gel and cologne.

He was everywhere, she thought miserably, even in his absence.

He always had been.