Page 7 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)

Chapter Four

E arly afternoon, the guests going on the boat trip made their way to the harbour and boarded Lorenzo Esposito’s superyacht.

Gennaro, who had no interest in sailing and who disliked nothing more than being in a crowd of people for forced fun, hoped for major engine failure, and that was before he found his parents holding court in the saloon with the Espositos.

Such a heartwarming scene, he thought cynically, the parents of the bride and groom playing the role of great friends.

Neither couple knew the meaning of friendship.

Playing the role of dutiful son, he kissed both his parents and then Lorenzo and Valeria, and then endured Lorenzo’s gregarious welcome speech before swiping two glasses of the copious champagne being poured by the magnum and muttering to Luisa, “Let’s go on deck.”

She complied without demurring.

Gennaro’s thoughts were grim as he led Luisa outside. He didn’t know which role was the hardest to play: the dutiful son or the dutiful husband. Both were intolerable in their differing ways.

Having already had enough of people for one day, he climbed the outdoor steps up numerous decks until he found one that was, as yet, unoccupied other than with staff.

He didn’t fool himself into believing it would be unoccupied for long.

He estimated around three hundred of the wedding party had come on this trip, and each of those people would be seeking their own space in which to soak up the sun.

When that happened, he would seek out one of his cousins – he could generally tolerate them – or find somewhere quiet indoors.

Lorenzo had told the guests they were welcome to use all the onboard facilities, and Gennaro was going to take him at his word.

Comfortable loungers were scattered around a swimming pool, and he stripped down to his swim shorts and stretched out. With his shades on, no one who spotted him would think him anything but a man on a well-earned break relaxing in the sun with his wife.

Up to that point, his wife had played her role with equal aplomb, but there was a long hesitation before she turned her back to him and removed her thin, white sundress.

Keeping his gaze fixed ahead, he tried to tune out the semi-naked body folding the dress and placing it neatly at the foot of the lounger next to his own.

Tried to tune out the golden skin and the scraps of black material covering the most intimate parts.

Especially tried to tune out the tightening in his loins and the tingling in his flesh.

Although not looking at her, he was aware of her every movement, and when she bent over to take something out of her bag, he screwed his eyes shut and fought the thickening sensation in his groin.

When he next looked, she was propped upright on her sun lounger, one toned golden leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee. Her eReader was in her pretty hand.

“So what’s really happening with Dante?” she asked, breaking the tense silence enveloping them without lifting her eyes from the screen in front of her.

“Nothing,” he answered shortly, now having to contend with a tightening in his chest as well as his loins.

“It didn’t feel like nothing earlier when I mentioned him leaving in front of Siena.” He felt her stare land on him. “I’m not stupid, Gennaro. I know something’s going on.”

“And you want to know what it is for what reason?”

“Because I dug you out of a hole earlier. Your poker face in public is normally professional standard, but it dropped when I mentioned Dante leaving. If I hadn’t exaggerated my conversation with him, Siena would be wondering what the hell is going on too, and my instinct is that whatever is going on is something you and Niccolo want to keep from her. ”

Taken aback at Luisa’s perception and its depth, Gennaro turned his face to look at her properly. But only her face. He would not let his gaze drift below her chin.

“Do you want to know because it concerns your crush?” he asked roughly.

Her doe eyes narrowed. “He’s not my crush.”

“You keep dropping his name into conversation which suggests a crush.” And her eyes always lit up for him. And her voice. She smiled a lot more when Dante was around too. Proper smiles. Only by exerting ruthless control had Gennaro smothered the disturbing emotions those smiles elicited in him.

“We don’t have conversations, Gennaro.”

“We are having one right now.”

“Only because I haven’t let you shut me down like you normally do.”

“I don’t shut you down.”

“Yes you do. Every time I try to hold a conversation with you, you either dismiss me or ignore me. It’s why I stopped bothering, but what the hell, we’ve only got a few more days left to put up with each other.

I’d never tell anyone anything you confide in me, and not because of that sneaky clause you put in our marriage contract allowing you to sue me for the return of the settlement if I speak out about you or our marriage.

If you’d bothered getting to know me, you’d know I can keep my mouth shut without threats. ”

If Gennaro was a man for dropping his mouth open at the unexpected, his would be on the floor.

It wasn’t just that Luisa was contradicting him and arguing with him, but the fire blazing from her eyes, a fire he’d never felt before.

He’d always sensed she had fire in her veins.

To witness the small, tempered flame she was exhaling now…

God, it was arousing. Everything physical about her had always aroused him, but this was the first time her attitude had thrust itself into his loins too, and though he knew he shouldn’t…

mustn’t… he could no longer stop his stare from dipping the length of her semi-naked body.

His throat running dry, he quickly pulled his gaze back to her face, but not before every inch of her softly curved perfection lodged into his retinas and into the arousal he was already fighting.

Luisa’s heart was hammering so hard it felt like a heavy pulse of its own in her throat, and she swallowed back the heavy, quailing sickness that always went hand-in-hand with Gennaro’s presence and which felt even heavier than normal.

It was taking everything she had to keep her focus on her eReader and not let her gaze drift over his semi-naked body.

She hated how deeply aware she was of him. How deeply aware she’d always been.

His terse message earlier had galvanised her more than she’d realised.

She could put up with being treated like a nodding dog when their private lives were kept separate, but it was much harder to swallow now they were destined for days with little respite from each other and when her awareness for him was mushrooming.

If there was a tether, hers had been reached.

There was a strange thickness in his voice when he slowly said, “It was never my intention to make you feel shut down.”

The quailing sickness that was like no other sickness increased at both his expression and his tone, and she jutted her chin and tightened her trembling fingers around her eReader. “Wasn’t it?”

Before he could answer, excited voices cut through the sea breeze Luisa had barely noticed dancing around them, and they simultaneously broke the lock of their eyes to find a handful of Siena’s excitable, glamorous friends bounding towards them.

The giggling women, all younger than Luisa, threw themselves onto the surrounding loungers and stripped to their teeny bikinis.

With nearly as much flesh on display as the day they’d been born, they introduced themselves.

Every one of them, Luisa noted, addressed their introductions to Gennaro.

All were openly making eyes at him, and she experienced a sudden strong urge to shove them all into the pool.

Swallowing back the acrid taste that had formed on her tongue, she glanced at Gennaro to see how he was reacting to their flirtations. He looked bored.

She expelled the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.

Maybe he’d spoken the truth, and his indifference to Luisa wasn’t personal…

not that he’d said that in so many words, but it had been implied.

Maybe he was one of those asexual people she’d read about…

She dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed.

Gennaro was practically wrapped in masculine sexuality, but for whatever reason, he kept the wrapping tight around him.

Before she could stop herself, she wondered what it would be like if he were to loosen the wrapping and cloak her in it, and as she imagined this, imagined Gennaro lowering himself on top of her, his face turned to hers.

Their eyes clashed and held, and suddenly she had the strongest sensation that he was reaching into her mind, the sensation so strong it felt like a touch to her skin.

A flush of heat pulsed deep between her thighs, a pulse so intensely powerful that she automatically pressed the top of her thighs together and sucked in a breath.

For one long moment, the breath stuck.

Her pulses, already erratic, went haywire, and she wrenched her stare away and gripped even tighter to her eReader.

Heart pounding, she pretended to be engrossed in her book; came within a fraction of jumping out of her heated skin when his clipped yet smooth voice murmured, “Let’s go inside and find some less excitable company.”

She didn’t respond for the longest time. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even look at him.

The only time she’d experienced anything like that pulse of heat had been when watching a particularly erotic love scene in a film when she’d been at art school.

That had been the night she’d first brought herself to orgasm, and her horror grew to remember the man in the love scene that had turned her on so much had looked like Gennaro.

She’d never made that connection before and she wished to hell that she hadn’t made it now.