Second-Time Bride (13 page)

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Authors: Lynne Graham

BOOK: Second-Time Bride
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Daisy turned off the shower and towelled herself dry. Then, throwing the towel aside, she padded back into the bedroom. She was heading for the dressing room, where she hoped to find some clothing, when a light knock on the door momentarily froze her to the spot. She wasn't wearing a stitch! As the doorhandle began turning, she gave a frantic, unavailing pull at the securely lodged sheet on the bed and then dived with a strangled groan under the massive bed to conceal herself. The rattle of china broke the silence. Daisy waited to see a pair of maid's feet approaching but instead she saw male feet... unmistakably Alessio's feet—bare, brown, beautifully shaped.
‘Daisy...?' he called.
She held her breath and turned puce with mortification. Things like this did not happen to other people; why did they continually happen to her? Especially around Alessio, who would greet a hurricane in the middle of the night with a stopwatch. He checked the bathroom, the dressing room, muttered something in Italian.
Daisy couldn't stand the suspense any longer. She cleared her throat. ‘I'm under the bed. For heaven's sake, go away!' she hissed in furious conclusion.
‘So... you are hiding under the bed,' Alessio drawled after a lengthy pause, a slight tremor disturbing his diction.
‘I thought you were the maid.'
‘I know you used to feel a little self-conscious around the staff,
piccola mia
...but don't you think this is rather excessive?'
‘If you must know, I haven't got any clothes on!' Daisy blitzed back.
‘Oh, I'm well aware of that,' Alessio assured her huskily. ‘I was standing below the trees earlier when you hauled open the curtains and stood there in all your unclothed glory for an entire ten minutes.'
‘You
timed
me?' Daisy could barely frame the scandalised demand.
‘I may not wax lyrical about sunrises or spout romantic speeches under balconies but I was deeply appreciative of that particular view. I also congratulated myself on my foresight that the domestic staff come in at only discreet hours of the day. We are presently the only people in the house—and isn't it fortunate that I included the gardeners in that embargo? I don't think I'm narrow-minded but I'm remarkably selfish. If you had even unwittingly flashed your attractions for anyone else, I would have wrung your neck!'
‘Get out of here, Alessio!' Daisy exploded, fit to be tied.
‘But I haven't enjoyed myself this much in years,' Alessio said with intense appreciation. ‘Why? I have learnt to cherish and value eccentricity and I am rejoicing in the sure knowledge that my wife is unique. I am certain that I am the only man in Italy who had to force-feed his bride on their wedding night, put her to bed alone and then hold a conversation with her while she hid naked under the bed the next day.'
‘
Push off!'
Daisy screeched, unimpressed. ‘I'm not coming out until you go away!'
Alessio set down a tray on the carpet. ‘Look,' he invited in a lazily seductive undertone. ‘Your favourite hot chocolate topped with whipped cream. Disgustingly rich and sweet. Every undiscriminating taste bud you possess has to be watering...'
‘I don't want it!' Daisy hauled wildly at the sheet hanging over the bed. It still wouldn't budge. Her teeth ground together. Then she espied something cotton lying in a heap on the floor on the other side of the bed and rolled over to stretch out her hand and retrieve it.
‘Even when you are concentrating sufficiently to know what's happening around you...which admittedly isn't all that often...you still fascinate me,' Alessio mused reflectively, stretching out long, denim-clad legs as he sank down in an armchair. ‘Any other woman would have got
into
the bed to conceal herself but you crawled under it.'
Feverishly engaged in trying to button the shirt, Daisy's fingers slowed to a clumsy fumble as she focused on those legs. She emerged from below the bed, silver hair wildly mussed, her violet eyes as bright as jewels in her triangular face. Treating her to a shimmering smile of blinding brilliance, Alessio sprang fluidly upright, a disturbing distraction in faded tight jeans and a white polo shirt.
Transfixed by that heart-stopping smile, her mind a dizzy blank, Daisy was now wholly absorbed by the jeans. Her mouth ran dry. She moistened her lips, her breath catching in her throat. Denim faithfully followed every superbly virile line of his lean hips and long, powerful thighs. Her magnetised attention strayed to the distinctively masculine bulge at his crotch and something almost painful twisted low in her stomach, colour slowly creeping up her slender throat in a burning wave.
‘Do the jeans still make your socks sizzle even when you're not wearing any?' Alessio enquired with purring emphasis as he reached down a strong hand and tugged her upright. ‘
Dio
, I should have ransacked my wardrobe in London. To bell with sartorial elegance! Clearly I missed out on a critical coup.'
‘Rubbish!' But Daisy was convinced that even her toes were turning shocking pink and could not credit that she had gawped at him like that. How could she have? How
could
she have? Her face burned hotter than ever.
‘And you are walking a tightrope in that shirt. Tara is not in a bedroom next door. You have no safety net. When you fall...I'll catch you.'
His narrowed gaze was a hot sliver of stark gold, semiconcealed by the lush crescent of his lashes. In the humming stillness, her fingers flew up to the pulse flickering madly at the base of her throat and pressed against it; she frowned as she tore her gaze free and finally registered that she was wearing one of
his
shirts.
‘Where did you sleep last night?' Daisy demanded starkly.
‘In the dressing room...like a gentleman.'
Her brows knit as she pondered that admission. ‘Was there only one bedroom prepared for us?'
‘You haven't buttoned my shirt up properly,' Alessio murmured as if she hadn't spoken, and that deep, low-pitched observation made her knees wobble. ‘Don't worry about it. I have every intention of taking it off again.'
Her startled eyes whipped back up to his. ‘But we're not going to
do
things like that!' Daisy gasped.
‘You do have some very peculiar ideas about marriage,
piccola mia
.'
‘You only married me to get custody of Tara...it's nothing more than a convenient arrangement!'
‘Convenient—available, ready-made, handy,' Alessio defined softly, savouring the words, his brilliant golden eyes smouldering over her with unconcealed anticipation.
‘Forget it!' Daisy said furiously, drawing herself up to her full five feet. ‘I am not a fast-food outlet...'
Alessio flashed her a megawatt smile of wolfish challenge. ‘And I am no celibate. I'm an unreconstructed, very old-fashioned guy. My wife shares my bed. That is not an issue up for negotiation today, tomorrow or any other day. You will not qualify for a separate bedroom should there be fifty guest rooms under the marital roof!'
CHAPTER SEVEN
D
AISY was stunned by the sheer challenging cool of that brazen assurance. ‘You know that I won't agree to that,' she stated tightly.
Alessio elevated a winged ebony brow. ‘No?'
‘No. Sharing a bedroom or a bed is out of the question. And I'd like you to leave so that I can get dressed,' Daisy informed him in speedy conclusion.
‘Daisy—'
‘There's the door. Use it,' Daisy advised, tilting her chin. ‘This is not the average marriage. I was forced into it against my better judgement.'
‘But whichever way you look at it we're
still
married. And without the passion this marriage hasn't got a hope in hell. In fact right now it's the only damned thing we've got going for us,' Alessio returned very drily. ‘So why would you try to deny us that one positive element?'
Unprepared for that raw candour, Daisy lost every scrap of her animation and colour. In demanding a room of her own, she had only been trying to protect herself. She was terrified of putting herself in a position where Alessio could hurt her again. And she could not imagine making love with Alessio without an awful lot of vulnerable feelings becoming involved and putting her at risk.
‘I will not allow you to sabotage this marriage before it even gets a fighting chance,' Alessio asserted with stark impatience. ‘Just for once in your life you are going to stand your ground and make a real effort.'
Daisy snatched in a shaky breath. ‘You have no right to speak to me like that.'
His starkly handsome features were set concrete-hard. Icy eyes held hers with an innate force of will. ‘It was a warning. No matter how bad things get, you are staying this time. We have Tara to think about now—'
‘Yes...but—'
‘And it was a miracle that I didn't drop dead with shock when
you
attacked
me
last week!' Alessio continued with raw emphasis, his lip curling at the memory. ‘It took you thirteen years to work up the courage to tell me why you walked out and you slung it all at me as if you were telling me things I already knew!'
Daisy stiffened. ‘I—'
‘But not one word did you say to me at the time!' Blazing golden eyes raked over her small, still figure. His wide mouth clenched hard, fierce tension splintering from every taut angle of his lean, poised length.
So, believe it or not, the divorce hit
me
very hard!
I wasn't prepared for it and I certainly didn't see it coming.
I loved you and I genuinely believed that you loved me...and then I found out different, didn't I, Daisy?'
That devastatingly candid admission hung there, quivering in the rushing silence.
Daisy was frozen to the spot, plunged at shattering speed into emotional turmoil. Even that day at the bank, she had not considered the staggering idea that Alessio might
not
have wanted the divorce. ‘You're just saying that now to make me feel bad,' she censured him in a faltering undertone. ‘You're lying.'
Alessio strode forward. ‘
Dio
, I—'
Pale and taut, Daisy whirled away from him. ‘You're trying to twist everything and act as if I left for no good reason when you know very well that there was nothing left to stay for! You had already moved out of our bedroom!'
Alessio tugged her back to him, his strong hands closing round her slim forearms to imprison her. His dark features were rigid and his eyes held something that looked remarkably like bewilderment. His long fingers tightened on her slender arms and then loosened before slowly dropping from her. His ebony brows drew together, black lashes lowering as he frowned down at her. ‘Only because I couldn't sleep in the same bed and hope to keep my hands off you.'
‘That doesn't make sense—'
‘Doesn't it? The most embarrassing time of my life,' Alessio confided with a rueful twist of his eloquent mouth, ‘has to be the day my father cornered me to say that he sincerely hoped that I wasn't still making sexual demands on my wife because pregnant women didn't find lovemaking comfortable after the first couple of months.'
Daisy's jaw dropped.
‘I was
seriously
embarrassed,' Alessio admitted with a grim half-smile of remembrance. ‘And I wanted to ask you whether I had been hurting you but I couldn't quite work up the courage. My demands in that department had, after all, been pretty voracious—'
‘I thought you didn't want me any more,' Daisy interrupted, in a complete daze. ‘You never hurt me.'
‘Didn't I?'
She shook her head in an urgent negative, her shining silver-blonde hair flying round her flushed cheekbones, her violet eyes welded to his.
‘That was why I felt so guilty when you lost the baby,' Alessio confessed harshly. ‘I thought that all those passionate encounters might have contributed to that—'
‘No!' Daisy protested in a pained whisper, her gaze soft with distress as she drew instinctively closer to him and smoothed her fingers down his arm in a comforting motion. ‘That was just something that happened. The doctor had assured me that there was no reason why we shouldn't be making love—'
‘How the hell could you have believed that I didn't want you any more?' Alessio broke in with a blatant lack of understanding.
‘That's how it seemed. You never touched me again,' she muttered uncomfortably.
‘Daisy, I couldn't
trust
myself to touch you! I didn't have any self-control around you and I was very frustrated,' he breathed feelingly. ‘Celibacy felt like another punishment. I was a selfish little jerk.'
‘No, you weren't,' Daisy said shakily, devastated by what he had told her but undeniably touched too. Her heart skipped a beat as her eyes connected with his vibrant golden gaze. A tiny muscle somewhere deep down inside her pulled tight and her lower limbs turned weak as insidious heat curled in the pit of her stomach. ‘But you didn't have to be so extreme...' She swallowed and the tip of her tongue stole out to moisten her full lower lip. ‘We could have done—'
‘Other things to ease my raging libido?' Alessio slotted in huskily as he reached out and folded both arms round her to ease her up against him, his burnished gaze nailed with magnetic attention to the voluptuous curve of her pink mouth. ‘Having made my magnificent gesture of self-sacrifice, I was in full martyr mode, and I was far too proud to come back and ask for favours.'
‘It...it wouldn't have been a favour...'
‘No?' Alessio prompted thickly.
‘I always liked making you lose control...it was almost as exciting as losing it myself,' Daisy confided abstractedly, in severe shock and unable as yet to emerge from it. In one bitter bout of confidence, Alessio had yanked the ground from beneath her feet. All those years ago, he had not turned away from her in deliberate rejection. No, indeed. Incredible as it seemed to her, Alessio had still been seething with unabated lust for her dumpy little barrel of a body, and that thought knocked Daisy sideways and over.
‘
Please
...don't say things like that,' Alessio groaned, and with lean, strong hands he gradually drew her up the poised length of his taut, muscular body, letting her find out for herself why he was trembling as she came into head-spinning contact with the bold, hard jut of his aroused masculinity.
Held level with the scorching blaze of his eyes, Daisy hadn't a single thought in her entire head. Every wanton skin cell in her body was busy limbering up at the starting line and Alessio did not disappoint her. He took her mouth with a wild, hot hunger. Excitement hit her in a violent shock wave of response. In an instant, she closed her arms round him, sent her fingers delving blissfully into his luxuriant hair and only uttered an encouraging moan when he sent his hands travelling down over her hips and clamped them to her slim thighs to hold her in place.
That single kiss blazed into fiery heat. Her head spun. Her heart raced. The passion she had damped down and suppressed for too long exploded in a shower of multicoloured fireworks and blew her away. With a muffled growl of raw satisfaction, Alessio hungrily probed her mouth with a wickedly erotic precision that imitated a far more primal possession.
He set her down and flipped her round, his seeking mouth delving in marauding exploration of the soft, sensitive skin between her neck and her shoulder, discovering pulse points she had forgotten existed. Daisy extended her throat in an ecstasy of shivering pleasure and automatically snaked her hips back into the hard, thrusting heat of him, feeling him shudder in urgent sexual response to that helpless provocation.
He brought his hands slowly, caressingly up over the straining thrust of her breasts, their swollen fullness pushing against the smooth cotton of the shirt. As his thumbs brushed and circled over the aching prominence of her nipples, all Daisy's breath escaped at once. Damp heat surged between her trembling thighs and her legs buckled. Twisting her round, Alessio lifted her against him to bring her down on the bed, locking her mouth urgently beneath his again.
‘You said I was incredible in bed,' Alessio breathed raggedly, blazing golden eyes holding her entrapped as he sat up and peeled off his shirt. ‘It wasn't true. We were incredible
together
...'
As a muscular golden brown expanse of chest highlighted by a triangle of curling black hair filled her vision, Daisy started melting from outside in, languorous weakness enclosing every limb. Alessio leant over her, releasing the buttons on the shirt then spreading the edges apart with deft fingers, to gaze down at the pouting swell of her pale breasts with explicit appreciation.
As their eyes collided again and meshed, Daisy quivered in sensual shock. He lowered his dark head and his mouth engulfed an achingly tender pink nipple, making her jerk and moan in unconscious supplication as her fingers tangled with his hair and then clutched blindly at his shoulders. The sensuous glide of his teeth was followed by the soothing sweep of his tongue. Her breath escaped in torturous bursts, her whole body burning up.
Somewhere irritatingly close a telephone shrilled and she frowned. Alessio cursed with what breath remained to him. Two more rings and a vicious burst of Italian was dragged from him. With the abruptness of violent frustration, he lifted himself away from her and lunged a seeking hand down to retrieve a mobile phone.
Then, unexpectedly, Alessio froze, dark blood highlighting the hard slant of his cheekbones while Daisy watched him in growing fascination.
‘His,' he murmured with surprising warmth. ‘
Sì
...
Sì
...wonderful...terrific...great ... Would you like to speak to your mother?'
‘Tara?' Daisy mouthed, her embarrassment as instinctive as it would have been had their daughter walked in and surprised them in bed together.
Alessio extended the phone without a word.
‘How are you guys getting on?' Tara chattered. ‘I knew you'd be worried sick about me because this is the first time I've been away.'
‘Yes—'
‘Isn't Dad romantic taking you back to where you first met?' Tara gushed. ‘I bet you were really knocked flat by that.'
‘Yes—'
‘Well, I'm fine and I'm having a whale of a time, so I hope you won't mind me not ringing again...' Her daughter's voice dropped very low before she continued, ‘Sorry, but it looks really naff having to phone home.'
Seconds later, Daisy returned the phone to Alessio. He tossed it aside. A gulf of silence stretched and Daisy's brow furrowed when Alessio made no move to pull her back into his arms. Her still heated body tautened and flushed with guilty acknowledgement of her own lingering and intense arousal.
‘I thought my memories might have been coloured by adolescent fantasy but they weren't.' His dark, deep voice flat with a curious lack of expression, Alessio cast her a sudden chillingly cold glance from below spiky black lashes, his brilliant dark gaze bleak and hard. Springing lithely off the bed, he reached for his shirt. ‘You really are dynamite in bed...but I think I'll take a rain check.'
Daisy's face flamed with shock and humiliation. That rejection slashed like a winter wind across her exposed flesh. She tugged the sheet over herself, her fingers bone-white as she clenched them beneath its cover. ‘What's the matter with you?' she heard herself whisper strickenly.
Alessio swung back to her, his dramatically handsome features taut. His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘I'm still very angry with you. Every time I remember that you took my daughter away from me, it makes me want to smash things. But I'll get over that. It's irrational to expect more from you than you are capable of giving and it's impossible to turn the clock back.'
Ill-prepared for that level of frankness, Daisy flinched. He had hidden that anger so well from her that she had been fooled. Now, when her every defence was down he condemned her with that reminder, throwing her into guilty confusion. ‘You're not being fair.'

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