Sicilian Husband, Unexpected Baby. Sharon Kendrick
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Emma flinched. It was one thing knowing it, but quite another hearing him saying it again so cold-bloodedly. And she had seriously underestimated what an intelligent man he was. Clever enough to realise that she wouldn’t just turn up out of the blue, asking for a divorce, unless there was a reason behind it. So give him the kind of reason he can believe in. ‘I should have thought that you’d be glad enough to have your freedom back?’
‘Freedom for what, precisely, cara?’ he drawled.
Say it, she told herself. Say it even if it chokes you up inside to have to say it. Confront your demons and they will disturb you no more. You’ve both moved on. You’ve had to. And the future will obviously involve different partners—especially for Vincenzo. ‘The freedom to see other women, perhaps.’
A lazy and faintly incredulous look made his ebony eyes gleam and he gave a soft laugh. ‘You think I need an official termination of our marriage to do that?’ he mocked. ‘You think that I have been living like a monk since you left me?’
Despite the lack of logic in her response, Emma’s lips fell open in dismay as disturbing visual images lanced through her mind like a sharp knife. ‘You’ve been sleeping with other women?’ she questioned painfully.
‘What do you think?’ he taunted. ‘Although you flatter me by presuming numbers—’
‘And you flatter yourself with your false modesty, Vincenzo!’ Emma said in a low voice. ‘Since we both know you can get any woman to come running with a click of your fingers.’
‘Like I got you, you mean?’
Emma bit her lip. Don’t destroy my memories, she pleaded silently. ‘Don’t rewrite history. You came after me. You wooed me,’ she protested in a low voice. ‘You know you did.’
‘On the contrary, you played a game,’ he demurred. ‘You were far cleverer than I gave you credit for, Emma. You played the innocent quite perfectly—’
‘Because I was innocent!’ she declared.
‘And that, of course, was your trump card,’ he murmured. Vincenzo leaned back against the sofa, arrogantly letting his gaze drift up her legs and over her thighs, which the cheap fabric of her dress was clinging to like cream. ‘You played your virginity like a champion, didn’t you? You saw me, you wanted me and you teased me so alluringly that I was unable to resist you. You saw me as a man who had everything—a Sicilian who would value your purity above all else and be bound by it!’
‘I…didn’t…’ she breathed.
‘So why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin before it was too late?’ he snapped. ‘I would never have touched you if I’d known!’
She wanted to tell him that she had been so in awe of him and so in love with him and that was why the subject hadn’t come up. That things had rocketed out of control. She had been at an utterly vulnerable time in her life and had thought him way out of her league—hadn’t for a moment thought that the affair would progress through to marriage. Hadn’t he told her—fiercely and ardently—that he would one day marry a woman from his homeland, who would inculcate their children with the same values they had grown up with?
And yet on some far deeper level she had known that he would have run a mile if he’d been aware that she was a virgin—but, of course, by then she had been in too deep to be able to withstand the hungry demands of her body and her heart to risk telling him.
‘I wanted you to be my first lover,’ she told him truthfully. Because she had suspected that no other man who came into her life would ever come close to Vincenzo.
Vincenzo’s lips curled in derision. ‘You wanted a rich husband!’ he stated disparagingly. ‘You were all alone in the world with no qualifications, no money and no property—and you saw your wealthy Sicilian as a ticket to ride your sweet little body out of poverty.’
‘That’s not true!’ said Emma, stung.
‘Isn’t it?’ he challenged.
Colour flared into her cheeks. ‘I’d have married you if you’d had nothing.’
‘But fortunately for you it never came to that, did it, cara?’ he retorted sarcastically. ‘Since you already knew what I was worth.’
Emma flinched as if he had hit her—but in a way his words were more wounding than physical blows could ever be. At least you know now what he thinks of you, she thought to herself. But she was damned if he would see her break down in front of him. She would get what she came for and she would walk out of here with her head held high.
‘Well, in view of what you’ve just said—at least neither of us can be in any doubt that seeking a divorce is the only sensible solution,’ she said calmly.
Vincenzo stilled and something inside him rankled. He didn’t like it when she used logic—it made her seem untouchable again and he was used to women always being passionate around him. So was Emma really immune to him—as unbothered by the idea of legally ending their marriage as she seemed—or was it all an act? Would she still turn on for him? he wondered idly.
Completely without warning, he leaned over her, almost negligently brushing his lips over hers, and smiled with triumph as he felt their automatic tremble at that briefest of touches.
Emma froze, even as she felt the blood beginning to heat her skin and the sudden mad thunder of her heart. ‘Vincenzo,’ she whispered. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘JUST testing,’ Vincenzo murmured, and returned his mouth to Emma’s, feeling her rapid breath warming his lips, and he found he wanted to lick his way into her—every part of her—as he had done so many times before.
‘Don’t—’
But she wasn’t pushing him away, was she? He could sense, almost smell Emma’s desire for him—but then he had always been able to read her like some long and erotic book. At least until the relationship had withered away to such an extent that they could hardly bear to look one another in the eye, let alone touch one another….
Until that very last time. Just before she had walked out of the door into the blazing Roman heat—he had caught her to him and had begun to kiss her and she had kissed him back, angrily and with more passion than she’d shown for months.
He remembered rucking up her little skirt and pushing aside her panties and pushing into her: doing it to her upright against the wall, where she stood. Remembered her gasping her orgasm in his ear. And then, ignoring her protests that she would miss her flight, he had carried her up to their bedroom. To the bed they had not shared for weeks—and had spent that one long, last sleepless night imprinting himself on her body and her mind. Pulling out every sensual skill he had ever learnt and using them on her almost ruthlessly as she had moaned with pleasure and regret.
Dio, he was getting hard now just thinking about it. Too hard.
‘Emma,’ he ground out, and this time his lips didn’t brush hers. They crushed them beneath his as ruthlessly as if they had been fragile rose petals beneath a hammer and as she gasped her fingers came up to wind themselves in the tousled thickness of his hair, just the way they used to do.
‘V-Vincenzo,’ she stumbled out, but the word was blotted out by his kiss—their kiss, because her moaned response surely made her a willing participant as she found herself blown away by the power of his touch.
Was it that she was so starved of any kind of adult comfort or pleasure that she found herself submitting to the sweet pleasure of his lips, like a woman drowning in honey? How long since she had been kissed? Not since last time this man had kissed her, and no man had ever kissed her like Vincenzo. No man could. He used his lips to cajole