Desert Princes Bundle Page 17

  And if you show him any weakness he will pounce on it.

  ‘I saw no reason in filing for divorce.’

  ‘Not even for the settlement?’

  Alexa hesitated. She could have done with a settlement. But pride had stopped her. She had chosen independence and freedom from his obsessive jealousy over all else—so in the circumstances could hardly ask him for any money. If she did that then the truth would come out, and the chance of a generous settlement was too high a price to pay if it meant that Giovanni could wrench Paolo away from her.

  ‘Perhaps you wish to remain married to me?’ His black eyes were gleaming as he continued with his relentless line of enquiry. ‘Maybe you regret that the division of our relationship ever occurred? Did you walk out thinking that there might be a million other men like me out there, only to discover just how wrong you could be?’

  Alexa opened her mouth to question his arrogance—to remind him of his unrealistic expectations of her which could never be fulfilled. But not only were accusations and recriminations futile, they also had the potential to be dangerous. Because was there the tiniest intimation of truth behind them? Just go. Get up and go.

  ‘There’s no point in making inflammatory remarks, Giovanni.’ She bent down to retrieve her handbag, repressing a sigh of relief that her ordeal was almost over. Yet there was some part of the feminine psyche—and hers in particular—that made her experience a terrible, tearing pang at the thought that this really might be the last time she saw him. And part of her was longing to ask him a stream of questions about his discovery. But it’s none of your business, she reminded herself. He’s not part of your life.

  Isn’t he?

  The goading question inside her head disturbed her more than it should have done, and Alexa gripped the strap of her handbag as if her life depended on it. ‘If that’s everything you wanted to say, then I really must be on my way. It really was…’ She shrugged a little helplessly. ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Do not be absurd, Alexa,’ he warned silkily. ‘You can’t just get up and leave.’

  ‘I can do anything I please,’ she returned. Because now the hammer of fear was beginning to strike at her heart—until she reminded herself that not even Giovanni would dare to keep her there by force. ‘That’s the joy of being single!’

  Stung to anger, she had given away the fact that there was no man on the scene—but Giovanni did not feel it necessary to allow himself a quiet smile of satisfaction. Even if she’s had a lover he would soon have been dispatched—for who on earth would ever win a woman over Giovanni da Verrazzano?

  ‘You still haven’t heard the reason why I have come here today, Alexa—surely you are a little bit curious?’

  She feigned uninterest but suddenly her senses prickled. There was an air of thinly veiled excitement about him. And something else too—something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Was he going to ask for a divorce? she wondered, and to her astonishment felt her heart plummet like a coin dropped from the top of a tall building. Wasn’t it strange how something as sensible and as irrevocable as the legal termination of a long-dead marriage should have the power to hurt, even after all this time? ‘Okay, I’m curious. Tell me.’

  He smiled. ‘I want you to accompany me to Kharastan. I want you at my side for the wedding of my half-brother.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALEXA stared at Giovanni, her heart now beating very fast.

  ‘You want what?’ she echoed incredulously, as if somehow she might have misheard him—though in reality every silk-dipped word had been as clear as the look of enjoyment on his dark, rugged face. He was getting a kick out of this, she thought.

  ‘Stop playing for time, Alexa—it really is very simple. Come with me to Kharastan,’ he murmured, and his eyes narrowed in sardonic query. ‘You can afford to be so blasé about it?’ he mused. ‘I confess myself surprised—after all, it isn’t every day that a woman gets an invitation to a royal wedding. Doesn’t the prospect of that tempt you?’

  She guessed that there were women who would have been thrilled to bits by the prospect of such a high-status event—no matter what the price they had to pay to get there. But Alexa wasn’t the kind of woman who could be swayed or seduced by money or trappings. Hadn’t she left every item of clothing and jewellery behind in Naples when she had fled the marriage?

  ‘You have to be out of your mind!’ she choked. ‘Give me one good reason why I should accompany you anywhere?’

  ‘Because you are my wife.’

  ‘In name only.

  ‘In name is enough.’

  ‘Not for me, it isn’t.’

  ‘But I am talking about my needs, cara—not yours.’

  Alexa picked up her wine glass and managed to successfully negotiate a mouthful of wine before putting it tremblingly back down on the table. She felt it burning its way down to her stomach, but at least it gave her a little bit of courage.

  ‘You’re not making sense, Giovanni—and even if you were the answer would be the same. It’s no. How could it possibly be anything else, in the circumstances?’ She could see that stony, obdurate look she knew so well on his face. ‘There must be women who would queue up around the block to accompany you!’

  He stilled, and when he spoke his voice was as cold as ice. ‘You would not care? It does not bother you to think of me taking another woman?’

  She injected bravado into her voice. ‘Why should it?’

  So she did have the calculating heart of a woman who could just walk away from a marriage without a backward glance or single regret. Hadn’t there been some small and crazy part of him which thought she might react—that she might have cared?

  Giovanni’s face darkened with a rage which made him want to hurt her. ‘It does not concern you to think of me kissing her? Nor to imagine me deep inside her body, with her legs wrapped tight around my back, until she cries out her pleasure?’

  Unprepared for his sexual taunt, Alexa was not expecting the hot swell of nausea which rose up within her. She flinched. ‘Giovanni—’

  His mouth curved and he made no attempt to hide the triumph which washed over him in a heady wave. ‘Of course it does!’ he gloated. ‘You would have to be made out of stone for it not to affect you.’

  And nobody could accuse her of that. Her body had been soft and warm. It had trembled violently beneath his touch as if he’d been a virtuoso playing a brand-new instrument. Where he had led, she had been content to follow—he had drawn up the boundaries of their sexual relationship and she had seemed happy to comply with them. When she had nodded in flushed agreement to his stern suggestion that they wait until after the wedding before they consummated their relationship, he had known a thrill of expectant pride like no other.

  He had been searching for innocence, and Alexa had led him to believe that he had found it. Not until their wedding night had Giovanni discovered what a sham it all was, and by then it had been too late to do anything about her deceit. Other than to despise her for making a fool out of him. And Giovanni had never been made to feel a fool before.

  Something in his heart had died on their wedding night. Yet through his hurt and his anger Giovanni had been determined to take the pleasure he deemed rightfully his—and he had taken delight in coaxing from Alexa her own reluctant response. She had known that he despised her for what she had done and yet she had been unable to resist him. For her, every time she’d sobbed out her orgasm it had been a kind of defeat; for him, a kind of victory.

  ‘Admit it,’ he urged softly. ‘You do not like the thought of me lying with another woman!’

  Of course she didn’t like it—it made her feel violently sick. She swallowed down the bitter taste in her throat and hoped her face didn’t reflect her inner turmoil.

  ‘Just as I do not like the thought of you lying with another man,’ he breathed.

  So nothing has changed there, thought Alexa. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said, clasping her hands together and resting them
on the table in front of him as if in silent appeal—like a handcuffed prisoner in the dock. ‘We’re separated. We haven’t seen each other for almost five years—one of us ought to get around to filing for divorce. It’s not exactly a textbook description of an easy relationship—yet you turn up out of nowhere and ask me to go with you to this wedding? You can’t honestly want that on such an important occasion.’

  ‘Ah, but that is where you are wrong,’ he contradicted. ‘I want this very much. In fact, it is you I want and only you.’

  For a moment Alexa wondered if her ears were playing tricks on her—for weren’t those the very words she had once dreamed of Giovanni saying? Coming to her with a contrite and heartfelt declaration that he had been wrong to treat her like a thing. A possession. Someone he had seen as perfect, but not quite real. A woman who could only be judged by his own archaic standards. And what woman in the world could have lived up to them?

  But of course he would not have changed. Men like Giovanni considered themselves always to be in the right—to admit otherwise would go against every arrogant atom of his alpha-male make-up.

  ‘Well, you can’t have me.’

  Carefully he placed his palm over her clasped hands, covering them entirely with his warm skin, and he felt her start, saw the pistachio-green eyes darken and her lips part in unconscious invitation.

  ‘Can’t I?’ he said softly.

  For a moment Alexa let herself go there—to the place where sensation dominated everything else. The touch of his hand made her tightly locked fingers relax—unfurling as if they were sticks of ice thawing under the unexpected heat of a winter sun. Such a seemingly innocent contact, and yet it brought all those long-suppressed and forbidden feelings flooding back. Skin against skin. The sensation of being touched, stroked, cajoled. Entered. Pleasured.

  ‘Why would you want to take me to the wedding with you?’ she whispered.

  Deliberately, he lifted up her hand, to let his thumb begin a slow, sensual circle around her palm. ‘Because I want a lover while I am there—a sexual partner for the duration,’ he murmured. ‘And it will be less offensive to Kharastani sensibilities if that woman is my wife.’

  There was a short, disbelieving pause.

  ‘A sexual partner for the duration?’ she bit out, as if he might suddenly turn round and say that he was sorry—he hadn’t been thinking straight and hadn’t meant to say it. But of course he didn’t. His black eyes just glimmered with amusement, and Alexa realised that he was actually enjoying himself. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  She hadn’t even noticed he was still holding her hand, he realised, and leaned a little closer. ‘Let me be honest with you, Alexa, in a way you were never honest with me. We should never have married—I accept that. But there’s still a lot of sex which didn’t happen between us—I feel it and you feel it too. I can tell just by looking at you, by the way you tremble beneath my touch. So why fight it?’ He gave a short laugh as he looked down at the fingers which were lying so compliantly cupped in his. ‘I don’t imagine you’re ever going to get an invitation like this again.’

  Snatching her hand away, Alexa shuddered and scrambled to her feet. There was, she realized, no diplomatic way to do this—there never had been, not with Giovanni. He would forge ahead until he got what he wanted. Only in this case he wasn’t going to get it—and the sooner he realised that, the better.

  ‘The answer is no,’ she said in a low voice, fighting her instinct to shout it out—but she didn’t want to draw any more attention to them. ‘It’s over, Giovanni. It should never have begun. Please—let’s just leave it. We’ve said all there is to say. Except maybe goodbye.’

  She walked out of the pub, her head held high and her cheeks burning—glad that her lifestyle meant she rarely ever went to places like this, and neither did her customers. At least it wasn’t likely that she was going to run into anyone asking Who was that gorgeous man we saw you with last night?

  But once outside she started running as if her life depended on it. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder, but thank God—oh, thank God—Giovanni hadn’t followed her.

  She was out of breath by the time she had reached the quiet cul-de-sac where Paolo’s childminder lived, but at least she had begun to relax. Of course he wasn’t going to follow her. He might want a ‘sexual partner for the duration’—to use his own sickeningly cold-blooded choice of words—but he wasn’t so desperate that he was going to start haranguing her to get her to agree to accompany him.

  ‘Mamma!’

  Paolo hurled himself straight into her arms the moment the neat little front door was opened, and Alexa’s heart turned over the way it always did when she saw her handsome and clever little son.

  But for once her joy was measured by other, uncomfortable emotions as she helped him into his duffel-coat.

  Fear, yes—but guilt, too.

  Because the huge brown eyes which gazed up at her so trustingly were so like Giovanni’s? Was it seeing him for the first time in nearly five years which had made the similarities so apparent? Or was it the vague stir of her conscience which troubled her—a conscience she could usually manage to push away to the corners of her mind during the busy blur of everyday living?

  ‘Where have you been, Mamma?’ Paolo asked, his little hand firmly clasping hers as they walked up the narrow track leading to her tiny cottage.

  ‘I went for a drink after work, darling.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘With…’ What did she say? What could she possibly say? Oh, just with someone I knew a long time ago. Your father, actually. She felt her cheeks burning hot and red, but whether it was with guilt or shame at the heavy secret she carried, she couldn’t be sure. There was nothing else you could do—no alternative open to you—you would have lost your only child if you had tried! ‘Look, we’re almost home, darling—shall I make us cocoa when we get in?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please, Mamma!’

  Alexa was so preoccupied with her swirling thoughts, and with opening the front door and switching on the light, that she didn’t see the figure emerging from out of the shadows behind them, before it was too late.

  Instinctively, she pushed Paolo inside—but that was probably a mistake, for the child stood in the full, illuminating glare of the light, staring up with fearless interest at the man whose powerful body almost filled the doorframe.

  ‘Who are you?’ her son asked innocently.

  But Giovanni was staring at the child with a look of incredulity—frozen into astonishment by the sight of himself as boy—but the shock slowly left him, and he looked up and met Alexa’s eyes.

  A silent question was asked, and she nodded her head. For how could she do otherwise?

  Yes, her eyes told him. He is yours.

  ‘How old is your little boy?’ he questioned, in a voice which somehow stayed steady. Because even though he knew the answer somewhere deep inside him, Giovanni was too much of an operator not to want to assemble all the facts before him. And it gave him time to think…

  There was a pause. ‘Paolo’s four—and a quarter,’ she said

  Maybe he wouldn’t believe her—why should he, when he had thrown all those accusations at her, his fevered and jealous mind imagining a whole catalogue of men she was supposed to have been intimate with? But five years on and he had changed, Alexa realised. Maybe it now suited him to see beyond the distortion of his own prejudices, or maybe he just could not deny the evidence of his own eyes—for she knew at the precise second when he accepted Paolo was his.

  A brief shining moment of exultancy which was quickly replaced by a much darker emotion as he looked at her.

  If she thought that she had seen bitterness there before then Alexa hadn’t even come close to it—and now she almost recoiled from the vitriolic light which flooded over her in a dark blaze.

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’ he questioned softly. ‘Or am I?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘TELL me what?’ demanded Paolo.<
br />
  Alexa bit her lip as she looked down at her son—at his beautiful, dark, oh-so-innocent face—recognising that once he was told his world would never be the same again. And shouldn’t that be done with a little forethought?

  She glanced up at Giovanni and his icy black gaze lanced through her like a sabre—but the recriminations which were bound to come her way were not important. Nothing was—except for Paolo. Deliberately she projected appeal from her eyes.

  Please don’t hurt him, went her silent message. Hurt me, but please not him—for none of this mess is his fault.

  There was an almost imperceptible narrowing of Giovanni’s eyes in response, a slight nodding of his dark head—or had Alexa imagined that?

  ‘I am a friend of your mother’s,’ he said softly.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ said Paolo stubbornly, and Alexa recognised that this strange man was stepping on the young boy’s territory—or at least that was how Paolo was interpreting it. Would Giovanni be sensitive enough to do the same? she wondered. ‘I’ve never seen you before. Are you Mamma’s boyfriend?’ he demanded, with a suspicious scowl.

  ‘Why, does Mamma have a lot of boyfriends?’ questioned Giovanni, and sent Alexa a look of pure, shivering malice.

  How could she stop this? He would never believe her if she tried explaining that she’d never actually had a boyfriend, because Giovanni took real delight in imagining the very worst about her.

  ‘I knew Giovanni a long time ago,’ said Alexa, in a bright voice which sounded as if it was cracking open, like a smashed nut.

  The black eyes glittered with another just-you-wait message.

  Paolo nodded his dark curls energetically, the dark eyes huge in his face as he stared up at the tall Italian. ‘Are you staying?’

  There was a tense silence, until Giovanni gave a soft laugh which might have convinced Paolo that he had found something amusing, but which failed to do the same for Alexa.

  ‘You’ll have to ask your mother that,’ he said, in a soft voice which sounded like a threat.