Carol Marinelli – Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain (страница 11)

This time she heard the chink of glass on glass.

Angelo and Sonya—Sonya and Angelo. Her eyes drifted shut as that dreadful little litany began playing itself over and over inside her head alongside frame-by-frame images of what she had just seen.

The open-mouthed kiss that devoured greedily, the slippery blue satin that was so willing to slide away from a silken thigh and hip. She heard the gasps, the groans of passionate agony, and felt sick to her stomach because all she’d ever got was quietly, calmly—briefly wrapped in a light-hearted affection, not the raging fires and animal lust.

What a perfectly choreographed act they’d put on for her benefit, she thought painfully. What a smooth blinding mask they’d pulled over her eyes as they snipped and sniped at each other the way that they had.

And what a sick—sick joke the two of them had been enjoying at her expense.

Humiliation poured through her bloodstream, the power of it grinding her bruised heart against her ribs. Dragging up her eyelids, she stared down at her dress. Angelo had not felt compelled to drag down this bodice and lay bare one of her breasts. He’d never once so much as stroked her thigh. The light touches she’d received that she’d believed were offered with love and tenderness and respect now became touches of idle contempt wrapped up in calculation and necessity.

He’d intended to marry her and take her to bed only when he had to do it and even then he was going to impose Sonya’s sylph-like image over her to help him get through the ordeal.

She quivered again, despising him for doing this to her—despising herself for being so gullible and blind.

A sound reached into her consciousness—people laughing as they walked past the closed study door. The party, she remembered. Her engagement party. Hers and Angelo’s.

The Gianni heiress and the fortune-hunter, she then thought bitterly.

But she was no heiress. There was no fortune to be had if she was. And she could not understand why Angelo could believe otherwise when she’d already told him the hard truth about her connection to the Gianni name.

‘Here, drink some of this…’

She hadn’t realised her eyes had closed again until she was forced to open them. The dark shadow was squatting in front of her, she realised, though she hadn’t noticed him arrive there. Only he wasn’t quite a dark shadow any more because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. So she could see the way he was studying her narrowly, the way he was holding his mouth thin and flat. The bright white of his shirt stood out, casting reflected light along the grim set of his chiselled jaw bone as he placed the rim of a glass to her mouth. She sipped without protest. The brandy trickled across her tongue and she forced herself to swallow, leaving warm vapours behind in her mouth.

He sipped too. She watched with unblinking absorption as he lifted the glass away from her lips to place it against his own. His throat moved as he swallowed, shifting the butterfly collar to his shirt. He held the glass between long brown fingers while her own pale fingers still clutched at her arms, her nails scoring crescents into the icy bare skin.

‘H-how much did you overhear?’ she whispered unsteadily.

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer, his mouth compressing. Then, ‘Most if it,’ he admitted, and rose to his full height.

She looked away from him—at the logs piled in the grate—on a sinking sense of dismay that robbed a bit more of her ravaged pride. This tall, dark, sophisticated man of Rome had stood there in the background witnessing the brutal murder of everything she cared about.

She felt stripped bare again and flayed this time.

‘Why were you out there?’ No one else had been out there—or at least she hoped no one else had been there!

The laughter came again, echoing around the marble hallway and sounding cruelly mocking to her oversensitised ears. It was then that a sudden thought hit that was so horrible it feathered her breathing. How many of those people out there knew the real motives behind Angelo’s engagement to her? Did they all know? Did all her friends know about Sonya’s affair with Angelo?

Had Carlo Carlucci known it all even before he stepped outside tonight? Her breath feathered again as she shifted her gaze back to his tense profile.

‘You weren’t there by accident, were you?’ she charged shakily. ‘You suspected that something was going to happen so you followed me outside then s-stood there like some—s-sleazy voyeur—’

His dark head turned to lance her an amused look. ‘You see me as sleazy?’

No, she didn’t, but… ‘Don’t laugh at me!’ she bit out painfully. ‘None of this is funny!’

‘You’re right.’ The laughter died. ‘It isn’t.’

The threat of tears came then. She dragged in a deep breath, fighting to stop them, fighting to keep her mind fixed on what had started her travelling along this thread. ‘H-how much of it did you know before you followed me?’

Without answering her he turned abruptly and walked away, disappearing back into the shadows at the other end of the room as if the darkness could save him from having to offer a reply.

But she needed to know. ‘How much?’ she launched shrilly after him.

‘All of it.’

The answer hit her like a blow. Her breasts heaved behind her crossed arms, and for a moment she felt dizzy again. Then she pulled herself together and asked the next wretched question burning a hole inside her head. ‘And—everyone else out there?’

She heard the fresh chink of glass on glass before the words came, felt the angry tension in him as he poured another drink. ‘Your true identity became an open secret within days of you meeting Angelo,’ he told her. ‘The fact that you were not announcing that you are the heiress to the huge Gianni fortune only helped to fuel the fires of intrigue and speculation as to why you wanted to play the ordinary working girl and keep your identity such a closed secret.’

‘I’m not the Gianni heiress,’ she denied. ‘There is no fortune to be had.’

He laughed like a cynic. ‘You are worth so much money, Francesca, cara, that the figure can make Rome’s wealthiest blanch.’

Which was all so much rubbish her brows snapped together. ‘Stupid rumour and speculation,’ she dismissed. ‘Bruno Gianni lives in a ruin. He has no money to leave to anyone, never mind a great-niece he won’t even see!’

‘Well, you’re right about Bruno’s money,’ Carlo drawled as he strode back into view. ‘But we’re not talking about Bruno Gianni’s money. We are talking about Rinaldo Gianni’s money. Your grandfather,’ he extended as if she needed that clarified, and bent to prise a set of cold fingers away from her arm so he could slot a fresh glass of brandy between them. ‘The fortune is his,’ he continued. ‘Rinaldo left everything to you. Bruno only lives in the palazzo at your behest because it, like everything else, belongs to you—or it will do when you marry,’ he then amended, ‘a man from a good Italian family, I think is near as damn it to the official working of his will. The lot to be held in a trust to be solely administered by his surviving brother until you comply. Angelo thought he’d hit gold when he seduced you into falling in love with him,’ he added. ‘He’s the real hero of the party tonight, cara. The man who pulled off the perfect coup.’

She was beginning to think she was dreaming all of this. ‘I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He used that laugh again. ‘And that is the real irony of it.’

He went to lean a shoulder against the mantel, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets then studied her ashen face as he continued.

‘While everyone else thinks you’re being intriguingly clever and infuriatingly devious, you are merely oblivious to it all. It took me weeks to suss you out,’ he confessed as if that was some kind of shock in itself. ‘You are not pretending to be the wide-eyed and beautiful, naïve innocent—you are her. And Bruno Gianni has a lot to answer for—which he will do when I get my hands round his wicked old throat.’

‘You won’t go near my uncle Bruno,’ she muttered dimly, feeling swamped by words that didn’t make any sense.

‘What—protecting the hand that robs you, Francesca?’ he mocked. ‘What were you—ten years old when your grandfather died? For the last fourteen years he’s been sitting on your inheritance and probably praying that you never show your face in Rome.’

‘Stop it,’ she jerked out. ‘There’s just been a dreadful misunderstanding, that’s all!’ she cried. ‘Angelo knows the truth. He knows I’m—’

His hiss of impatience snapped her lips shut. ‘Get real, Francesca,’ he derided. ‘You heard what that mercenary bastard said out there! To start trying to defend him is bloody pathetic! He wants your money,’ he lanced down at her. ‘He needs your money! Get that into your lovesick head and deal with it!’

He was angry—why was he angry? That was her prerogative! She was the one being used and abused and talked about as if she was some kind of juicy commodity!

‘There is no money!’ She launched herself to her feet to spit the denial at him. ‘And what makes you any better than Angelo when you actually believe all that stuff you just threw at me?’