Mediterranean Tycoons: The De Santis Marriage / The Greek Tycoon's Unwilling Wife / The Sicilian's Virgin Bride

He was right and it wasn’t. The brandy went straight to her head. She lasted a full long hard-fought-for hour before she succumbed to the need to lie down and close her dizzy eyes.

Luc offered to help her down the cabin. She refused with a stiff dignity that cost her plenty to make it all the way into the small bedroom without stumbling over her own feet.

A few minutes later, wearing only her bra and panties, she was curling up beneath a soft duvet covered in the smoothest linen, and dropping into a muzzy sleep with what felt like the world playing drumbeats on her head.

For hours she slept, she didn’t know how many, before she came drifting upwards into semi-darkness with the muted sound of the plane’s engines to remind her where she was.

Her head had cleared and she felt so much better than she’d felt when she’d come in here. She was hungry too, but the idea of getting up out of the comfortable bed and getting dressed to go out there and face Luc had her turning over in the bed with the intention of staying right where she—

Shock froze the air in her body when she saw him. He was lying on his front right beside her with his dark head resting on the pillow next to her pillow and his wide naked shoulders glowing bronze in the soft light coming from the lamp on his side of the bed.

From being completely relaxed to the point of a wonderful bonelessness, she was already in the process of tensing up when she realised he was asleep and she let the tension seep away again on an inner swirl of tingling relief.

The black satin crescents of his eyelashes were resting peacefully against his high cheekbones and his mouth was the most relaxed she had seen it, its sensual shape all the more beautiful in repose, and his hair was ruffled, revealing a hint of a glossy black wave she hadn’t ever noticed before.

Held by a curiosity she knew she should not be giving in to, Lizzy let her eyes roam over his arms, thrown up against the pillow, the width of his shoulders and long bronzed back exposed because the duvet had slipped down so low.

Her fingers scrambled at her own part of the duvet, inching it carefully over her shoulder because his nakedness reminded her about her own near nakedness.

Was he naked—as in completely naked? The intimacy of the situation struck like a feather being drawn across the surface of her skin. Her nostrils flared and she picked up the warm scent of him, clean yet so irresistibly male it sent the moist tip of her tongue sliding on a slow circuit of her warm lips for a reason she refused to examine.

And the skin covering the muscles she could see shaping his body wore a sheen that made her think of suntan oil, though she knew the effect was due to his own natural oils conditioning his skin while he slept.

Her husband, she thought, trying the title out to see how it felt, and still found the concept as alien to her as having the two of them lying here together in this bed.

‘Grey,’ a deep, dark, slumberously warm voice murmured.

Lizzy started, her eyes leaping up to his face. He was awake. She tensed, her fingers gripping the duvet. She would have dived right out of the bed if she weren’t aware that she was wearing the sheerest leaf green bra ever fashioned and matching panties that made a mockery of the name.

‘Sexy soft smoky grey—no, don’t move away,’ he said when she went to do just that, and with a lithe shift of his body he rolled onto his side and propped his head on the heel of his hand so he could look down into her wary face and the scented fire flow of her hair where it spread across the pillow.

’Bellissima, ’ he chanted softly. ‘La signora bella De Santis. ‘

‘No,’ she denied. ‘Will you stop calling me beautiful?’

‘Strange creature.’ He smiled, reaching over to stroke the stray curl from her brow. ‘You have the most exquisite face I have ever seen on any woman and the most fascinating determination to deny it. I would love to know why that is.’

‘I won’t respond to your kind of flattery—’ the curl flopped back again and Lizzy swiped at it frowningly ‘—just because you…’

Her voice trailed away, teeth pressing into her bottom lip when she realised what she had been about to say next.

Moving that bit closer to her so she felt the tingling sting of his chest hair prickle the skin on her arm, he prompted, ‘Because I—what?’

‘Because w-we’re married and—here,’ she finished—then shook out an unsteady gasp when one of his legs arrived across both of hers. ‘W-what do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.

‘Getting comfortable with my wife.’

Her fingers let go of the duvet so she could use them to push him back again, but it came as a tingling shock to her racing senses to feel the solid heat of his muscled body and the crisp warmth of his chest hair prickle against her palms. The whole situation was a tingling shock, she decided, snared by the living warmth of his leg weighing heavy on hers and the expression in his eyes as he continued to look down at her, tender and soft and still sleepy enough to make those shadowing eyelashes diffuse the hunter-like gleam from the gold.

She could even feel the steady beat of his heart where he pressed against her arm. He leant down and kissed her, not passionately or anything, just light and gently, yet she still jerked her head back, feeling besieged by his heat and his strength and his close proximity.

‘Stop panicking,’ he chided softly. ‘I am not here to hurt you.’

‘But I don’t—’

‘And it is customary that you kiss the man you wake up with.’

He was expecting her to kiss him? No way, she thought, and gave him her response with a shake of her head.

‘You mean you expect me to do the kissing? Not very fair of you, cara, but—okay,’ he said, and his mouth found hers again, only this time he traced the outline of her lips with his tongue, then gently probed between until she gave in and parted them for him. She let him taste her with a sensual slowness, her breath trapped in her chest. By the time he pulled away again her heart was thumping heavily and her lips trembled in protest at the loss of his.

‘Not a bad way to start the new day,’ he murmured.

‘It—it’s still dark out there,’ Lizzy managed to whisper.

‘But past midnight,’ he said, drawing back a little to rest his head on the heel of his hand again. ‘You were asleep for hours. You missed our first dinner together as man and wife and left me alone to contemplate the folly in urging my temperate bride to knock back brandy like a fully-fledged alcoholic.’

Lizzy flushed. ‘Being unused to drinking brandy does not make me temperate.’

‘Intemperate, then?’

Meaning she’d behaved like a hot-headed fool? He was probably right, she accepted reluctantly.

‘Well, I’m hungry now,’ she said with what she congratulated herself as sounding near normal with her heart still thumping against her ribs. ‘S-so if you would just move your leg away I’ll get up and…’

Her voice faded into nothing at the slow shake of his head. ‘Relax,’ he encouraged. ‘I am not going to seal our wedding vows here in this very unromantic place, but I do want some more of what we have been sharing…a lot more,’ he husked as he lowered his head again, and this time there was nothing slow or gentle about it.

His mouth claimed her mouth with deep, sweet, sensual male hunger, and he pressed her back into the pillows with the weight of his body, driving the breath from her lungs. Heat poured into every skin cell, the taste and the scent of him and the ravishing passion making her lose her death grip on the duvet so her hands could clutch at him for dear life.

His husky assurance that he was not going to turn this into something she wasn’t ready for gave her the excuse she needed to just let go of restraint and she began kissing him back with an eager fervour, her body arching into the pressure of his. She barely noticed when he stripped the duvet away altogether; she just writhed with pleasure when she felt his hand stroke the length of her pale naked thigh.

Dragging his mouth from hers, he burned a dark golden look into her eyes. ‘You feel like silk,’ he breathed, the words deep and excitingly unsteady.

Then he made her groan when he reclaimed the kiss, his hand stroking upwards over the thin line of her panties to the flat of her stomach, the warmth of his skin against her over-sensitised skin making her quiver and cling as he blazed a trail of burning possession over her taut, slender ribcage to the rounded thrust of her breasts.

Panic arrived in a self-conscious rush from her exposed thighs to her throat as he gently cupped his fingers around the firm, rounded fullness of her breast barely covered by the green flimsy mesh of her bra. She tried to push his hand away, but he caught hold of her wrist with his other hand, making the flurrying sound of her breath shiver from her body as he gently lifted her hand out of the way so he could sear a path of warm, moist kisses down the arching column of her throat and over the hectic pant of her other breast.

She cried out and went wild beneath him as the sensual lap of his tongue located her nipple, sending a clamouring shock of heat piercing sensation screaming through her head.

With a softly uttered tense expletive he came back to her mouth, his hand sliding beneath her to draw her up against him. The next thing she knew the clasp of her bra had sprung free and he was lying her back against the pillows again and the scrappy bit of mesh was being trailed away.

‘You are exquisite,’ she heard him rasp through the hazy mists of her ravaged senses.

Then he was taking her mouth once again, crushing the pulsing hot softness of her lips and dipping deep and hungrily with his tongue at the same time that his hand closed around her breast again, naked now and so alive to his touch she cried out in half protest, half sense spinning pleasure, and grabbed blindly at his head, her fingers clawing into the glossy thickness of his hair.

He kneaded and shaped and kissed her breathless. She could feel the tremors attacking him, feel the fevered flush of his body and the tension in him, trapped his groan with her tongue when he pressed the distended tightness of her nipple against his palm.

She should have stopped it there, but she didn’t. She should have known that if you arched and writhed and quivered against a man you were going to tip him over the edge. But she liked what he was making her feel, too much, and was much too greedy for more.

And his hands were gliding everywhere now, caressing and learning what made her cry out and what made her writhe in shimmering pleasure. And his skin was like hot satin against her anxiously restless palms. She had never felt so totally out of control of her body and senses. She was panting and whimpering against his mouth and he was breathing fast and unevenly.

Reality should have arrived with the burgeoning thrust of his powerful erection pushing against her thigh at the same moment as he slid his hand between her legs and made that final intimate claim—but reality was nowhere. She was lost in a storm of heated pleasure. It sang along her veins and her flesh and it was all she could do to cling to him as his long fingers cupped and moved against her, his other hand buried in her hair, and the heat of his kiss was so deep and potently passionate she was almost beyond recovery when he lifted his mouth to mutter, ‘I knew you would do this to me,’ and eased her last scrap of mesh out of his way so he could glide the length of a finger inside.

Nothing prepared her for the power of this heated intrusion. There was just no way she could control her response. She arched and squirmed and found her mouth locking onto his as if it were the only way she was going to survive what was racing through her blood. He was whispering things she couldn’t hear, and filling her with sensations she hadn’t known she could feel.

Then he moved to strip the panties from her body and it was the rasping curse he uttered that brought her crashing back down to earth.

Panic erupted from her like a heaving monster, and she pushed him away from her with the agonised strength helped by the stinging shot of adrenalin singing through her blood. She caught a glimpse of his face, his shocked confusion, then she’d slithered out from beneath him to land in a mess of shaking limbs and whirling senses on her feet by the bed.

The pulsing silence that followed held the small cabin in a death grip except for the sound of her broken breathing. Her eyes felt so big and dark and glazed she was barely even able to see him through them.

‘Y-you said—’ she finally just about managed.

‘I know what I said,’ he coolly cut in.

Lizzy blinked, her eyes daring to focus on him still lying there with his long body so magnificently naked to his long brown feet. He had covered his eyes with an arm and the mouth beneath it was closed and tight. Unable to stop her eyes from raking over him, she stared at the potent evidence of his desire thrusting up from a thick cluster of virile dark hair.

Shocked by the blinding rush of heat that burned through her, she turned dizzily away with absolutely no idea what she was going to do next.

Jump on him, a wicked voice inside her suggested. ‘Oh, God,’ she choked, lowering her head to cover her burning eyes with her hands. She couldn’t believe she’d ever let it go that far—she couldn’t believe she’d trusted the promise he’d made!

‘You have the sexiest backside,’ he drawled suddenly, making the tumble of her hair slither down her spine as she arched upright. ‘Creamy white and smooth and tight and deliciously framed by the lace edges of your pretty useless pants.’

Feeling the sting of total embarrassment, Lizzy reached behind her to hook the green mesh back into its rightful place.

‘You think that helped?’ he mocked.

She shook her head and wished she still had her bra on, because she just might have found the courage to turn around and spit something vile at him. But she didn’t and her breasts felt heavy and throbbed, the fiercely distended tips stinging like aliens with the power to reach down deep inside her and pluck at other senses she wished she didn’t have.

‘You think, then, it is good fun to call a stop when things were becoming—passionate?’

He was angry. It hit Lizzy like a blow that arched her aching spine some more. ‘Y-you don’t understand.’

‘I know a tease when I encounter one,’ he said cynically.

She heard movement behind her to say he was getting off the bed, and like a wild thing she snatched up the only thing she had available—her wraparound top, which she dragged on. He too was pulling his clothes on; she could hear the rustle as she wrapped the top around her and tied it in an angry, tight, finger—trembling knot.

‘A man who can’t honour his promises deserves to be switched on—and off,’ she responded once she felt safer to do it with her upper body covered up.

‘No natural instincts at work in you, then,’ he scorned that.

Snatching up her skirt and shimmying into it, she finally felt brave enough to turn around. He was standing on the other side of the bed, with the bulkhead almost touching his broad shoulders. And he was still so boldly naked she wished her ravished senses would just curl up and die. The soft light from the bedside lamp played across the flexing muscles in his shoulders as he pulled on his trousers, the taut clench of stomach and his hair-roughened chest.

Dragging her eyes away from him, she missed the way he lowered his own eyes to the burgeoning fullness of her breasts moulded by fine knit fabric so the tight peaks of her nipples pushed against the cloth.

‘I’m not going to apologise for calling a stop to what you said was not going to happen,’ she tossed back her hair and said.

He hooded his eyes, the old cold cynicism back with a vengeance. Bending down towards the bed, he picked up something. ‘Here…’ He tossed it at her. ‘You had better put this on before you walk out of here, or my steward will suffer an apoplectic fit.’

With that ruthless cut into her bravery, he pulled the black tee shirt on over his head, then strode towards the door. It didn’t slam—it wasn’t designed to slam, Lizzy realised as she watched it seal into place.

But he’d wanted it to slam, the grim, spoiled, arrogant devil.

Then she looked down at the bra she now held in her fingers, glanced at her body and blushed to the roots of her hair.

They finished the rest of the journey in a state of cool withdrawal from each other scattered with super-polite snatches of conversation now and then. Lizzy ate, he didn’t, instead he drank coffee, and no hint of alcohol in any form put in an appearance.

Eventually he produced a bulging briefcase and settled into his chair to concentrate—Lizzy wished she had something similar so that she could do the same thing.

But she didn’t. She was now the pampered wife of a very rich man and her job as her father’s secretary had gone. Her new role in life was to look the part of a rich man’s wife—learn to look the part, she amended. And to be quiet when the rich husband was concentrating, because the look on his stern profile told her that was what he expected her to do.

Eventually she dozed again, curled into her seat with her shoes slipped off and her feet tucked beneath her and her head resting against the corner of the chair. When she awoke it was to find herself covered with a soft blanket and Luc was still sitting beside her working away.

She watched him for a while, sleepy eyes following the sudden flick on his pen when he scrawled something on the document he was reading, long fingers deft and supple and precise in their link with his brain. It was the same fountain pen she’d used to sign the prenuptial contract, she noticed, black, with a ring of gold circling its slender body, the platinum tipped nib feeding ink onto the paper like liquid silk.

‘You’ve spelt indecisive wrong,’ she murmured without knowing she was going to say it, or even that she’d been reading as he wrote.

The pen stopped and lifted. He turned to look at her, golden eyes not angry any more, just coolly detached. ‘I do not misspell,’ he informed her arrogantly.

‘You’ve used an “i” instead of an “e”,’ she insisted. ‘The sentence says, “This attitude is indecisive and unacceptable.”’ she read aloud. ‘It loses impact with the misspelling.’

‘You can read my writing from right over there?’ Setting his shoulders against the back of his chair, he looked at her curiously. ‘To the point that you can distinguish an “i” from an “e”?’

Lizzy nodded, still curled beneath the blanket. ‘Not if you were writing in Italian,’ she felt she should point out. ‘My Italian spelling isn’t good enough.’

‘Nor is your English.’

Lizzy glanced at his face. There wasn’t a flicker of uncertainty in his expression, yet she hadn’t seen him look down to check if she was right. Which meant that either he was too confident for his own good, or she had made a mistake.

Uncurling her feet from beneath her, she pushed aside the blanket and reached out and took the page from his lap. She read it carefully, then handed it back to him without uttering a single word.

His eyelashes flickered, uncertainty darkening the colour of his eyes, and she laughed softly, couldn’t help it—it felt so very good to be right.

He looked down, couldn’t help himself, then a rueful smile stretched his lips. ‘You aggravating ginger haired witch,’ he said, having to carefully turn an ‘i’ into an ‘e’.

‘My hair’s not ginger,’ Lizzy protested.

‘What is it, then?’ Tossing the work down on the table in front of them, he sat back and looked at her again.

‘Chestnut,’ Lizzy answered, and combed a set of fingers through it to push the curls away from her face. ‘With a will of its own,’ she added as a curl flopped down onto her brow.

‘Much like its owner.’

‘So you noticed.’ She gave the errant curl another hopeless swipe only to watch it spring back down again.

‘I noticed,’ he answered evenly.

‘Have you also noticed yet that I’m a virgin?’ she asked him casually.

CHAPTER SIX

IF LIZZY said it to shock Luc out of his cool composure, then she certainly succeeded, she saw, as burning dark colour swept across his high golden cheekbones and he launched to his feet sending paperwork scattering as he accidentally knocked against the table.

‘Is that your idea of a damn joke?’ His eyes flashed out a blaze of blistering fury that made her reach for and pull up the blanket.

‘I just—thought I should mention it before things go too—heated again,’ she explained, blushing herself because now that she’d said it she felt silly and stupid and—

‘A virgin,’ he snapped out from between his clenched teeth. ‘Where the hell did you get the idea to throw something like that at me from out of nowhere?’

‘Well, what would you have preferred me to do?’ Lizzy reacted hotly. ‘Have it written into that stupid prenuptial contract so you could take your time getting used to the idea?’

He was pale with anger now, not flushed. ‘We just almost made love—’

‘No, I stopped it,’ she reminded him, ‘being such a horrible tease.’

Grabbing the back of his neck, he spun away from her. Lizzy huddled in her seat. ‘I was going to tell you before in—in the bedroom but you turned nasty. Now I wish I hadn’t told you at all!’

‘So do I,’ he muttered, striding off towards the drinks cupboard.

‘Well, if it offends you this much, then why don’t you do your usual trick and chuck this bride out and put another more experienced one in her place?’

‘It does not offend me,’ he denied stiffly. ‘And I did not chuck Bianca out, as you so charmingly put it. She left me.’

‘Wise girl,’ Lizzy choked, fighting hurt tears now because hearing him say that made her remember that she wouldn’t be here having this conversation if Bianca hadn’t walked away from him.

Bianca, his first-choice bride!

‘Well…’ getting up, she began picking up scattered papers because she desperately needed something to do ‘—I am what I am, and you are what you are, which says to me that we don’t have m-much going for us in this stupid m-marriage. But I know I can’t bury my head in the sand and pretend I’m going to stop you every time you touch me because we both know I like it too much!’

‘Elizabeth—’

‘No,’ she choked out. ‘Just sh-shut up, because hearing you toss out one of your clever answers right now will just m-make me sick!’

He actually looked startled. ‘I was not about to—’

‘Yes, you were. You don’t know how not to.’ Swiping the tears from her eyes and that annoying stray curl from her brow, she gathered in his papers with trembling fingers, then came to her feet. ‘I don’t know how to deal with a man like you and it’s making this situation very difficult for me.’

‘You think I know how to deal with you?’ he hit back. ‘You are nothing like any woman I’ve ever encountered.’ He knocked his drink to the back of his tense throat. ‘You are quiet and shy and unbelievably sensitive in one disguise, then a flaming mix of defiance and passion in another!’

‘Well, now you know why.’ She put the papers on the table.

‘Yes, I know why,’ he accepted. ‘You’re a virgin—’

‘Trapped in a marriage I didn’t want.’

‘By a man that you do want.’

Lizzy swallowed thickly because she just had no defence to that. She did want him, even though she wished that she didn’t. She had wanted him for so long the guilty feeling still creased her insides.

‘I’m not going to fool myself that you really want me,’ she responded unsteadily, hunting around for her shoes now, though where the heck she thought she was going to go in them she hadn’t a clue. ‘Like you so love to say, you don’t hunt and I’m here. But if you’re daring to think that because I’m attracted to you I can’t m-mind that I come in second best for you, then forget it, because I do mind.’ She swallowed again. ‘And the fact that I’m not being given the choice as to who I give my virginity to hurts enough without you responding as if I’m offering you some dreadful social disease.’