‘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
DAISY 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?’