He shrugged. “We live together. I am bound to notice things.” Whether he wanted to notice them or not.
Just as Niccolo had committed to marrying Siena to save his own skin and fortune, so Gennaro had committed to marriage with Luisa to pull off the business deal that would turn him from a multi-millionaire to a billionaire and secure his company’s fortunes for decades to come.
It had all come about when the ruling monarch of a Middle Eastern country had pulled out all the stops to entice Gennaro into expanding his electric car company to his small but fabulously wealthy kingdom. The kingdom’s riches and its location in the hub of other fabulously rich nations had meant the monarch’s enticement had made perfect business sense and would give Gennaro a huge advantage over his rivals.
The problem had come after Gennaro had invested millions in the construction of the factories and was in the process of getting the necessary permits to start production.Without any warning, the kingdom’s law changed – for non-citizens to get the necessary permits to do business there, the non-citizen had to be married. Either Gennaro got married or he could forget the production permits and kiss his investment goodbye.
The monarch had not been in the slightest bit amenable to bending the rules for him. “Take a wife,” he’d laughed. “It doesn’t have to be forever – once production is up and running and a decent amount of time has passed to stop the rousing of suspicious minds, you can divorce her. Just make sure none of my family or ministers suspect the truth.”
Swallowing his rage at this underhand last-minute changing of the goalposts, Gennaro had forced himself to think rationally, and in doing so had thought of the Rossellinis. Only days before, his mother had mentioned that they’d hit hard times and were on the verge of bankruptcy, something Gennaro’s father, a cruel brute of a man, had dismissed as their own fault. Despite the extenuating circumstances and Pietro Rossellini dedicating his entire legal career to Giuseppe Martinelli’s service, and despite three decades of close friendship with the Rossellinis, his father had refused to help them. Gennaro had thought, too, of their ugly, buck-toothed eldest daughter.
A win-win scenario had formed in his mind, and he’d approached the Rossellinis with it. He would pay off enough of their debts to keep them solvent and in exchange he would marry their eldest daughter. Once two years of marriage had passed, they would quietly divorce, and he would pay the parents enough money to never have to worry about falling into debt again and pay the bride a substantial amount of money in her own right so she could live in luxury for the rest of her life. His only proviso was that the nature of the marriage must be kept secret between himself, the bride and the bride’s parents, something he’d subsequently had written into thewedding contract. The penalty for revealing the truth would result in all monies at the end of the marriage being forfeited.
The Rossellinis would have bitten his hand off to agree but they’d tempered their relief at this potential way out of their money problems by calling their daughter down from her bedroom to present the proposal to her. Up to that point, Gennaro hadn’t even known Luisa was in the house.
Marriage to the ugly duckling Rossellini daughter, he’d thought, would be tolerable for him. She’d been a shy little girl with an extraordinary talent for drawing whose presence had never irritated him the way others had and, most importantly, there would be no danger of desiring or developing feelings for someone he found physically unattractive.
It had been a good ten years since he’d last seen her. Intellectually, he’d known the twenty-five-year-old woman he was proposing marriage to would be much different from the shy adolescent he remembered but hadn’t factored in justhowdifferent she would be. Hadn’t factored in that the ugly, buck-toothed duckling would metamorphose into an elegant, beautiful swan.
Short and slimly built with gentle curves, she had a face anyone would take a second look at. It wasn’t perfect, the mouth being a little too wide and a little too full and the nose being a little too small, but when combined with her large dark brown eyes, oval face and high cheekbones, the effect was breathtaking. Factor in the long, thick, glossy dark hair that reached down to her high breasts, and she was devastatingly beautiful.
He’d come within a whisker of insulting everyone by demanding marriage to the other daughter instead. If Luisa hadn’t accepted his proposal with a look of cold indifference, he just might have done.
Only seven more sleeps and he would never have to suffer her presence again. Never have towalk through his home and breathe in her essence. Never have to keep such tight control of himself and watch his every word and reaction around her. Never have to retire to his bed and fight his own mind from thinking of her sleeping in the adjoining room.
To reach that end game though, he had to get through six nights spent sharing a bed with her for the very first time…
Chapter Two
Luisa brushed her teeth at the double sink, unable to stop herself from staring at the second toothbrush. In the home they shared in Florence, she had her own bathroom. It was the same set-up in those of Gennaro’s other homes she’d stayed at when accompanying him on his work travels these last two years. Their separate, private spaces were clearly demarcated.
The one time they’d shared a bathroom had been on their short honeymoon. She’d spent those four days terrified he would breach the agreed boundaries and decide to share her bed too. She wouldn’t have been able to stop him if he’d been set on having her; he was twice her size and built of solid muscle. She’d been so hyper-alert in those early days that she’d barely slept a wink. It had taken weeks to realise he’d no interest in breaching the agreed boundaries and that she could sleep easy.
Gennaro held all the power in their marriage, but he’d never abused it, not in that way. Maybe it would have been different if he’d desired her, but the only emotion she’d ever elicited from him had been irritation. He’d needed a temporarywife; her parents had needed the money, and that’s all there was to it. If he held any residual affection for the girl who’d been a part of his family for so many years and whose heart he’d once touched with a random act of thoughtful kindness, he hid it well.
Had he shared a bathroom with another woman before, even for one night? She couldn’t imagine it. Gennaro was a solitary creature. His socialising was, for the most part, business-related. If he’d sought other women to fulfil his sexual needs since their wedding, he’d been discreet about it, and Luisa quickly pulled her thoughts away from wondering about his sex life because to think about it always made her feel a squidgy kind of sickness.
Teeth clean, she dressed quickly, pulling on the skinny black trousers and red corset-style top she’d taken into the bathroom with her, and tugged up the zip of the top as far as she could get it to go. She looked at her reflection from all angles and rued that she’d become accustomed to having female staff available in Gennaro’s home to help her deal with little things like zips. Thankfully, her parents and sister had arrived and would be meeting them for dinner. She would get Marisa to pull the zip up properly.
She stepped back into an empty suite. Gennaro was on the balcony, his back to her, looking out at the seascape. She slid the glass door open enough to say, “The bathroom’s free.”
He nodded acknowledgement but didn’t turn to face her. It was a snub she’d been on the receiving end of so many times in their two years together that she really should have become immune to it, not sit at the dressing table and open her makeup bag imagining herself throwing a vase at him.
He slipped back into the suite and into the bathroom without a word.
Alone, Luisa stared at her reflection and took a deep breath. It was time to put on her war paint, just as she’d donefor every function they’d attended together. Except she’d always applied her war paint in the privacy of her own room and without the sound of the shower running telling her that Gennaro must be standing beneath it. Must be naked...
Another deep breath and a tight squeeze of her eyes to drive the image out, and she got to work. Her moisturiser already on, she primed her face and then applied a thin layer of light foundation. She’d just finished applying dark brown eyeshadow to her eyelids when the bathroom door opened. From the mirror’s reflection, she saw Gennaro head to the dressing area with nothing but a towel hung around his snake waist.
Her breaths suddenly feeling heavier and the beats of her heart weightier, Luisa put the makeup brush away and reached for her black eyeliner. When she put it to her eye, she found her hand was trembling and had to concentrate hard not to stab herself with it. Right eye done, she was about to do her left eye when he stepped into the mirror’s reflection again, right at the edge of it, and opened his wardrobe. The muscles of his back rippled. A beat later, the muscles of her heart rippled too. God, hisbody…
Luisa had never forgotten that game of water polo or how the glowering Gennaro had filled the goal he’d been defending. She’d squealed with delight on Dante’s shoulders but it had been Gennaro’s glowering gorgeous face her eyes had been constantly drawn to. But only his face. She’d been only eight or nine, too young to notice a man’s body. He might as well have been invisible from the neck down for all she remembered.
In all their many months of marriage, the closest to naked Luisa had seen Gennaro was when he wore polo shirts. She always had to keep herself in check to stop herself staring at his muscular arms. Just as her eyes had always been drawn to his face as a child, marriage had found them drawn to his armsand the fine dark hair covering them, and to his neck on the days he didn’t bother to shave it. Resisting this had been a constant battle. It was worse the times he undid the top buttons of his shirt and she was given a glimpse of the dark hair that covered his chest. Seeing it always made her feel sick, although it was like no other sickness she’d suffered from. This sickness was low in her abdomen, and it was hot, like her insides were melting, and pulsed in ripples that collided with the knots in her stomach.
She’d finally finished lining her left eye when he turned to open a drawer in his dresser, and she caught a near full frontal view of him. She sucked in a breath, the last breath she was able to make as suddenly she found her throat had closed too tightly to let in air and her heart had become a roar in her ears.
Gennaro was raw, unadulterated, masculine perfection. Every inch of him, from the smoothness of his olive skin to the hair that covered his chest but then faded into a straight line down the middle of his washboard stomach until it reached his navel.