‘I don’t suppose she would have told it that way. You’re wasting your breath,’ Santino informed her drily as he slid upright. ‘Della’s the very soul of avarice. I tied her into a strict legal agreement—even then I had few illusions about her character—and, believe me, she exercised considerable criminal talent in all the fraudulent claims for cash that were made... You can’t expect me to listen to sob-stories on her behalf when you took your cut too.’
‘Are you planning to prosecute us both?’
‘Can you really see me dragging my wife into court? But your mother...’ Santino met her wide, fearful eyes in a head-on collision that slithered through her like a hard physical blow. ‘I have no inhibitions about punishing her.’
‘But if you consider me equally at fault that wouldn’t be fair!’ Frankie protested, utterly appalled by the idea of her mother being taken to court and prosecuted like a criminal.
‘Are you telling me that you were in on it too, from the start?’ Santino demanded very quietly. ‘I had received the impression that Della ensured that you received only a small percentage of the money.’
Frankie’s heart was pumping at feverish speed behind her breastbone. She could hardly breathe. ‘I knew exactly what Della was doing right from the beginning,’ she lied with fierce emphasis, reasoning that if she forced him to share out the blame it might somehow lessen his fury with her mother and persuade him to direct it at her instead.
Santino was very still, his spectacular bone structure rigid below his golden skin, his eyes hooded. ‘You’re changing your story now?’
‘I knew that taking your money was wrong but I... I hated you after I saw you with that woman in Cagliari!’ Frankie shot her last bolt in her determination to give her mother what protection she could.
‘That I can believe...but I also once believed that you would sooner starve than knowingly accept my support. Hence the original secrecy. Was I really that naive?’ Santino surveyed her with narrowed dark eyes of grim enquiry, his beautiful mouth taking on a uniquely cynical twist. ‘That protective, that romantic? It seems you’re not the only one who needed to grow up five years ago. I set out to be a hero and fell at the first fence!’
Frankie wasn’t listening to him. ‘Please don’t do this to Mum,’ she whispered pleadingly. ‘Give her the time to move out of the house with dignity—’
‘And what would I get in return for such undeserved restraint?’
The silence lay thick and oppressive in the stillness. There wasn’t the slightest breeze. The heat of midday was like a cocoon. It dampened her skin beneath her clothing. As she breathed in deeply, her distraught green eyes locked into that lancing look of ruthless challenge.
‘I don’t know what you want...’
‘Don’t you?’ A derisive smile of disagreement twisted Santino’s sensual mouth. ‘I want you in my bed.’
‘I can’t believe that...’ Frankie muttered unsteadily, unable to accept that he could be serious. ‘I can’t believe that that’s what you want.’
‘Isn’t that what every man wants from a beautiful woman?’
‘I’m not beautiful—’
Santino advanced in one long, graceful stride. He stared down at her with brooding dark golden eyes that burned hotly beneath her skin. And then he lifted his hands and with cool, deft fingers detached the clip from her plait ‘I like your hair loose.’
With disturbing patience he threaded out the multiple strands one by one, and the whole time Frankie stood there trembling, barely breathing, but with every brush of those brown fingers against her cheekbone, or her scalp, or even the nape of her neck, her heart raced faster and her pulses pounded even harder, leaving her dizzy.
‘Very beautiful, very sexy,’ Santino stressed huskily as he drew her closer.
Instantly she tensed, the sun-warmed, eerily familiar male scent of him flaring her nostrils. Her breasts felt languorously full and heavy, the nipples taut buds of swollen sensitivity pushing against the rough cotton that bound them. There was no thought in her dazed mind as she connected with shimmering golden eyes, only a powerful, drugging awareness of every throbbing skin-cell she possessed.
‘And so incredibly submissive all of a sudden too. And you might tell yourself it’s to save Della from her just deserts, but really that wouldn’t be honest, piccola mia. There’s a streak of wildness in you. There always was,’ Santino breathed in a harshly amused undertone as he released her again. ‘And right now you’re more likely to expire from excitement than petrified reluctance!’
In shock, Frankie fell back from him, outraged by that assurance but silenced by a sudden sense of intense shame as she acknowledged the truth of it. Her own weak body betrayed her with wanton efficiency. For an instant she had wanted him with a desperate physical yearning over which she had absolutely no control. And it had nothing to do with any echo from the past, nothing to do with what she had once felt...it had been an instinctive craving born very much of the present.
Santino bent down and, drawing two glasses from the basket, he passed her one. ‘I’m not complaining, you understand,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘A sacrificial lamb wouldn’t appeal to me. But then what you’ve become doesn’t have any lasting appeal either...’
Her skin as hot as hellfire, angry pain sparking in a raw surge through her taut length, Frankie stood her ground. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That at this moment I believe three weeks will suit me fine.’ Dense black lashes screening his gaze, Santino treated her to a gleaming scrutiny that was coolly derisive. ‘Three weeks will be quite long enough.’
Three weeks was the span of the vacation she had planned to spend touring Italy. Her hand shook slightly as he let clear sparkling wine splash down into her glass. ‘You’re asking me to spend that time with you?’
‘Only this time around Hamish gets to sleep alone,’ Santino spelt out lazily.
‘I had gathered that,’ Frankie gritted, but she couldn’t meet his eyes.
‘At the end of it, we go our separate ways and get a divorce. Della moves out of the house and I wipe the slate clean. It’s a very generous offer,’ he asserted softly.