Page 44 of Forgotten Mistress, Secret Love-Child
What good were such memories when she couldn’t share them? They might as well be figments of her imagination, torturing rather than comforting. She’d never again experience that closeness with the man she was about to marry.
‘Carys.’ The word feathered across her nerves like the stroke of his hand. His sexy accent invested the name with undercurrents that made her tremble. He turned her towards him and inevitably her eyes lifted to his face.
Her breath caught in astonishment as she met his deep green gaze. Its intensity scorched.
She tried to draw breath, but the incendiary flare in his eyes arrested her. Instead her breathing shallowed, became rapid and unsteady. Her knees trembled and tattered hope rose at what she read in his face.
Alessandro’s expression almost made her believe…
The priest spoke and instantly, like a curtain descending to hide a stage, Alessandro’s face became blank, wiped of all expression. No heat, no vibrancy, no emotion.
Had she imagined it? Wanted so much to believe he felt something, anything for her that she’d invented that look of fixation and wonder?
Looking now into shadowed dark eyes, Carys felt that tiny seed of hope shrivel in her breast.
The past was the past. What they’d once shared was dead.
In its place she gave herself in a farce of marriage.
Carys tasted the ashes of old dreams on her tongue as she turned to face the priest. Instinct screamed that she was making a terrible, terrible mistake.
But, for the sake of her son, she’d go through with it.
Hours later, drooping with fatigue, face stiff from pinning on a smile, Carys was too weary to object when Alessandro swept her off her feet and into his arms in front of their guests.
‘There’s no need for pantomime,’ she whispered, attempting to ignore the insidious melting sensation as his arms closed round her. ‘My legs work perfectly.’
‘No pantomime, wife,’ he murmured as he carried her from the enormous marquee and across the lawn to the sound of applause. ‘In Italy men carry their brides across the threshold.’
Carys eyed the hundred metres between them and the villa and kept her lips closed. If Alessandro wanted to indulge in a show of machismo, she had little chance of dissuading him. She’d just have to pretend being held in his arms didn’t evoke a cascade of tingling awareness she couldn’t control.
She stiffened in his hold.
‘You could try smiling,’ he said under his breath. ‘People expect a bride to look happy.’
Carys bared her teeth in what she guessed was more of a grimace than a smile of joy. The strain of acting the happy bride had taken its toll, shredding her frayed nerves.
‘I’m a hotel management trainee, not an actress.’
Not for anything would she let him guess how deeply his embrace affected her. How that terrible gnawing sensation ate once more at her belly, and how her arms ached with the effort not to lift them around his neck so she could sink against the broad cushion of his chest.
‘Little viper.’ There was no heat in the look he gave her. But there was…something.
Her heart raced faster.
‘You can put me down now. We’ve crossed the threshold.’
He didn’t answer, just made for the sweeping central staircase and climbed it with a speed that belied the burden he carried.
Dimly Carys was aware of more applause and laughter from the few staff gathered in the foyer.
But nothing could distract her from the look on Alessandro’s face. The determined set of his jaw and the hooded, unreadable expression in his eyes. He was so focused.
‘Alessandro?’
He didn’t answer as he reached the top of the staircase and plunged down a wide hallway.
‘My room is to the left.’ Was that her voice? That wisp of sound? Her hands clenched together so hard the pulse throbbed through her palms like a beaten drum. Her chest hollowed with an emotion that should have been trepidation.
Ahead wide double doors stood open. Alessandro strode through them then paused to kick them shut with a thud that reverberated right through her.
Slowly the sound died away to echoing silence. A silence taut with rising tension.
Still he held her.
She felt the rise and fall of his chest against her, surely more pronounced than when he’d climbed the stairs.
Did she imagine the shift of those long-fingered hands? The tightening of his embrace, drawing her more firmly against his powerful torso? Heat radiated from him, seeped into her flesh and bones, melting the tightness of her tensed muscles.
Craven, she turned her head, unable to meet his stare. Afraid he might see in her face traces of the crazy yearning that still plagued her. The yearning for him. No matter what she’d told herself, she’d never been able to obliterate it.
