Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Crying pulled Gino from his sleep. No, a whimpering. So deep in sleep had he been that it took a second to recognise the sound was coming from Francesca and that she was on her back, thrashing about beside him.
He put a hand on her shoulder and gently shook it. “Francesca, wake up.”
She immediately went rigid. There was just enough light in the room to see her eyes open. “Gino?”
“Yes, I’m right here, Chicca. You’ve been having a bad dream.”
She turned and curled her trembling body into his.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “Go back to sleep. I’ve got you.”
Francesca was too frightened to go back to sleep. Nightmares had haunted her early childhood, but since she’d confronted the fears driving them, they’d become a thing of her past.
She’d forgotten how terrifying a nightmare could be, how the ice you wake with in your chest lingers for as long as the worst of the images linger.
Not even the warmth from Gino’s body could melt the ice. Nor the strong, warm arms holding her so securely to him or the beat of his heart beneath her ear.
This nightmare had been nothing like the ones from her childhood. Those had all involved monsters hidden in shadows, closing in on her. This one…
She’d been running, not from danger but to it, racing to her cousins’ home, screaming for them to stop, but the words not coming out.
She’d been too late to save him. Gino had been propped against their front door. There had been no life in his sightless stare. His skin had been pale and cold.
It was a long time before she fell back to sleep.
“Can we just stay in bed today?” Francesca whispered forlornly after they’d made love some hours later.
Gino, his face hot in her neck, laughed roughly and rolled off her onto his back. “I wish.”
She turned and nestled into him. “This is our last full day together.”
“You should be glad of it.”
“Well, I’m not. Can’t you extend the deadline?” She was only half joking. She still had images of that awful dream stuck in her mind. The ice that had been in her chest from it had gone, but in its place, an awful, crushing weight.
He laughed again. She didn’t know if it was wishful thinking that made her think his laughter sounded strained.
“Whatever happens, I’m not marrying that man,” she said quietly, cuddling tighter to him.
“If I know you, Chicca, you’ll convince your family very quickly that marrying him is wrong for everyone.”
After a pause, she tentatively said, “I think I should marry you.”
She felt him freeze before he groaned. “I am the last man you should want to marry.”
“If you marry me, you will be a part of my family. My cousins…”
“Your cousins will put a bullet even more quickly into my head.”
“They won’t. Not if you’re my husband. That will make you family.”
“You’re not na?ve enough to believe that. I’m sorry, Chicca, but it is out of the question, so put the thought from your mind.”
“But the danger you’re in...” She tried to keep the panic she was feeling from her voice. Knowing that in little more than twenty-four hours she would have to say goodbye to him, probably for good, felt increasingly unbearable.
“Danger that I’ve contained and mitigated. I appreciate your concern for me, but you don’t want to marry Elio because you fear he’s a monster. All you would be doing is swapping one monster for another.”
“You would never hurt me.”
“Not physically. Emotionally, I would destroy you, worse than anything Elio would put you through. I told you before, serious relationships are not for me. I live my life on my terms, which is what you need to do too. You don’t have any independent financial resources, but you have a quick brain and a stubborn streak.
If you harness those traits against your family in the way you harnessed them against me, you can’t lose.
You know the future that you don’t want, so now you need to figure out the future you do want and go out there and get it.
” He pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head and sat up. “I need to get rid of the condom.”
Closing the bathroom door behind him, Gino flushed the condom down the toilet, closed his eyes and swore.
Francesca’s suggestion they marry had landed like a bucket of ice on his head.
She’d suggested it as if she were thinking only of him and the danger she perceived him to be in, but his gut told him something else.
The last thing he needed was for Francesca to develop feelings for him that went beyond sex.
Things already felt much too heavy as it was.
After a deep breath, he stepped into the shower. As he cleaned himself, he cleaned his thoughts onto firmer ground.
The intimacy of what they’d shared these last few days was an intimacy neither of them had shared before, Francesca because she’d been wrapped in cotton wool – or, as he imagined, pinned down by her parents and triple wrapped in it with gaffer tape – and him because he engineered things so any lover left before breakfast. He would never have even entertained taking the Espositos on if he had a wife or child to consider.
Wouldn’t have done a quarter of the things he’d done to build his fortune if he’d had to think of possible repercussions to those he loved.
If his parents ever settled back on dry land, it would be far from Italy.
The only reason he hadn’t got bored with Francesca was because he’d not been out in the world to have another woman catch his eye.
They’d been stuck in his apartment, doing what was forbidden, so of course the sex was hot.
Scorching. Forbidden fruit always tasted the sweetest. Once he gave her back to her family, she would quickly fade from his mind, her taste forgotten.
That she could even entertain a future with him was all wrong, and he cursed himself for ever accepting that damned bet, and then cursed himself even harder that he’d kept her in his bed since.
He wasn’t an adolescent. He knew how to keep control of himself, so why the hell had he let himself lose all common sense when it came to Francesca?
Forget the danger of her family learning they were lovers; she’d been a virgin for heaven’s sake!
Of course it would mean more to her than it would to anyone else! That she wanted to protect him…
God, this was all so wrong. He’d snatched her from the street. He’d been holding her hostage. Why the hell would she want to protect a man like him? He’d made no bones about the kind of man he was, and still she…
It suddenly occurred to him that it had all been just words. Meaningless words to a woman who knew exactly what underlined the life he lived.
But she didn’t know him. Not the real him.
All she’d seen was the private man in confinement, not the man he was in the real world.
If she knew that man, she wouldn’t even entertain a future with him, and it came to him, how he could show her that man and save her from hurting herself with impossible dreams.
He would show her the truth of his world. Show her the truth of him.
“Are you being serious?” Francesca asked later that afternoon. “You want to take me to your club?”
He’d hit her with it once the army of lawyers who’d filled the office had left. The office had been a hive of activity, and while she’d tried to amuse herself at their expense with snide comments about her being a hostage, her heart hadn’t been in it. Dejection was weighing heavily on her.
She didn’t want to marry Gino for herself. That would be ridiculous; he was her kidnapper. But equally, the more she looked to the future, the colder her chest became. If she married him, she would save him, she was certain of it, but he’d dismissed the idea.
Didn’t he realise that all the reasons he’d given for not marrying her only proved she was right to care for him?
He must know that marriage to her would guarantee his safety.
Announcing their marriage to the world hot on the heels of the announcement about his buy-in with the Esposito Group meant the whole of Italy’s eyes would be on them.
Her cousins would be forced to back off, and then once she and Gino started having babies, even they would baulk at killing the father of their own flesh and blood.
But he wouldn’t save himself by taking her offer, and there had been no chance to try and talk him round because the day had been spent on the damned contracts between him and her cousins.
And now he wanted to take her to his club.
She’d have been less shocked if he’d said he wanted to marry her after all.
He shrugged expansively. “Only for an hour. It’s good to show my face there when my staff aren’t expecting me, and I thought, as it’s your last night with me, I would show you a side of life you’ve never seen before. I seem to remember you requesting I take you there.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think you wanted me to leave the apartment?”
A faint smile played on his lips. “I think we both know the danger of my hostage trying to escape is over.”
She sighed a smile. Francesca had long stopped feeling like a hostage, didn’t think she ever had felt like a real one, and now she had the sensation that if Gino were to set her free right now, she would never force her legs out of the door.
“If I’m to show you anything of the world, now is the time,” he added.
“The contracts will be couriered to both parties first thing in the morning. Once they’re signed, an announcement about my buy-in to the Esposito Group will be made public, and you will be released.
All being well, you will be home with your family by late-afternoon, so it’s now or never. ”
As much as she longed to visit his nightclub, she shook her head. “Won’t you be putting yourself in danger? Nothing’s been signed yet.”
“Your cousins won’t do anything to screw things up. Not now. If they choose to take me out, it will be after you’re back with your family.”