CHAPTER SEVEN
SEBASTIANOWASUSED to working long hours, but this was something else. Everything was proceeding as planned but pockets of fire kept flaring that all needed to be doused, and that was on top of the workload that came with running an international bank along with ensuring he was on top of his workload enough to take a week off as a sop to a honeymoon, and came with organising the wedding of the century at incredibly short notice.
He’d had the earth’s sexiest creature under his roof and in his bed for three days and been too busy to spend more than snatches of time alone with her.
His current workload had him working each night until the early hours. He would climb the stairs to his room, the entirety of his being inflating to know Layla was already in there. He’d slip beneath the covers beside her sleeping form torn between making noise and movement enough to wake her and not wanting to disturb the peace of her sleep. It had to be all that fiery passion burning her energy through the day that allowed her to sleep for the dead.
Although their time alone together had come in snatches, their shared meals and adjoining offices meant he’d had much opportunity to observe her, and when he reached the dividing threshold and found her on a telephone call, he instinctively knew from the tone of her voice that she was talking to one of her clients. On the desk that formed an L with hers, Giovanna, Layla’s assistant, looked up from her computer, gave a nervous smile of greeting before immediately looking back at her screen.
Layla took much longer to meet his eye, but when she did, a smile curved her cheeks and something glimmered in her eyes he was quite certain she was unaware of.
She held up a finger to indicate she’d be one minute.
Waiting was no bother, not when it meant he got a whole minute of observing his fiancée unhindered.
How was it possible for someone’s beauty to grow by the day?
How was it possible for desire to turn on with the ease of a tap just to catch a glimpse of someone or catch a waft of their perfume?
Today she was wearing a dark blue maxi-dress, the buttons running its length opened to show the merest hint of cleavage, her hair in her favoured loose style. Having observed her so much, he now understood why she preferred it loose: she was always fiddling with it, whether running her fingers through it, tucking strands behind her ears or winding strands around her fingers. He could still feel the sensation of those fingers scraping through his own hair...
She ended her call and smiled at him. ‘Did you need me for something?’
He had the perfect answer for that but, with Giovanna working so close to them and no doubt hearing every word exchanged, he settled for sitting on the edge of Layla’s desk. Having an audience, though, gave him a legitimate excuse to lean over and stroke her cheek. ‘I had a few minutes free and thought I would check in with my beautiful fiancée before she’s whisked away for her dress fitting.’
The colour that enflamed her cheeks at his touch was an aphrodisiac all of its own.
The design team had moved into the villa so they could work around the clock on her wedding dress and that afternoon had been set aside for Layla’s first proper fitting. Whatever direction the design of the dress took, she would be the most beautiful bride to have ever graced Sicilian soil. He traced the rim of her ear, delighting in her almost imperceptible shiver.
From the moment Sebastiano slipped into her office, Layla had been wholly aware of his presence and now, her cheek and ear aflame from his touch, she was having to fight to stop the entirety of her senses becoming consumed by him. Clearing her throat, she said in a voice she needed no effort to make sound husky, ‘I’m not wanted for another half-hour.’
He pressed his cheek against hers and whispered, ‘Believe me, cara, you are always wanted.’
She could do nothing to stop her breath hitching and when he pulled back and she caught the gleam in his beautiful green eyes, she knew he’d heard it, and when he reached again to stroke her cheek, the thumps of her heart were so strong she was certain he must be able to hear them too.
His desirous stare not leaving hers, he said, ‘Giovanna, can you give us two minutes please?’
Layla’s assistant left the office and closed the door without a murmur.
Alone with Sebastiano, her heart thumping erratically, Layla tried to wrench her stare from his, tried even harder to fight the thrills of anticipation lacing her blood at the mouth closing in on hers...
The tip of his nose brushed against her. His breath was hot on her face...
‘In case I forget to mention it later, my parents and grandparents and a few other relatives will be joining us for dinner this evening,’ he murmured. ‘Formal dress. I will go through behavioural expectations later.’
Layla’s butterfly-laden stomach turned over and she reared back.
A knowing smile played on his lips. The bastard knew exactly the effect he had on her and was positively revelling in it.
‘Don’t look so alarmed. They won’t eat you,’ he teased. ‘They might want to eat you...’ His eyes glimmered. Her pelvis clenched. ‘Not in the same way as I want to eat you, of course, but my family are old-school courteous and they wouldn’t dream of being rude to you. Not to your face.’
She had to scramble through the fog of blood roaring in her head to drag out, ‘What have you told them about me?’
‘What I have told everyone else.’ The firm lips her mouth was tingling with need to feel compressed upon it were barely a feather away from making contact. ‘That you are my lover and that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to make you mine.’
Layla didn’t know if it was a sob of relief or disappointment that hitched up her throat when he pulled away from her and returned to his own office.
Sebastiano had known his chameleon fiancée would charm his extremely proper, socially conscious family, and so it proved from the moment she swished into the dining room wrapped in a slinky black cocktail dress with her hair piled in a loose bun, loose tendrils and large hooped earrings framing her perfect face. Being seated opposite her meant that, though he had to forgo the pleasure of feeling the heat of her body beside him and inhaling the sultry scent of her perfume, he had the pleasure of watching her. And it was a pleasure. Not a single expression on her beautiful face or movement of her body was anything less than mesmerising. Whenever their eyes locked, he caught a shimmer in hers, a remnant of the desire that had blazed earlier and which sent a shimmer of it straight back into his loins.
Only the knowledge that the villa was overrun with hundreds of staff and external workers busy transforming it for the wedding had stopped him pressing his mouth to hers for the kiss her lips had parted for.
Layla wanted him. He knew it. And she knew he knew it.
Throughout their five-course meal, she played the part he’d given her to perfection, proving herself as graceful and elegant and learned as they could wish for a new family member, especially one who would be so prominent. His mother studied her the closest but his grandfather was smitten before the main course had been served. As for Paolo, Sebastiano’s cousin and best man for the wedding, he found himself on the receiving end of death stares from his wife for his failure to remove his eyes from Layla’s face, death stares he was completely oblivious to.
‘Don’t you drink, Layla?’ Sebastiano’s father asked when she poured herself another glass of iced water.
Her mesmerising forget-me-not eyes darted to Sebastiano before she bestowed his father with the lopsided smile that could break a man’s heart at fifty paces. ‘Not when I need to keep a clear head for my wedding,’ she quipped, which made his father laugh and his mother’s eyes narrow.
Sebastiano thought back to all the meals they’d shared these last few days. She’d stuck to water in all of them. Not a drop of alcohol had passed her lips since her arrival here.
She did drink though. They’d shared a bottle of champagne the night they’d spent together.
A pulse throbbed in his temple.
Why keep up the act of being pregnant when there was nothing to be gained? Layla was smart enough to know he couldn’t pull out of the wedding now. She was legally minded enough to know the prenuptial agreement was watertight and the fifty million would be hers from the moment they signed the certificate. Those of the world’s press who hadn’t already set up camp at the villa’s gates were scurrying as fast as they could to join them. It was too late to cancel—
He suddenly noticed she had a hand resting lightly on her belly. Noticed, too, the gentle strokes of her fingers. The animation on her face as she continued charming his father suggested she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.
The pulse turned into a pounding. The surrounding conversations had become distant white noise. Closing his eyes in a long blink in an effort to clear it, Sebastiano opened them to find Layla’s beautiful eyes dart back on him.
His heart made a heavy thump against his ribs.
Their gazes held.
The white noise vanished into nothing.
The strangest sensation loosened in the centre of his chest. He was barely aware of it spreading to cover his lungs, not until it had squeezed the breath from them.
Layla tugged her hand out of Sebastiano’s and, without saying a word, headed straight to her bathroom.
Closing the door, she rested a hand to her pounding heart. She was struggling to breathe. For the first time since her arrival in Sicily, Sebastiano had come to bed with her.
She removed her makeup and brushed her teeth with shaking hands.
It had taken every sinew of effort to put her focus on playing the role Sebastiano demanded of her for his family. Every sinew because all her eyes had wanted to do was stare at him. Every sinew because the ache that had opened in anticipation of the kiss that had never come still burned. Just to be held in his gaze intensified it.
And now they were alone. No audience to play for. Nothing to distract her from the pulses beating in her throat and the heat between her legs.
Nothing at all to distract her from him.
How on earth was she going to manage their ‘honeymoon’ week, she wondered helplessly when she padded into her dressing room. Come Sunday morning and Sebastiano’s helicopter would fly them to the tiny Mediterranean island bought by the Russo family as the perfect romantic, private getaway. With only a skeleton staff there, it would essentially be just the two of them. No work or other distractions. For a whole week.
A ‘honeymoon wardrobe’ had already been prepared for her by her design team. She didn’t dare ask what it consisted of or hope it involved more than string bikinis and sexy lingerie.
The lingerie couldn’t be worse than what she already had. The worst of it was how much her skin sang to wear it. Beautiful matching underwear for the day, delicate silk camis for the night. She had to rummage through the latter to find one that actually covered her buttocks, settling on a cream silk number that still left little to the imagination.
She felt almost sick with nerves but it was a different kind of sickness from the occasional mild nausea she’d experienced in the first few months of the pregnancy. This was a sickness of anticipation.
Desperate to have better control of herself before she joined him in the bedroom, Layla slipped her arms into a kimono-style robe and then called her mum. Just to hear her voice and know she would be joining her here in the morning, an ally in an overwhelming world, soothed a little of Layla’s frayed edges.
But only a little. Once the call was finished, she was out of distractions.
She could put it off no more. She was going to have to get into bed with Sebastiano for the first time since they’d conceived their child.
Taking a deep breath, she tightened the robe and opened the dressing room door.
Sebastiano was in bed reading something on his phone. His magnificent torso was bare. She didn’t dare imagine what he was—or wasn’t—wearing on the lower half of his body.
He looked up from the device in his hand and, without taking his eyes from her, placed it on his bedside table.
Layla had never felt as self-conscious as she did during that walk to the bed. Not that self-conscious was the right phrasing for what she felt under the gleam of eyes that felt as if they were seeing straight through the kimono and cami to her naked skin.
Having reached her side of the bed, she sat awkwardly with her back to him and shrugged the robe off. Painfully aware that she had way more flesh on display than covered, even more aware that Sebastiano did too, she slipped under the sheets with her back to him.
The sheets rustled as Sebastiano made himself comfortable then the room was plunged into darkness.
Immediately the huge bed shrank.
She cocooned herself deeper into the sheets and fought to stop her airwaves closing up. The silence was so profound and Sebastiano so close he would surely be able to hear her erratic breaths.
His deep voice penetrated the silence. ‘You did well with my family. I appreciate it must have been difficult for you.’
His voice was so close. He was so close.
Swallowing, she whispered, ‘Your mother disapproves of me.’
His mother had been as gracious and welcoming as the rest of the Russos but there had been an underlying stiffness that went beyond the stiffness that came from belonging to one of the richest families in the world. It was a stiffness that had felt personal.
‘My mother would only have been happy if I was marrying a Sicilian.’
At least he wasn’t denying it.
‘You do realise your family know our marriage is all for show, right?’ she said.
‘They might suspect but they don’t know.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you? All this lying?’ And now she was a liar because of it too, and she would be lying in two days when she made her vows and lying with every display of affection she endured throughout the day...
But that in itself was a lie, she acknowledged. How could she call it enduring when she was tucked under the same bedsheets as him, intensely aware that if she slid her foot back just a few inches it would make contact with warm, hard flesh? Intensely aware that if Sebastiano moved just a few inches closer his breath would fall on her skin?
‘Lies based on truth. Our marriage will be real for as long as it lasts, and my family will not question it because the only thing that matters is the bank’s survival.’
‘That all sounds very cold,’ she managed to drag out as her pelvis contracted at the remembrance of how Sebastiano’s lovemaking had been the antithesis of cold.
‘To someone like you, perhaps.’
She rolled onto her back and turned her face to him without even thinking about it. ‘Someone like me? What are you implying?’
Sebastiano gazed at her with eyes adjusted to the dark. Even shadowed her beauty made his chest tighten in an echo of earlier, when he’d caught Layla’s stare and lost the capacity to breathe. ‘I am saying that I understand why my family and our priorities would seem cold to you. The nature of your relationship with your mother is very different from my relationship with my family.’
Her brow furrowed in question.
‘I don’t believe I have ever called my mother for the sake of calling her but you call yours frequently,’ he explained. At least three times a day. The most recent had been only minutes ago. He’d stepped out of his bathroom and caught a hint of Layla’s musical voice. It had been the softness in her tone that had been the giveaway as to who she was speaking to. It was a different kind of softness from the tone she took when speaking to her clients. With her mother, the softness had a chattier lilt; with her clients the softness was overlaid with the professionalism with which she spoke to her colleagues.
‘I have an excellent relationship with my parents, but my personal life is private from them,’ he continued. ‘From what you’ve told me and what I’ve observed from your calls with her, you share confidences as if she was a close friend rather than your mother.’
Her gaze still locked on his, she turned her whole body to face him. Fingers appeared from beneath the sheets pulled up to her chin and her hand slid under her cheek. A long inhalation and then she quietly said, ‘She’s more than a mum to me. She’s the closest friend I have.’
Curiosity had him ask, ‘Do you think your closeness is because she raised you on her own?’
Her eyes narrowed a little in thought. ‘That’s definitely a factor, and her age when she had me was too. She was so young and had no one to fall back on or tell her she was doing it wrong, so she had to trust her own instincts.’ She gave the smallest of smiles. ‘Basically, she made it up as she went along and did parenting her own way, and it was a way that meant we were always close.’
Her little finger was poking out at the side of her cheek. Sebastiano had the strangest urge to take it in his mouth and taste it.
Dio, he could still taste her. It was a taste that had lingered in his memories for all those months he’d spent determinedly refusing to think about her.
As he lay in the dark, each inhalation soaking in the sweetness of her breath and the last vestiges of her perfume, heady awareness thrummed heavily through him. That the awareness was shared and thrummed through Layla’s veins too only heightened the sensation.
She’d been his for the taking earlier but that moment had passed. Her guard was up but different barriers had been lowered and their lowering was starting to satisfy a different kind of hunger, one he hadn’t been aware had been roused.
A hunger to know everything about her.
‘What do you mean by her own way?’
Her lips quirked with another small smile. ‘Well...she never lectured for a start. When I was little and did anything naughty or plain wrong, she didn’t sit in judgement. She would get me to talk about why I’d done whatever I’d done and steer me into realising why I’d been wrong to do it.’ The smile curved a little wider. ‘You could confess anything and her empathy and lack of judgement made you feel absolved but also a hundred times more guilty than if she’d got angry and ranted.’
‘What did you do that was so bad?’
‘That’s just it—I didn’t, not unless you count the time she caught me and my friend Natalie smoking when we were fourteen. She didn’t lecture us on the evils of smoking, just gave us this awful, disappointed smile, kissed my head and told us to dispose of the butts responsibly. I don’t know why it made us both feel so terrible but whatever witchcraft she used, it worked and neither of us ever touched a cigarette again. How can you rebel against someone like that? You can’t...at least, I couldn’t.’
‘Your upbringing was very different from mine,’ he told her slowly as he digested all she’d just confided and tried not to wonder what kind of mother Layla would be to the child he was finding it increasingly difficult to deny already existed inside her.
Difficult to deny but equally difficult to accept.
‘I grew up knowing I wasn’t just a member of a family but an institution,’ he continued, forcing his thoughts back to safer ground. ‘The bank has been in my family for five hundred years. I have known my whole life that my destiny is to lead it. My father knew it and his father before him, all the way back through the generations, but every family member plays their part in upholding the Russo image because all our fortunes depend on it and we marry accordingly. That is what I meant about my family not questioning our relationship—they know a background investigation will have been conducted on you because background investigations are always made on those we wish to bring into the fold through marriage. I appreciate that it sounds cold, but to us it is a necessary evil. It’s survival. I do not have the luxury of allowing emotions to dictate my actions. None of us do.’
This was nothing Layla didn’t already know through all the late nights in Sebastiano’s suite, pouring his favourite bourbon, acting as a smiling sounding board for him. Many confidences had been shared with her, business and personal. In Sebastiano’s case, business and personal were inextricably linked.
Now she was here, in his home, thrust into the heart of his world, she understood better the enormous pressure he was under. Understood it because she’d felt it, in his office when Sebastiano and his team had been waiting for the news about his monetary loss to drop. The tension had been like nothing she’d ever experienced, so tangible that it had felt like she could wave her fingers and find resistance in the air.
It was her own resistance she was having to hold onto now. The strange intimacy of a conversation in the still darkness.
He was so close that she could feel her pores opening to breathe him in, and, as hard as she tried, she was struggling to stop her gaze focusing on the sensuous mouth that had kissed every inch of her flesh. The urge to press a finger to the indentation on his bottom lip and then replace the finger with her mouth was so strong that she squeezed the pillow beneath her cheek even tighter and half joked, ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’m well aware you have the emotional range of a goldfish.’
And, when it came to women, the attention span of one too, she reminded herself.
Neededto remind herself, especially as her mild insult had resulted in a growl of surprised laughter that soaked straight into her open pores.
One night of bliss and Sebastiano had cast her aside. The emotional connection she thought she’d found in his arms hadn’t existed for him.
‘Being compared to a goldfish is an improvement on a pig,’ he said musingly.
‘You took pig to be a compliment.’
‘But you meant it as an insult. You like goldfish.’
‘How do you know that?’ Surely a childhood pet goldfish wasn’t the kind of thing an investigator would pick up?
His chuckle was husky, his voice smug. ‘You just told me.’
She couldn’t stop the snigger that escaped. ‘If you’re happy to be compared to a creature that only has the brain capacity to remember the last three seconds, then you do you.’
‘I’m happy to be compared to a creature that you like.’ His voice lowered. ‘It gives me hope.’
It was the meaningful gleam in his eyes that finally gave Layla the impetus to roll over and turn her back to him.
It would be too easy to read something in his eyes that just wasn’t there and hear false meaning in his words. Too easy to let herself forget how much he’d hurt her and give him the tools to do it again.
He was talking about sex. Nothing else.
She’d allowed herself to see and hear falsehoods in the dark of night with Sebastiano before. To him, they’d been just words. She’d been the fool for believing them.
Closing her eyes, she strove with everything she had to keep her voice light. ‘Like I said, you do you. I’m going to get some sleep now, so time to stop talking.’
‘Your wish is my command.’
She didn’t know if she was breathing easier or harder when she felt him turn over and shift away, taking the warmth of his body with him.
There was movement as he made himself comfortable, and then he murmured her name.
She had to swallow to answer. ‘Yes?’
‘If I was to compare you to a creature it would be a swan. They’re beautiful and elegant, just like you.’
Her chest expanded to accommodate her blooming heart, and she had to swallow even harder to speak. ‘They also bite when provoked.’
His laughter rumbled through her skin. ‘Kinky.’
She could have sobbed. ‘Sebastiano?’
‘Yes, my little rabbit?’
‘Shut up and go to sleep.’
He gave one last husky chuckle and then silence finally fell.
The oblivion of sleep took many hours to claim her.