‘He was the same with me and my brothers.’
‘I hated him!’ Belle admitted in a driven undertone. ‘I felt guilty about that when he was killed in the crash.’
‘You shouldn’t, cara,’ Cristo parried. ‘He was a very selfish man, who lived only for his pleasure and his profit. Nothing else mattered to him.’
Belle settled into her seat on Cristo’s opulent private jet. Franco was in the sleeping compartment and, once she had settled her little brother down for his nap, Cristo had informed her that he had hired a nanny for the child, who would be waiting when they reached their destination.
‘Which...is?’
‘Italy. I’m taking you to my home in Italy.’
‘Venice...we’re going to Venice?’ Belle carolled in sudden excitement.
‘No, that is where my mother and stepfather live. I inherited a house in Umbria, which has belonged to my mother’s family for generations. Sorry, it’s not Venice,’ Cristo quipped.
‘Won’t your mother be upset that she wasn’t at your wedding?’ Belle prompted, shooting him a look of wide-eyed curiosity.
‘I doubt it. Anything that reminds Giulia of Gaetano puts her in a very bad mood,’ Cristo admitted, compressing his lips. ‘She never recovered from what he put her through. You couldn’t be in her company for five minutes before she told you that he stole the best years of her life, robbed her blind and slept with—among others—her best friend and her maid.’
‘Good grief...’ Belle breathed, reeling from that blunt admission.
During the flight, even with his laptop open in front of him, Cristo found his attention continually straying from the financial report he was checking. He studied Belle’s delicate profile from below his dense lashes, marvelling at the display of innocence and vulnerability that she continued to exude. Was he supposed to be impressed? Did he strike her as that stupid? After all, Mary Brophy’s daughter was considerably shrewder than her mother had ever been because she had not hesitated to use Gaetano’s children as a weapon to enrich herself. But his awareness of that aspect of her less than stellar character faded whenever Cristo looked at her, appreciating the vibrancy of her Titian curls against her porcelain-pale skin, the clarity of her beautiful green eyes, the feminine elegance of the fingers and unpainted nails adorning the slim hands that held a magazine. She always looked so amazingly natural, he registered, black brows drawing together in a bemused frown as he questioned the depth of his fascination and hurriedly returned to his financial report, trying and singularly failing to rustle up an immediate image of Betsy’s face.
The nanny, Teresa, a middle-aged woman with a warm smile, greeted them at the airport and gathered up Franco with enough appreciation to persuade Belle that her little brother would enjoy the best of attention. Though quite what Cristo expected her to do with her time while someone else looked after Franco, she had no idea. After driving through miles of extensively cultivated agricultural land the sun was going down fast when the limousine began to climb mountain roads with hairpin bends that soon slowed the speed of their passage.
‘It feels as if we’re travelling to the end of the world,’ Belle commented.
‘As far as my mother was concerned, the Palazzo Maddalena, named for one of her ancestors, might as well have been. It was never her style.’
And as the car travelled slowly towards to the massive stone building presiding over the hill tops, Belle knew it wasn’t her style either and her heart and her courage sank to their lowest ever level. For the first time it really hit her exactly what marrying Cristo entailed and the little girl whose earliest home had been a tiny house was ready to surface again because the adult woman was overpowered by the sheer size and grandeur of the property confronting her. Ancient mellowed stone encased the three-storeys-tall palazzo, which had graceful wings spreading to either side. Elaborate terraced gardens in an ornamental pattern spread down the hill in front of it and behind the solid bulk of the building loomed the imposing snow-capped tops of the Sibillini mountain range.
As pale as a newly created ghost, Belle climbed out of the car, her lovely face frozen and expressionless, her wedding gown glimmering eerily in the twilight. Cristo surveyed her with a level of satisfaction that disconcerted him. His wife, his home where he was free to be himself. Her tension, though, was not a surprise because Cristo was convinced he knew precisely why Belle would have preferred Venice. What was the point of marrying a billionaire if she couldn’t enjoy the expected rich advantages that came with the wedding ring? In Venice she could have partied with his mother’s wealthy and famous friends and shopped in expensive boutiques and jewellery stores. An ancestral palazzo in the mountains was no fair exchange.
‘It’s a great place for a honeymoon,’ Cristo informed her with something that just might have been amusement glimmering in his keen gaze.
A honeymoon? Well, she was married. But why was he laughing at her? Did he also see the ludicrous gulf between a boy raised in a gilded Venetian palace and the housekeeper’s daughter? How could he fail to? A tide of self-conscious colour washed Belle’s complexion as they entered the enormous palazzo. She knew time was running out. They had dined on the plane, so not even the need to eat could be stretched out to lengthen the evening ahead. For goodness’ sake, she urged herself, lighten up, wise up. This was the deal; this was the agreement that would ensure her siblings received everything that should have been theirs from birth. They would grow up secure and safe as Ravellis and nobody would have an excuse to mock them or sneer at them. They would have the best of educations and opportunities to equip them to enter adult life. They would never have to worry about where their next meal was coming from. As she listed the countless benefits of having married Cristo Ravelli, Belle’s breathing slowly steadied and she steeled her spine.
Franco clutched at her dress as they mounted the stairs and the manservant who had let them in showed them first to a nursery suite where the nanny tried to detach Franco from Belle. But Franco didn’t like strange places and he started to sob and clutch at his sister and it took Cristo to detach him from her.
‘Kiss-do,’ Franco warbled mid sob, ready to smile until Cristo handed him over to the nanny, and then in desperation stretching his arms out to Belle instead.
Belle moved forward to go to Franco but Cristo forestalled her with a hand on her arm. ‘It’s our wedding night,’ he reminded her drily and the very dryness of his tone disturbed her.
In her opinion only people who loved each other had wedding nights, but that wasn’t what she had signed up for, she reminded herself squarely as Cristo led the way along the corridor and cast open a door across yet another landing into a huge bedroom. In spite of her nervousness, the thrill of desire began to build within her.
Belle’s attention centred on the giant gilded four-poster bed topped with a gilded coronet and stayed there as if a padlock had snapped her into place. Suddenly she was regretting the innate shyness and mistrust that had kept her out of other men’s beds. A little sexual experience would have felt better at that moment when ignorance felt more like a threat.
Cristo closed his arms round her rigid figure from behind and the scent of him engulfed her. He smelled so good, a citrusy mix of designer cologne and aromatic male that did something strange to her senses. Her heartbeat kicked up pace as he tugged her hair back from her shoulders and bent his mouth to her nape. His chest was against her spine and as solid as rock, and lower down against her bottom she was suddenly startlingly aware that he was aroused and that had the oddest effect on her. Even as her nervous tension heightened, she couldn’t help being pleased that she could have that much influence over a male who tended to reveal very little on the surface, and who had stood at the altar in the chapel as though he were an innocent bystander on the brink of boredom.
‘I love you in that dress, gattina mia,’ he growled against her skin, and buried his mouth there in a place she hadn’t even known could be sensitive. Every cell in her body pulled taut with anticipation as he laved her flesh with the tip of his tongue and grazed her with