To her surprise he just nodded, no clever quick counterattack, face still serious, the dark golden eyes wrapped in luxurious dark eyelashes, an even shape to his beautiful mouth. He’d dropped the cool mask, Lizzy realised, and all she was seeing now was the too handsome, worryingly alluring man.
Then he was rising to his full height and holding out a hand for her to take so he could help her up. Lizzy stared at that hand for a few seconds, still hesitant to take what she knew it was offering, yet too aware of the tingling sting of enticement at work in her blood to stop her own hand from lifting and settling into his. His fingers closed around hers and he drew her upright. When she tried to take her hand back he held onto it and used it to bring her even closer until she was standing a mere breath away from touch-close to his lean, hard, now very familiar length.
Her heart began to thump. He was going to kiss her, and she couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted to be kissed right now. Tension inched up along the length of her spine and made the air shiver as it left her lungs.
‘I n-need some things your wonderful style team forgot to pack in my luggage.’ She went for a diversion on a quick agitated rush of speech.
‘Like what?’ he murmured.
The murmur was disturbingly husky. ‘A gentleman doesn’t ask that question,’ she responded distractedly.
‘I thought we had already established that I’m not one—a gentleman,’ he added.
She looked up, at his mouth, saw the hint of a grimace taking control of it, felt her own lips tremble and part. ‘A s-sunhat, then, and a truckload of sun screen,’ she compromised her answer, trying so hard not to sound as unnerved by his closeness as she actually felt.
But maybe he knew, maybe she even quivered. It was difficult for her to tell any more because tense inner quivers around him had become such a permanent thing she was learning she had to live with. Anyway, he gave a tug at her hand. The thin gap between them disappeared altogether, the warmth of his body heat stimulated every nerve-end she possessed and sent her eyes lifting up to clash warily with his.
Whatever he saw reflected in her eyes sent a strange kind of grimace moving across his lips. Then he did it—he kissed her.
It was such a brief embrace that it had gone before she could even think to react to it.
‘Then let’s go shopping,’ was all he said.
Lizzy knew then that they had just sealed yet another deal between them, though heck if she had enough sense left to work out what this one was about.
And he was back to playing it cool again, being the guy who liked to be in control of everything—including his renegade wife. He drove them into town in a soft-top sports car with the roof firmly in place to keep the heat of the sun off her fair skin. They strolled in and out of small shops painted in different pretty pastel shades, each one carrying the kind of interestingly individual things that made Lizzy want to linger and browse.
He chose her sunhat while she wasn’t looking, a wide, floppy-brimmed thing made of bright pink straw that he paid for, coolly put on her head, then walked her out of the shop without giving her the chance to object about the colour and the way it had to be clashing with the colour of her hair.
‘Arrogant,’ she muttered.
‘All of my life,’ he answered smoothly, and walked her into a pharmacy and proceeded to pick out the highest factor sun screen he could find and Lizzy let him because—
Well, why not? she told herself. He’d taken command of every other decision in her life, like her clothes, her wedding—her wedding night. So she left him to it and went off to find the other female-type items she’d wanted to buy that she’d left off her list back at the gazebo.
He paid the bill.
And she began to feel like a very mute, very pampered female with just enough resentment burning inside her to stop her from liking it.
As he walked beside her his hand was always in touch with her somewhere—her hand, her arm, the base of her spine—until they bumped into some people he knew, when his arm became that angled pressure across her back and the hand a long fingered clamp in the indentation of her waist that drew her in very close to his side.
Making a silent statement as he’d done at the wedding or being protective of his new bride? Lizzy didn’t know but she leant into him anyway for protection as he introduced her as, ‘My wife, Elizabeth.’
She could tell from their expressions that the news about their scandalous marriage had even reached as far as this tiny island in the Caribbean.
‘Cara, this is Elena and Fabio Romano, friends of mine,’ he completed the introductions.
Elena Romano was young and slender and extremely beautiful, but she wore the kind of curious gleam in her dark eyes that made Lizzy think of a black-eyed witch with long sharp nails. Fabio Romano was tall and tanned and middle-aged with a languid boredom about him that had her wondering if that was where Luc was going to be by the time he reached his middle years.
They said they were cruising the Caribbean on their yacht and invited Luc and Lizzy to join them for the afternoon. Luc was beautifully suave and gracious with his refusal. Fabio Romano was beautifully suave and gracious in his acceptance of it. His lovely wife was not. Her black eyes sparked with irritation, which she vented on Lizzy.
‘Such a sweet hat, cara,’ she murmured, ‘very cute and—pink. How do you dare to wear that shade with your hair colouring?’
‘Luc chose it,’ Lizzy answered smoothly. ‘He likes cute and pink.’
Elena’s light laugh tinkled off into the sunlight. Lizzy felt the press of Luc’s fingers as they bit into her waist.
‘Ah,’ Elena hadn’t finished, ‘that explains your wedding photograph in this morning’s papers—’ she nodded ‘—and the positively dramatic image you made of the pale young virginal bride standing next to her sternly reformed rake.’
Well, the cruelly perceptive bitch, Lizzy thought breathlessly. ‘My style team managed to get it just right, don’t you think?’ She smiled through gritted white teeth.
She hadn’t been around Bianca for years without learning how to respond to such a woman. And even if the floppy brim to her cute pink hat hadn’t been blocking him off from the shoulders upwards, nothing on earth would have made her look up at him as she felt Luc’s fingers bite into her again.
‘And with so little notice.’ Elena slid her eyes down to Lizzy’s stomach, the suggestion she was implying shocking Lizzy into releasing a gasp.
‘Gosh,’ she rallied. ‘It never entered my head that people would think poor Luc had been forced into marrying me!’
‘They don’t.’ Surprisingly it was Fabio Romano who pulled himself out of his boredom to put a stop to this. ‘Elena is fishing for information. She is always fishing for information—it is the staple diet for a professional bitch.’
Well, he said it, Lizzy’s eyes told the other woman while Elena flushed. A few minutes later they’d made their polite farewells and were walking back to where they’d left the car.
‘You were a great help,’ Lizzy said, stiff with anger and a very bruised pride.
Luc, on the other hand, was coolly indifferent. ‘You will learn soon enough that it is safer to say nothing at all around people like Elena.’
Well, Lizzy didn’t want to learn to be quiet. If that was a brief taster of what was waiting for her when they returned to Italy, then she didn’t want any part of it.
‘She’s attracted to you, which is why she got her nails into me.’
‘Now you are being fantastical.’
‘An ex-lover, then, with a grudge because she didn’t end up your dramatically pale virginal bride.’