Mediterranean Tycoons. Michelle Reid

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СКАЧАТЬ you to sleep your jet lag away, but I was beginning to worry that you would never wake up to this beautiful, beautiful day!’

      The housekeeper’s gushing bright chatter eased some of the tension out of Lizzy’s body. Within minutes she was sitting in the same chair she’d sat in the night before, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice and eating slices of delicious fresh fruit with Nina still fussing around her like a mother hen taking care of a brand-new chick.

      ‘Please call me Lizzy,’ she said after the signora began to grate. She didn’t feel like a signora, she didn’t even feel like Mrs, though the gold ring on her finger told her she was.

      Which then asked the question—what did she feel like?

      ‘Mr Luc went out after his breakfast to check on his farmers, as he always does when he arrives here,’ Nina was saying, gaining Lizzy’s attention quicker than anything else could.

      ‘His farmers?’ she prompted.

      Nina gave a nod, pouring steaming coffee into her coffee-cup. ‘He didn’t tell you? This house and the land belonged to his grandmamma. Her portrait hangs in the main salon. I will show you later, if you like. Mr Luc spent a lot of his childhood here, during the school holidays. His grandmother was a forceful lady who pioneered the concept of collective farming on the island. Mr Luc has continued her success in the wake of her untimely death last year.’

      Last year? Lizzy had not known that Luc had suffered such a loss so recently.

      Nina nodded. ‘We still miss her—Mr Luc most of all. She made him human, he once told me.’ The housekeeper paused to offer up a sigh. ‘It is the downside of being born into great wealth and responsibility, I suppose, that you switch off your softer instincts so you will keep yourself strong.’ Then she showed Lizzy her wonderful smile again. ‘Now you are here to make him feel human, heh?’ The gleam in her rich brown eyes made Lizzy burn. ‘His grandmamma would like you. You have a look of her, and you are stubborn like she was, and—’

      ‘English,’ a different voice drawled.

      Lizzy froze in the process of picking up a juicy chunk of fresh pineapple, her eyes skittering towards the door where he stood leaning against the framework, casual as hell dressed in pale chinos and a blue tee shirt, his hair ruffled as if by the breeze. Every inch of him was long, lithe, so spare of flesh it was like looking at a breathtaking study of firm-muscled, lean golden strength that set her senses responding with tight little pulses deep down in the intimate place between her legs.

      ‘Virago.’ The housekeeper turned to smile at him, seemingly unaware as to how the tension in the room had just rocketed. ‘You called her the English virago.’

      ‘Il virago inglese’ he softly translated, then watched, his eyes mostly hidden beneath the heavy fall of his soot-black eyelashes, the telling dark flush march up Lizzy’s throat and cheeks.

      He’d called her that last night, when she’d buried her teeth in him. He’d said something similar to her on the plane. Stifled beyond speech by the endearment’s link with one of his close family, she dropped the piece of pineapple back onto the plate and came jerkily to her feet.

      ‘Buon giorno, la mia moglie bella,’ he murmured smoothly then, the hidden gold in his eyes flaring briefly as they took in her tiny white vest-top and her short blue skirt.

      Lizzy was suddenly excruciatingly aware of the pinprick sting of her nipples inside the flimsy white cups of her bra, and the amount of leg left on show by the shortness of the skirt. Her hair was tied back and she wished that it weren’t as a fresh layer of heat seeped into her cheeks. She wished she were standing here in a full-length woollen coat despite the overwhelming Caribbean heat.

      ‘No reply for me, cara?’ he mocked her numbing silence.

      No, she thought, because I just can’t speak yet. Instead she used her tongue to soothe the sudden tremor that had developed across her lips. He watched it happen, and there was nothing on his face to tell her what he was thinking, yet she sensed a tension in him that literally picked at her flesh as he dipped those eyes down her full length once again.

      ‘So my sweet virgin bride is robbed of speech,’ he mocked her. ‘Perhaps there is some hope left for my lousy technique.’

      Lizzy tensed. ‘Don’t,’ she shivered out, mortified beyond bearing that he could say something like to her at all after last night and especially in front of his housekeeper.

      ‘We are alone.’ He smiled briefly at the way she flicked her startled eyes to the place where Nina had been standing. ‘She beat a hasty retreat when you blushed so charmingly. And it is too late to keep your virgin status on our wedding night a secret, amore. There was blood on the sheets.’

      The shockingly abrupt announcement froze the colour out of Lizzy’s face.

      ‘You did not notice?’ Levering himself away from the door, he started moving towards her. ‘One of the maids surely will have done when she remade the bed after you left it.’

      Lizzy flinched when the sleeve to his shirt brushed her arm as he reached past her to pick up her discarded piece of pineapple.

      ‘No comment,’ he mocked when she still said nothing. ‘I admit, when I saw it, it made me feel positively medieval.’ He put the pineapple into his mouth. ‘I half expected to arrive back here this lunchtime to see the evidence hanging from the window as proof of your chastity and my undoubtedly—’

      With a stifled choke, Lizzy turned and ran, switching the cruel battery of his words off like a flick of a switch. As she made it into the hall without throwing up she wondered bitterly if the heavy crash she heard behind her was a sign that he was angry he’d been left mocking a lost audience!

      Outside the heat was so intense she almost changed her mind and went back into the coolness of the house. But—no. Burning alive was a better option than going back in there, she thought painfully as she took off across the grass, heading for—she didn’t know where or care.

      She did not understand what made him want to be so constantly cruel to her. Twenty-four hours as his bought bride and already she did not know how much more of it she could take.

      Dropping down on the stone steps of the gazebo, she hugged her knees to her chest and stared out to sea. She was trembling, her mind filled with lurid images of giggling maids whispering their secret to the rest of the staff here. Luc had called it medieval, Lizzy wanted to call it—

      A step sounded close beside her, shutting off her painful thought patterns to replace them with a whole aching set of new ones.

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