Claimed by the Sicilian. Kate Walker
head went back, smoky green eyes narrowing in suspicion.
‘Where exactly are we going?’
Where were they going? There was only one place he could think of where they would have the privacy they needed.
‘Sicily. Siracusa in Sicily, if you want me to be exact.’
She didn’t like the mockery of his tone. It showed in the quick frown that drew her brows together. Or was it that she was still assuming that he was the impoverished photographer he had claimed to be when they first met? In that case, she was very definitely heading for a shock.
It seemed that was what was in her mind because she studied him coolly and went on, ‘Siracusa is where you live, I take it.’
‘Si. Oh, don’t look like that, bellezza. It really won’t be quite as bad as you’re expecting—in fact, it won’t be what you’re expecting at all. You see—’
‘And what if I don’t want to go to Sicily?’ Amber cut into his attempt to explain the truth to her.
Oh, well, she’d see soon enough.
‘I don’t think you have a choice. We need somewhere we can stay and take stock and think about what our next move will be.’
‘I don’t need to think about it!’
Amber pushed herself off the bed, taking the sheet with her and wrapping it round her body like some sort of white linen toga.
‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you. And we don’t have a next step to plan at all.’
‘We don’t?’
He laced the words with a note of warning, one that she seemed determined to ignore.
‘No way! All I want is to wait for the furore that my aborted wedding caused to die down and then to organise a quickie divorce—and, believe me, it can’t be quick enough.’
‘No chance.’
Guido couldn’t hold back the harsh bark of laughter that escaped him, drawing the full concentration of those green eyes to his face again.
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
‘Why not?’ Guido echoed cynically, drawling out the words deliberately. ‘I should have thought that the answer to that was obvious to anyone. If you were hoping for a quickie divorce, mia cara, then I’m afraid you’d better think again. You see, what we did here, just now…’ he nodded towards the bed, where the still rumpled bedclothes, the dented pillows, were blatant evidence of just what they’d been doing only a short time before ‘…will count as a renewal of our marriage.’
As he had expected, she looked appalled at the thought, her face losing all colour and one slender hand going up to her mouth to hold back the cry of horror that almost escaped it.
‘But no one needs to know. If we don’t tell anyone…’
‘We don’t need to tell anyone. They already know. Are you forgetting that we had an audience of hundreds—your former wedding guests—who were witnesses to the fact that we were shut in here for hours just after we declared to the world that our marriage was back on again? I’m damn sure that, if asked, any one of them would be happy to give evidence to that fact.
No, carissima, like it or not, I’m afraid we have to accept that in the eyes of the law we are very definitely man and wife again and this afternoon’s pleasure is going to cost us dear in that it will have put the date of our permanent freedom from each other back by at least two years.’
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