The Temporary Mrs Marchetti. Melanie Milburne

shared with Alice...well, it wasn’t in the same league. Her body, her touch, her wildcat-on-heat response to him triggered something in him. Something indefinable. Something that made his flesh shudder in reaction when she came near. Something that, even now, with her sitting less than a half a metre away, he could feel moving through his body like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

      He had to get her out of his system.

      He had to.

      He could no longer tolerate the rush of adrenalin every time he saw a silver-blonde head in the crowd and the savage drop of his gut afterwards when he realised it wasn’t her. He had to prove to himself he was over her.

      Was this why his nonna had set her will up this way? To help him move past the five-foot-six blonde roadblock in his life? To force him to confront the failure he would give anything to forget?

      Cristiano had made a promise to himself not to sleep with Alice. Look, but don’t touch. But how long was that going to last? He was barely keeping his hands off her now. All he had to do was reach over and stroke his hand down the slim flank of her thigh peeping out from above the knee-high hem of her little black dress.

      His fingers twitched against the steering wheel. His groin growled when she crossed one long leg over the other, her racehorse-slim ankle moving up and down as if she were feeling the same restless agitation he was feeling.

      Of course she was.

      Cristiano allowed himself an internal smile. His ego had nothing to do with it. He could see the struggle she was having controlling her desire for him. He had felt it from the moment he’d stepped into her office and seen her sitting like a starchy schoolmistress behind that desk. She’d used the desk as a barrier. She hadn’t trusted herself to get too close to him. She knew her body would betray her as his was doing to him. It was the way they were together. Match and tinder. Spark and flame. Trigger and explosion.

      It was only a matter of time before he had her where he wanted her. Begging him. Clawing at him with those little wildcat claws. Gasping his name between panting breaths as he showed her what she’d been missing. What he’d been missing. Dear God, how he’d missed it! Missed her. The feistiness of her. The razor-sharp wit of her tongue. The flashpoint temper and the come-and-get-me teasing that had made him feel as if he were living on the edge of a vertiginous cliff.

      The way her body felt around him when he drove in to the hilt.

      Getting her to marry him was his goal, not sleeping with her...although if what he had seen from her so far was any indication, sleeping with her might happen sooner rather than later. A little financial blackmail was not his usual modus operandi, but he had to get her married to him otherwise his shares would be lost.

      Not to mention the villa.

      He couldn’t lose that. It was the place where his father had grown up. It was where Cristiano had spent numerous happy family holidays before his parents’ and brother’s death. It was his home for the rest of his childhood and adolescence, the place where overnight he had grown from boy to man. Losing the villa would be like losing even more of his family than he had lost already.

      Why had his grandmother done such an outrageous thing as to force him to share it with Alice?

      He didn’t need a conscience right now. Six months would pass before he knew it. He would insist on Alice living with him because he wasn’t going to let the press get wind of there being anything amiss with his ‘marriage’. No way was Alice Piper going to make a laughing stock out of him in the daily tabloids. He would enjoy making her act the role of devoted wife. It would be amusing to see her push against the boundaries he laid down.

      ‘So, we’ll have a nice dinner and discuss this situation we find ourselves in,’ Cristiano said after a time.

      ‘Discuss?’ Alice’s voice held a generous note of scorn. ‘You don’t discuss. You command.’

      He sent her a smiling glance. ‘And as my wife you will obey.’

      Even from the other side of the car he could feel the heat coming off her livid blue glare. ‘They have rewritten the marriage ceremony since the nineteen-fifties, you know. Women no longer have to obey their husbands. Not that you’re going to be my hus—’