soft, full, inviting mouth, pressed another claiming kiss to it, then let his eyes clash with hers. He was moving again. Back into the bedroom, across the priceless Indian carpet covering its solid oak floor, to the bed, which looked like an island you could quite easily live upon without needing to leave for a long, long time.
Caroline certainly didn’t want to leave it. She wanted to take off her clothes and crawl beneath its snowy white linen topped by the really decadent blood-red and dark gold brocade coverlet, to survive on hot kisses and rich dark flesh and the passions of a man who was incomparable.
Allowing her feet to slide to the floor, Luiz took a step back, then began undressing. She didn’t move, didn’t attempt to take her own dress off. That was for him to do. It was his duty to unwrap his bride himself.
But her breasts pouted provocatively at him all the while he was undressing, and the moist pink tip of her tongue kept snaking slowly around her kiss-swollen lips in needy anticipation.
‘You,’ he murmured when he eventually reached for her, ’ought to be locked up.’
She just smiled a very wicked smile and lifted up her arms to receive him. The dress slipped lower. On a growl, Luiz helped it the rest of the way, and had seen off everything else she was wearing before he straightened up again.
Outside, beyond the four-foot thick walls, the party went on without them. Somewhere else, in another wing of the castle, two people were packing.
‘Luiz…’ Caroline murmured tentatively a long time later, when they lay curled up against each other. ‘Can we talk?’ she begged. ‘About Felipe?’
It ruined the moment. His body went taut, his jawline clenched. ‘Only if we have to do,’ he said tightly—which didn’t offer much encouragement.
Caroline pushed on anyway. ‘I know you have every right to hate him and his mother,’ she allowed. ‘And I know he behaved appallingly tonight. But…’ Leaning up a little, she looked anxiously into his ice-cold eyes. ‘It isn’t his fault his mother told wicked lies about your mother, or that she tricked and deceived your father! Just as it isn’t Felipe’s fault that you had the childhood you did. He is your cousin—and it’s been tough for him too, you know!’ she insisted at Luiz’s lowering frown. ‘Growing up in your shadow, with a mother who could barely live with herself for what she’d done to her own sister and a so-called father who rejected him at birth and hated his mother for putting him in your place. It’s all so very tragic and sad,’ she said. ‘And I know your father had a right to feel bitter as he wrote it. He broke his own heart by believing your aunt instead of your mother, and spent the rest of his life punishing himself for it. But Felipe should not have been made to pay. It—’
‘What do you mean—how my father wrote it?’ Luiz put in.
‘Oh!’ she gasped in horror when she realised what she’d said. Then a long sigh whispered from her, and with a twisted smile that acknowledged it was probably for the best she lifted sombre eyes to his darkly glowering ones. ‘How he wrote it in his diaries,’ she said gently.
Softly and quietly she began telling him everything she had learned.
When eventually Luiz asked her where the diaries were, she told him, and without another word he got out of bed, pulled on a robe and went to get them.
A long time later, on his way back from Caroline’s bedroom, he saw Felipe and his mother just about to leave the castle. Standing there on the upper gallery, he viewed their sober features and felt something pick at the stone it was reputed he had for a heart.
‘Felipe,’ he said. The other man’s dark head came up and he spun on his heel to glance upwards. ‘We need to talk,’ he murmured quietly.
Instantly Luiz could see the battle taking place behind the defensive aggression pasted onto his handsome features. Then, on a sigh, Felipe gave a curt nod of his head. ‘One day,’ he replied. Maybe he, like Luiz, had had enough of the lies and bitterness and betrayal. ‘One day…’ he repeated, and turned away again.
Luiz watched gravely as his aunt lifted her pale face up to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she said, but Luiz understood. After all, what else could she add that could take away what had gone before?
When he went back into his bedroom, he found his bride no longer there. Tossing the diaries onto the tumbled bed, he went looking for her and found her soaking in a bath of steaming bubbles. It took him ten seconds to join her, uncaringly sloshing water over the rim onto the tiled floor as he climbed in behind her then sat down and drew her back against him.
‘I’ve just seen Felipe and my aunt leaving,’ he told her levelly.
Caroline nodded. ‘She told me they would leave tonight.’
‘I didn’t want them to do that.’ He sighed. ‘I never meant to actually throw them out of here. Family is family…’
‘Warts and all?’ She nodded, ‘I know,’ she said referring to her own feckless father. Picking up one of his hands, she began kissing his fingers. ‘Did you read the diaries?’ she asked.
‘Mmm.’ His other hand slid up her slippery flesh until it found and closed around one of her breasts. ‘I knew some of it,’ he confessed. ‘First from my mother and then from my father, when we did eventually attempt to communicate.’
‘Seven years ago,’ Catherine sighed out bleakly, thinking of all those years they’d lost.
‘Seven years ago,’ he agreed. ‘When I made the trip to Spain to arrogantly lay claim to my roots and met the woman who claimed me instead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, thinking about how ruthlessly her father had used one of them against the other.
‘I told your father that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you,’ he informed her heavily. ‘He politely informed me where I could go. I wasn’t good enough for his daughter, he said. At the time I agreed with him.’ He grimaced. ‘Still do, actually.’
‘But you’ll have me anyway,’ Caroline added smilingly. ‘There really isn’t much to pick between you, my father and poor Felipe,’ she said. ‘You’re all too self-motivated to be true.’
‘Felipe was right when he compared my father’s life with the life of the ancestor who built this castle,’ Luiz remarked gruffly. ‘It was history repeating itself.’
Twisting in the water until she was facing him, Caroline murmured softly, ‘Not this time, though. This time the Conde got his woman. That makes for a happy ending.’
Eyes like dark chasms filled with satisfaction. ‘A very happy ending,’ Luiz agreed huskily, and began to kiss her…
The Bellini Bride
Michelle Reid
CHAPTER ONE
THE BED was a sea of rumpled white linen. Tangled amongst it Marco Bellini could see a long golden leg bent at the knee and the smooth silken-curve of a hip and thigh. The rest was covered by fine white sheeting but for a slender arm and the rippling swathe of strawberryblonde hair flowing away from the kind of profile that would have launched ships in times gone by.
Only her name was not Helen, it was Antonia, and, although her beauty might have launched many metaphorical ships in her time, there was no disputing to whom she now belonged.
Leaning back against the balcony rail, Marco allowed himself a smile as he brought his coffee cup to his lips. It was still very early, but the sun was already hot against his naked back. He had come out onto the terrace directly from his shower, and the white towel draped low around his narrow hips was his only concession to modesty, here, in his summer villa perched high on the hill above Portofino, where the only eyes to see him belonged to the seagulls soaring on the early morning currents of air.
And Antonia, of course, if she bothered to wake up. But, unlike him, she didn’t have to be back in Milan by nine o’clock,