To her surprise, he just nodded, no clever quick counterattack, his 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, Charley realized, 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. Charley 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 touching 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

"I believe Nina said so," he returned evenly."But you don’t?" She was staring up at the face of a breathtakingly beautiful creature who could have come straight out of a Titian painting."Your hair is darker, and your eyes are grey, not blue."But the shape of her mouth, the small pointed chin, and the hourglass shape of her slender figure inside a gentian-blue gown that could only have been fashioned by the finest haute couture looked like Charley."How old is she here?" she asked with a reverent murmur."Forty-nine," he replied, dragging another gasp from Charley’s shocked lips because she looked barely eighteen. "My grandfather commissioned the painting as a gift for her fiftieth birthday." He claimed that her beauty was the only thing about her that kept them together. She claimed they stayed together because she allowed it, despite the countless affairs he enjoyed during their long marriage."She loved him, you mean.""I like to think so, though I don’t believe he deserved such

She didn’t even know if Adelina and Charles had reappeared. She hadn’t spoken to her father at all—she hadn't wanted to, and Dami hadn’t encouraged her to call him. And after their altercation about their wedding picture on their first day here, she hadn’t bothered to bring up the subject again because—well, she’d discovered that she preferred to pretend that all of this was the true reality and out there was the fantasy.He turned to look at her then, and she felt her heart squeeze to an aching standstill. He’d been in an unusually sober mood all day, and that mood still reflected in the golden eyes he lowered to the half-drunk glass in her hand, then lifted back to her too expressive eyes.I love you, she was thinking, and she just hoped to goodness he couldn’t read that as he walked towards her, the farmer having been distracted by his mobile phone."Would you mind if I finished that for you?" He took the glass from her without waiting for an answer and downed what was left of the

Ten minutes to get ready to leave was nothing compared to the nine long hours it took to fly back to Milan. Dami wasn’t talking. He’d withdrawn behind a wall of icy courtesy, and Charley couldn’t blame him. His pride had been hit, as had his integrity. Charley didn’t think he was ever going to forgive any of them for it.And the only slither of comfort she could glean from it all was that Charles’s arrest had not leaked out into the public arena. Dami spent most of the flight on the telephone, working to ensure that it remained that way.They arrived at Linate Airport early in the morning to dark clouds and heavy rain. A limousine with blackened windows picked them up and transported them to Milan.Dami remained on the phone throughout that journey too, the monotone flow of his voice never tiring, though Charley had switched it off hours ago.Half an hour later, they were in his Milan apartment. Dami was checking his mail. Charley moved off, looking around her, aware that he was watch

Why else, indeed? Charley thought bleakly. Desire? Anger? Wounded pride? a determination not to look the fool Adelina had turned him into, no matter what it cost him?She could have made the list grow and grow if he’d let her, but "Now all I want is you, so badly I ache," he roughed out, and the warm crush of his hungry mouth took away her ability to think.For the first time since their wedding night, they made love with a grim, silent intensity that pounded her wounded emotions and left her satiated but with tears on her cheeks.He gently licked them away and said nothing. He continued to hold her close and said nothing. And when she woke up the next morning, he had gone from their bed, leaving her with an ache that dragged on her insides.It was an ache that was not going to go away any time soon, and indeed, it was about to become a whole lot worse.though Charley didn’t know that when she crawled out of bed that morning. In truth, she would have preferred to remain in it, with he