The Wedding Charade Read online

  Jade frowned and angled her head at him suspiciously.

  ‘I … I did?’

  He gave a nod as he set the tray down on the bed right next to her tightly clenched thighs. ‘I found you sleepwalking at about two in the morning,’ he said. ‘Do you do that often?’

  She felt her face colour up. ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Hasn’t a previous lover found you wandering about like a ghost in the past?’ he asked.

  Jade rolled her lips together. She looked down at the curl of steam coming from the teapot on the tray, wondering if Nic, like her father, thought there was something wrong with her, something seriously wrong as inside her head. She had walked in her sleep at regular intervals in the first few months after her mother had died. Jon had usually found her wandering around the house and had gently led her back to bed. After he had been killed she had started again, only this time her father had wanted her to see someone about it. She had seen the disgust on his face, the disappointment that his only living child was defective in some way.

  ‘Jade?’ Nic tipped her face his way with the blunt tip of his index finger.

  Jade felt the pulse of heat pass from his body to hers. It was like a slow burn on her skin, making it quiver with a longing she could not explain. ‘NO,’ she said and sent her tongue out over her bone-dry lips. ‘No one has ever mentioned it. I used to sleepwalk when I was a child. I thought I had stopped ages ago but it must have been the stress of the wedding and moving and so on.’

  He exchanged his finger for his thumb on her chin, using it like a soft brush over the sensitive area just below her bottom lip. ‘Sometimes I get the feeling you are not the person everyone thinks you are,’ he said, his eyes holding hers as his thumb continued its mesmerising action.

  Jade disguised a swallow. ‘Wh …what makes you say that?’ she asked, annoyed at the slight catch in her voice.

  His eyes were more brown than green this morning, reminding her of the shadows deep inside a forest. ‘You have perfected your don’t-mess-with-me-I-don’t-give-a-damn air, but I think deep inside you are crying out for attention. You push everyone away but what you really want is someone to be close to, someone who understands you and accepts you as you are.’

  Jade felt cornered. The tray containing the hot tea had her trapped on one side and she knew if she moved to the other it would spill and possibly burn Nic. ‘I have no idea of what you are talking about,’ she said, schooling her features into an expression of boredom.

  He gave a slowly spreading smile and brushed the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip. It was like an electric shock as soon as his flesh touched hers; every nerve in her mouth leapt and tingled, eager for more. She wanted to send her tongue out again to taste where he had been but she fought the urge with an enormous effort. ‘You play the glamorous socialite so well,’ he said in a low, deep burr. ‘You dress the part, you act the part, but there’s something about you that doesn’t quite fit.’

  She tried to lift her chin but he captured it between his thumb and index finger as if he had anticipated her movement even before she had done so herself. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t like it when I touch you like this?’ he asked as he traced a slow-moving finger down the curve of her cheek.

  Jade felt a responding quiver deep in her belly. ‘I … um …n-no.’

  ‘What about this?’ he asked, leaning in and pressing a barely touching kiss to her left temple.

  ‘N …no,’ she croaked and then swallowed as he moved to her right temple. She felt a shiver pass through her, awakening every sense inside her body.

  ‘What about here?’ he asked and kissed the edge of her mouth, not on her lips but close enough for her to feel the masculine rasp of his unshaven skin.

  Heat exploded inside her, blistering heat that threatened to consume everything in its path, like her resistance and resolve, for instance. ‘Don’t do this to me, Nic,’ she said in a breathless little voice that sounded nothing like her own. ‘It will only make things so much harder in the end.’

  His eyes lasered hers, holding them, searching them, as if he was looking for her soul in their depths. It seemed a very long time before he spoke. ‘You’re right,’ he said, resettling the tray, which was threatening to slip off the bed. He stood upright and added, ‘Have your breakfast. I have some work to see to, in any case.’

  Jade blinked in a combination of surprise and disappointment. He could switch off his feelings just like that? She was still smouldering like hot coals while he was acting as if all of this was a game, a test to see how far he could go with her. She seethed as he strode nonchalantly out of the room. No doubt the business he had in mind had something to do with his mistress. He would probably be emailing or texting her within minutes and laughing about his loveless contract marriage and the money he stood to gain at the end of it. A year tied to a woman he had no respect for, no feelings for other than transient lust.

  Jade pushed the untouched breakfast to one side as she got out of the bed. She had to remind herself that she had no choice but to put up with things as they were. She needed the money far more than Nic did. She could not survive without it. It wasn’t as if she could go out and get a job. She had no skills, no qualifications and no experience.

  The only thing she could do was paint, but who was going to pay her to do that when there were literally thousands of gifted art students selling their wares on the streets all over Europe? She had seen them in Milan the last time she had visited Salvatore before he’d died. A young man had sold her a beautiful watercolour of the Castillo. She had been generous to him, but how many people would do that for her? She had spent hours in galleries over the years, studying the masters and watching DVDs on their work, but none of it gave her the qualifications or indeed the confidence to feel a part of the art world. She felt like a fraud, a child dabbling in amongst gifted adults, pretending she had a chance to be like them. She didn’t even have a proper studio. She had nowhere to set out her things so she could come and go as she pleased without having to pack everything up all the time.

  She chewed at her lip as she looked out of the window of the villa. The lake was shimmering with the sunlight dancing on its surface in the distance. It was such a stunning view. She had been distracted by it so many times yesterday while she was supposed to be acting the role of the besotted bride. Her fingers had been twitching to get to her paints and brushes to capture the light on the water, or the way the roses in the garden hung from the terrace in a scented arras. Then there was the villa itself, so old and stately, so magnificently placed above the lake, set on five levels, with so many rooms surely there would be one she could use as a studio while they were here.

  Jade quickly showered and dressed and, pulling her long hair back into a ponytail, she went on a tour of the villa. Even from her privileged background, she couldn’t help being impressed by the villa’s priceless artworks and sculptures. The marble floors were softened with Persian rugs and the antique furniture gave each room an old world charm that somehow was both stately and homely at the same time.

  If there were any household staff around they were keeping themselves well in the background as Jade ran into no one while she was going from floor to floor and room to room.

  She came to a room on the third level of the house that was clearly a nursery, but not a modern one. It was like stepping back in time as she walked through the threshold of the squeaky door. A shiver ran up her spine like a spider in a hurry as she looked about the room.

  A teddy bear was leaning sideways in the cot. A jack-in-the-box was hanging over the edge of the mantelpiece where he had been released all those years ago and no one had thought to put him back inside ready for the next leap out. A doll with wide-open glassy eyes sat next to him, her pretty pink dress faded with the passage of time until it was almost but not quite white.

  Over thirty years ago a baby girl called Chiara had been put to bed in that cot under the window and the next mornin
g her oldest brother Giorgio had come in and found her lifeless.

  Jade could feel the weight of grief close in on her. It was like a presence in the room. It reminded her of how her mother’s room had felt when she had been told she was never coming home. Jade had gone in there repeatedly, just to check, just to see if everyone was wrong. She could still smell her mother’s perfume. She had picked up her mother’s lipstick tube and felt sure her mother would be back to reapply it as she so regularly did. Jade had felt her mother’s presence as if she hadn’t really been dead, but just waiting for the right time to come back. She had even dressed in her mother’s clothes whenever she could until the day her father had ordered for them to be sent to a charity. It had taken years for her to accept her mother was not going to come back to her, years and years of quiet desperation until she had finally given up all hope.

  Tears burned in her eyes as she went over to the cot. There was a soft pink blanket tucked in neatly, embroidered with little rosebuds. She trailed a fingertip over the fabric, wondering what that little girl would be like now if she had not died such an early tragic death. Would she be married with a baby or two of her own? Would she love her brothers as they clearly loved and supported each other? Would she have welcomed Jade to the family as graciously as everyone had, considering her tainted reputation?

  ‘What are you doing?’ Nic’s voice spoke from the doorway.

  Jade spun around, her heart leaping to her throat. ‘I …I was just looking around … ‘ she said lamely.

  His eyes swept over the room, a mask settling over his face like a blind coming down over a window. ‘This place needs to be cleaned out and redecorated. I’ve been telling my mother that for years.’

  ‘Is that why you insisted on being married here?’ Jade asked. ‘To force her to face her grief?’

  ‘Thirty-one years is a long time,’ he said, glancing at the Tower of Pisa teddy bear before returning his gaze to hers. ‘My mother never really recovered from the loss; I understand that part. No parent should lose a child; it’s not the right order of things. That’s why I understand what your father went through. But I felt it was time to move on. This place used to be our holiday home. I was too young to remember it, of course, but Giorgio and Luca said we spent every summer here. It seems such a waste to have it and not use it.’ ‘Why not sell it?’

  ‘It’s been in our family for generations,’ he said. ‘When Giorgio and Maya were going through their divorce she wanted to have it as part of the divorce settlement. Giorgio dug his heels in, however. There was no way any one of us would part with this place, not under any circumstances.’

  Jade could see why, now she had toured most of the rooms and taken in the view from each of the windows. And then there was the fact that this was the last place their baby sister had smiled and chortled. It would be very hard to sell and move out after something as deeply personal and tragic as that. She wondered then if Nic’s shallow take on life hid a deeper soul than he let on publicly. He lived life in the moment, but there was a side to him that suggested he was a lot more sensitive than most people realised. She wondered if the death of his sister had affected him more than he let on. He had been young, yes, but his parents would have been devastated by their grief. Perhaps Nic had been left to fend for himself during that tragic time. Small children picked up on even the most subtle of changes in a household, let alone something as tragic as the loss of a sibling. They could be affected in ways the experts were only just discovering now. The sense of abandonment at such a tender age could permanently change the architecture of a small child’s brain. Had Nic shut off his feelings because there was no one there to listen to him, to be there for him? Who had cuddled and comforted him? His brothers would have been far too young to see to his emotional needs. Nic had been a toddler, younger than little Ella. It was so sad to think of him wandering about this huge villa with no one to take proper emotional care of him apart from nannies and servants.

  ‘Why do you love this place so much if you were too young to even remember it?’ she asked.

  His expression was still shuttered. ‘I am not as sentimental about it as my brothers are but I still don’t think it should be left empty for most of the year.’

  ‘How do you think your mother coped with coming back here after all this time?’ she asked.

  His broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. ‘She was emotional, as you saw, but then my mother has always been that way. She coped pretty well, I think. She came up here to the nursery with Maya. Maya said she thought it was a major turning point for Mamma. She needed to come back, to say a proper goodbye. She didn’t get the chance at the time. It all happened so suddenly. It was so different back then. There wasn’t much information on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. For years my mother blamed herself. I think she thought everyone else blamed her too.’

  ‘Is that why you don’t want to have children?’ Jade asked.

  His expression tightened, as if pulled inward by invisible strings. ‘No, Jade, I am just selfish, like you said. I value my freedom too much. This marriage is a means to an end. Don’t get any ideas of making it anything it was never meant to be.’

  Jade opened her mouth to respond but, before a single word could come out, he had turned and left her with the silent ghosts of the past.

  When Jade came downstairs later that evening she found Nic in the salone, pouring himself a drink. He turned when he heard her come in and held up the bottle he was holding. ‘Would you care to join me in a drink?’ he asked.

  Jade agreed to have a very weak white wine spritzer and sat on the edge of one of the sumptuous sofas, holding the frosted glass in her hands once he had fixed it for her.

  ‘SO,’ he said, looking down at her with a mocking smile lurking about his mouth. ‘Here we are then. Our second day of marriage is almost over. Only three hundred and sixty-three to go.’

  She returned his look with a little hoist of her chin. ‘You’re not the only one counting the days, Nic.’

  ‘I know of a very good way to pass the time,’ he said with a dark glint in his eyes.

  Jade felt a frisson of excitement rush through her in spite of her determination to keep things cool and impersonal between them. All day long she had lived with the expectation of running into him while she moved about the villa and its grounds. Every corner she turned, every door she opened and every corridor she traversed, she had felt a flicker of heady expectation that at some point Nic would track her down. Why he hadn’t both intrigued and irritated her. ‘I am sure you are very practised in spending time in pointless liaisons,’ she said.

  ‘How is your mistress taking the news of your marriage, by the way?’

  He took a deep sip of his drink before he answered. ‘She was coming up to her use-by date, in any case. I have no time for clingy, needy women. They bore me senseless.’

  Jade felt as if a dagger had just pinned her heart to her backbone. She would stand no chance with him if he knew even half of the needs and insecurities she had. That she even wanted a chance with him showed how vulnerable she had become. A few days ago she had hated him with a vengeance … Now she was not so sure. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to take over where she left off,’ she said, keeping her voice steady and controlled with an effort.

  His cynical smile said it all. ‘I think you know what I want, Jade. You want it too, but for some reason you are holding out on me. What do you want? More money than you are already getting? ‘

  Her mouth tensed as she threw him a cutting look. ‘Is that how you charmed all those women into your bed, by dangling huge sums of money in front of them?’

  He came up close, taking her glass out of her trembling hand before she could do anything to stop him. He drew her to her feet, her body so close to his she could feel his warmth. ‘Why don’t I show you how I do it?’ he asked as he pressed a soft feather of a kiss to the side of her mouth.

  Jade could feel her body swaying towards him. She tried to counteract the urge but
it was as if her body was operating independently of her reason. A shiver fluttered like soft wings beating all the way down her spine, and her breasts tightened in heightened awareness of his warm hard chest pressed against them. She felt the stirring of his erection and for a moment had to fight not to pull away. This was not some faceless man she had been flirting with, teasing and acting out to show the world how tough she was. This was Nic; this was the one man she had always wanted.

  It was Nic Sabbatini, her husband for the next twelve months.

  He put a hand to the small of her back and pressed her against him, his breath a caress over her lips, which were aching for his kiss. ‘You are driving me crazy with those looks you keep giving me. Are you doing it deliberately to make me beg? ‘

  Jade ran the tip of her tongue out over her lips, her eyes going to his mouth—so close, so temptingly close. ‘I’m trying to be sensible about this … ‘

  ‘Forget being sensible,’ he growled just above her mouth. ‘Nothing about this arrangement is sensible, in any case.’

  Jade wasn’t sure if he came down or she rose up to meet his mouth in an explosively hot kiss. She didn’t really care. All she knew was her body was on fire for him as soon as their lips came into full contact. His tongue probed for entry and she gave a little gasp of longing, a space inside her stomach hollowing out as he stroked and teased her tongue into seductive play with his. His kiss was slow and sensual one minute and determined and daring the next. Jade felt the simmering of her blood as his teeth gently nipped at her bottom lip in little tease and tug bites that triggered something deeply primal inside her.

  His mouth moved from hers to burn across the sensitive skin of her neck and décolletage in a slow-moving journey that made every cell of her body cry out for more. She felt the liquid honey of desire between her thighs and the aching of her tight nipples where they were pressed so firmly up against his chest. The hand that had rested in the small of her back had now moved to boldly cup her bottom; the other hand was already seeking the soft swell of her right breast. She could scarcely believe the way her body responded to his touch, even though it was through the barrier of her clothes. Tremors of reaction ricocheted through her, making her ache to be naked with him, to feel him skin on skin, hot flesh on hot flesh. She placed her arms around his neck, letting her fingers delve into the thickness of his hair, relishing in the way he felt to her touch.