Fascination: The Sicilian's Ruthless Marriage Revenge

He had never been possessive where his lovers were concerned. His previous relationships had always been brief, never lasting longer than a month or two, and at the first sign of any serious intent on the woman’s behalf he would end the affair and move on.

This slight possessiveness he felt where Robin was concerned had to be because she was to be his wife, and as such he would require exclusivity, he assured himself.

‘There, now.’ Robin smiled at him mischievously once the wine waiter had left their table, the bottle of wine completely satisfactory this time. ‘That didn’t hurt too much, did it?’

‘I did not apologise because you thought that I should,’ he told her haughtily. ‘I merely realised I was not … polite to him earlier,’ he accepted curtly.

No, he hadn’t been, Robin acknowledged—but she doubted that too many other people had ever told this man when he was being impolite, let alone reproved him for it as she had.

She sat back as their first course was placed on the table—pâté for Cesare, smoked salmon for herself—very aware that several other women in the restaurant had looked at Cesare admiringly when they’d arrived together a short time ago, and that several of those women were still eyeing him covetously.

He did look rather tall, dark, and handsome tonight, she allowed ruefully, with that overlong dark hair curling silkily onto the collar of the pale grey shirt he wore beneath a charcoal grey suit. His dark good looks and those dark brown eyes were riveting, to say the least, and the expert tailoring of his suit showed his wide shoulders, tapered waist and thighs to their advantage.

Something that at least half a dozen other women in the restaurant seemed just as aware of!

‘This marriage you’re proposing between the two of us, Cesar—’ she kept her gaze lowered on her smoked salmon ‘—is it to be an exclusive relationship? Or are you expecting me to ignore the odd mistress or ten?’ She looked up at him challengingly as she said the last.

Cesare had been in the process of eating some of his toast and pâté, but he put it back down on his plate as he frowned across at her. ‘Would it bother you if I was?’ he probed softly.

She pulled a face. ‘No one likes to be made to look a fool. I just thought it might be better if I was aware of the … arrangement beforehand, that’s all.’

No, it was not all, Cesare reflected darkly. If he were to take mistresses during their marriage, then no doubt Robin would consider she had the same freedom to take a lover, or lovers. But, as he had never shared a lover, neither did he intend sharing his wife.

‘There will be no mistresses, Robin,’ he vowed. ‘I have no idea why you should think there would be when I will have a perfectly desirable wife waiting for me at home. Now, do you think we could eat our meal this evening without the danger of the indigestion I am sure both of us suffered yesterday?’ he added, before she could come back at him with any of her clever replies.

Robin raised blonde mocking brows. ‘I’ve already told you—I slept perfectly well last night.’

Cesare glared at her frustratedly for several long seconds before leaning forward across the table to easily hold her startled gaze with his. ‘Perhaps I should warn you that at this moment this tabletop is looking very tempting as a place to make love to you!’ he hissed between gritted teeth.

Those purple eyes remained locked with his for several long, expectant seconds, like a deer caught in the headlights of a car, and the sexual tension between them was so strong Cesare felt as if he could almost reach out and touch it.

‘Good—I see that we understand each other.’ He finally nodded his satisfaction at her silence, his teeth showing very white as he smiled. ‘Now, could we eat our food? Please?’ he requested dryly, as he remembered her reaction to anything she construed as an instruction on his part.

Robin’s hand shook slightly as she picked up her fork and began to eat her smoked salmon, not even tasting its delicacy as she recognised the sexual awareness that was once again singing through her veins.

She had never been so aware of anyone in her life as she was Cesare, and she wondered what it meant.

If it meant anything!

She could just be one of those frustrated women who suffered from sexual starvation at the end of their marriage. Especially as she knew now exactly what a wonderfully satisfying lover Cesare was …

‘I spoke to my father about you this morning,’ she ventured, once they had eaten their first course and the plates had been taken away.

Cesare raised dark brows. ‘In what way?’ he prompted guardedly.

She grimaced. ‘I told him that you had ravished me last night and now I had to marry you! In what way do you think I spoke to him about you, Cesare?’ She sighed her impatience with his suspicion.

He shrugged wide shoulders. ‘You could have decided to tell him of my … intentions towards Ingram Publishing.’

‘Hardly likely, after all the trouble I’ve already gone to to keep it from him—’

‘Trouble?’ Cesare repeated in a dangerously quiet voice.

Robin’s cheeks flushed uncomfortably, and she knew he had to be referring to the time she had wantonly spent in his arms yesterday evening. ‘I merely told my father that we have been seeing each other since the two of us were introduced last weekend,’ she snapped. ‘And that when—if—you propose to me, I intend accepting.’

Cesare gave a humourless smile. ‘And how did Charles take to the possibility of having me as a son-in-law?’

‘Badly.’ Robin didn’t even attempt to prevaricate. ‘But he’ll come round,’ she added confidently.

‘I admire your optimism,’ Cesare drawled.

It was impossible not to admire this woman, Cesare acknowledged. She certainly hadn’t backed off from his threats, and now she had opened the subject of their relationship with her father too. Which he appreciated could not have been easy.

‘Perhaps if you hadn’t sent his letter of condolence back quite so—aggressively?’ she reminded him.

Cesare’s mouth tightened. ‘My sister had been dead a matter of months; I was not feeling … kindly disposed towards anyone, let alone a member of the Ingram family.’

In fact he had felt murderous at the time. Carla had gone for ever, and Marco had been left completely parentless—although Cesare still hadn’t given up on finding the man who had deserted Carla when she’d most needed his support; he had a private investigator looking into exactly who had been his sister’s lover fifteen months ago. Because he would find Marco’s father, and when he did—

‘My father—both of us—we were suffering too,’ Robin reminded him huskily.

Yes, he could see that now. Cesare realised that Robin and her father had still loved the reprobate that Simon Ingram had become, that they had felt his death as keenly as he had felt Carla’s.

But that realisation changed nothing.

Made absolutely no difference to his own plans to make Robin his wife.

In fact, Cesare was even more determined on that resolve since last night!

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘I’M STILL NOT absolutely convinced this is a good idea,’ Robin told Cesare later that evening, as the two of them went up to his hotel suite in the private lift.

He eyed her mockingly as he leant back nonchalantly on the other side of the lift. ‘Scared, Robin?’ he taunted.

‘Of you? No,’ she asserted, even as her fingers tightly gripped her evening bag. He wasn’t the one she was scared of—it was her own response to him that scared her. ‘I’m just not sure my father is ready for me to stay out all night, now that he will naturally assume I’m with you.’

‘You are twenty-seven years old—’

‘But I’m living in my father’s house at the moment,’ she returned swiftly.

Cesare shrugged, standing back to let her vacate the lift first once it had stopped at the penthouse floor. ‘You still have time to change your mind.’

Yes, she did, not having made the phone call to her father yet to tell him she wouldn’t be back tonight.

But, despite her uncertainty about exactly where in this spacious hotel suite Cesare would expect her to sleep—or not, as the case might be—Robin knew that she didn’t want to change her mind.

Her uncertainty about Cesare’s intentions apart, she just might see Marco again, might have the chance to hold him again as she had been aching to do since meeting him yesterday.