Italian Bachelors: Brooding Billionaires: Ravelli's Defiant Bride / Enthralled by Moretti / The Playboy's Proposition

‘Di niente...no problem,’ Cristo fielded, his wide, sensual mouth compressed. ‘By the way...I mean a real marriage.’

‘Real...?’ Belle spluttered to a halt, the tip of her tongue stealing out to wet her dry lower lip. His intent dark gaze flashed pure naked gold to that tiny movement. Heated colour swept her face as she grasped his meaning in growing disbelief. ‘You’d expect me to sleep with you?’

‘Of course,’ Cristo murmured with an indolent assurance that suggested that that idea was entirely normal and acceptable. ‘I have no plans to emulate my father and entertain mistresses while I’m married. And I don’t want a wife who plays around behind my back either. That kind of lifestyle would not provide a stable home for the children.’

Belle got his point, she really did, but she flushed scarlet at the thought of sharing a bed with him, suddenly very conscious of her own lack of sexual experience. Growing up, she’d had to combat the expectations of the local boys who saw her mother as free and easy in that department and she had had to prove over and over again that she was different. Saying no had been a matter of pride and self-preservation, but as she got older that conditioning along with other needs and insecurities had influenced her and trusting a man enough to drop her guard and make love had proved to be even more of a challenge for Belle.

Cristo settled a business card into her limp hand and she stared down at it blankly.

‘My private cell number. Let me know by seven this evening, bellezza mia,’ he instructed with unblemished cool. ‘That way I can make an immediate start on the arrangements.’

CHAPTER FIVE (#uca032b44-5670-52ad-a716-c379e0f219ac)

‘DON’T DO THIS...don’t do this...’ Isa’s constant refrain was still sounding like a death knell in Belle’s ears as she climbed out of the car Cristo had sent to collect her and mounted the steps that led up into the chapel of St Jude’s. She was wearing an elegant but rather plain vintage dress with a boat-shaped lace neckline. It was her late mother’s wedding gown.

The symbolism of that gesture had appealed to her and in the three weeks that had passed since she last saw Cristo she’d had the dress lengthened to suit her greater height. Mary might never have got her Ravelli to the altar but her daughter was succeeding where she had failed, Belle could not help reflecting with guilty satisfaction. She knew it wasn’t right to feel that way because Cristo was not Gaetano and he had not committed his father’s sins but she couldn’t help it. She was the talk of the neighbourhood, for nobody was quite sure how she had hooked a husband who had only set foot in Ireland for the first time less than a month ago. Indeed there was a crowd of well-wishers waiting outside the old church, quietly ignoring Cristo’s request that the wedding be regarded as a private affair.

Of course, Cristo definitely knew how to garner support and respect in the locals, Belle conceded ruefully. He had decided not to sell Mayhill but to instead gift the historic house to the village as a community centre and endow it for the future. Money talked, money certainly talked very loudly in an area where incomes were low and jobs were few. Mayhill would put the village on the map by becoming a tourist attraction and its maintenance and the business prospects it would provide would offer many employment opportunities. And naturally, it was tacitly and silently understood by the recipients of Cristo’s extraordinary largesse that his father’s affair with Mary Brophy and the birth of their children were matters to be buried in the darkest, deepest closet never to see the light of day again.

Her sisters, thirteen-year-old Donetta and eight-year-old Lucia, were beaming at her from a front pew. Her brothers Bruno, Pietro and little Franco were beside them. Bruno was frowning, too intelligent to be fooled by the surface show and still suspicious of what was happening to his family.

‘Do you really want to marry Gaetano’s son?’ Bruno had demanded the night before when he had returned from school with Donetta, both teenagers granted special leave for the occasion of their sister’s wedding.

‘It was love at first sight,’ Belle had lied, determined to remove the lines of concern from his brow and the too anxious look from his sensitive gaze. ‘And how can you ask me that?’

‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you...but it seems very convenient in the circumstances. I mean, here we are, broke, virtually homeless and sinking fast and along comes Cristo Ravelli in the rescue boat and suddenly our every dream is coming true,’ Bruno had recited thinly. ‘It doesn’t feel real to me—it’s too good to be true. How did you finally bury the hatchet?’

‘What hatchet?’

‘You grew up hating the Ravelli family and now all of a sudden you’re marrying one of them?’

‘He’s your brother,’ Belle had reminded the teenager stubbornly.

‘He’s a super-rich banker and as sharp as a whip. It’s you I’m concerned about. What do you know about being married to a guy like that?’ Bruno had asked worriedly. ‘He lives in a different world.’

But right now, Cristo was in Belle’s world, she savoured helplessly, finally allowing herself to look at the tall, well-built male waiting for her at the altar. Not an iota of the traditional bridegroom’s nervous tension showed on his lean, darkly handsome features. In fact he might just have been an attendant at someone else’s wedding for all the awareness he was showing. Unconsciously, Belle’s chin lifted as if she had been challenged; her heart was pounding fast as a hammer blow behind her ribs and her spine was rigid with all the tension he lacked. After all, she had barely slept since texting him a single word, ‘Yes’, on the day he had proposed to her on the beach.

Accepting had taken a massive amount of courage and she had garnered that courage only by focusing on the advantages of marrying Cristo Ravelli and suppressing all awareness of the downsides. Her family would finally be safe, absolutely safe and secure and that was the bottom line and the only important thing she should concentrate on. What it cost her personally wasn’t important and couldn’t be weighed on the scale of such things.

After all, she had never been in love and was even more certain that she didn’t want to fall in love with anyone. Her memories of her mother’s unhappiness during Gaetano’s long absences were still fresh as a daisy. Mary had only really come alive when Gaetano was around. Every time he departed it had broken Mary’s heart afresh and he would leave her pining and lifeless with only the occasional brief phone call to anticipate while she counted the weeks and days until his next visit. Belle had kept one of those painstakingly numbered calendars as a reminder of what such unstinting, unhesitating love, loyalty and devotion could do to wreck a woman’s life. Mary had lived for Gaetano. Belle only wanted to live for her family and ensure that they enjoyed a much happier and more stable childhood than she had received.

Isa was staying on in the Lodge for the summer and had insisted that Bruno, Donetta and the twins stay on there with her, leaving only Franco to stay with Belle because her little brother was too attached to her to be separated from her for weeks on end. ‘You get your marriage sorted out before you uproot the kids to London and new schools and all the rest of it,’ her grandmother had told her bluntly. ‘You know I don’t approve of what you’re doing and if there’s a risk that this marriage will only last as long as it takes you to come to your senses, you shouldn’t drag the children into it with you.’

Belle had argued until she was finally forced to acknowledge that the older woman was talking good sense. Of course there was a chance that she and Cristo wouldn’t make a go of their ‘practical’ marriage. She would have to make a success of their relationship before she could risk disrupting the children’s lives and bringing them to London to live on a permanent basis. That was a pretty tall order when she had, more or less, agreed to marry a complete stranger.

Thinking along those lines, Belle decided she had to have been insane to say yes with so little thought. It was not that she had not thought about things, simply that she had avoided considering the negative aspects. Going to bed with Cristo had to be one of the more intimidating negative aspects, she conceded, turning hot and cold at the very thought of it, but just living with Cristo, indeed with any man, would surely be the ultimate challenge.

Wintry dark eyes slashed with gold by the sunlight piercing the stained-glass window behind him, Cristo watched his bride approach. She looked absolutely amazing in white, red gold curls tumbling round her narrow shoulders, her bright head crowned by a simple seed-pearl coronet. Lust engulfed Cristo in a drowning wave and his wide, sensual mouth compressed hard. Maledizione! He was convinced that he had never wanted a woman as much before yet he was equally convinced that she would ultimately prove as disappointing as her predecessors. Of course she would, he reflected impatiently, being no fan of optimism or fairy stories. But at least he already knew the worst of her, which was that she was a virtual blackmailer, a gold-digger and a social climber. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, he conceded sardonically and he was exceptionally well versed on the habits and needs of mercenary women.

Her hand trembled in his when he slid on the wedding ring. A nice touch, he thought cynically, a bridal display of nerves and modesty and utterly wasted on Cristo, who was the last man alive likely to be impressed or taken in by such pretences. He was gaining a very beautiful and desirable wife, he reminded himself doggedly, and putting a lid on the threat of an unsavoury scandal. Even his brothers didn’t know what he was doing, for the last thing he would have risked was bringing either of them to the scene of Gaetano’s reckless shenanigans in this little Irish village.

Cristo pretty much ignored Belle on the short drive back to the Lodge, where a small catered buffet and drinks had been laid on for the family and the few friends invited. It had not escaped Belle’s notice that Cristo had not invited a single person and it bothered her, making her wonder if he was ashamed of her and her humble background and lack of designer polish.

Bruno walked up to Cristo in the hall. ‘Could we have a word?’ he asked, youthful face taut and pale.

Bruno was the living image of Zarif as a teenager and that likeness had unsettled Cristo at their first brief and awkward meeting the evening before. It seemed that Gaetano had stamped the Ravelli genes very firmly on all his offspring.

‘Is there a problem?’ Cristo enquired, a fine ebony brow lifting.

The teenager backed into the small space at the foot of the stairs and said gruffly, ‘If you hurt my sister like your father hurt my mother, I swear I’ll kill you.’

Cristo almost laughed but a stray shard of compassion squashed his amusement when he recalled his own turbulent teenaged years. In any case the warning had all the hallmarks of a prepared speech and, having delivered it, Bruno was backing off fast, troubled brown eyes nervously pinned to Cristo as though he was expecting an immediate physical attack. Before the boy could leave, Christo called him back.

‘We’re family now and I’m not like my father in any way,’ Cristo responded very quietly to the teenager. ‘I have no desire to hurt any woman.’

From a tactful distance, Belle absorbed that little interplay. Although she hadn’t heard the conversation, she suspected that Bruno had probably been very rude in his outspoken need to protect her and she recognised with a sense of unfamiliar warmth that Cristo had handled her kid brother with surprising sympathy. Their kid brother, she mentally corrected, yet there it was—Cristo might not be ready yet to acknowledge that blood tie, but he had restrained both his cutting tongue and his temper when he dealt with Bruno and she was grateful for his kindness.

As Bruno moved hurriedly away, his goal evidently accomplished, Cristo studied the slim dark man whose eyes were welded to Belle’s vibrant face as she talked to her grandmother’s friends. Cristo stiffened, aggression powering through him as he recognised the son of the land agent, Petrie. Petrie’s son, Mark, was attracted to his wife. His wife. The shock of that designation ricocheted through Cristo as well and he suppressed his awareness of both strange reactions. He concentrated on Belle instead and watched when she fell still the instant she saw him looking at her, enabling him to clearly see her sudden tension and insecurity.

The golden power of Cristo’s gaze was almost mesmeric in its intensity and Belle gulped down the rest of the wine in her glass.

‘Eat something,’ Isa instructed. ‘You didn’t have any breakfast.’

Belle accepted the sandwich extended for the sake of peace, for although her tummy felt hollow it had nothing to do with hunger. ‘I’ll go and get changed,’ she said uneasily, ruffling Franco’s curly head where he stood by her side.

Cristo was still in the hall, detached from the small crowd by a barrier of reserve that chilled her.

‘He’s not very friendly, is he?’ her sister Donetta whispered in her ear.

Belle forced a smile, cursing Cristo’s detachment and his clear reluctance to use the opportunity to get to know his younger siblings. ‘He’s just shy.’

‘Shy?’ Donetta gasped in surprise.

‘Very shy,’ Belle lied, wanting to lay the teenager’s concerns to rest. ‘It’ll be different when he gets to know all of you properly.’

And the burden of ensuring that it would be different was on her shoulders, Belle acknowledged apprehensively, registering what a challenge she had set herself. Cristo had been raised an only child and a family the size of hers had to be a shock to his reticent nature. Franco was tugging at his jacket, looking up at Cristo with adoring brown eyes, and Cristo was at least tolerating the child, she reasoned ruefully, wondering if that was the most she could hope for from him when it came to the children. And her? Would he only be tolerating her as well? A shiver of distaste at that image ran down her back until she was warmed by the recollection of his considered response to Bruno.

‘Where are you going?’ Cristo enquired when she brushed past him to head for the stairs.

‘I’m getting changed...for the flight you mentioned,’ she extended awkwardly, lashes screening her strained green eyes.

He was her husband, for goodness’ sake, and he had decreed that they would be flying out of Ireland within hours of the ceremony. She had thought about arguing but then had seen no point in trying to put off the inevitable. She had given up her life to enter his and leaving home was the first step in that process.

‘No. I like the dress. Don’t take it off.’

Thoroughly taken aback by the command, Belle glanced up at him in astonishment at the request. ‘I can’t trudge through an airport dressed like this.’

‘I have a private jet and we won’t be trudging anywhere. Don’t take the dress off, bellezza mia,’ Cristo instructed sibilantly, a strong dark forefinger curling below her chin to lift it so that she collided with smouldering golden eyes. ‘I want to be the one who takes it off.’