Awakened By The Scarred Italian

Ciro’s mouth tightened. ‘No. It was about class.’

No, Lara thought, it was about blackmail and coercion.

But, yes, it had been about class too. Albeit not for her; she couldn’t have cared less about class. She never had. Not that Ciro would ever believe her. Not after the way she’d convinced him otherwise.

She clamped her lips together, resisting the urge to defend herself when she knew it would be futile. She hardly knew this person in front of her, even though at one time she’d felt as if she’d known every atom of his being. He’d disabused her of that romantic notion two years ago. Yet, she couldn’t deny the rapid and persistent spike in her pulse-rate ever since Ciro had revealed himself. Her body knew him.

Something caught her eye then, and she gasped. His right hand...the one holding the glass...was missing a little finger.

He saw where her gaze had gone. ‘Not very pretty, eh?’

Lara felt sick. She remembered Ciro lying in that hospital bed, his head and half his face covered in bandages...his arms... She’d been too distraught to notice much else.

‘They did that to you? The kidnappers?’ Her voice was a thread.

He nodded. ‘It amused them. They got bored, waiting for their orders.’

Lara realised that he was different. Harder. More intimidating. ‘Why am I here, Ciro?’

‘Because you betrayed me.’ He carefully put down the glass on the silver tray. And then he looked at her. ‘And I’m here to collect my due.’

My due. The words revolved sickeningly in Lara’s head.

‘I don’t owe you anything.’ The words felt cumbersome in her mouth.

Liar, whispered a voice.

‘Yes, Lara you do. You walked out on me when I needed you most, leaving me at the mercy of the press, who had a field day reviving all the old stories about my family’s links to the Mafia. Not only that, you left me without a bride.’

A spark of anger mixed with her guilt as she recalled the lurid headlines in the aftermath of the kidnapping and her subsequent engagement to Henry Winterborne. She focused on the anger.

‘You only wanted to marry me to take advantage of my connections to a society that had refused you access.’

Ciro hadn’t loved her. He’d wanted her because at first she’d intrigued him, with her naivety and innocence, and then because of her connections and her name.

Over the last two years, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, Lara had come to acknowledge how refreshing someone like her must have been for someone as jaded as him. She’d been so trusting. Loving.

If they had married it never would have lasted. Not beyond the point where her allure would have worn off and he would have become disenchanted with her innocence. Not beyond the point at which her name and connections would have served their purpose for his ambitions. Of that she had no doubt.

Of course he wasn’t going to forgive her for taking all that away from him. He was out for revenge.

For a heady moment Lara imagined telling him exactly what had happened. How events had conspired to drive them apart. How her uncle had so cruelly manipulated her. She even opened her mouth—but then she remembered Ciro’s caustic words. They resounded in her head as if he’d said them only moments ago.

‘Don’t delude yourself that I felt anything more for you than you felt for me, Lara. I wanted you, yes, but that was purely physical. More than all of that I wanted you because marrying you would have given me a stamp of respectability that money can’t buy.’

Ciro’s voice broke through the toxic memory as he said coolly, ‘I prefer to think of it as a kind of debt repayment. You said you’d marry me and I’m holding you to that original commitment. I need a wife, and I’ve no intention of getting into messy emotional entanglements when you’re so convenient.’

Lara’s blood drained south. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘Is it? Really? People have married for a lot less, Lara.’

She looked at him helplessly, torn between hating him for appearing like a magician to turn her world upside down and desperately wanting to defend herself. But she’d lost that chance when she’d informed him coldly that she’d never had any intention of going through with their marriage because she was already promised to someone else—someone eminently more suitable.

She’d told him that it had amused her to go along with his whirlwind proposal, just to see him make a fool of himself over a woman he could never hope to marry. She’d told him all her breathy words of love had been mere platitudes.

She’d never forget the look of pure loathing that had come over his face after she’d spoken those bilious words. That had been the moment when she’d realised how deluded she’d been. And on some level she’d been glad she was playing a role, that at least she knew how he’d really felt.

He was almost killed because of you.

Lara felt sick again. He hadn’t deserved that just for not loving her. And he hadn’t deserved her lies. He’d saved her from the kidnappers. He’d offered up his life for hers. And then she’d learned she’d never really been in danger. He didn’t know that, though. And right now the thought of him ever finding that out made her break out in a cold sweat. However much he hated her already, he would despise her even more.

Suddenly a ball of emotion swelled inside her chest. Lara couldn’t bear it that Ciro thought so badly of her, even if it was her fault that she’d convinced him so well. Seeing him again was ripping open a raw wound inside her, and before she knew what she was doing she took a step forward, words tumbling out of her mouth.

‘Ciro, I did want to marry you—more than anything. But my uncle...he was crazy...he’d lost everything. He didn’t want me to marry you—he saw you as unworthy of a Templeton. He forced me to say those awful things... They were all lies.’

Lara stopped abruptly and her words hung in the air. The atmosphere was thick with tension. Taut like a wire. Ciro was expressionless. She could remember a time when he’d used to look at her with such warmth and indulgence. And love, or so she’d thought. But it hadn’t been love. It had been desire. Physical desire and the desire for success.

He lifted his hands and did a slow and deliberate hand-clap, the sound loud in the room. Lara flinched.

He shook his head. ‘You really are something, Lara, you know that? But the victim act doesn’t suit you and it’s wasted on me. You really expect me to believe you were coerced into marrying a man old enough to be your father and rich enough to pay off the national debt of a small country? You forget I’ve seen your extensive repertoire of guises, and this innocent, earnest one is overdone and totally unnecessary.’

Her belly sank. She’d known it was futile to try. How could she explain how her uncle had manipulated and exploited her for his own gain since the moment he’d taken over her guardianship after her parents had died? The extent of his ruthlessness still shocked her, even now.

And she should recognise ruthlessness by now. She should have known Ciro hadn’t been making idle threats two years ago. After all, he was Sicilian through every fibre of his being. He came from a long and bloody tradition of men who meted out revenge and punishment as a way of life, even if they had tried to distance themselves from all that in recent generations.

Ciro had told her once that his ancestors had been Moorish pirates and she could well believe it. She could see that he’d been wounded beyond redemption—not in his heart, because that had never been available to wound, but in his fierce Sicilian pride. Wounded when she’d walked away, and by the ruthless kidnappers when they’d physically altered him for ever and demonstrated that even he wasn’t invincible.

She did owe him a debt. But it was a debt she couldn’t afford to pay emotionally.

Lara’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and she cursed herself for even trying to defend herself. She couldn’t bear for him to find out just how vulnerable she really was—how nothing had really moved on for her since she’d known him. How the last two years of her life had been a kind of lonely torture.

She ruthlessly pushed aside all those memories and shrugged one shoulder minutely, affecting an air of boredom. She’d played this part once before—she could do it again.

‘Well, it’s been interesting to see you again, Ciro. But quite frankly you’re even more pathetic now than you were two years ago, if this is how little you’ve moved on. What would you have done if Henry hadn’t died? Kidnapped me? Seduced me away and then meted out your punishment?’

Lara’s words fell like stinging barbs onto Ciro’s skin. They cut far too close to the bone. He had been keeping tabs on her. Getting reports on her whereabouts and her activities—which, as far as he could see, had consisted of not much at all. Not even socialising. Her husband had monopolised her attention, kept her all to himself.

Ciro hadn’t articulated to himself exactly what he was going to do where Lara was concerned, but he’d known he had reached some kind of nadir when he’d bought this house, sight unseen, because it was around the corner from where she lived. He’d known that he was reaching a place where he simply could not go on without exacting retribution.

Without seeing her again.

He crushed that rogue thought.

In the past few months, as a restless tension had increased inside him, he’d found himself contemplating seducing Lara Winterborne. He’d told himself it would be to prove just how duplicitous she was. But he knew that his motivations were murkier than that. Embedded in a place he’d locked them away two years ago, when she’d morphed into a stranger in front of his very eyes.

When she’d shown him up as a fool who had cast aside his well-worn cynical shell in a fit of blind lust and something even more disturbing. Emotion. A yearning for a life he’d never known. For a woman who was pure and who would be faithful. Loving. Loyal. A good mother. Fantasies he’d never indulged in before he’d met Lara and she’d exposed a seam of vulnerability he’d never acknowledged before.

The fact that he’d even considered seducing her away from her husband was galling for a man who had always vowed to conduct his life with more integrity than his mother—never to stoop to her level of betrayal. And yet he’d had to face the unwelcome realisation that his desires were no less base than his weak and adulterous mother’s.

Lara watched a series of expressions flicker across Ciro’s face. They gradually got darker and darker, until he was glaring at her as if she was the sum of all evil. He started moving towards her then, all coiled lethal masculinity, and Lara took an involuntary step back.

She wasn’t scared of his physicality—not even with this tension in the air. She was scared of something far more ambiguous and personal deep inside where she knew he had the ability to destroy her. Where he’d already destroyed her.

He stood in front of her, his scent winding around her like invisible captive threads. He asked with lethal softness, ‘Are you suggesting my life has been on hold?’

Before she could respond, a sound halfway between a sneer and a laugh came out of Ciro’s mouth.

‘Oh, cara, my life hasn’t been on hold for one second since you decided to take that old man into your bed.’

Lara winced inwardly. She already knew that Ciro’s life hadn’t been on hold. Far from it. As much as she’d tried to block him out of her consciousness, it had been next to impossible. Since his kidnapping he’d become even more infamous and sought-after. He’d tripled his fortune, extending the wildly successful Sant’Angelo Holdings, which had been mainly focused on real estate, to encompass logistics and shipping worldwide.

And he hadn’t been seen with the same woman twice—which was some feat, considering the frequency with which he’d been photographed at every ubiquitous glamorous event on the European and the worldwide circuit.

The gossip about his hectic love-life had quickly eclipsed any rumours about why his wedding to Lara hadn’t taken place. Most people had assumed exactly what her uncle had wanted them to assume—that the kidnapping and fresh stories of his links to the Mafia had scared off Lara Templeton, one of Britain’s most eligible society heiresses.

If anything the tone of the gossip about her had been as sneering as about Ciro—especially when she’d got married so quickly after the event, to a man more than twice her age. It was as if she’d merely proved her own snobbishness. As if she hadn’t been woman enough to handle Ciro Sant’Angelo.

Certainly all the women he had been photographed with since then had run to a type that was a million miles from Lara’s cool blonde, blue-eyed looks. Women with flashing dark eyes and glossy hair. With unashamedly sexy and curvaceous bodies and an effortless sensuality that Lara could never hope to embody. She was too self-conscious. Too...inexperienced.

Ciro was shaking his head now, a look of disgust twisting his features and making his scar stand out even more. ‘Did you keep up the virginal act with your husband? Or did you fake it right up until—?’

‘Stop it!’ The sharp cry of Lara’s voice surprised even herself. She felt shaky. ‘That wasn’t an act.’

Ciro made a rude sound, dismissing her words. More proof that she’d been utterly naive to try and defend herself. All she could hope for was that Ciro would get bored and ask her to leave.

‘Look, what do you want, Ciro?’ Lara’s voice had a distinctly desperate tone that she didn’t even try to disguise now.

‘It’s very simple. I want you, Lara.’ He folded his arms across his formidable chest. ‘It’s time to pay your debt.’

CHAPTER TWO

LARA’S SENSE OF panic and desperation increased. ‘I told—you I don’t owe you anything.’

Ciro responded, ‘We’ve been through this and, yes, you do. You owe me a wedding.’

Lara fought to stay calm. To appear unmoved. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to marry you.’

He shook his head. ‘Not ridiculous at all. Very practical, actually. Like I said, I’m in need of a wife, and as you deprived me of one so memorably two years ago, you can step up now and honour the commitment you made when you agreed to marry me in the first place.’

Vainly scrabbling around for something—anything to make sense of Ciro’s crazy suggestion, Lara asked, ‘Why do you need a wife so badly?’

‘The circles I’m moving in... Let’s just say things would be better for me if I had an appearance of stability. Settling down. Conforming to societal norms of what people expect of a man my age.’

‘An appearance... So this would just be a sham...a fake marriage?’

‘Call it a marriage of convenience.’

‘But it’ll mean nothing.’

Ciro’s lip curled. ‘As if that was a concern in your first marriage... As if you cared about Winterborne.’

Lara had to hide her flinch at that.

Ciro continued, ‘It’ll be a lesson in learning that your actions have consequences.’

She took a step backwards, surprised that her legs were still working. ‘This is beyond crazy. If marriage is so important to your image then I’m sure there are many more suitable women who would be happy to become your wife.’

Like any of the hundreds of women she’d seen on his arm over the past twenty-four months, for a start.

‘I don’t want any of them. I want you.’

Ciro was finding it hard to maintain his composure. Lara was right—there were plenty of women he knew who would jump at the opportunity to become his wife. He’d found himself seeking out women who were the antithesis of this woman’s cool blonde looks, but none of them had made his blood run hot as she could, just by standing in front of him.

For two years his bed had been lonely and he had been frustrated. Not that the world would believe it. But he hadn’t wanted any of them. He wanted Lara. And now, after two years of a kind of purgatory, hating her and wanting her, she was finally within reach again.

He would be the first to admit that his pride had suffered a huge blow when she’d walked away from him and from their marriage commitment. He was, after all, descended from a long line of proud Sicilians.

She’d accused him of only wanting to marry her to further his ambitions for social acceptance and he hadn’t been able to deny it. But it hadn’t been as much to the forefront of his desire to marry her as he’d let her believe. However, he had to admit that it had always been in the back of his mind...her strategic connections.

But, more than that, he hadn’t been done with her. When she’d told him she was a virgin—most likely a lie—Ciro had been stunned. To think that she was untouched...a rare novelty in his jaded world, had been, surprisingly, and seriously, erotic. The prospect that he would be her first lover had tipped Ciro over the edge of his restraint where Lara was concerned.

He’d always been traditional and Sicilian enough to envisage taking an innocent wife some day, but also cynical and experienced enough to know that it was next to impossible in this modern world. And yet there had been Lara, with her huge innocent blue eyes that had looked at him sometimes as if he was a hungry wolf, and her body with its slender lines and lush curves, telling him that she was this rare thing. An innocent in a world of cynics.

She’d led him a merry dance. Convincing him that she had something he’d never seen before in his life: an intoxicating naivety. But it had all been an act. For her own amusement. Because she’d been bored. Or as jaded as him.

Lara stood in front of him now, tall in her heels, but she’d still only reach his shoulder. For a second something inside him faltered.

Had her eyes always been so blue and so huge? She was pale now, her cheeks and lips almost bloodless. Because she was disgusted by his proposal? Good.

Ciro had to forcibly curb the urge to clamp his hands around her face, angle it up towards him and plunder that mouth until she was flushed and her mouth was throbbing with blood.

No other woman had ever had the same effect on him. Instantaneous. Elemental. He vowed right then that she would never see how easily she pushed him to the edge of his control.

He took a step back. Lara had denied him before but she wouldn’t deny him now. She owed him. Owed him her body and the connections a marriage to her would bring him.

‘Well, Lara?’

‘This is the day of my husband’s funeral...have you no sense of decency?’

Ciro could have laughed at her dogged refusal to stop acting. ‘Are you telling me you really cared about the old man?

The thought that she might actually be grieving for her husband slid into his mind for a second before he brutally quashed it. Impossible.

She flushed. With guilt. Ciro didn’t like the rush of relief he felt. ‘Save your energy, cara. Your acting skills are wasted on me.’

‘Stop calling me that. I’m not your cara.’

Her hands were balled into fists by her sides and her eyes were bright blue.

Ciro uncrossed his arms. ‘You never minded it before... If I remember correctly you used to love it.’ He mimicked her breathless voice, ‘“Ciro, what does it mean...? Am I really your cara?”’

‘That was before.’ Lara’s cheeks had lost their colour again.

‘Yes,’ Ciro said harshly, angry that he noticed so much about this woman. Every little tic. ‘That was when you were only too happy to court infamy by becoming engaged to me to alleviate your boredom. What I can’t quite understand, though, is the virginal act? That was a touch of authenticity that deprived us both of mutual pleasure.’

It was excruciating to Lara that Ciro remembered how ardently she’d loved him. How much she’d wanted him.

Without thinking about it, just needing to wound him as he was wounding her, she let words tumble out of her mouth. ‘I never wanted you.’

As soon as she’d said the words she realised her mistake. Colour scored Ciro’s cheekbones, making the scar stand out even more lividly. His eyes burned a dark brown, almost black. She was mesmerised by the fierce pride she could see in his expression. He was every inch the bristling Sicilian male now.

‘Little liar,’ he breathed. ‘You wanted me as much as I wanted you. More.’

He came towards her, closing the gap. Lara’s feet were frozen to the floor. He reached for her, hands wrapping around her waist, pulling her towards him, until she could feel the taut and unforgiving musculature of his body. But not even that could break her out of this dangerous stasis. She was filled with a kind of excitement she’d only ever felt with this man.

She’d thought she’d never feel it again, and something exultant was moving through her, washing aside all her reservations and the sane voices screaming at her to wake up. Pull back.

Ciro’s hands tightened on her waist and his head came down, blocking out the room, blocking out everything but him. Lara’s breath was caught in her throat, nerves tingling as she waited for that firm mouth to touch hers. It was so torturous she made a small sound of pleading...

Ciro heard the tiny sound come from Lara’s mouth. He knew this was the moment when he should pull back. He’d already proved his point. She was practically begging him to kiss her... But his body wouldn’t follow the dictates of his mind. She was like a quivering flame under his hands. So achingly familiar and yet utterly new.

He could feel the press of her high firm breasts, the flare of her hips, the cradle of her pelvis. He burned for her. He’d been such a fool to believe in her innocence. He’d held back from indulging in her treacherous body. But no longer.

Ciro gave in to the wild pulsing beat of desire in his body and claimed Lara’s mouth with his. For a second he couldn’t move—the physical sensation of his mouth on hers was too mind-blowing. And then hunger took over. He could feel her breath, sharp and choppy, and he deepened the kiss, taking it from chaste to sexual in seconds.

Lara was wrapped in Ciro’s arms, and for a moment she happily gave up any attempt to bring back reality. His touch and his kiss, that masterful way he had of touching her and bringing her alive—she’d dreamed of this so often.

His taste was heady and all-consuming. She barely noticed his hands moving up her body, cupping her face so he could angle it better and take the kiss deeper, make it even more explicit. She craved him. Pressed herself even tighter against him.

The knot at the back of her head loosened and the sensation of her hair falling around her shoulders finally broke through enough for her to falter for a moment. And a moment was all she needed to allow enough air back into her oxygen-starved brain to recall what Ciro had called her. Little liar. And she’d just proved him right.

She stiffened and pushed against Ciro. He let her go and stood back, but it was no comfort. Lara already ached for him. The glitter of triumph in his eyes only added salt to the wound she’d opened.

She felt totally dishevelled and unsteady on her feet. Her cheeks were hot and her mouth felt swollen. She’d just humiliated herself spectacularly.

She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth. ‘You had no right to—’

‘To what?’ he said silkily. ‘To demonstrate that our chemistry is still very much mutual and alive?’

It wasn’t much of a consolation that Ciro didn’t look overly thrilled about that fact.

He shook his head, his dark hair gleaming. ‘In this at least you can’t hide your true nature.’

He started to walk around her and Lara’s skin prickled. Her pulse was still pounding. She felt raw.

‘How could you do it?’ he asked from close behind her. ‘How could you take that man into your bed every night and let him—?’