The Proud Wife

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Zipping open the leather case, she pulled out a sheaf of papers that exactly matched the ones in front of both Pietro and Matteo, the ones from which the lawyer had been reading the list of conditions.

‘I’ve seen your offer of a divorce settlement and I’ve decided to reject it—totally and completely.’

At last Pietro moved, even if it was only his mouth that opened to speak in a voice that was deadly and low.

‘Then you’ll get …

‘Then I’ll get exactly what I want, husband dear—exactly what I came here to tell you I’ll take from you—and the answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I came into this marriage with nothing and I’m going out of it with exactly the same. So you can take your divorce settlement and put it—put it wherever you like. Because I want none of it!’

As she finished speaking, she tossed the documents down onto the table in front of Pietro where they landed with a heavy thud, the impact throwing up the loosened pages and sending them flying up into the air—straight into her husband’s icily controlled and rigid face.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I WANT none of it!’

The sound of Marina’s voice died away, to be replaced by the fluttering of the papers still settling down on the desk in front of him. Then the room was filled with silence, a silence so taut and intense that you could have cut it with a knife.

At Pietro’s side, Matteo had dropped his pen from his grasp and seemed to have frozen into statue form. The young secretary who had been sitting at the far end of the table, keeping tactfully quiet and trying to look inconspicuous as she took notes, was staring, goggle-eyed, with her mouth wide open.

All this Pietro took in with a single swift glance before turning his attention back to Marina. To his wife. The wife he had thought would soon be his ex.

All she had had to do was to accept the terms of the divorce he had offered and sign on the dotted line.

Instead of which …

She was still not fully back under control after her outburst of just moments before. Her chest was heaving as if she had run a marathon, the generous curves of her breasts lifting and falling with each irregular, snatched gasp of air. And the effect of her loss of temper, together with the effort of getting her breathing under control, had sent a rush of colour into those normally pale cheeks, so that now they were delightfully flushed with pink in a way that no clever make-up, no matter how subtly used, could ever achieve.

Above that wash of rose, the green eyes were bright with emotion, sparkling wildly under the thick, black lashes. Her hair had escaped from its fastening and was now starting to tumble down around her shoulders in casual disarray.

This was the woman he had first met. The woman who had knocked him off-balance so that he couldn’t think straight. She looked wild. She looked defiant. She looked magnificent. If truth be told, she had never looked so damn good—not even on their wedding day, when she had been as stunningly beautiful as he had ever imagined it was possible for a woman to be.

Perhaps later, on their wedding night—lying in their bed with that glorious hair spread out around her, bright against the creamy colour of the pillows; her mouth swollen with kisses and her green eyes deep and dark with the pleasure that came from sexual satiation?

No!

Furiously Pietro clamped down on the erotic thoughts that threatened to escape his control and forced himself to focus back on the situation in hand. He’d let them take charge once before, and look where that had got him.

The silence had stretched out now almost to breaking point, neither the secretary, nor indeed Matteo, daring to make a move to break it. Marina’s still slightly ragged breathing was the only sound in the room other than the sudden lash of rain against the windows as the rainstorm outside started up again.

It was as Marina’s wide green eyes met his, clashing sharply, that Pietro launched into action. Pushing back his chair, he got to his feet, one hand shooting out in a commanding gesture.

‘Everyone—out!’

His pointing finger indicated the door, but there was no need. Already Matteo and the secretary were heading in that direction.

So too was Marina. She had swung round on her heel and was marching out.

‘Not you!’

In a swift, pouncing movement, Pietro was round the table and at her side in a couple of determined strides. Reaching out, he caught hold of her arm, his fingers clamping tightly around her wrist when she would have ignored him and moved on.

‘I said, not you.’

The look she turned on him was mutinous, defiant, and he felt the muscles under his grasp tighten in instinctive rejection. But to his surprise she didn’t put up the struggle he anticipated, the resistance she clearly wanted to use. Perhaps it was the fact that they were in his lawyer’s office. Perhaps she realised that she couldn’t just fling that challenge—and the papers—right in his face and walk out. She must have known he would only come after her. That they would have this out sooner or later. ‘Sooner’ seemed to suit her.

And sooner definitely suited him.

‘Just what is going on?’ he flung at her as soon as the door had closed behind the other two. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

Marina’s face was a mask of pure rebellion and her eyes flashed rejection of his closeness, his words. But she answered him at least.

‘I’m not playing at anything. I meant every word I said.’

‘But you can’t. I mean, why the hell would you?’

‘Why the hell would I what, Pietro?’ she flung back at him. ‘Turn down your offer of a divorce settlement? Reject the money you would be prepared to give me if I would only accept your small, petty conditions?’

Of course, by ‘petty’ she didn’t mean small and insignificant; Pietro felt his jaw tighten against the furious response that almost escaped him.

‘I was offering you a generous—’

‘I’m sure you were,’ Marina cut in sharply. ‘After all, you are a very wealthy man and, as I said, there are laws about these things.’

This time he couldn’t hold back on his anger, outraged by the fact that she would consider that was all that mattered.

‘You think I was only offering you a settlement because of what the law says?’

Just for a moment their eyes locked together, clashing sharply so that he saw the moment her expression changed, saw the defiance and provocation leach from her gaze, leaving it darker and more subdued—a mossy green flecked with gold, rather than the sparkling, flashing emerald of just moments before.

‘No,’ she conceded, glancing down and away as her sharp white teeth worried at the soft flesh of her bottom lip. ‘No, of course I don’t think that.’

‘Then why …?’

His question brought her head up sharply. The look in those wide eyes twisted something deep in his gut that had him fighting against responding, against showing the burning rush of reaction that seared through him.

Hell, no! Frustration, anger, shock and disbelief were already a volatile and treacherous mixture, one that had him disturbingly off-balance when he wanted to be fully and tightly in control. Add in sexual desire to that potent blend, and it was even more dangerous. All it needed was a single spark and the resulting explosion would take his head off.

Sex was what had brought him and Marina together. Sex was what had kept them together, even when things were falling apart. Sex was the one thing that had never died between them, at least for him. And sex, damn it to hell, was what was still there.

With the width of the table between him and Marina, it had been bad enough. She had still been able to get to him—physically, at least—just as she always had. But he had been able to tamp it down, put a lid on it, keep it under control.

But now, with her eyes burning into his and her curvaceous body up close, it was so much harder to impose restraint. The scent of her skin was in his nostrils, sweet as a rose, mixed with some faintly herbal tang from the shampoo in her hair. He could feel the warm softness of her flesh and the delicacy of bone under his fingers, the contact sending electrical pulses of heat along every inch of nerve. It was all he could do not to give in to the demands of his senses.

‘Why?’ Marina echoed now, her tone subtly different. ‘Why did I turn you down? Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not to me.’

Then, when she lifted a russet eyebrow to question his response, and those green-and-gold eyes flashed another challenge straight at him, he gave her the real truth.

‘All right, I will admit that I am torn between two possible explanations.’

‘Two?’ She hadn’t expected that. ‘What two?’

‘One—’ Pietro lifted the first finger of his free hand to mark the point ‘—you think that if you play hard to get with this then I will increase the settlement—give you more to keep you in—what is it you say?—the manner to which you have become accustomed.’