Before she could guess his intentions he spun her around, dragging her into his arms and moving his hips. Dancing. Yes, he was dancing. Again.

She stayed perfectly still, her face showing confusion. ‘I don’t want to dance any more.’

‘No, but you want to speak to me. It is easier to do that if we dance. So dance.’

‘I...’ Emmeline shook her head. ‘No.’

He slowed his movements and stared at her for a long, hard second. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not my...thing,’ she mumbled, looking away.

Mortification filled her. So many things she’d never really done. Experiences she’d blindly accepted that she would never enjoy. She’d made her peace with that. But now, surrounded by so many people who’d all lived with such freedoms as a matter of course, wasn’t it natural that she was beginning to resent the strictures of her upbringing?

Her voice was a whisper when she added, ‘As you so wisely pointed out.’

‘Then let me show you,’ he said.

And his hands around her waist were strong and insistent, so that her body moved of its own accord. No, not of its own accord; she was a puppet and he her master.

Just as she remembered—just as she’d felt hours earlier—every bit of him was firm. His chest felt as if it was cast from stone. He was warm too, and up close like this she could smell his masculine fragrance. It was doing odd flip-floppy things to her gut.

‘You told me you’d be discreet,’ Emmeline said, trying desperately to salvage her brain from the ruins of her mind. ‘But you looked like you were about to start making out with that woman a moment ago.’

‘Bianca?’ he said, looking over his shoulder towards the redhead. Her eyes were on them. And her eyes were not happy. ‘She’s a...a friend.’

‘Yeah, I can see that,’ Emmeline responded, wishing she wasn’t so distracted by the closeness of him, the smell. What was it? Pine? Citrus? Him?

‘Are you jealous?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ she said with a sarcastic heavenwards flick of her eyes. She leaned closer, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘We have a deal. I just don’t want our wedding guests to see you with another woman. What you do in private is up to you.’ She let the words sink in and then stopped moving. ‘I’d like to go home now.’

Pietro wasn’t used to being ashamed. He was a grown man and he’d lived his own life for a very long time. But something about her calm delivery of the sermon he really did deserve made a kernel of doubt lodge in his chest.

He knew he should apologise. He’d been flirting with Bianca and Emmeline was right: doing that on their wedding day wasn’t just stupid, it was downright disrespectful. To his bride, sure, and more importantly to their parents.

He stepped away from her, his expression a mask of cold disdain that covered far less palatable emotions. ‘Do you need anything?’

‘No.’

‘To say goodbye to anyone?’

She looked towards Sophie, enthralling her newfound friends, and shook her head. ‘I’d rather just go. Now.’

Silence sat between them and she waited, half worried he was going to insist on doing a tour of the room to issue formal farewells.

But after a moment, he nodded. ‘Okay. Let’s go, then.’

He put a hand on her back but she walked away, moving ahead of him, making it obvious she didn’t need him to guide her from the venue. She’d walk on her own two feet.

She hadn’t made this deal with the devil to finally find her freedom only to trade it back for this man.

Emmeline Morelli was her own woman, and seeing her husband fawning all over someone else had simply underscored how important it was for her to remember that.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE’D EXPECTED A LIMOUSINE, but instead Pietro directed her to a low, sexy black Jaguar, parked right at the front of the restaurant.

He reached for the front passenger door, unlocking it at the same time, and Emmeline sat down quickly, stupidly holding her breath for some unknown reason. What did she think would happen if she breathed him in again?

He closed the door with a bang and a moment later was in the driver’s seat. The car throbbed to life with a low, stomach-churning purr, and he pulled out into the traffic with the consummate ease of a man who’d grown up in these streets and knew them well.

Silence stretched between them and it was far from comfortable. The car had a manual transmission and required frequent gear changes from the man with his hand curved around the leather gearstick, his strong legs spread wide as he revved the engine, his arm moving with the gears.

There was an athleticism in his movements even when simply driving a car.

Emmeline ground her teeth together and focussed on the passing view of starlit Rome. Her new home.

She hadn’t thought about what it would mean to leave Georgia behind. At most she’d contemplated the sadness that would come from not seeing her father so often. But there was so much more than that. Annersty was the plantation she’d called home all her life, in the town where she’d grown up, with all the people she knew...

‘Tell me what you see for yourself, in the future, pumpkin?’ her father had asked her.

‘I don’t know, Daddy. This. I like it here...’

‘But one day I won’t be here.’

His voice had been soft, yet it had cut like glass through her flesh.

‘One day,’ he’d said to calm her, and the words had been reassuring, referring to a time that was distant-seeming. ‘But I’d want to know you’ve got a family of your own to make you happy.’

‘I hardly know Pietro—and what I do know I don’t think I like.’

He’d given a laugh of genuine amusement. ‘He’s a good man. Do you think I’d be pushing for this if I didn’t thoroughly believe that?’

Her eyes had met his and she’d seen the truth in them. She’d nodded then, sealing her fate with that single gesture.

A soft sigh escaped her lips. She had agreed to this and there was no sense in getting all remorseful now. She’d married Pietro Morelli and they both knew it was a marriage in name only. She held that reassurance close like a talisman.

Yet what was that vitriolic acidity in her gut? It frothed angrily when she remembered the way he’d been looking at that redhead—Bianca—as though he wanted to lick her all over.

An angrier sigh pressed from her lips and Pietro turned his head, studying her in the intermittent light cast by the streetlamps they drove beneath. She looked pretty damned good, despite his assertion weeks earlier that she was far from the kind of woman he was attracted to. It wasn’t as though she’d made any major changes—only it was the first time he’d seen her in a dress, wearing make-up, heels, and with her hair done in a style other than a plain ponytail.

He fought the urge to ask her how she was feeling. It wasn’t his business and he sure as hell didn’t care.

He pressed his foot harder onto the accelerator, chewing up the miles to his home.

The gates swung open as they approached and he eased the car along the curving drive, pulling it up outside the garage. His fleet of vehicles was housed inside and his mechanic would be waiting to give the Jaguar a once-over. He cut the engine and turned to say something to his bride, though he wasn’t sure what.

There was no point, in any event. Her hand was on the door and she was pushing it outwards before he could articulate a thing.

She stood tall and proud, her eyes running over the façade of the building, studying it as if for the first time.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said, the words darker than the night that surrounded them.

She flashed him a tight smile. ‘Yes, it has.’ Her eyes looked bigger somehow, and the moon was drawing out flecks of amber and gold from amongst their caramel depths. ‘I live here now.’