‘Seriously?’Tore countered in apparent wonderment. ‘You’re not about to pitch a five-act tragedy over this?’
‘I don’t think you could do anything that would make me pitch one of those,’ she answered truthfully. ‘I’m quite a quiet person and usually non-confrontational.’
So take that and stop jumping down my throat looking to fight, she wanted to say but she was not that blunt.
Tore breathed in deep and slow. ‘I apologise for making that scene at the church but the awareness that I had seemingly married the wrong woman, and a woman wearing a disguise, overcame my good manners.’
‘That’s okay. Nobody died, nobody was hurt,’ Violet responded more sunnily. ‘I did understand how you felt.’
‘But you still haven’t explained why,’ he reminded her.
‘Maybe someday,’ she said dismissively, recalling how sarcastic he could be and shrinking at the prospect of describing her mother’s frail health in what would probably strike him as the ultimate sob story. And then she would be so angry she would lose her temper and she did not like to lose her temper, it being the only thing she seemed to have inherited from her horrible father.
Tore cast open a door, wondering what other murky secrets she was still hiding from him. Although there was nothing murky about a bakery, he conceded as she walked into the spacious bedroom they would be forced to share. Surely, Aldo Renzetti, quite a prudish older man, could not have thoughtthatthrough!
‘The bed is big enough for three or four of us. We’ll manage,’ Violet framed with determined calm even though she had never ever shared a bed or a bedroom with an adult male. Wild horses could not have dragged that lowering truth from her. But honestly, for the past few years with her mother’s illness, her friends’ deaths, the bakery and her daughter, Violet hadn’t had the space for a personal life. That was something other young single people got to have while she had little but heavy responsibilities on her plate.
‘I appreciate you not freaking out about this whole situation,’ Tore conceded, suppressing the suspicion that she might want something from him in return, striving to be a little more gracious to match her.
Violet gave him a huge smile and her slight shoulders lifted.
Green eyes narrowed and Tore’s big powerful frame tensed. The smile lit up her little face like sudden sunlight.Little, he reminded himself fiercely, in danger of being squashed if he got too close. Why was she looking sexy all of a sudden? Was it the hair, that generous fall of waving ebony silk? The big blue eyes he had told himself he didn’t like? The sheer delicacy of her in miniature? Or the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts and the curve of her hips? He had no idea; he only knew that he was without the smallest warning, hard as a rock. Well, there wasn’t going to beanyfraternising of any kind. She would have to drug him to get him in that mood…only apparently, not this time.
Tore had gone silent and it unnerved Violet. ‘I’ll just unpack, get comfortable.’
‘There’ll be an early lunch served in an hour.’ There was a kind of intensity in those startlingly green eyes that held her fast where she stood. He had very thick, dark lashes, which accentuated them up close. Her tummy flipped, her nipples tightened; the kind of heat she didn’t want to notice caused an ache between her thighs. Her face went scarlet and she turned away to the luggage, determined to stop looking at him. So he was beautiful like a fantasy, and fantasies were harmless. They weren’t real. She recalled her late friend talking about being sex-starved when her partner was abroad visiting family, and she smiled down at her case contents.Obviously, she was sex-starved and that was all that was wrong with her. And it didn’t matter anyway because Tore was not available. He was as safe a target as a hot pin-up poster on the wall, she reasoned.
She had gone very pink, Tore was thinking as he took his leave. Because he had been staring at her, his brain pointed out. He absolutely should not be doing that but for the first time he was thinking that the lack of sex in his life might not be as sensible as he had assumed. For years he had been of the opinion that sex was genuinely not a necessity, and bedding women who universally viewed him as a trophy because of his wealth and status, had not changed his mind. He had had all kinds of sex and almost all of it had been vaguely disappointing, not at all what he had hoped lay ahead of him as an adolescent. If lusting after the wrong woman was the punishment, he needed to think again. When was a wife not a wife?Hiswife. Their marriage contract excluded sex.
Stella acted as translator for her mother, the housekeeper Sofia, and the two women began to lead Violet on a tour of the castle before lunch. As far as Violet was concerned, she thought, unlike Tore, that it was a very large property but grasping that Tore’s relatives visited in family groups helped her understand his point. They were in a long stone corridor when Tore strode out to join them and spoke to the two women.
‘I’ll show you the castle,’ he spoke in English to bring her up-to-date.
And he did, pausing to show certain paintings that displayed the main characters in an ancestral saga that spanned several hundred years, explaining how his grandfather had tracked them down once the family impoverishment was at an end. He showed rooms like the one set aside as a game room for the teenagers, the snooker table, the library stuffed with recent literature, and she realised that it was very much afamilyholiday home. It might be in apple-pie order and lavishly furnished but the accent was on character and comfort, rather than grandeur or a desire to impress.
‘It’s a really lovely house,’ Violet acknowledged as he reached over her head to open the narrow door set between massive walls that they had paused in front of. An odd little chime sounded and just as she was wondering what it was and hastening to precede Tore through the door, he was suddenly, unexpectedly wedged in the same too-small space of the doorway with her.
Jarred by the startling heat and strength of his very tall and powerful physique locked against hers, Violet blinked up at him, disconcerted that he could’ve pushed his way in front of her to get through the door first.
‘The bolted door and the alarm are a warning that it’s dangerous. That’s why I tried to go ahead of you,’ Tore explained in a somewhat raw undertone. ‘There’s a flight of stone stairs to your immediate right and only one child had to fall down them for Aldo to appreciate that he needed to block off this entrance to the extension. Only adults and staff use it. Access isn’t a problem on the ground floor.’
‘Oh…’ Violet barely stirred, paralysed where she stood with Tore’s body heat leaking into her every skin cell and setting off what felt like a chain reaction inside her: the warm flush of her skin, the goose bumps on her bare arms, the dangerous flutter in her belly. And still locked against her,him,all that was lean and hard and masculine, tearing apart her equanimity.
‘Am I allowed to…to kiss you?’ Tore breathed in a fractured undertone, glorious green eyes blazing down at her with desire.
Violet may not have been around the block very much but she had long waited the advent of a man who would study her as if she were his very last meal, as if shemeantsomething more than a fleeting notion. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s against the rules—’ Tore glowered down at her as if she should know what he was talking about.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Violet hissed, rising impatiently on tiptoes, but even that wasn’t sufficient to overcome the difference in their heights, and his hands dropped to her waist and he lifted her up in an effortless movement that in some mysterious way was incredibly sexy.
And then he kissed her, bracing her spine back against the thick stone wall that bounded the doors. He went for gold like an Olympic swimmer, pressing even closer, welding every inch of her into his powerful body until his mouth connected with hers. Firm and soft, assured but gentle, and she leant into that kiss like a trouper. A split second later, fireworks went off in the pit of her stomach, exploding through her limb by limb until there wasn’t a single part of her, it seemed, that wasn’t on fire for its continuance.
His tongue skated across the roof of her mouth and then plunged and then she was spun into a fierce maelstrom of hunger that left her quivering and breathless. She wanted more; she wantedsomuch more. One hand lifted and speared into his springy silken hair and the other braced on his shoulder, closed in place, gripping the tensile steel of muscle there. Nothing had ever felt like being in his arms; nothing had ever been so exciting, so fiercely compelling, that she simply couldn’t resist it. Buthewas. And that truth was a revelation that stunned her out of what little remained of her wits.
A sound interrupted them and Tore lowered her carefully back onto her own feet again, turning to address the housekeeper, who had a crisp stack of fresh bedding in her arms.
Sofia beamed at Violet and for just a moment, Violet was in such a daze at the disruption that she couldn’t work out why. Of course, the newly marrieds finally acting like honeymooners! What people expected even if nothing about that experience had proved to be whatsheexpected.
