LITMIR.BIZ

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memory of the way she’d frozen when he’d spoken, the time it had taken her to turn round, was still clear in his memory. He’d been planning that moment for weeks, ever since he’d learned of her upcoming marriage, and it had brought a dark satisfaction to his soul. The sort of satisfaction he wanted to know again.

      ‘Let them think we’re a couple.’

      ‘What?’

      There was no need to ask what she thought of his suggestion. It was etched into her lovely face, darkening the pools of her eyes above cheeks that had gone white in appalled shock.

      ‘Let them…?’

      ‘Let them think we’re back together.’

      ‘You have to be joking!’

      ‘No joke.’ Guido shook his dark head emphatically. ‘It’s the only way you’re going to walk out of here with any sort of reputation-and able to look people in the eye. Your chances of marriage to St Clair are ruined…’

      ‘Thanks to you!’

      Guido glanced down at the tight little fists into which she had clenched her hands. He could read in her eyes the way she was tempted to launch herself at him, raise her fist to pound him on the shoulder, maybe even hit him in the face.

      Perhaps he should tell her the truth about her supposed bridegroom. If she knew the real Rafe St Clair and the way that the man had been prepared to use her for his own ends, then would she be so quick to attack? Would she fight so hard for him then?

      ‘You’ve destroyed my life!’

      ‘No, cara,’ Guido reproved silkily. ‘You did that for yourself when you tried to get yourself a new groom without making sure that you had got rid of the old one first.’

      ‘You said it was not a legal marriage!’

      ‘I said we didn’t have any sort of real marriage—it’s not at all the same thing. The marriage you walked out on was perfectly legal, perfectly binding, as you would have found out if you had bothered checking.’

      ‘It didn’t seem necessary.’

      Amber couldn’t believe she had been such a fool. Ever since the day that she had walked out on Guido, she had struggled to put their charade of a marriage behind her. It had been bad enough thinking that Guido had only gone through the ceremony to control her, to keep her in his bed. To find that she had swallowed the idea of it being real when in fact it had just been a fake, set up to deceive her, had twisted the original knife in even deeper.

      As a result, she had ruthlessly locked away all thoughts of that day into a sealed compartment in her memory, refusing to let herself bring them out to look at them for any reasons whatsoever. When Rafe had asked her to marry him, she had wondered briefly if she should check on the legality of her first ‘wedding’. But the memory of Guido’s brutal tone, his callously scornful words, had made her flinch right away from even thinking about it.

      Fear had added an extra impetus too, she admitted, feeling the sense of horror that had gripped her then take her by the throat once again. If she had found that the Las Vegas ceremony had been binding, then she would have had to admit it to Rafe, and—far worse—she would have had to connect with Guido in order to arrange for a divorce.

      Cravenly—and foolishly, it now seemed—she had dodged away from the whole issue and had let herself believe that there had been no earlier marriage to stand in the way of the present one.

      ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t even remember our time together,’ she lied in a desperate attempt to protect herself from the anguish that was slashing at her heart. ‘It didn’t really matter.’

      She’d got in a knife cut of her own that time, she saw as she watched the flames of dark anger blaze in the depths of his eyes. His jaw clamped tight shut over the flare of anger and a muscle tugged in his cheek.

      Hastily she backed away, down the aisle, moving into one of the pews so as to put the strength of the wood between him and her. She felt better that way. He’d never, ever hurt her physically but the emotional anguish he’d put her through had been hard enough to bear. Not that any wood, however strong and solid, was any sort of protection against a broken heart.

      ‘So you were in such a rush to become a lady that you didn’t care whether this marriage was lawful or not also?’ Guido questioned stiffly. ‘You really should not be so careless about the legalities of your weddings, carissima. Now you’ve lost the title you aimed for…’

      ‘And the husband I wanted!’

      That brought him up sharp. For a moment something new flared in those deep-set eyes. Something that wasn’t anger but something darker and more dangerous even than his fury had been.

      ‘So I’m supposed to believe that the man himself was what you really wanted in all this? You aren’t going to claim that you loved him, are you?’

      Amber’s hands folded over the edge of the pew back, holding on tight until her knuckles showed white under her stretched skin. She knew she was on very dangerous ground here. One false step and she could give herself away completely, putting herself right into her tormentor’s hands and giving him the perfect set of weapons to torture her with.

      ‘Did you even consider that before you marched in here and broke up my life?’ she demanded, her harsh, tight voice echoing around the high, arching roof of the church. ‘Did it make you pause to think about what you were doing?’

      ‘Why does that matter?’ Guido countered harshly. ‘Did you love him?’

      Oh, how she wished she could say that yes, she loved Rafe. That she adored him. She longed to be able to fling her defiance right into his face but even as she opened her mouth the need for honesty caught her on the raw.

      She hadn’t been marrying for love, she’d known that right from the start. But she had tried love once and it had blown up right in her face. She didn’t dare to risk that sort of bitter disillusionment all over again. So she was marrying for friendship—warm, gentle friendship. Without the savage bite of passion that had taken her heart and shattered it into a million irreparable pieces. She was marrying for freedom, for comfort and—yes—finally, for once in her life, to make her mother smile.

      And Pamela Wellesley had smiled, at least for a moment or two. She had smiled when the engagement was announced. And she had smiled today when they had set out for the church and this wedding that meant so much to her.

      ‘I wanted to marry him,’ she managed stiltedly.

      ‘Oh, I’ll just bet you did. After all, the Honourable Rafe St Clair had so much more to offer you than an apparently penniless photographer trying to earn a living in Las Vegas.’

      ‘Apparently?’

      She’d caught the unexpected word and looked up, turning a puzzled face in his direction. But Guido offered no hint of explanation. Instead he lifted one hand in an arrogantly dismissive gesture, brushing aside her question as if it were a buzzing fly that annoyed him.

      ‘But this won’t solve our immediate problem. The paparazzi outside won’t wait for ever. They want a story and the sooner the better. We should give them one—’

      ‘The one we should give them being that we are still a couple,’ Amber interjected, the cynicism and disbelief in her intonation making it plain just what she thought of that.

      ‘That we are back together again,’ Guido corrected smoothly. ‘They’ll love that!’

      ‘They might, but I most definitely won’t. And I can’t think why you should even imagine that it would work.’

      ‘Your English Press adore a love story—they want to write about that perfect ending where two people live happily after all.’

      ‘Happily ever after,’ Amber corrected automatically, the unwanted thought—if only it could be true—slicing

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