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‘Perhaps you should mention it to your sister.’
Roberto gave her a staggered glance and then bewildered her by roaring with laughter. He snatched up her hand again, surveyed her with eyes still alight with dancing amusement and murmured, ‘So very pleased to make your acquaintance, Signora Falcone. But break news like that to Franca when there’s an audience around to hear her hysterics? You have to be joking! As for Cesare…he deserves to have the bars of his cage rattled…’
With that incomprehensible assurance, Roberto Ecchio carried her fingers up to his mouth and started kissing them one by one.
Mina was so taken aback by his behaviour that she froze and simultaneously collided with an electrifying look of stunned censure from Cesare. Eyes across a crowded room, she thought numbly—eyes that went for the jugular would have been a more appropriate description. Abruptly freeing himself from Franca’s clinging hands, Cesare sprang upright. His vibrantly handsome features a mask of dark fury, he thrust the table out of his path. Mina was transfixed and she wasn’t the only one trapped in sudden paralysis. Everybody was looking.
Roberto squinted sideways as he slowly raised his head, even greater amusement marking his mobile face. ‘So! One violently jealous husband erupts out of nowhere! Dio mio! Cesare Falcone, Mr Cool himself, so jealous he makes a public scene,’ he savoured smugly, lounging back unconcerned in his seat. ‘He won’t hit me. I’m his best friend.’
He was right. Cesare didn’t hit him. He threw him in the swimming-pool.
Somebody screamed. In a state of utter mute paralysis, Mina watched Roberto Ecchio hit the water with an enormous splash and an expression of extreme shock.
‘We’re going home,’ Cesare snarled, tugging Mina out of her seat with one powerful hand.
‘I’ve g-got to get my clothes!’
But Cesare wasn’t listening, he wasn’t hearing. His blazing golden eyes settled on her and he just grabbed her up into his arms like an unwieldy parcel and strode away from the poolside, leaving a deathly silence in their wake.
‘Cesare!’ Mina shrieked, and then the clasp on the front of her bikini came undone and she made a frantic dive to hold it in place over her heaving breasts.
The Ferrari went down the driveway like a rocket.
‘Violently jealous’. In the thunderous silence, as Cesare took a corner on a wing and a prayer, tyres screaming in protest, Mina stole a wide-eyed look at the ferocious cast of his profile. ‘Violently jealous’. She was dumbstruck by the concept. Yet she now saw that that same concept had been staring her in the face from the very moment of meeting Cesare again. Cesare went crazy if another man so much as looked at her. First Edwin Haland, then Steve…now his best friend who had been foolish enough to bait the tiger.
He had actually been jealous of Steve. No wonder he had been delighted to realise that her former boyfriend had never been her lover. His repeated references to Steve on their wedding night were now clarified. Cesare had been so inflamed with jealousy, he hadn’t been able to think of any other solution beyond burying her alive in a remote Sicilian valley and preventing her from returning to England.
That was a demonstration of such innate insecurity that Mina was torn between helpless amusement and a kind of agonised tenderness on his behalf. She had been so blind, so pitifully hung up on the belief that she was not important to him. Only now did she see that her own insecurity had come between her and her wits. Cesare did not want to lose her…Cesare was afraid of losing her and she did not think that the volatile emotions he was struggling to control right now were anything to do with Susie.
So what on earth had he been playing at with Franca Ecchio? That didn’t make sense. Why behave in a fashion guaranteed to cause trouble? For some extraordinary reason he had allowed Franca to come on to him like a maneater while he ignored Mina.
A little smile softened the formerly strained line of Mina’s mouth. Well, sixth sense told her that Cesare would not ignore her again in company, nor would he allow another woman to flirt like mad with him. He would be too busy watching a wife he clearly considered to be fatally attractive to other men and fighting off the competition. Perhaps there was something to be said for those irredeemably basic instincts of his. They cut right through that smooth, sophisticated and polished exterior and revealed the wonderfully human emotions that lurked secretively beneath.
He snatched her up out of the Ferrari outside their villa, roared through the front door, startling the maid fixing flowers in the hall, and carted her upstairs, kicking open the door to her bedroom.
He dropped her down on the bed and looked down at her with scorching golden eyes, hunger blatant in that electrifying stare. Intense awareness throbbed in the atmosphere between them, filling Mina with a sudden surge of heat, shooting every skin cell on to red alert.
Cesare drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Don’t do that again,’ he warned unevenly.
Considering his mood, it was an astonishingly mild reproof. He pushed an unsteady hand through his black hair. Momentarily he looked dazed, like someone waking up after a brainstorm. The phone buzzed. Lines of strain engraving his hard features, he backed away from her. His physical retreat was so unexpected, that Mina simply stared. He answered the phone. Dark colour demarcated his savage cheekbones. He uttered a forced laugh. ‘Ciao, Roberto.’
He dropped the receiver back onto the cradle.
Mina sat up, her skin drenched with hot pink.
‘Tit for tat,’ Cesare murmured darkly, his teeth gritted.
‘P-pardon?’
‘Ten days ago you told me to find another woman.’
Mina turned pale. ‘I did what?’
‘I decided to test the water, see how you reacted…’
Belatedly she recalled all the foolish things she had thrown in that row, not one of which she had expected him to take seriously. Now it dawned on her that Cesare had believed her when she had urged him to entertain himself elsewhere. Horror gripped her, then incomprehension. Had Cesare been trying to make her jealous this afternoon?
‘And you didn’t like it—you didn’t like it at all,’ he drawled, but his teeth were still gritted. ‘Until Roberto decided to throw a spanner in the works——’
