AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Amadeo was so locked in his memories and thoughts that he only realised silence had elapsed between them again when Elsbeth smoothed her hair and delicately cleared her throat. ‘I should take a shower and get some breakfast,’ she murmured.
He snapped himself back to the present.
Walking in step, they reached the bottom of his stairs, beneath which lay the short path to Elsbeth’s French doors.
Their eyes met at the point where they went their separate ways.
‘Well...’ she said with another of those graceful shrugs. ‘I will see you later.’
He gazed again at the elegant swan of her neck. His mouth watered to imagine tracing his tongue over it.
Amadeo was halfway up the iron steps when he looked down to where Elsbeth was about to step into her quarters. ‘Elsbeth,’ he called.
She looked up at him.
It was on the tip of his tongue to invite her to join him for breakfast. ‘Enjoy your day.’
A soft smile played on her lips. ‘And you.’
And then she vanished from his sight.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELSBETH’SLEGSWEREstill shaking when she stepped out of the shower and wrapped a large fluffy towel around herself. They’d started shaking the moment she’d closed her French doors and finally escaped her half-naked, rampantly masculine husband.
Since their wedding, she’d taken an early morning walk around her garden every day and not once had she been disturbed by anyone. The garden was the only place in the castle where she could be alone without feeling lonely. As the weeks had passed, she’d redesigned it in her mind, imagining it as a riot of colour with quirky statues and hammocks, occasionally allowing herself to dare to dream about the children who might one day play in it. She’d become so used to being alone with only her thoughts and early morning birdsong that when she’d sensed another human presence and spun around to find Amadeo walking down the iron steps, she’d been completely unable to control the contraction in her body that had felt much too much like joy to be healthy.
She’d barely held it together from that point.
When he’d strode over the lawn to her, she’d inwardly cringed at being caught wearing pyjamas more suited to a teenage girl than a princess, had been unable to stop her mother’s stern voice repeating in her ear the warning givenad nauseamin the weeks before the wedding. ‘A prince expects his wife to be a princess at all times.’
He hadn’t looked disapprovingly at her though. In fact...
If she didn’t know better, she’d think the hooded glimmer in his eyes had been desire. She must have imagined it. How could he desire her when being civil was an effort for him?
For the first time though, she hadn’t sensed the effort. It had been a strangely intimate encounter, filled with a weird, indefinable tension that had only added weight to the heavy wings of the butterflies loose in her belly. It hadn’t helped that Amadeo had been practically naked, only a pair of low-slung black shorts covering him. It had taken every fibre of her being to stop herself openly staring at him, hardly daring to allow her eyes to skim over the deeply tanned broad, hard chest and flat brown nipples, or the washboard abdomen where dark hair gathered beneath his navel and thickened as it lowered to the waistband of his shorts. Lord, just to think of him like that was enough to send heat flushing her skin again, and she sank onto the bathroom chair and gripped her hair.
She needed to banish the butterflies and train her body better. She was married to a man who disliked her, despised her family and had admitted he’d never wanted to marry her. To have all these feelings for a man like that was dangerous. Especially when he was her husband.
‘Out!’
Amadeo glared at his sister-in-law, who was sitting in the umpire’s chair casting judgement on his serve. ‘It was not.’
‘Yes, it was. Second serve.’
Taking his place back on the line, he lobbed the tennis ball into the air and thwacked it.
‘Out. Game to Marcelo.’
‘You don’t know how to umpire,’ Amadeo seethed.
‘And you don’t know how to serve,’ she retorted chirpily.
He resisted the furious urge to hurl his racket at the clay court by the skin of his teeth and readied himself for his brother’s serve.
In less than an hour Marcelo had thrashed him three sets to nil, the worst defeat Amadeo had ever suffered.
He blamed Elsbeth. Or tried to. Damn it, she was getting under his skin. He’d spent the morning with the concentration span of a goldfish, official paperwork shoved to one side unread, the image of her, all sexy and dishevelled in those sexy little pyjamas a memory he could not rid himself of. The knowledge that she was doing whatever she was doing in the quarters below his had only added to the infuriating distraction.
