One Christmas Night A Sicilian Marriage The Italian's Blackmailed Bride The Sultan's Seduction

NINA did not want to listen to this. In fact she was so sure she didn't that if she hadn't been sitting in her own home she would have seriously contemplated getting up from the lunch table and walking out. As it was, all she could do was stare glassy-eyed at her mother and silently wish her a million miles away. "Don't look at me like that," Louisa said impatiently. "You may like to think that the state of your marriage is none of my business, but when it is I who has to listen to ugly speculation and gossip about it then it becomes my business!" "Does it?" Her daughter's cool tone said otherwise. "I don't recall ever questioning you about the many reports on your various lovers throughout the years." Her mother's narrow shoulders tensed inside the fitted white jacket she was wearing, which did so much for her fabulous dark looks. At fifty-one years old, Louisa St James could still pass for thirty. Born in Sicily, the youngest of five Guardino children, Louisa had taken the lion's share in the beauty stakes, along with her twin sister Lucia. As small girls they'd wowed everyone with their black-haired, black-eyed enchantment, and when they'd grown into stunning young women besotted young men had beaten paths to the Guardino door. Now in her middle years, and with her twin sadly gone, Louisa could still grab male attention like a magnet. But a lifetime spent being admired had made Louisa so very conceited that Nina could sometimes see by her expression that she was bewildered as to how her womb had dared to produce a child that bore no resemblance to her at all. Nina was tall and fair, and quiet and introverted. She looked out on the world through her English father's cool blue eyes, and when trouble loomed she locked herself away behind a wall of ice where no one could reach her. In her mother's Sicilian eyes the burning fires of all the passions were alien to her daughter, and she tended to treat Nina as if she did not know what they were. "Your father made me a widow ten years ago, which means I am allowed to take as many lovers as I choose without raising eyebrows," Louisa defended, completely ignoring the way she'd been taking lovers for most of Nina's life. "Whereas your marriage is barely out of the honeymoon stage and already gossip about it is hot!" Hot? Nina almost choked on the word, because the last thing she would have called her marriage was--hot. Cold, more like. A soulless waste of space. A mistake so huge it should be logged as an official disaster! "If it's just gossip you're concerned about then you're talking to the wrong person," she responded. "Rafael is your culprit--go and talk to him." With that she got up, not quite finding the courage to walk out of the room but doing the next best thing by going to stand in front of the closed glass doors that led out onto the terrace. Behind her the thin silence feathered her slender backbone. Her cold indifference to whatever her husband was doing had managed to shock her mother into stillness--for a moment or two. "You are a fool, Nina," she then announced bluntly. Oh, yes, Nina agreed, and she stared out towards the glistening blue waters of the Mediterranean and wished she was on the little sailboat she could see gliding across the calm crystal sea. "Because it is not only gossip. I saw them together for myself,caraand even a blind woman could not mistake the chemistry they were generating it was so--" Hot,Nina supplied the word because it seemed much more suitable now than it had earlier. Her mother used a sigh. "You should keep him on a much tighter leash," she went on. "The man is just too gorgeous and sexy to be left to his own devices-- and you know what he's like! Women fall over themselves to get closer to him, and he doesn't bother to push them away. He could charm a nun out of her chastity if he put his mind to it, yet how often are you seen at his side? InsteadReid, Michelle is the author of 'One Christmas Night A Sicilian Marriage The Italian's Blackmailed Bride The Sultan's Seduction', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373837380 and ISBN 0373837380.