Convenient Brides by Lindsay Armstrong, Catherine Spencer, Melanie Milburne Page A

self-disgust.
    His mouth curled in a faint smile. “If you’re asking me, will I be faithful, I give you my word it will be so. The reason I’ve not taken a wife sooner is that I was not willing to make a promise before God that I knew I couldn’t keep.”
    Although it hurt to say the words, the question begged to be asked. “Yet you are now, with a woman you’ve admitted you don’t love?”
    “Yes,” he said, with a candor that dealt a savage blow to her romantic fantasies. “Much has changed recently. Tragedy has struck and turned us all, particularly you and me, in a new direction. Suddenly we have children to consider. They must be our first priority. That much we owe them.”
    “And what of the rest?” Common sense told her not to press the point, but she couldn’t help herself. “By themselves, children aren’t enough to hold a marriage together, and I ought to know. Despite having two young daughters and a wife who needed him, my father walked out on my mother and left her to bring up Vanessa and me on her own.”
    “Then your father amounted to less than a man. To sire two children, then abandon both them and their mother is despicable.”
    He took stock of her again. “Listen to me, Caroline, and believe me when I tell you, I will not desert you.”
    “Then why bother to include the option to dissolve the marriage after one year?”
    “Because I hoped it would make you feel less coerced. I am not so blinded by duty that I expect you to remain in a union you find intolerable. But let me make this much clear: if our marriage doesn’t last, it will be because you decide to end it.” His voice dropped suggestively. “And I intend to make it very difficult for you to arrive at such a choice.”
    If the way his arm tightened around her shoulders hadn’twarned her of his next move, the sexy, smoky note in his threat did. Starting with her forehead, he skimmed his mouth from her eyes to her jaw in a string of kisses that ended at her lips.
    Such a mouth should be against the law, she thought, all the reasons she should call a halt to his behavior evaporating. If, in the course of their marriage, he never did more than simply kiss her, she could die a happy woman.
    But he was bent on more erotic pleasure. With a low murmur of approval, he eased her down on the bed—not that he had to expend much energy to do that; already, she was limp with pleasure. Then, with the unhurried expertise of a man who’d had much practice, he unfastened the row of small pearl buttons running down the front of her nightgown, and parted the fabric to lay bare her breasts.
    Still not satisfied, he continued dispensing with the garment. It yielded to his efforts, sliding down her torso in a soft sigh of surrender until it puddled around her waist. Another tug, and he had it past her hips and down her legs until not an inch of her was spared his inspection.
    She had carried his two children practically full-term, and although her body had weathered the experience far better than most, the signs were there, if he cared to look for them. Plagued by a belated attack of nervous modesty, she tried to curl away from his gaze. But to no avail. Shaking his head in reproof, he manacled her wrists in the tender steel of one hand and imprisoned them above her head.
    Helpless as a butterfly pinned to a collector’s mat, she gave up the struggle and submitted to his absorbed scrutiny. His breath sifted over her, warm and light as a summer breeze.
    “Magnifica…incredibile…!” he whispered, his sultry gaze scorching her flesh. “Venero, la mia bella!”
    She’d studied enough Italian to know what his murmured words meant, but even if she’d been unfamiliar with the language, she’d have guessed that he liked what he saw. Onlywhen his emotions ran high, be it from anger or, as now, from passion, did he lapse into his mother tongue with her.
    What seduced her completely, though, was not that he eventually stopped looking and put his