Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,112

bodies intimately entwined. As the heat flooded through her body she closed her eyes and thought about him hard inside her, moving. She gritted her teeth and ejected the image forcibly from her mind.

When she opened her eyes he was still looking at her, his expression only marginally less seductive than his velvettoned voice had been—if ever a man had been given a voice designed for making indecent suggestions it was Francesco, she reflected with an inward sigh.

She tried to inject a note of levity to lower the tension. ‘How many times have you used that line?’

‘You seem to find the truth difficult to cope with, Erin.’

‘You wouldn’t recognise the truth if it bit you,’ she snapped back crankily.

‘The only person who has ever bitten me is you, cara.’ His laugh deepened as the colour flew to her cheeks. ‘You remember the occasion, too, I see.’

‘Dear God, no wonder we never get to work through our issues. It always ends up with us trying to rip each other’s clothes off.’

‘You say that as though it is a problem. And I have no issues.’

She regarded him with frustration. ‘That sort of attitude is why we. Don’t you realise that our marriage has been based on a tissue of lies. Oh, I know lies of omission for the most part, but it amounts to the same thing.

‘First you don’t tell me who you really are, then you don’t even mention Rafe …’ She saw Francesco stiffen at the mention of his brother’s name.

‘I can see why you didn’t tell me about him,’ she admitted. ‘But when you marry someone you can’t be selective about what you tell them and what you don’t. I know that I have my own issues, but can’t you see that knowing you have no problem lying to me when it suits you makes it hard for me to believe you when something happens … and, well … I think I’ve said enough.’

And none of it, she suspected, had been very lucid, but she just hoped she had got her point across.

‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘what you want off me is honesty and straight-talking?’

What I want off you is love. Her eyes fell from his. ‘It would be a start.’

‘That,’ he conceded, ‘does not seem an excessive request.’ He arched a brow. ‘If I don’t deliver on your demands …?’

She was about to say that they weren’t really demands when the plane dropped like a stone for what felt like several thousand feet, but had been, she later learned, less. Erin screamed, and grabbed the side of her chair.

We’re going to die! I’ll never get the chance to see my baby. Never get the chance to lie next to Francesco and feel the friction of his skin against my skin, smell the warm scent of his body and enjoy the touch of his lips on my skin, taste him …

‘Erin, it’s fine, we’ll be fine.’

She opened her eyes and found that the plane had levelled off and during the interminable time that it had been bounced around like a cork in a stream, somehow, even though it seemed a physical impossibility, Francesco had moved around to her side of the table.

She presumed that the arm resembling a steel bar that was clamped across her was the reason she had not been thrown from her seat.

A voice, presumably the pilot, came over the loud-speaker system. ‘Mr Romanelli, would you like to come up front? There could be a bit more of that.’

‘What does he think you can do about it?’ she demanded indignantly.

‘An extra pair of hands on these occasions does not come amiss,’ Francesco said, strapping her into her seat and giving a thumbs-up sign to the shaken-looking female attendant who was strapping herself into the seat beside her. Erin would have thought that any pilot would have wanted to keep nonessential people clear of the cockpit on such occasions, but she kept this opinion to herself.

When he bent down to brush his lips against hers and promised that there was no need to worry, she saw the gleam of exhilaration in his eyes and realised that, far from being terrified, her husband was enjoying this.

It wasn’t the best time in the world to learn you had married a madman, the sort of crazy who got a kick out of situations that would turn normal people into quivering lumps of jelly.

Her expression was indignant as she watched him stride away. ‘I don’t see why they want him. It’s