Page 22 of Innocent's Wedding Day with the Italian

But he had done it. For her.

Telling herself to get a grip, she rootled through her wash bag for her moisturiser but came up empty. With a vague recollection of leaving it in the bathroom of the hotel room, she slipped back into the bedroom hoping one of the hotel staff had noticed and popped it in her case.

Her hope was fulfilled but as she wrapped her fingers around the cold jar, the side of her hand brushed against silk and her stomach turned over.

Gathering all her courage, Rebecca pulled the white negligée from the case and shook it out.

Her eyes swam. Memories of the dreams that had sustained her for so long flooded her.

This was what she’d planned to wear for Enzo on their wedding night. This night. In their honeymoon penthouse suite. All the possessions within the case open before her should have been moved to the suite in anticipation.

She’d planned it all out in her head, from the shower she’d take using the beautiful, sensuous shower gel she’d bought especially for this night, to the tempting makeup she would paint her face with. She hadn’t wanted her first time to be all about her virginity. She had wanted it to be for the both of them. She had dreamed of Enzo’s touch on every inch of her skin and dreamed of touching every inch of him too. In her dreams, their wedding night wouldbefrom the realm of dreams. Enzo’s refusal to make love before their nuptials had only fed this fantasy.

And he would have made love to her that night. He would never have risked an annulment.

Almost unthinking, Rebecca took her pyjamas off and replaced them with the negligée she’d bought with her final monthly salary payment. She’d wanted to pay for it with her own money; her gift to the man she worshipped.

She stood in front of the mirror just as she’d done when she’d first bought it and had imagined the desire in Enzo’s eyes before he stripped it from her.

The flattering cut made her look curvier than she actually was even if it didn’t enhance her small breasts. Its spaghetti straps joined with the main body of silk, which skimmed her cleavage in a plunging V. The hem barely skimmed her bottom. This was not an item intended to be slept in. This was an item to be shared and enjoyed.

Still staring hard at her makeup-free reflection, Rebecca cupped her breast and imagined it was Enzo’s hand caressing it. Closing her eyes, she imagined him replacing his hand with his mouth, and when her other hand slipped between her legs and brushed herself, a swell of rage burst through her and she wrenched her hands away from her hypersensitive zones and threw herself onto the bed she was never supposed to have slept in again.

It wasn’t just her dreams for their wedding night Enzo had fed but the sickness raging in her blood—and there was no doubt her desire for him had morphed into a sickness, or else how could she be feeling so sick with desire for him now? His promise that the wait would all be worth it had set up in her mind impossibly unrealistic expectations and built what should have been perfectly ordinary desire into a fever that would never now be realised.

Was all this a punishment for being some kind of heinous person in a previous life?

Would she be feeling such heightened emotions for the man who’d broken her heart if she’d had previous experience of men? Would she be lying with her face buried in a pillow stifling screams if she’d already known another man’s touch?

She couldn’t kid herself that she wouldn’t have fallen in lust with Enzo even if there had been men before him, but would she have been suckered in so completely? Would she be going through such agony now?

If only she’d found someone she felt strongly enough for to take the plunge and sleep with before her parents died then maybe she would have been better armed to spot the lie of his feelings and intentions from the beginning, but it had never happened. Her experience with men before Enzo had been practically nil. His good humour, charm, glamour and looks had dazzled her. Blinded her.

But shehadcontinually asked questions, she argued with herself, angrily thumping the pillow for emphasis. Right from the start. Asked herself why a man like Enzo could fall for an ordinary woman like her.

She’d never questioned her own feelings though. Those she’d accepted from the beginning. She’dwelcomedthem, revelled in them because for the first time in so, so long, she was experiencing an emotion that wasn’t grief.

Rebecca’s natural shyness meant she’d always been most comfortable blended in a pack, the girls she hung around with her entire school life a middling gang who stuck together and went mostly unnoticed by their peers. When she got to university, she’d made new friends in her halls of residence. Unlike her old sedate school friends, these girls were wild—in comparison in any case—and dragged her out partying. She’d enjoyed it enormously but had been shocked with the ease some of her fellow students were happy to swap bodily fluids with people whose names they’d struggled to remember in the morning. She hadn’t wanted her first sexual experience to be a drunken one-night stand. She’d wanted it to mean something. By her third year, her wild peers began to settle as the reality of the approaching big wide world loomed in their minds and made them knuckle down and actually do some work, but any hope Rebecca had of finding someone was forgotten when her mother’s constant exhaustion was finally diagnosed as blood cancer. Two weeks later she was dead. Three days later, her shattered father suffered his fatal heart attack. In hardly the time it took to blink, Rebecca’s world fell apart and she was plunged into a grief so complete it took her a full year to resume her studies.

The shell she’d hidden herself in had coated her until that cold, grey winter afternoon when Enzo had changed the tyre she now knew he’d punctured himself and bathed her world in colour.

He’d pulled her out of the fog of grief, brought her back to life and turned on the tap of her desire. But it had all been a lie and now she would never know what it felt like to give herself fully to a man and this awful fever would never be purged...

She pulled her face out of the pillow and shot upright, her heart thumping wildly.

This was all Enzo’s fault. Everything. All those damn promises about their wedding night. He’d built this fever up in her.

Before she could change her mind, she scrambled off the bed and stormed out of the room, the fury driving her to Enzo’s bedroom as alive in her veins as the desire.

Knocking loudly on his door, she didn’t wait for an answer before shoving it open.

The curtains were open, the silvery light from the moon and stars pouring through the three windows enough for her to see. At the far end, in what she was convinced was the biggest bed in the world but one she’d been forbidden from sleeping in until they were legally husband and wife, Enzo lifted his head.

‘Rebecca?’ There was no sleepiness in his voice.

‘Miss Foley to you,’ she corrected angrily, kicking the door shut with her heel and crossing the vast floor space to him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, sitting up. The bed sheets slipped down to his waist revealing his bare chest.

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