Читать книгу Rings of Gold: Gold Ring of Betrayal / The Marriage Surrender / The Unforgettable Husband - Michelle Reid - Страница 10

BY THE time Nicolas got downstairs he was back to being the man most people knew him to be. He entered the study to find it a veritable Aladdin’s cave of hi-tech equipment. Toni, the two policemen, two men he did not recognise but knew came from some special services department—all of them stood or sat about messing with the complicated array of communications stuff.

Stone-faced, hard-eyed, he homed directly in on Toni.

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did Toni’s face reveal what he must be thinking, knowing how long Nicolas had been with Sara. ‘Almost time,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything is ready.’

Nicolas gave a curt nod and moved over to the desk. The others in the room watched him like wary cats following the hunting pace of a dangerous animal. They were split into three groups—one group tracing, one group talking, one man ready to hit a command the moment they were given the go-ahead.

He sat down. ‘Any problems?’ he clipped.

‘No.’ It was Toni who answered. ‘We have them pinned down to a certain area code, but to be sure this works we need more time.’

‘It has to work,’ Nicolas said grimly. ‘Failure means panic and panic means risk. I won’t have the child’s life put at risk—you understand?’ It wasn’t said to Toni but to the two special agents huddled in a corner across the room.

The phone on the desk began to ring. The room froze into total stillness. Nicolas sat very still in his chair, hands tense, eyes fixed on the two policemen. And waited.

Two rings. Three rings. It seemed an age. Four. He got the nod. He snatched up the phone. ‘Santino,’ he announced.

‘Ah, good evening, signore.’ The smooth, oily voice slid snake-like into every headphoned ear listening in. ‘You have resolved the small cash-flow problem, I hope …’

Dawn was just breaking the sky when Nicolas entered Sara’s room and gently shook her awake.

She sat up with a jerk. ‘What’s happened?’ she gasped, instantly alert, her eyes huge and frightened in her sleep-flushed face.

‘It’s over, cara,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Your daughter is safe.’

‘Safe?’ She blinked up at him, not really taking the words in. ‘Safe, Nicolas?’ she repeated. ‘Really safe?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

‘Oh, God.’ Her hand whipped up to cover her wobbling mouth, her eyes, still badly bruised with the strain of it all, going luminous with tears of relief. ‘How …?’ she whispered. ‘Where is she?’

‘I will take you to her just as soon as you can get dressed and be ready to travel,’ he promised.

‘She’s not here?’ Then in a burst of alarm she cried, ‘Have they h-hurt her?’

‘No, to both questions,’ he answered calmingly. ‘Here—’ He turned away, then turned back to push a cup of something hot into her hand. ‘Drink this, then get dressed. I would like to leave here in half an hour. Can you be ready?’

‘I … Y-yes, of course …’ She was suffering from shock—a new kind of shock, the shock of deliverance from the pits of hell, which stopped her from asking the kind of questions she knew she should be asking.

‘Good.’ He nodded, then, turning, went quickly towards the door.

‘Nic!’ She stopped him, waiting for him to turn back to face her before saying huskily, ‘Thank you.’

After what had happened between them the night before, there was a certain amount of irony in that. But he took it at its face value, his half-nod an acknowledgement before he was turning away again.

‘Downstairs in half an hour,’ he instructed, and left her alone.

She was showered, dressed and ready to leave by the specified time. Nicolas was waiting for her in the hallway. He watched her come down the stairs towards him, his eyes drifting over the simple lines of the sage-green linen trousers and cream shirt she was wearing beneath an off-white jacket. She wore no make-up—she rarely ever did. And her hair she had brushed quickly and secured back from her face with a padded green band.

Nothing fancy. Nothing couture. Like the Sara he had first met. She had reverted to that person of simple tastes the moment he’d had her banished here to his London residence. She wondered if he was making the same distinction as he watched her like that, unrevealingly, with his eyes narrowed, so that she could not read what was going on behind them. But she made no apology for her appearance. This was what she was. That other person had been fashioned like a piece of sculpture to suit the role it had been intended to play. A false role, fake like the life she had been forced to live and the marriage that should never have been.

He, by contrast, looked dynamic again, not in one of his handmade silk suits but a pair of tobacco-coloured linen trousers and a white roll-neck worn beneath a black linen jacket—Armani, she guessed, recalling that his casual wardrobe had held mainly that designer’s name.

‘Where’s Toni?’ she enquired as he led the way outside into an early summer morning.

‘He has business of mine to attend to,’ he answered coolly, opening the rear door of the Mercedes saloon standing with its engine running at the bottom of the steps.

She smiled to herself as she climbed into the car. Problem solved, so Toni’s attention had been turned back to business. Then she wondered how long she was to be graced with Nicolas’s company before he turned his attention to other things.

For the duration of this drive? she suggested to herself as the car took off with Nicolas seated beside her and the driver safely hidden behind a wall of tinted glass. Until he had efficiently delivered Lia into her arms? Or would he feel duty-bound to see them safely back home again and maybe even hang around long enough to make sure that the security surrounding them was tight enough for something like this not to happen again?

She shivered, the mere idea of it occurring again striking like a death knell right through her. ‘How far away is she?’ she asked. ‘Will it take long to get there?’

His dark head had been resting against the soft, creamy leather headrest, his eyes closed. But when she turned the questions on him his long lashes flickered then lifted slowly to reveal sensually sleepy pupils surrounded by a sandstorm of energy. It caught at her breath, because that look was his sexually hungry male look and—

No. She glanced away, refusing to so much as think of him in that dangerous mould. Not after last night. Never again after last night! And anyway, how could he be looking at her like that after what he had said?

‘Quite far,’ he murmured, answering his first question. ‘A plane journey actually. She is in Sicily,’ he finally tagged on.

‘Sicily?’ The shock of it showed in the momentary blank blue look she fixed on him. ‘But how could she be in Sicily?’

‘With good planning,’ he drawled. ‘How else?’

She shivered. Her baby had been taken so far away from her and she had been helpless to stop it. ‘But I’ve not brought anything with me for a journey this long! No change of clothes for me, or for Lia. And my passport, Nicolas.’ She turned to him urgently. ‘I haven’t brought my passport with me—’

‘I have it,’ he said. ‘I recovered it from the wall-safe. Packed for you too,’ he added wryly, because it wasn’t a job he was used to doing for anyone, not even himself. ‘For both you and the child while you were still sleeping.’

He had been in her room? Walking around it, packing for her while she slept? The very idea did the strangest things to her, filled her with alarm and a shocking sense of—

‘You opened my safe?’ she protested, picking on that one intrusion because the other did not bear thinking about.

‘My safe,’ he corrected her. ‘My home.’

But she ignored the jibe because another thought had suddenly struck her, one that held the breath trapped in her lungs. ‘Where is she in Sicily?’ she asked.

There was a small hesitation. Then, ‘With my father,’ he said, watching her narrowly.

Alfredo. She stiffened, all her muscles clenching. ‘After all you said,’ she breathed. ‘He was behind it all, wasn’t he? He’s the one who did this to me!’

‘Not to your child, I make note,’ he drily observed. ‘I can at least take comfort in the fact that you are not accusing my father of wanting to hurt a child.’

Her blue eyes flashed in a bitter contradiction of that final remark. ‘If he has hurt her,’ she warned, ‘so help me, wheelchair or not, I shall see him dead.’

‘A Sicilian emotion,’ he noted, ‘this desire you have developed for retribution. Do you think we may have taught you something after all?’

His lazy mockery was spiked, the glinting eyes full of a cold condescension entirely aimed at previous diatribes in which she had condemned everything Sicilian. ‘You people taught me many things, Nicolas,’ she threw back at him. ‘Not least the rule of possession. “What’s mine I keep”!’ she quoted. ‘And woe betide anyone who tries to lay a finger on a possession of mine, including your wonderful father, who is nothing but a—’

‘Stop right there,’ he inserted very softly.

She sucked in a breath of air, her heartbeat pounding in her head. But it was no use. The fact that he had actually managed to convince her that Alfredo had nothing to do with Lia’s abduction only made this moment of truth more impossible to deal with.

‘And you still protect him, don’t you?’ she derided bitterly. ‘No matter how many dirty tricks he pulls on you, you still refuse to see what a nasty, cunning, evil man he is—even when the proof of it is shoved right under your very—’

His hand snaking round her neck and yanking her forcefully towards him stopped the words. ‘Hold your tongue, you little shrew!’ he rasped. ‘Before I bite it off!’

‘I hate and despise you!’ she threw into his angry face.

‘You were warned,’ he muttered, and crushed his mouth down onto hers in a brutal kiss aimed at subduing all hint of defiance left in her.

Yet within the punishment was a dark, duplicitous intimacy that dragged pleasurably at her senses and took some fighting against to stop her from sinking greedily into the kiss.

She groaned instead, pretending he had hurt her.

‘You asked for it,’ he muttered as he drew away.

‘I got it, didn’t I?’ she muttered in return, pulling shakily out of his arms.

‘What surprises me,’ he struck back cruelly, his hand shooting out to capture her wrist then holding onto it so they could both feel the way the blood was breaking speed records as it thundered through her veins, ‘is how you were affected by it. Could it be that you’re just a little in need of a man, Sara? Has the princess been locked up in her tower too long, and did last night’s little—taster remind her of what she once craved?’

‘Can you be so sure the tower has been locked?’ she retaliated, refusing point-blank to let him diminish her as he used to so easily.

His eyes glinted. ‘You’re damned right I can,’ he gritted. ‘I’ve told you before: what’s mine I keep. And I’ve kept you under surveillance enough to be sure no man has been near you.’

‘Except for my gaoler,’ she threw back at him deridingly. ‘In the end even you—hate yourself though you do for it—couldn’t keep your hands off me.’

‘I have the legal right,’ he declared. ‘If not the moral one.’

‘And the princess in the tower had the cunning to let down her hair for her secret lover to climb,’ she hit back, reminding him of the old fairytale.

His eyes narrowed. She held her breath, aware that she was prodding a very temperamental animal here yet, strangely, unable to stop herself—finding it exhilarating almost.

Then, deflatingly, he dropped her wrist and relaxed. ‘You have changed,’ he observed. ‘You would not have dared speak to me like this three years ago.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, subsiding angrily into the far corner of the seat. ‘I’ve changed. Grown up. Grown tough. What did you expect me to do, Nicolas?’ She flashed him a bitter look. ‘Remain the same gullible fool I was when I first met you? The one who thought you loved me above all others and would stand by me whatever was thrown at me?’

‘You were the one who took a lover to your bed,’ he reminded her. ‘Not I!’

‘And you were the one who threw me to the hungry wolves then dared to be disgusted with me when I cried to you for help!’

He threw her a contemptuous look, the disgust as clear in his eyes now as it had been three years ago. ‘I notice you don’t deny the charge of adultery,’ he jeered.

‘What’s the use,’ she asked, ‘when you refuse to believe me?’

‘Believe what?’ he derided. ‘Your lies?’

‘I never lied to you,’ she asserted.

‘Denying that swine’s presence in your room was no lie, was it?’

‘I never denied he was there,’ she insisted. ‘Only my acceptance of his presence.’

‘I fail to see the difference.’

‘And I refuse to discuss this with you now,’ she countered coldly. ‘Besides the fact that it comes three years too late, I find I no longer care what you think. My daughter is all that matters to me now, and she is all I want to think about.’

‘My father did not steal your child, Sara,’ he said grimly. ‘He recovered her. Or, at least, he coordinated the whole thing so his people could. She is at this moment sleeping safely under his protection. And soon, very soon,’ he warned gratingly, ‘I shall make you eat every filthy, lying word you’ve spoken about him. Understand?’

She understood. Another vendetta. Another reason to punish her for being foolish enough to mess with his close-knit clan.

Nicolas could believe what he liked about his father but just the simple knowledge that her daughter was in Sicily with Alfredo told her just who had arranged for her to be there.

What worried Sara now was his reason for doing so.

The Santino private jet landed at midday at Catania airport then taxied over to the far side of the runway. Away from the terminal. Away from the people.

That was the power of the Santino name. They were met by a Customs official. Nicolas dealt with him, tiredness pulling at the lean contours of his face now, even though he had slept away the whole flight.

And despite the hostility still thrumming between them Sara experienced a sharp pang of pity. Forty-eight hours ago he had been in New York. Since then he had crossed the Atlantic, dealt with a very stressful crisis then flown another few thousand miles to get here.

‘Let’s go,’ he instructed her, placing a hand at the base of her spine to urge her to precede him off the aircraft.

His touch sent a spray of tingling awareness skittering across the surface of her skin. She had discarded her jacket on entering the plane, and knew from past experience that the weather in Sicily would not require her to put it back on. But she wished she had now, wished she’d decided to roast in the jacket rather than suffer the sensation of his hand so close to her skin.

And it wasn’t revulsion she was experiencing, not any more. In the few fraught hours she had been back in his company, her senses had been reintroduced to their lord and master! And, good grief, they were clamouring with excitement!

It was a lowering truth. And one she didn’t live easily with. Could Nicolas have been right when he’d accused her of being starved of a man’s touch?

She hoped not. She hoped this was only a brief reaction to the stress she had been living under. Because it was a pride-levelling concept to find herself still so violently physically attracted to the man who had hurt her so badly.

It was a perfect Sicilian day, the air hot and dry, the sun burning down from a perfect porcelain-blue sky.

A car was waiting—a white limousine shimmering in the sunlight. Nicolas saw her into it then sat beside her. They took off almost immediately, making for a pair of high, wire-fencing gates which were drawn open by two uniformed members of staff as they approached.

Neither Sara nor Nicolas spoke. Both were tense. Sara was readying herself for the moment when she would see her daughter again, impatient but oddly nervous with it. And there was Nicolas. She frowned as she stared out at the bright, shimmering coastline they were following. She didn’t know how he was going to react to his first meeting with the child he saw as the living evidence of his wife’s betrayal.

She saw the house the moment they rounded a bend in the twisting road. It stood on its own halfway up an acutely sloped bay. And her heart gave an odd pull of recognition as her gaze drifted over beautiful, white-painted, flower-strewn walls built on several terraced levels to hug the lush hillside all the way down to the tiny, silver-skirted beach.

Then suddenly it was gone as the car cut inland, not far but enough to take them through a tunnel of leaf-weighted trees towards the rear of the house. It was the only access unless you came by sea. A beautiful place, very private, idyllic. A high, whitewashed stone wall stood impenetrable behind the gnarled trunks of old fig trees, two royal-blue-painted solid wood doors cutting a splash of colour into it where it rose to curve over them in an arch twisted with bougainvillea heavy with paper-like vivid pink blooms.

The car stopped, gave a single blast of its horn. A small square porthole cut into the blue opened then closed again. The blue-painted doors swung open on well-oiled hinges. The car began moving slowly through them into a huge cobbled courtyard alive with colour, with the dappling shelter of several olive trees, with the delicate sprinkle of water from the simple fountain gushing water into a circular pond.

Sara heaved in a tense breath then held onto it. She sensed Nicolas’s swift glance in her direction but ignored it. This beautiful place was the scene of all her nightmares, and she needed to concentrate if she was to hold on to her composure.

Lia, she told herself grimly. Just think of Lia.

The car stopped. The driver got out, stepping up to open her door. Her senses were assailed by the sweet scent of flowers and the crisp tang of fruit, the quietness, the sheer peace that enveloped her just another deception she had to do battle with.

The house from the back appeared quite humble when compared with its dramatic front—a mere single storey of long white wall with blue-painted shutters thrown back from small windows and a terracotta-tiled roof.

Twin blue doors stood open to offer a welcome. Sara gritted her teeth, tried to make her suddenly shaky legs move. A cicada sawed lazily, hidden somewhere in a tree.

No other sound. Nothing. Her hand reached out, unconsciously searching for and locating another, warmer, stronger hand. It closed around her trembling fingers, but she was not really aware of it as she forced herself to move forwards through the doors into a cool square hallway where she paused for a moment while her eyes adjusted themselves to the dimmer light inside.

It was all so familiar. The beautiful paintings adorning the walls, the tasteful mix of dark, well-polished furniture, delicate ornaments, and vases of flowers.

And the stony-faced housekeeper standing a couple of yards inside the hall.

But no baby to greet her. She glanced at Nicolas, eyes questioning, anxious. He stepped forward and spoke in low tones to the housekeeper then turned to come and take hold of Sara’s arm.

‘Where—?’ she jerked out tensely.

‘This way,’ he said, his face stiff. He began leading her across the entrance hall and through an archway that she knew led to one of several stone staircases.

The house was built on several levels. Here on the top floor were the more functional services like kitchens and garages and servant accommodation. Then came the formal reception rooms where the Santino family entertained. Next was the floor given over entirely to the Santino empire, with office suites with all the relevant state-of-the-art equipment to go with them. The next tier housed the family’s private bedroom suites, followed by the guest suites and finally the less formal pool and recreational tier where you would find the only televisions in the whole place, and the garden terrace, which stepped downwards to the tiny pebbly beach below.

There were some two hundred steps in all from top terrace to beach. Sara had counted them once during one of her lonely periods while Nicolas had been away and his father had driven her outside to seek refuge from his constant hostility. But those two hundred steps were outside. Inside, each level had its own stairway worked in a dogleg which took you from tier to tier.

And as Nicolas led the way down her legs began to wobble, memories she would have much preferred to keep at bay beginning to crowd her mind.

Memories of a beautiful suite of rooms with a huge, white-silk-draped canopied bed and a man lying naked and glossy brown against the pure white sheets. A man who loved to just lie there like that and watch her as she moved about the room, loved to watch her brush her hair and cream her skin and …

‘Sara.’

She’d stopped. She hadn’t realised she’d stopped until the sound of her name brought her jolting to the present. Her lashes fell then lifted again to reveal the glaze of pained reminiscence as she found the same man watching her.

The same man but not the same, she noted bleakly. The one who’d liked to watch her move about their bedroom had worn a look of lazy pleasure on his face. This one looked hard and cold and …

‘This way,’ he prompted.

He was standing by the stairway to the next level. She frowned in puzzlement. ‘But …’ Her hand wafted out in the vague direction of the bedrooms, her logic expecting Lia to be in one of those. Then it hit her, and if she had been up to it she would have smiled at her own stupidity. The next level contained the guest suites. Of course Lia would be there. She was not family. Just as Sara herself was no longer family—not in the true sense of the word anyway.

She followed him, her head lowered so he would not read the irony she knew must be written in her eyes. In silence they made their way down to the next level, and here, as she had expected, Nicolas led the way to a suite of rooms, then paused by the door as if taking a moment to brace himself for what was to come.

So did Sara.

The door swung open, she stepped up beside him—then went perfectly still, heart, lungs, everything inside her crashing to a shuddering halt at the sight that met her eyes.

Across the room and to one side of the open plate-glass window which led outside was a man. His dark hair was peppered with more silver than she remembered, his once big frame radically diminished by the wheelchair he was sitting in.

But it was not just the man who held all her stunned attention. It was what he held in his arms.

Lying against his chest was a baby wearing nothing more than a disposable nappy and a white cotton vest. Her golden head was cushioned on his shoulder, her little arms clinging tightly to his neck.

Her eyes blurred out of focus then back again, the sight of her child—her child!—clinging to her worst enemy seeming to rock the very ground she stood upon.

Then the greying head was turning, the bright, hunter’s gold eyes searching out and homing directly in on Sara’s eyes. And the expression glowing in them froze the blood inside her veins.

It was possession, fierce and parental. And at last Sara began to understand what this had all been about.

The child. Her child!

In his illness, Alfredo Santino had seen his own mortality. He had seen himself dying without ever holding his own grandchild. It no longer mattered that the child was also Sara’s child. He wanted. And what Alfredo Santino wanted he got, even if it meant stealing to get it. Even if it meant having the woman he hated most coming back into his life. He wanted Lia. And there was no longer a single doubt in Sara’s mind that it had been Alfredo who had orchestrated her child’s abduction.

‘No!’ Sheer instinct brought the thick denial bursting from her locked throat. And, almost stumbling in her haste, she went towards him, saw, with a horror that tightened like a steel clasp around her chest, his hands move on her baby in a convulsive act of ownership.

‘She would accept comfort from no one else but me!’ he exclaimed in glowing triumph as Sara reached him. ‘See how she clings. See!’

‘No,’ Sara breathed again, denying it, denying his right to feel this way about her baby—as he had denied the little girl her right to know the love of her own father!

As if the baby sensed the closeness of her mother, she gave a shaky sigh against Alfredo’s shoulder, bringing Sara’s attention swerving back her way. And suddenly Alfredo was forgotten. Nicolas, still standing tense and silent in the doorway, was forgotten, everything was wiped clean out of her mind as she watched the head of golden curls lift and slowly turn. A deep frown shadowing her luminous eyes, her Cupid’s-bow mouth cross and pouting, she looked up at her mother, released another unsteady sigh then simply stretched out an arm towards Sara.

Sara bent, lifted the baby from Alfredo, folded her to her, one set of fingers spreading across the little back, the others cupping the golden head. The baby curved herself, foetus-like, into her mother, head nuzzling into her throat, arms tucking in between Sara’s breasts.

Then neither moved. Neither spoke. Neither wept. Sara simply stood there with her eyes closed and her face a complete and utter blank, the emotion she was experiencing so deep that none of it was left to show on her whitened face.