Читать книгу Rings of Gold: Gold Ring of Betrayal / The Marriage Surrender / The Unforgettable Husband - Michelle Reid - Страница 8

IT WAS a long night. Sara dozed fitfully and came down to breakfast the next morning hollow-eyed and wan-faced, to find Nicolas sitting alone at the breakfast table, a newspaper spread out in front of him.

He folded it away when he saw her, though, making a narrow-eyed study of the obvious evidence of strain in her face.

She gave an inward grimace, entirely aware of exactly how terrible she looked.

She was wearing no make-up, and the peaches-and-cream bloom that her skin usually wore was missing. She had brushed her hair, but only so she could tie it at the back to keep the long, heavy mass out of the way. And she was wearing a simple, sprigged muslin skirt teamed with a long, loose silk knit jumper in a delicate shade of blue. Under normal circumstances the pastel colour would have suited her, but today it just enhanced the washed-out look—not that she cared. She didn’t care about anything to do with herself right now.

He didn’t look too hot either, she noted. His lean face had a drawn quality about it that suggested he hadn’t slept much himself last night. But at least the slick silk business suit had gone, his casual beige linen trousers and long-sleeved polo shirt in mint-green softening the harder edges of his tycoon persona. And the shirt was big enough not to mold his impressive torso but soft enough to make her aware of the muscled breast flexing beneath it as he moved.

‘What has happened to the nanny?’ she asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down. ‘I went to see how she was this morning, but she wasn’t there, and her room has been cleared out.’

‘She was taken home to her parents last night,’ he informed her. ‘She was too distressed to be any use here so …’ His concluding shrug said the rest.

No use, so remove her. Sara found a small smile. ‘I never wanted a nanny in the first place,’ she remarked.

‘You were ill,’ he reminded her, getting up to go over to the internal telephone. ‘Tea for my wife,’ he ordered curtly to whoever it was who answered. ‘And whatever she usually eats for breakfast.

‘You needed help with the child,’ he continued as he returned to his seat.

That filled her eyes with a rueful wryness that rid them of a little bit of strain. ‘Have I managed to make a single move during the last three years that you don’t know about?’ she mocked, not expecting an answer—and not getting one.

She knew how Nicolas worked. ‘What’s mine I keep,’ et cetera. And that was exactly what he had done over the last three years—kept his wife and her child in the kind of comfort that would be expected of a man of his stature.

So when Sara had gone down with a severe bout of flu several months ago Julie, the nanny, had appeared to take over caring for Lia. Since then, she’d stayed, not by Sara’s request but probably because this man had ordained it so. Now the nanny had been banished again. For being of no use. For falling into a fit of hysterics in the park instead of responding as she should have responded when her charge was snatched from right beneath her nose and coming straight home to inform Lucas, the chauffeur, who would have then immediately informed Nicolas, his boss—probably before he would have informed Sara. Because Lucas the chauffeur was not just a chauffeur. He was Sara’s guard, and she chose the word selectively. Lucas was paid to guard one of Nicolas Santino’s possessions, namely his wife—not the child, who he did not believe was his child and therefore did not warrant her own guard to watch her every move. Which was why someone had managed to take her.

The breakfast-room door opened and Mrs Hobbit came in carrying a tray loaded with tea things and some lightly toasted wholemeal bread. She smiled nervously at Nicolas and warmly at Sara.

‘Now, you eat this toast,’ she commanded sternly, her busy hands emptying the tray onto the table in front of Sara. ‘Or I shall just follow you around with it until you do.’

‘I will,’ Sara whispered, her eyes filling with a sudden burst of weak tears at the older woman’s rough kind of affection. ‘Thank you.’

‘Oh!’ the housekeeper exclaimed in dismay when she saw the tears. And suddenly Sara was being engulfed by a big, homely bosom. ‘Now, there, there,’ Mrs Hobbit murmured soothingly. ‘You need a good cry, and don’t we all?’ Her soft bosom quivered on a sigh. ‘But the little princess will be back here before you know it, all safe and sound; you wait and see.’

‘Yes. Of course.’ With a mammoth drag on her energy, Sara pulled herself together, straightening out of the older woman’s arms. ‘I’m sorry. It was just …’ Her words trailed off, lost in the helplessness she was feeling inside.

‘I know exactly what it was,’ Mrs Hobbit said grimly. ‘You don’t have to explain anything to me, madam. Not a thing …’

With that she patted Sara’s arm and walked out, leaving Sara alone with a very still Nicolas who had observed the whole exchange without uttering a single word.

Sara didn’t look at him—couldn’t. She had an idea that he had been rather shocked by Mrs Hobbit’s affectionate display.

‘They all—care for you a great deal, don’t they?’ he commented at last. ‘I’ve already had Lucas in this morning enquiring about how you are coping. And Mr Hobbit stopped me in the garden earlier to do the same.’

Was he making a comparison with the cold, stiff way his Sicilian servants had treated her? He should do. The difference was palpable. ‘Surprised, are you?’ she countered drily, reaching out with an unsteady hand for the teapot. ‘That anyone could care for the likes of me?’

To her surprise he got up and stepped tensely over to the window. ‘No,’ he replied, the single negative raking over a throat that sounded usually dry for him.

A silence fell, and Sara poured herself a cup of tea then cupped it in her fingers, bringing it to her lips to sip lightly at the steaming hot drink. He didn’t turn back to the table, and they remained like that for long, taut minutes, she sipping at her drink, he lost inside some tense part of himself.

‘Is she?’ he asked suddenly. ‘A little princess?’

Sara stared at his long, straight back and felt the bitter burn of a bloody anger begin to swell inside her. Today he had the damned effrontery to ask a question like that when only last night he had virtually denied her the right to so much as speak of the child! He had even tossed the baby’s picture away from him in open distaste!

She stood up, discarding her cup onto its saucer with the same appearance of distaste. ‘Go to hell, Nicolas,’ she said, and walked out of the room.

The morning stretched out like an interminable wasteland in front of her, growing more difficult to bear the longer it went on without a single telephone ringing in the house. The silence grated. The sense of utter, wretched helplessness grated. The way everyone else seemed to be getting on with their normal business grated. And the burning fact that Nicolas had locked himself away in the study and not come out again grated. Because he should be right here by her side comforting and supporting her! Worrying with her! If he truly believed Lia to be his daughter would he be so calm and collected about it all? Would he be sitting in that damned study getting on with the day’s business while the people who had stolen their baby decided to make them sweat with this long, cruel silence?

In the end, she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand any of it any longer. In an act of desperation she ran upstairs, dragged on an old pair of washed-out and skintight jeans and a T-shirt and ran downstairs again, busily tying a dark green cotton apron about her slender waist while trying to open the front door at the same time.

‘Can I help you, Mrs Santino?’ A big, burly bodyguard stepped out in front of her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And she went to walk past him.

The big hand closing quite gently around her arm made her freeze. ‘Take your hand off me,’ she instructed him glacially.

A dark flush rushed into his face. But he maintained his grip on her arm. ‘I have instructions that you are not to—’

‘Nicolas!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.

Doors flew open all over the place—including the study door. Nicolas appeared in the hallway, his gaze sharp-eyed and questioning as he took in the little scene being enacted on the steps of the front porch.

‘Tell him,’ Sara breathed, barely enunciating because of the revulsion bubbling inside her, ‘to get his hands off me!’

Instead of obeying, Nicolas frowned. ‘What is this, Sara?’ he asked in genuine puzzlement. ‘You must know that none of my men mean you any harm—’

‘Tell him,’ she repeated, her quivering mouth ringed by a white line of tension. ‘Tell him right now!’

His face darkened, his walk as he came down the hall towards her a statement in itself. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, especially in front of his lackeys. And he did not like it that she was daring to do so now.

He flashed the guard a slicing look that had him abruptly letting go of her arm then melting away like ice on hot coals. ‘Right,’ he said shortly. ‘Would you like to tell me what that was all about?’

‘No,’ she replied, her face still tense with anger and disgust.

He wouldn’t understand if she did try to explain how no man—no man—would ever touch her again without her permission—not without her retaliating accordingly, anyway. She had learned that lesson the hard way, at Jason Castell’s hands. If she had screamed then, if she’d only had the sense to scream and shout and make loud protests, then Nicolas would have known she deserved his help and not his anger. And everything else would have been so different.

He sighed, his whole manner impatient. ‘Then would you like to tell me where you think you are going?’

‘Out,’ she said. ‘Or am I under some kind of house arrest?’ she then asked bitterly.

‘No.’ He denied that, but in a way that only helped to irk her further. ‘But I would have thought your daughter’s plight was more important to you than any appointment you may desire to keep.’

Sarcasm, dry and deriding. She responded to it like a match to dry wood. ‘Don’t you dare try telling me what should be important to me,’ she flashed, ‘when you have no understanding of the concept yourself!’

An eyebrow arched, black, sleek and threatening, golden eyes warning her to watch her step. ‘Where do you think you are going, Sara?’ he repeated smoothly.

‘I don’t think it, I know it!’ she asserted. ‘We still have the right of free will in this country in case you didn’t know it. I can go where I please without answering to anyone and that includes you and your damned henchmen!’

With that she turned, hair flying out in a silken fan of sun-kissed gold, the frustration that had been building up all morning culminating in that one furious movement.

His hand circling her wrist halted her mid-step, pulling her back round to face him. ‘Stop it,’ he commanded when she tried to tug free. His face was dark, its angles sharpened with anger. ‘Now try again,’ he suggested. ‘And this time come up with a suitable reply. Where do you think you are going?’ He enunciated it warningly.

She glared into his predator’s eyes, glared down at the place where his long fingers were crushing the bones in her slender wrist, felt the ready tears burst into her eyes and the frustration alter to despair. Felt horrid and frightened and useless and fed up and lonely and—

‘To help Mr Hobbit in the garden,’ she whispered thickly, and wilted like a rag doll. ‘Where else would I be going dressed like this?’

He should have recognised what she was wearing! He might hate the very sight of her, and he might have come to despise her lack of sophistication and good dress sense. But did he really think she would go out into the street dressed like this?

And he really should have recognised the apron as the same kind she always wore to work in the garden!

And it hurt—hurt like hell that he hadn’t.

He muttered something. What, she didn’t catch, because she was too busy fighting the onset of tears. Then the grip on her wrist slackened and she slid it free to lift it into her other hand where she rubbed at it pitiably.

‘Where are your gloves?’ he enquired gruffly.

So, he remembered that she usually wore gloves to protect her hands! One small tick in his favour, she thought sarcastically, and indicated with a half-nod of her bowed head towards the side of the house. ‘In the garden shed,’ she mumbled.

‘Come on, then.’ His arm coming to rest across her shoulders made her stiffen in rejection, but he ignored it. ‘Let’s go and find your gloves.’

She went with him simply because he gave her no choice, the arm remaining where it was as they walked together around the front of the house to the side where, cleverly concealed behind a high box hedge, the big garden shed stood with its door open to reveal the multitude of gardening implements held inside.

The moment they reached it, she went to move away from him, but he stopped her, the arm remaining firm as he twisted his body until he was standing in front of her. Then he reached out to pick up her wrist—the wrist he had used to pull her back towards him. His fingers were gentle as they ran over the tiny marks already promising to become bruises in the near future.

Sara kept her face lowered and didn’t even breathe. If she did breathe she would weep; she knew she would. She was feeling so raw at the moment that anything—anything—was likely to set her off.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sorry if I overreacted. But you must understand that it is not safe for you to come outside without someone with you. And I am sorry for this.’ His thumb brushed a gentle caress over the fine veins in her wrist. ‘I forgot my own strength, and the delicacy of yours.’

‘Why isn’t it safe?’ she asked huskily.

He didn’t answer for a moment, then gave a small sigh. ‘We’re dealing with ruthless people here, Sara,’ he said grimly. ‘They will stop at nothing to get what they want. Which means they would very much like to snatch you too if they thought they could get you.’

‘Why?’ She lifted tear-filled eyes to him in wretched bewilderment. ‘Isn’t it enough that they have my baby? What more do they think another life is worth on top of hers?’

For the first time since he had walked back into her life yesterday, she saw the Nicolas she used to know. The one who didn’t slice her in two with his eyes. The one who looked almost—tender.

A tenderness that was mirrored in the way he dropped her wrist in favour of stroking a gentle finger over her pale cheek. ‘When I married you I went against my father’s wishes,’ he reminded her. ‘In their eyes that makes you my most prized possession.’ He paused, looking deeply into her hollowed, anxious eyes which showed such a complete lack of comprehension, then sighed heavily. ‘The child is enough. They know she is enough, but in case I decide not to toe the line some extra leverage would suit them down to the ground.’

‘But you are toeing the line, aren’t you?’ she demanded with an upsurge of alarm. ‘You won’t put her life at risk by playing games with them?’

His eyes flashed, tenderness wiped out by anger. ‘What do you think I am?’ he muttered. ‘Some unfeeling monster? Of course I won’t put her at risk!’

‘Then why are you trying to frighten me with all this talk of my own safety being at risk?’

‘Because they have already threatened it, dammit!’ he growled, then pulled her to him—as if he couldn’t help himself, he pulled her to him and pressed her face into his chest. ‘I shall kill them if they so much as touch you,’ he vowed harshly. ‘Kill every single one of them!’

‘But you don’t feel the same killer instinct for the baby,’ she noted, and firmly pushed herself away from him.

He sighed, derision cutting an ugly line into his mouth. ‘Is it not enough for you that I can feel that kind of emotion for a faithless wife?’ he mocked himself bitterly.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t enough.’ And she walked into the garden shed and away from him.

He followed her, his expression harsh to say the least. ‘You give no quarter, do you?’ he rasped.

‘No,’ she agreed, rummaging through the mad clutter that decorated the workbench. ‘Why should I, when you gave none to me?’

‘I kept you, Sara,’ he seared, ‘when I should have thrown both you and your child out on the street to starve!’

‘And why didn’t you?’ she challenged him, spinning to face him. ‘Because you were protecting your own pride, Nicolas,’ she offered as the answer. ‘That isn’t giving anything,’ she declared. ‘That is just you protecting you.’ With a gesture of contempt, she turned back to the bench. ‘So if you’re expecting eternal gratitude forget it. You did me no favours allowing me to stay here, and if anything I hold you responsible for not protecting us properly when you must have known we were at risk!’

His response to that was a short, hard, mocking laugh. ‘You are amazing, do you know that?’ he said in scathing disbelief. ‘It is no wonder you remain so stunningly beautiful when you can shed blame as easily as you do! Your own sins are not allowed to linger long enough to place a single line of guilt or shame upon your lovely face! It must be the perfect recipe for eternal youth!’

‘And what’s your recipe?’ she countered, then went very still, realising what she had just said.

He was still too, silent, unbreathing, pumping the wretched Freudian slip for all it was worth. Then, ‘For my beauty?’ he prompted silkily.

Her nerve-ends went into panic mode, forcing her hands to move again in short, jerky movements. ‘Men aren’t generally described as beautiful.’ She dismissed his question as casually as she could.

But it was too late. She’d known it was too late from the moment she let the foolish remark slip from her lips. He was suddenly standing right behind her, bending to brace his hands on the bench at either side of her tense frame, his breath warm against her slowly colouring cheek. ‘Yet beautiful was always the word you used to describe me,’ he reminded her softly. ‘You would lie naked on top of me with your lovely hair caressing my shoulders and your slender arms braced on my chest. You would look into my eyes and say with heart-rending solemnity, “You are so beautiful, Nicolas,”’ he chanted tauntingly.

‘Stop it,’ she hissed, having to close her eyes to blot out the picture he was so cruelly building. But it wouldn’t be blocked out. Instead it played itself across the backs of her quivering eyelids. Beautiful hair … She could hear herself saying it in that soft, adoring voice she used to use as her fingertips had reverently touched the smooth black silk. Beautiful nose, beautiful mouth, beautiful skin …

And he used to listen—listen to every shy, soft, serious word with a solemn intensity that made her sure, so sure, that the moment had touched something very deep inside him.

You have beautiful shoulders … Her fingers would trace them, sliding lovingly over the muscular curves and hollows. Beautiful chest …

She let out a shaky sigh, her tongue sneaking out to run a moistening caress around her suddenly dry lips because she knew what her mind was going to conjure up next. And it conjured up the way her head would lower, her soft mouth closing round one of his beautiful, taut male nipples …

His response had been that of a man driven beyond anything, his eyes turning molten, the breath escaping his lungs on a harshly sensuous rasp. And in a quick, sure, purely masculine action he would lift his legs to clamp them around her slender hips then tug her downwards—down until she—

‘Did you whisper those same soft, evocative words to your lover?’

The angry growl had her eyes flicking open, her whole body jumping on a sudden stinging crack back to reality. His hands came up, hard on her shoulders, to spin her around.

‘Did they have the same mind-blowing effect on him they used to have on me?’

She shook her head, unable to answer, white-faced and pained, her breasts heaving on a single frightened intake of air when she saw the anger scored into his face—the hard, murderous jealousy.

‘Have you any idea what it did to me imagining you lying there with him like that?’ he grated. ‘I loved you, dammit!’ he snarled. ‘I worshipped the very ground you stood upon! You were mine—mine!’ He shook her hard. ‘I found you! I woke you! I owned this beautiful body and those beautiful words!’

‘And I never gave either to anyone else!’ she cried.

‘Liar,’ he breathed, and dropped his mouth down to her own.

It was punishment. It wasn’t meant to be anything else. His lips crushed hers back against her clenched teeth until, on a strangled gasp, she gave in to the pressure and opened her mouth. From then on it was both a punishment and a revelation. A terrible, terrible revelation because from the moment their tongues met all sense of now went flying, and she found herself tossed back three years into a hot, throbbing world where this man reigned supreme. It was the smell of him, the taste, touch, texture.

Texture. The texture of his angry lips forcing her own apart, the texture of his moist tongue sliding against her own, the texture of his smooth, tight cheek rubbing against the softness of hers, and there was the sensation of his breath mingling with hers, and the drowningly sensual sound of his groan as she gave into it all and buried her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, hungry, greedy for something she had not known she had been starving for until this bright, burning moment.

When he eventually wrenched himself away she sank weakly back against the bench behind her, unable to do anything but wilt there while her shattered senses tried to regroup.

The air inside the shed was hot and stifling, the sun beating down on the roof filling it with the musty smell of baking wood, old oil and earth.

He stood about a foot away, his breathing harsh and his body tense. Violence still skittered all around them, the threat of it dancing tauntingly in the motes of dust skittering in the musty air.

Then came the distinctive sound of a telephone, shattering the tension like glass. He raked his hand into his trouser pocket, came out with a small mobile telephone and pressed it to his ear.

‘Right,’ he gritted after listening for a moment. ‘I’m on my way.’

‘What?’ Sara choked out, coming upright with an alarmed jerk.

He didn’t answer. Did not even spare her a glance as he turned to walk out of the shed.

‘Don’t you dare shut me out as if I don’t count!’ Sara spat hoarsely after him. ‘She is my child! Mine! If that was a call to say they are making contact again, then I have a right to know!’

His big shoulders flexed, the muscles bracing and stretching beneath the fine covering of his shirt. ‘They are making contact,’ he said, then walked off, out into the sunshine and away, leaving her standing there, trembling, wanting to throw something after him, wanting to scream, wanting to tear the whole world down!

‘You bastard,’ she whispered wretchedly. ‘You cruel and unfeeling bastard.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘Why can’t you care? Why can’t you care?’

She was sternly composed, though, by the time he opened the study door long, agonising minutes later to come to a sudden halt when he saw her sitting in a chair across the hall.

She looked like a schoolgirl who had been told to wait outside the headmaster’s office, all big eyes and pensive uncertainty.

Only her mouth was not the mouth of a schoolgirl. Her mouth was the full, pulsing mouth of a woman. A woman who had recently been quite violently kissed.

She shot to her feet. ‘Well?’

He shook his dark head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It was a false alarm. A hoax caller.’

‘H-hoax?’ She mouthed the word in numb disbelief.

‘We have had several of them.’

Her head twisted at that, the gesture sharp with pained disgust at a fellow human being who could be so cruel as to try to cash in on other people’s anguish. She didn’t say another word, but simply walked away, taking the stairs with her spine erect and her chin up.

Alone, as only a woman in her situation could be.

‘She did that like a princess,’ Toni Valetta remarked with quiet respect from Nicolas’s side.

To his consternation the remark acted like a lighted fuse on a time bomb. The other man turned on him, his eyes sparking yellow murder. ‘Go to hell,’ he rasped, stepped back into the study and closed the door, right in Toni’s surprised face.

If Toni Valetta had been present at the breakfast table that morning, he would have understood all of that. As it was, he stared blankly at the door, gave a bewildered shrug and walked away.