Читать книгу Rings of Gold: Gold Ring of Betrayal / The Marriage Surrender / The Unforgettable Husband - Michelle Reid - Страница 9

THE afternoon dragged on interminably. Lunch, which Sara didn’t even bother to turn up for, came and went. Then more hours, hours where she roamed from room to room, drifting out if someone else came in, wanting to be alone, needing to be alone because there was no one she could share her torment with.

Dinner that evening was another grim, silent affair, if only because none of them were prepared to pretend that there was anything even vaguely normal about it. Sara had joined Nicolas and Toni for the meal, but only because Nicolas had sent up a message to her room ordering her to attend, and she just didn’t have it in her even to try to argue.

So she sat at the table, played lip-service to Mrs Hobbit’s delicious chicken soup, cut up the light, fluffy omelette that must have been specially prepared to tempt her failed appetite because the other two were served thick, tender steaks, managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls, accepted a glass of water, refused dessert and coffee then excused herself and left the two men to it without so much as uttering a single word except the pleases and thank-yous that good manners required.

‘She can’t take much more of this,’ Toni grimly observed as the door closed behind her.

Nicolas flashed him a deadly glance. ‘Do you think I am blind?’ he gritted.

And that was that, the atmosphere at the table no better with Sara gone from it. They too finished their meal in silence.

A couple of hours later Nicolas Santino opened the door to Sara’s bedroom to find the room empty. He frowned, eyes skimming over to the bathroom where the door stood open and its inner darkness told its own story.

He strode back down the stairs again and checked in every room before returning to the study where Toni sat at the desk with his eyes fixed on the television screen across the room. ‘It’s on the news,’ he informed his employer. ‘They’re intimating Mafia connections and God knows what else. I thought you’d put a blackout on this.’

‘I did.’ He stepped further into the room. He had just taken a shower and had changed his clothes for buff cords and a fleecy cotton shirt. ‘Has Sara been looking for me while I was showering?’ he asked the other man.

‘No.’ Toni glanced up, frowning. ‘Isn’t she in her room?’

Nicolas didn’t answer, his expression tightening. ‘Get hold of whoever is running that bloody news station and put a block on it,’ he commanded.

‘A bit like locking the door after the horse has bolted, Nic,’ Toni said drily.

‘This whole thing is an illustration of that remark,’ he clipped. ‘She can’t have got out of the house, could she?’

It took a moment for Toni’s mind to swap subjects. ‘Sara?’ he said then. ‘No chance. Alarm bells would have gone off, bringing ten men running and at least three dogs. And anyway, why would she want to go out?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nicolas frowned. ‘But she’s not in her room and she’s not in any room down here …’

Toni stood up, a mobile telephone suddenly stuck to his ear. ‘I’ll check with the men,’ he said grimly. ‘You check upstairs again.’

He went, taking the stairs two at a time then methodically opening doors and checking inside every room on the seven-bedroomed landing.

He found her in the last one—and would have missed her altogether if the shaft of light spilling in from the landing hadn’t fallen on the flow of her long golden hair.

It made him still—several things made him still, but the fact that she was sitting on the floor curled up against the bars of a baby’s cot had the severest effect on him, closing his lungs and tightening his chest when he realised that this was her child’s room, and it was a child’s pretty pink fur animal she was clutching to her breast.

Her eyes were open. She knew he was there. He had to swallow on a wave of black emotion that ripped at him inside—at his heart because of how utterly bereft she looked—and his anger stirred because he cared when he knew he should not.

‘Don’t put on the light,’ she said when his hand reached out to do just that. ‘Have they called again?’

‘No.’ Slowly he lowered his hand then leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. ‘What are you doing in here, Sara?’ he sighed out heavily. ‘This can only be more painful for you.’

‘It comforts me,’ she said. ‘I miss her. She’s missing me.’

She didn’t look comforted. She looked tormented. ‘You need sleep,’ he muttered.

‘Lia won’t sleep,’ she countered dully. ‘Not without Dandy.’ Pulling the fluffy pink teddy from her breast, her fingers began gently smoothing its soft fur. ‘He goes to bed with her every night. A nursery rhyme first, then a cuddle. Then she—’

‘Come out of here!’ he cut in harshly. Then when she went instantly quiet he added wearily, ‘You are only punishing yourself doing this.’

But she didn’t move, showed no sign at all that she’d even heard him, her fingers trailing gently over the satin-soft fur.

‘Sara!’ he bit out impatiently.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Go away if you don’t like it. But this is where I feel closest to my baby and this is where I’ll stay.’

Toni came up behind him then, catching the huskily spoken words and the way muscles began to work all over his friend and employer’s face. ‘OK?’ he said gruffly.

‘Get lost, Toni,’ Nicolas responded thickly, the very fact that once again he could speak to his best friend like that a revelation of what he was struggling with inside him.

Toni silently moved away, his handsome face carved in a grim mask of sympathy—whether for one or both of them he wasn’t sure himself. Certainly, Sara deserved sympathy for what she was having to endure. But he hadn’t expected to see Nic look so damned tormented by it.

Slowly Nicolas levered himself away from the door and came further into the room, releasing the light his frame had been blocking so he could see more clearly—the pretty pink walls dressed with baby pictures, white-painted shelves decked with baby toys. The carpet beneath his feet was pink, as were the curtains at the windows.

His face tightened and he moved stiffly to stand staring out at the still, dark night, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets.

Sara allowed herself to look at him. Look at this man whose lean, lithe body she had once known more intimately than she knew her own body. A man she had loved to just look at like this, to feel with that warm, dark sense that resided somewhere deep inside herself, the wonder of knowing that he belonged to her. This man, this—special man.

Hers. Just as unequivocally as she had been his.

He was eight years older than she and usually it showed. He used to like that, she recalled—like the way they contrasted with each other. Whereas he was dark she was fair, whereas he was hard she was soft, whereas he was cynical with worldly experience she was as innocent and naïve as a newborn babe.

They were complete opposites, he the tall, dark sophisticate with a cool maturity stamped into his lean features, she the small and delicate blonde whose youth and natural shyness made her vulnerable and therefore ignited his male need to protect.

He’d liked to have her at his side, to feel her hand clutching at one of his or resting in the crook of his arm, or simply to know that she needed to be standing close enough to touch him to feel at least bearably at ease in the élite kind of company he circulated in.

He had had the instincts of a killer shark in every other aspect of his life except where she was concerned; when he was with her his whole demeanour would soften so openly that it used to set other women’s teeth on edge in envy of something she possessed that they knew they could never emulate.

An innate femininity, he’d called it—a certain fragile delicacy of mind, body and spirit that most women these days had polished out of them before they even left their cradles.

But its novelty value had worn off after a while, especially when the pressure of his workload had grown heavier by the week and she had not appeared to be learning to cope well without his being right beside her. Then the shyness that had originally drawn him towards her had become an irritant that he had, in the end, had little patience with. Adding to that the fact that she had been seriously afraid of his father, he had actually become angry with her when she’d begged him at least to let her set up house for them on their own.

‘This is our home,’ he’d stated. ‘Is it not enough that you offend my father with your nervous attitude towards him without further insulting him by wanting to move out of this house?’

‘But he doesn’t like me.’ She’d tried to make him understand. ‘I’m not what he wanted for you, Nicolas, and he lets me know it at every opportunity he gets!’

‘He teases you for your shyness, that’s all. It is your own paranoia that makes you see everything he does as malicious!’

Which was just one display of his own blindness where Alfredo was concerned. For Alfredo had not been just malicious in his dealings with his son’s unwanted wife, he had been downright destructive.

‘OK,’ Nicolas said gruffly now. ‘Talk about it.’

The command made her blink, simply because she had been so lost inside her thoughts about him that she had forgotten he was actually there.

‘About what?’ she asked.

The profiled edges of his jaw flexed. ‘The child,’ he said. ‘What you’re feeling right now. Talk about it.’

Sara smiled wearily. ‘You don’t really want to hear.’

‘If it helps you, I will listen.’ He took a deep breath then let it out again. ‘Tell me what she is like,’ he invited in a low voice.

What was he thinking? she wondered curiously. What was he really thinking behind this—false fade of caring? Was he simply humouring her as his words suggested or was there something more profound going on here? Was Nicolas looking for an excuse for the right to care?

‘You saw her picture. She looks like me,’ she told him, wishing she could announce some clear physical evidence of the father who’d sired her child, but she couldn’t. ‘My features. My hair. My eyes …’ She could have told him her daughter had her father’s smile, his stubbornness, his ability to charm the socks off anyone. But it would not be enough, so she didn’t say it. ‘She was a late talker but an early walker. And she likes to be smiled at. If you frown at her she’ll cry. She has done from—’

Her throat locked, choking her, because she had a sudden vision of those people who had taken her, frowning all the time and—

Oh, God. ‘Nicolas,’ she whispered starkly. ‘I’m frightened.’

He turned, his eyes as dark as his expression. ‘I know,’ he acknowledged quietly.

‘If they hurt my baby—’ Again she stopped, having to struggle with the fear clawing at her insides. ‘Would they hurt a baby?’ Her eyes were dark with torment. ‘Could they hurt a baby?’

‘Don’t,’ he sighed, but for once his voice sounded rough and unsteady, and the shoulders beneath the shirt flexed as if they could not cope with the tension attacking them. ‘They will not hurt her,’ he insisted. ‘It will serve them no useful purpose to hurt her.’

‘Then why this long silence?’ She stared at him wretchedly. ‘What are they waiting for?’

‘It is a game they are playing with us,’ he grimly replied. ‘The cruel game of making us sweat. They do it to push up the ante, so that by the time they do call again we will be so out of our heads that we will agree to anything.’

‘And will you—agree to anything?’

‘Oh, God,’ he rasped, his fingers going up to rub at his aching eyes. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that I will do whatever is in my power to get your child back?’ He turned on her angrily.

Remorse brought tears brimming into her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘But it’s just all so …’

His harsh sigh eased her of the need to finish. ‘Come on,’ he said, and bent to lift her firmly to her feet. ‘You are exhausted; you need rest which you will not get here.’

He was right; she was so tired that she could barely stand on her own, but she pleaded with him, ‘Don’t send me back to that bedroom. Please! I feel so alone there!’

‘You will not be alone.’ Grimly, he plucked the pink teddy from her fingers, then laid it back in the cot. ‘For I shall be with you.’

‘You?’ She frowned in surprised confusion. ‘But—’

‘I will brook no protest from you, Sara,’ he cut in warningly. ‘You need rest. I am offering you the physical comfort of my presence. The alternative is two sleeping tablets the doctor left for just such a contingency. The choice is yours. Make it, but make it quickly or I will do it for you.’

Her luminous eyes lifted to search his, trying to discover why he was suddenly being like this. His own lashes lowered, two arcs of black settling against his cheekbones to hide what was going on in his head.

Something happened inside her—a soft flutter of yearning. A need. A memory of a time when this man had been as gentle and caring as any woman could wish for.

‘You wish me to make this decision?’ he prompted, at her continuing silence.

‘Your accent is thickening,’ she remarked, quite out of context.

He looked nonplussed momentarily, then grimaced. ‘That is because I am as tired as you are,’ he sighed. And in an act of failing patience he bent and lifted her into his arms. ‘Your time is up,’ he muttered, moving out of the baby’s room and down the hallway to her own room. ‘The decision is taken from you.’

He walked to the bed and allowed her bare feet to slide to the floor. Then he was grimly dealing with her robe, drawing it from her shoulders and tossing it aside to reveal a matching gown of the smoothest coffee satin, before leaning past her to flick back the covers on the bed.

‘In,’ he commanded.

Meekly, she did as she was told, while he turned his attention to extracting his mobile phone from his trouser pocket.

‘Toni?’ His voice was curt, demanding attention, not responses. ‘I am with Sara. Disturb me only when it is time.’ Click. The mobile was flicked shut.

‘What did that mean?’ she asked sharply, her wide eyes watching every move he made as he placed the mobile on the bedside table.

‘Nothing,’ he dismissed. ‘I am expecting a call from New York.’

He began striding around the room, turning off table lamps until only the small silk-shaded one by the bed remained illuminated. Then he returned to the side of the bed, and, never once glancing at Sara, though she was sure he was aware that she never took her eyes off him, he discarded his shoes then stretched out beside her.

‘Nic—’ she began pensively.

‘Shush,’ he cut in. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘I was only going to say—thank you,’ she whispered.

He didn’t reply, didn’t move, didn’t do anything but lie there staring at the ceiling above their heads. Sara watched him do it, watched until her eyes began to sting and her lids grew heavy, watched until she could no longer watch, and at last drifted into sleep.

He was still lying there over an hour later, but had moved onto his side and was half dozing when she suddenly groaned and moved restlessly, throwing off the covers and twisting out of them so that she could curl herself against him instead.

‘Nic,’ she whispered, then placed her warm lips against his.

It was his downfall. He knew it and despised himself for it even as he gave in to it.

But she tasted so sweet. So exquisitely sweet. Like nothing he had ever tasted anywhere else in his life but from her …

It was wonderful. Like floating on a soft, fluffy cloud of rich, warm euphoria. Her body felt as light as a feather but her limbs were heavy, somnolent with the most honeyed delight. And her flesh was smiling. Could flesh smile? she asked herself wonderingly. Because hers certainly was. And since this was her dream she could let herself do and feel anything she liked. So, yes, her flesh was smiling, its outermost layer caressed by something warm and moist and infinitely pleasing.

She tried breathing not fast but slowly, savouring the sensual pull of oxygen into her lungs which seemed to set off a chain reaction throughout her body, setting her senses pulsing, slow and easy like the cloud she was floating on, the smile on her flesh, the sigh she released as she exhaled again.

‘Nic,’ she whispered.

That was what this was. It reminded her of Nicolas in one of his lazy, loving moods when he would lick her skin from toes to fingertips, raising a million and one sensations of pleasure all over her, rendering her lost and helpless. His to do with as he pleased.

‘Sweet,’ a hushed voice suggested.

Oh, God, yes, this was sweet, she agreed silently. The sweetest, sweetest sensation on earth—or in heaven. For she wasn’t of this world right now. She was floating somewhere above it, stretched out, naked and basking, basking in the wonder of herself.

Her breasts felt full and heavy, her nipples stinging with impatience because he hadn’t reached them yet. And they wanted him to. They wanted him to close his mouth around them, lick and suck and make them his own.

‘Nic,’ she whispered again, in breathless need this time.

‘Shush,’ the hushed voice answered.

She sighed in lazy agreement—then came fully awake with a muscle-locking, bone-clenching jerk when he slid the tip of his tongue into the delicate crevice between her thighs.

‘Oh, God,’ she gasped. ‘Nicolas—No!’

‘Yes.’ He was suddenly looming over her, his face dark with passion, mouth full and moist from the havoc he had just been creating with his tongue.

And they were both naked! Her nightdress was gone—his clothes!—the crisp hair on his chest rasping against her breasts, one wonderfully muscular thigh heavy across her own.

‘You want me, Sara,’ he insisted. ‘Your body wants me. Your subconscious mind wants me! Don’t tell me no when I can feel you literally throbbing with need of me!’

‘You said comfort,’ she reminded him whimperingly.

‘This is comfort,’ he declared. ‘The most exquisite comfort there is.’

‘But—’

‘No,’ he gritted. ‘I need this too! We both do.’ Then he cut off any more protests with the hungry crush of his mouth.

She let out a single helpless sigh. He answered it by groaning something in his throat, then his tongue was playing with hers in the most sensuously evocative way, which brought her hands up to grasp tightly at his neck. His thigh moved against hers, rubbing a caress over the soft golden mound which protected her sex. His fingers trailed over her shoulders, her upper arms, then finally, exquisitely, her breasts.

‘Do you know how sweet to taste you are?’ he muttered, head coming up, hunter’s eyes glowing at her in the darkness. ‘How your skin secretes something onto my tongue that causes a chemical reaction inside me that drives me half-insane?’ He sighed, as if he despised himself for saying all of that. ‘I am addicted to you,’ he admitted thickly. ‘You are a fix I can get from no other source!’

‘You’ve tried?’ she asked painfully.

‘Of course I have tried!’ he admitted. ‘Do you think I like feeling this way about you?’

‘No,’ she sighed on a wave of dark sadness for this man with his monumental pride which must be taking a battering because he had discovered he could not lie with her without wanting her. Wanting the woman he believed had betrayed him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Sorry that fate had forced him to feel that way.

‘Don’t talk,’ he commanded bleakly. ‘I have to remember what you are when you talk. And I need this—need it!’ he repeated hoarsely.

Then he groaned again, caught her mouth in a mind-blowing desperate kiss that brought tears to her eyes and her hands down to stroke his chest in a lame gesture of comfort to relieve his agony.

It was at that moment that she realised how much she still loved him, loved this man who could believe such vile things about her yet could still desire her as desperately as this.

The rest took place in a charged kind of silence, he arousing her with a grim sense of determination that told her he wanted the full collapse of all her senses before he would feel satisfied in taking her.

When he did eventually come into her, he did it with a ruthless precision that brought a grunt from his throat and a gasp from hers. Then he stopped, elbows braced at each side of her, eyes closing on a tense sideways jerk of his head that was in itself a dead give-away of how close he had driven himself to the edge before allowing himself to do this.

He filled her. In that moment of complete stillness Sara lay there and felt him fill her, felt the wonder of it, the beauty, felt her own muscles close around him, draw him deeper, hold him, knead him.

‘Breathe,’ he gritted. ‘Damn you, Sara. Breathe!’

It was only as she sucked air into her lungs on a greedy gasp that she realised she had stopped breathing, her whole body locked in a spasm of sheer sensual ecstasy.

Her hands flew out, wildly uncoordinated as they searched for something solid to hold onto. They found his shoulders. He growled something in his throat, then his body was moving, thrusting—short, tense, blunt thrusts that held his face locked in a mask of total sexual compulsion and drove her over the edge to complete oblivion.

When she eventually dragged herself back from wherever she had gone off to, Nicolas was no longer in the bed. He was standing by it, pulling on his trousers with terse, angry movements, every cell in him sending out a message of bitter regret.

‘Hating yourself now, Nicolas?’ she taunted lazily.

He went still, then jerked his head round to look at her, the hunter’s gold eyes barely brushing over her before they were flicking away again. ‘Yes,’ he answered flatly.

He didn’t even have the decency to deny it, and that hurt. ‘You seduced me,’ she reminded him. ‘It was not the other way round.’

‘I know it.’ Snatching up his shirt, he tugged it on. ‘I am not blaming you for my own—’

He didn’t finish. His jaw flexing with tension, he pushed buttons into holes. Sara watched him, too spent to do much else as he dropped into a chair to pull on socks and shoes. That done, he stood up, glanced at her then away again, as if he couldn’t stand looking at her lying there like that, with her eyes languid and her body wearing the flush of a woman who had just been devoured.

‘Will you be—all right?’ he asked stiffly. ‘If I leave you?’

Desperate to get away now he had disgraced himself? she wondered.

‘Without you to comfort me, you mean?’ she mocked. ‘Yes, I’m sure I shall manage.’ Her sarcasm bit. ‘I’m used to being alone, after all,’ she added bleakly. ‘I’ve been alone since I was thirteen.’

‘Not always,’ he gritted. ‘Once, until you spoiled it, you had me.’

‘Really?’ She sliced a glance at him, his bitterness igniting her bitterness, and she scrambled off the bed to reach angrily for her robe. She didn’t even care that she was exposing her body to him. Nicolas hated himself for desiring her, so let him gaze at her naked body—and hate!

‘Alone, Nicolas,’ she repeated. ‘Even with you. You gave me no support, no rights. No say in how we ran our marriage. If I dared to object, you shut me up in the most effective way you knew how.’ She meant in bed, and he knew it; his grim mouth tightened. ‘If I persisted, you shot me down with hard words and derision. You thought it amusing that I liked to be amongst flowers rather than people, but never once allowed me the concession that maybe I had a right to like what I wanted to like no matter how empty-headed and frivolous it seemed to you.’

‘I never considered you empty-headed,’ he muttered.

‘You rarely considered me at all,’ she countered, searching angrily around her for the tie to her robe. ‘Except where it mattered exclusively to you. Then I was expected to put up and shut up, because you knew best and I was, after all, just the pretty little doll you’d had the grace to elevate onto such an exalted plateau in life! Your servants rated higher in the pecking order than I did. They—’ she pulled the belt tight around her waist ‘—looked down on me!’

He let out a short laugh, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing all of this. ‘I don’t know whether to weep for you or applaud you for stringing together more words than I’ve ever heard you manage in one go before!’

‘Oh, applaud, Nicolas,’ she flashed. ‘I deserve the applause for putting up with it all for as long as I actually did!’

He turned away, the movement dismissive. ‘You are beginning to bore me.’

‘Well, what’s new?’ she retorted. ‘You were bored with me within weeks of marrying me when you discovered I was going to be just a little more trouble than you thought I was worth! But I’ll tell you something, Nicolas,’ she continued hotly. ‘If you grew bored with the shy, timid little mouse you married in a fit of madness, then I certainly grew tired of the tall, dark, handsome god I found myself tied to, because he turned out to be just one of a very select, very well cared for but boringly similar flock of sheep!

‘Oh, their coats were exquisite,’ she railed on recklessly, ‘and they ate off the very best turf, but what they gained in fine finish they lost in good brain cells! They did the same things. They thought the same things. And they bleated on and on about the same things! Genetic farming, I think they call it. I had no idea it went on in human society as well as—’

‘Have you quite finished?’ he inserted coldly.

She nodded. ‘Yes.’ She felt flushed and breathless, incredibly elated. In all her twenty-five years she had never spoken to anyone like that. It had been almost as good as the sex!

‘Then I shall remove my—genetic abomination from your presence,’ he said, giving her a stiff, cold bow that was as big an insult as the way he had hated himself for touching her again.

‘After I have said one last thing,’ she threw at his retreating back. ‘Make a note of today’s date, Nicolas. For I took no precautions against what we just did in that bed over there, and I know for a fact that the idea just would not even enter your head! If I am pregnant because of tonight, I want there to be no doubt this time who the father of my child could be.’

He’d reached the door, from which he turned to slice her with a coldly shrivelling look. ‘A genetic mutation?’ he clipped out curtly. ‘What an appalling thought.’

Shot down. With one smooth, clever one-liner, he had managed to turn her wild tirade back on her. She didn’t know whether she wanted to scream or weep in bitter, blinding frustration!

What she actually did was sit on the edge of the bed and just—wilt.