Читать книгу The Marriage Surrender - Michelle Reid - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

‘COULD I s-speak to Alessandro Bonetti, please?’

The public call box smelled of stale cigarettes. Pale-faced, the full length of her slender body muscle-locked by the mettle she needed to make this telephone call, Joanna barely noticed the smell or the unsavoury mess littering the floor beneath her black-booted feet as she stood there clutching the telephone receiver to her ear.

‘Who is calling, please?’ a coolly concise female voice enquired.

‘I’m...’ she began—then stopped, white teeth pressing into her full bottom lip as the answer to that question stuck firmly in her throat.

She couldn’t say it. She just could not bring herself to reveal her true identity to anyone but Alessandro himself when there was a very good chance that he might refuse to speak to her, and in the present state that she was in, she didn’t need some cold-voiced telephonist listening to that little humiliation.

She had been there before...

‘It—it’s a personal call,’ she temporised, closing her eyes on a faint prayer that the reply was enough to get her access to the great man himself.

It wasn’t. ‘I’m afraid I will have to have your name,’ the voice insisted, ‘before I can enquire if Mr Bonetti is available to speak to you.’

Well, at least that stone-walling response placed Sandro in the country. Joanna made a grim note. She had half expected him to have gone back to live and work in Rome by now.

‘Then put me through to his secretary,’ she demanded, ‘and I’ll discuss this further with her.’

There was a pause, one of those taut ones, packed with silent pique at Joanna’s rigidly determined tone. Then, ‘Please hold,’ the voice clipped at her, and the line went quiet.

The seconds began to tick slowly by, taking with them the desperation that had managed to bring her this far. A desperation that had kept her awake last night, trying to come up with some other way to get herself out of this mess without having to involve Sandro. But every which way she’d tried to look at it, it had always come down to two straight choices.

Arthur Bates or Sandro.

A shudder ripped through her, the mere thought of Arthur Bates’ name enough to keep her hanging onto that telephone line, when every self-preserving instinct she possessed was telling her to cut loose and make a bolt into hiding somewhere rather than resort to this.

But she was tired of hiding. Tired of—being this person who stood on her own, isolated by her own inability to reach out to another human being and simply ask for help.

So, here she was, she reminded herself bracingly, ready to ask for that help. Ready to reach out to the only human being she felt she could reach out to. If Sandro said No, get lost, then she would. But she had to give him one last chance—give herself this chance to put her life back together again.

After all, she consoled herself, against the fretful doubts rattling around inside her head, she wasn’t intending dumping permanently on him, was she? She was simply going to put a proposition to him, get his answer, then get the hell out of his life again.

For good. That would be part of her proposition. Help me this one time and I promise never to bother you again.

Easy. Nothing to it. Sandro wasn’t a monster. He was, in actual fact, quite a decent human being. He couldn’t still be feeling bitter towards her, surely? Not after all this time.

Then the telephone suddenly began demanding more money and her self-consolation died a death as a much more familiar panic soared abruptly into life, gushing through her system like a raging flood.

What am I doing? she asked herself frantically. Why am I doing this?

You’re doing this because you’ve got no damned choice! her mind snapped back, so angrily that it jerked her into urgent movement. Her trembling fingers reached out towards the small stack of coins she had piled up in front of her ready to feed into the pay box. She made a grab for the top coin in the stack—and stupidly sent the rest of them scattering so they fell in a chinking shower to the ground.

‘Oh, damn it,’ she muttered, starting to bend to pick up the scattered coins as a voice suddenly sounded down the earpiece.

‘Good morning, Mr Bonetti’s secretary speaking,’ it announced. ‘How may I help you?’

The voice made her shoot upright again. ‘Just a minute,’ she muttered, struggling to feed the only coin she had stopped from falling into the required slot with fingers that decidedly shook. The line cleared and Joanna took another few moments to pull her ragged nerves together. ‘I w-would like to speak to Mr—to Alessandro, please.’ She quickly changed tack, hoping the personal touch might get her past this next obstruction.

It didn’t. ‘I’m afraid I must insist on your name,’ Sandro’s secretary maintained.

Her name. Her teeth gritted together, eyes closing on a fresh bout of indecision. Now what did she do? she asked herself pensively. Tell the truth? Let this woman bear witness to the full depth of Sandro’s refusal, instead of the other cool voice she had spoken to before?

‘This is—M-Mrs Bonetti,’ she heard herself mumble, the name sounding as strange leaving her own lips as it must have sounded to the woman on the other end of the telephone line.

There was a short sharp pause. Then, ‘Mrs Bonetti?’ the voice repeated. ‘Mrs Alessandro Bonetti?’

‘Yes,’ Joanna confirmed, not blaming the woman for sounding so astonished. Joanna herself had never managed to come to terms with being that particular person. ‘Will you ask Alessandro if he has a few minutes he could spare for me, please?’

‘Of course,’ his secretary instantly agreed.

The line went quiet again. Joanna breathed an unsteady sigh into the mouthpiece, wondering how many cats she was setting loose amongst Sandro’s little pigeons by daring to make an announcement like that.

Again she waited, so tense now she could barely unclench her jaw-bone, the thrumming silence setting her foot tapping on the debris-littered concrete base of the call box, fingernails doing the same against the metal casing of the telephone. And there was a man standing just outside the kiosk, obviously waiting to use the telephone after her. He kept on sending her impatient glances and her palms felt sweaty; she tried running them one at a time down her denim-clad thighs but it didn’t make any difference, they still felt sweaty.

‘Mrs Bonetti?’

‘Yes?’ The single word shot like a bullet from her tension-locked throat.

‘Mr Bonetti is in conference at the moment.’ The voice sounded incredibly guarded all of a sudden. ‘But he said for you to leave your number and he will call you back as soon as he is free.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Joanna said, feeling a dragging sense of relief and a contrary wave of despair go sweeping through her. ‘I mean—I’m in a public call box and...’

Shaky fingers came up to push agitatedly through the long silken fall of her red-gold hair while she tried to think quickly with a brain that didn’t want to think at all. Sandro couldn’t speak to her and she didn’t think she could accumulate enough courage to do this again.

‘I’ll h-have to call him back,’ she stammered out finally, grasping at straws that really weren’t straws at all, but simply excuses to stop this before it soared out of all control. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back s-some time w-when I—’ Her excuses dried up. ‘Goodbye,’ she abruptly concluded, and went to replace the telephone.

But, ‘No! Mrs Bonetti!’ The secretary’s voice whipped down the line at her. ‘Please wait!’ she said urgently. ‘Mr Bonetti wants to know your reply before you... Just hold the line a moment longer—please...’

It was a plea—an anxious plea, which was the only thing that stopped Joanna from slamming down the receiver and getting out of there.

That and the fact that she had just had a revolting vision of Arthur Bates smiling at her like a very fat cat who was about to taste the cream. She shuddered again, feeling sick, feeling dizzy, feeling so uptight and confused now that she really didn’t know what she wanted to do.

Oh God. She closed her eyes, tried to get a hold on her swiftly decaying reason. Sandro or Arthur Bates? her mind kept on prodding at her. Arthur Bates or Sandro? The choice that was no choice.

Sandro...

Sandro, the man she had not allowed herself to make any contact with for two long wretched years.

Except when she’d told him about Molly, she then remembered, feeling what was left of the colour drain from her cheeks as poor Molly’s face swam painfully into her mind. She had tried to contact Sandro once—about Molly.

He had ignored her call for help then, she grimly reminded herself. So there was every chance that he was going to do the same now.

And why not? she derided. There was nothing left between them any more, hadn’t been for a long, long—

The phone began demanding more money again. She jumped like a startled deer, eyes flicking open to search a little wildly for another coin. It was only then that she remembered that she had knocked them all flying to the ground a few minutes earlier, and she bent down, functioning on pure instinct now because intelligence seemed to have completely deserted her.

But then, it always did when it came to Sandro, she acknowledged ruefully as her fingers scrambled amongst the dirt, cigarette ends and God alone knew what else that was littering the call box floor.

‘Mrs Bonetti?’

‘Yes,’ she gasped.

‘I’m putting you through to Mr Bonetti now...’

There was a crackling sound in her ear that made her wince. Her scrambling fingers discovered one of her missing coins. Grabbing at it, she straightened, face flushed now, breathing gone haywire, fingers fumbling as she attempted to push home the coin, the stupid panic turning her into a quivering, useless mess because she was about to hear Sandro’s dark velvet voice again and she didn’t know if she could bear it!

The man outside the call box got fed up with waiting and banged angrily on the glass. Joanna turned on him like a mad woman, her blue eyes flashing him a blinding glare of protest,

‘Joanna?’

And that was all it took for everything to come crashing down around her—the agitation, the panic—all crowding in and congealing into one seething ball of chest-tightening anguish.

He sounded gruff, he sounded terse, but oh, so familiar that her own voice locked itself into her throat. The man outside banged again; she closed her eyes and set her teeth and felt Sandro’s tension sizzle down the telephone line towards her, felt his impatience, his reluctance to accept this call.

‘Joanna?’ he repeated tersely. Then, ‘Damn it!’ she heard him curse. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ she answered breathlessly, and knew she had just taken one of the biggest, bravest steps of her life with that one tiny word of confirmation. ‘S-sorry.’ She apologised for the tense delay in taking it, and tried to relax her jaw in an effort to find some semblance of calm. ‘I dropped my m-money on the call box f-floor and couldn’t find it,’ she explained. ‘And there’s a m-man standing outside w-waiting to use the telephone. He keeps banging on the glass and I—’

The rest was cut off—by herself, because she realised on a wave of despair that she was babbling like an idiot.

Sandro must have been thinking the exact same thing because his tone was tight when he muttered, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered again, which seemed to infuriate him.

‘I am in the middle of an important meeting here,’ he snapped. ‘So do you think you could get to the point of this—unexpected—honour?’

Sarcasm, hard and tight. Her eyes closed again, her chest so cramped she could barely drag air into her lungs as each angry word hit her exactly where it was aimed to hit.

‘I n-need...’

What did she need? she then stopped to wonder. She had become so addled by now that her reason for calling him at all had suddenly got lost in the ferment of her panic.

‘I n-need...’ Moistening her dry lips, she tried again. ‘Your—advice about something,’ she hedged, knowing she couldn’t just tell him outright that the only reason she was phoning him after all this time was to ask for money! ‘Do you think you could possibly m-meet me somewhere, s-so we can talk?’

No reply. Her nerve-ends reached snapping point A tight, prickling feeling began to scramble its way up from her tingling toes to her hairline. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t swallow, and, worse than all of that, she felt like weeping.

And if Sandro knew that he would fall off his chair in shock, she mocked herself.

‘I am flying to Rome this evening,’ he informed her brusquely. ‘And my day is fully taken up with meetings until I leave for the airport. It will have to wait until I get back next week.’

‘No!’ That wouldn’t do! ‘I can’t wait that long. I...’ Her voice trailed away, her mind flying off in another direction as she bit into her bottom lip on a fresh wave of desperation. Then, defeatedly, she whispered, ‘It doesn’t m-matter. I’m s-sorry to have—’

‘Don’t you damn well dare put that phone down on me!’ Sandro warned on an angry growl that told her that, even after all this time, he could still read her intentions like an open book.

And she could hear him muttering something to himself—cursing most likely—in Italian, because Sandro always did revert to his native tongue when he was really angry. She could even see him in full detail while he did it. Tall and lean, an unbearably handsome Latin dark figure, with brown velvet eyes that turned black when angry and a beautifully shaped intensely sensual mouth that could kiss like no mouth she had ever experienced, but could also spit all sorts at her without her knowing what the words were—but, hell, did she get their drift!

Then, emerging from the middle of all that Latin temperament, came a warning beep that the phone needed feeding yet again.

‘I haven’t any more money!’ she gasped into the mouthpiece while her eyes flickered anxiously across the dirty floor at her feet. ‘I’ll have to—’

‘Give me your number!’ Sandro snapped.

‘But there’s a man waiting to use the telephone. I have to—’

‘Maledizione!’ he cursed. ‘The number, Joanna!’

She gave it. Her time ran out and the line went dead. She dropped the receiver back onto its rest, then just stood there staring at it, unsure if Sandro had managed to get down every digit before they were cut off, scared that he had done, and terrified that he had not!

Almost faint with stress and wretched confusion, she bent again to search the grubby ground for her other lost coins, found them, then stepped out of the call box to let the man waiting outside take his turn on the telephone.

He sidled past her as though she was some kind of freak. She didn’t blame him; if he had been watching her enact her nervous breakdown inside that telephone box, then she knew she must have looked like a freak!

Sandro’s fault; it was always Sandro’s fault when she went to pieces like this. No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.

Sex.

That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Sandro and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.

And that was why she was standing here, a shivering, quivering wreck. Because in stirring her up sexually he also stirred up all the phobias that sent her into this kind of panic.

Fear was the main thing: a stark, staring fear that if she ever gave in to the sex then her life would be over.

Because he would know then, wouldn’t he? Know what she was and despise her for it

The man came out of the phone box. He hadn’t been much more than a couple of minutes, which made her feel even guiltier for keeping him waiting as long as she had.

‘I’m so sorry I was so long,’ she felt compelled to say. ‘Only I had difficulty—’

The phone inside the kiosk began to ring and she made a sudden desperate lurch for it, forgetting about the man, forgetting everything as she snatched the receiver to her ear again.

‘What the hell happened?’ Sandro’s voice shot down the line at her. ‘I have been trying that number for the last five minutes and kept getting an engaged signal! Were you stupid enough to hold onto the receiver instead of hanging up and waiting for me to call you back?’

Well, Joanna thought ruefully, that just about said it. Stupid. He thought her that stupid, and Sandro suffered fools as most people suffered raging toothache.

‘I let the man I told you was waiting use the phone,’ she explained.

Another of those Italian curses hit her burning eardrums, then she heard him take in a deep breath of air and his voice, when it came again, was more as it should be, grim but controlled.

‘What is it you want from me, Joanna,’ he demanded. ‘Since when have you ever wanted anything from me?’

Which only showed that even when he was under control he still couldn’t resist another dig at her.

‘It isn’t something I can discuss over the telephone,’ she told him. Then as her own temper suddenly flared, ‘And if this is a taste of how your attitude is going to be, then it probably isn’t worth me taking it any further!’

‘OK—OK,’ he conceded on a heavy sigh. ‘So I am reacting badly. But I am up to my neck in work at the moment, and the last thing I expected, on top of it all, was for my long-lost wife to give me a call!’

‘Try for sarcasm,’ she snapped. ‘Pleasantries just don’t become you somehow.’

Their simultaneous sighs were acknowledgements that they both recognised they were reacting to each other now as they had always used to do: biting and scratching.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, with more heaviness than hostility.

And Joanna relented too, saying with an equal heaviness. ‘If you can’t find time to see me today, Sandro, then I’m afraid I have been wasting your valuable time. I did try to tell you that,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘before you went off at half-cock.’

‘Five o’clock,’ he said. ‘At the house.’

‘No!’ she instantly protested. ‘I don’t want to go there!’ Then she bit her lip, knowing exactly how he was going to take mat horrified reaction.

But his lovely house in Belgravia held only bad memories for her. She couldn’t meet him there, would probably die of mortification before she’d even stepped over the threshold!

‘Here, then,’ he clipped. And now he really was angry: not hot, Italian angry but frozen, arctic angry. ‘In an hour. It is all I can offer you. And don’t be late,’ he warned. ‘I am working on a very tight schedule and as it is I will have to fit you in between two important meetings.’

‘OK,’ she agreed, wondering sinkingly if meeting him at his office was any better than meeting him at the house they had once used to share? In all honesty she had no idea, because she had never been to his place of work before. ‘How—w-what do I do? When I arrive there, I m-mean?’ she asked, her bottom lip beginning to feel as if it had been completely mutilated by her own anxious teeth. ‘W-will I have to tell someone who I...? Only I don’t like...’

‘Coming out of hiding?’ he suggested acidly. ‘Or don’t you like admitting your legal association to me?’

‘Sandro...’ she whispered huskily. ‘Can’t you appreciate how difficult I’m finding this to do?’

‘And how difficult do you think I am finding it?’ he threw back gruffly. ‘You walked out of my life two years ago and have never bothered to so much as show your lovely face since!’

‘You told me not to,’ she reminded him. ‘When I left, you said—’

‘I know what I said!’ he bit out. Then he sighed, and sighed again. ‘Just be here, Joanna,’ he concluded wearily. ‘After all of this, just make sure you don’t chicken out at the last minute and stand me up, or so help me, I’ll—Oh, damn it,’ he muttered, and the line went dead.

And suddenly Joanna felt dead: dead from the neck up, dead from the neck down. Dealing with Sandro had always ended up with her feeling like this. Drained, so sucked clean to the dregs of her reserves that it was all she could do to slump against the phone booth wall while she wondered wearily why she had set herself up for all of it in the first place!

Then a sudden vision of Arthur Bates sitting behind his cluttered desk as he issued his ultimatum flashed in front of her eyes, and, with the usual shudder, she remembered exactly why.

‘Payment, Joanna, comes in cash or in kind,’ he had declared in that soft and silken voice of his. ‘You know the score here.’

Payment in cash or in kind...

The very words had made her feel sick.

‘How long have I got to pay?’ she’d demanded with an icy composure that completely ignored the second option.

But the man himself had refused to ignore it. He had waited a long time to bring her down to this low point and he meant to savour every second of it. So he’d sat back in the creaky leather desk chair, inserted a heavily ringed finger into the gap between two gaping buttons on his overstretched shirt, then taken his time sliding his eyes over her slender figure, so perfectly defined beneath the tiny white waiter’s jacket and black satin skirt she had to wear for work.

‘Now would be good,’ he’d suggested huskily. ‘Now would be very good for me...’

Which had had the effect of freezing her up like a polar ice cap. ‘I meant to pay the money.’ She’d made it clear. ‘How long?’

‘A debt is a debt, sweetheart.’ He’d smoothly dismissed the question. ‘And you are already two weeks late with your payments.’

‘Because I was off work with the ’flu,’ she’d reminded him. ‘Now I’m back at work I can pay you as soon as I—’

‘You know the rules,’ he’d cut in. ‘You pay on time or else. I don’t make them for fun, you know. You people come to me to help you out of your financial difficulties and I say, Yeah—good old Arthur will lend you the cash—so long as you understand that I don’t take it nicely if you don’t pay me back on time. It’s for your own sake,’ he contended. ‘If I were to let you get behind, then you’d only end up in a worse mess trying to play catch-up again.’

He’d meant she’d have to borrow more from him to keep up the extortionate repayments on his high interest loan and thereby sink further in his debt. It was a clever little ploy. One which kept him, the loan shark, firmly in control.

But for her it was different, and she’d always known it. Arthur Bates didn’t want her money, he wanted her body, and by getting behind with her repayments she had played right into his hands. What made it worse was that she worked for him, which meant he knew exactly how much she earned; he knew he was in control of that part of her life. She waited on tables or worked behind the bar of his seedy little nightclub—the same club where she had got herself into debt by stupidly playing at its gaming tables.

Which actually meant that Arthur Bates believed he was in control of Joanna’s life every which way he wanted to look at it.

But then, Arthur Bates didn’t know about her marriage. He didn’t know about her connection to the powerful Bonetti family. He didn’t know she had a way out of the whole wretched mess—if she could find the will to use it.

Even with that will, she’d realized she was going to need time—time Arthur Bates was not predisposed to give her. So, there she had been, standing in front of him, feeling her skin crawl as his eyes roamed expressively over her, and she had done the only thing she could think of doing to gain herself time. She had lowered her lashes over the revulsion gleaming in her eyes, and offered him the sweet, sweet scent of her defeat.

‘OK,’ she’d muttered huskily. ‘When?’

‘You’ve finished for the night,’ he’d said. ‘We could be at my apartment in fifteen minutes...’

‘I can’t,’ she’d replied. ‘Not tonight, anyway...’ And she had given an awkward little shrug of one slender white shoulder. ‘Hormones,’ she’d explained, and had hoped he was quick enough to get her meaning because she was loath to go into a deeper explanation.

He’d understood. The way his expression flashed with irritation told her as much. ‘Women,’ he’d muttered. Then, suspiciously, ‘You could be lying,’ he’d suggested. ‘Using that excuse as a delaying tactic.’

Her chin had come up at that, blue, blue eyes fixing clearly on his. ‘I don’t lie,’ she’d lied. ‘It’s the truth.’

‘How long?’ he’d asked.

‘Three days,’ she’d replied, deciding she could just about get away with that without causing more suspicion.

‘Friday it is, then,’ he’d agreed.

And she’d felt too sick to do more than nod her head in agreement before she’d turned and walked stiffly out of his office, only to slump weakly against the wall beside his closed door, in much the same way she was now slumping in reaction to Sandro.

Only there was a difference, a marked difference between having reacted as she had through sickened revulsion at what Arthur Bates wanted to do to her, and reacting like this through helpless despair at what Sandro could do to her.

Sighing heavily, she forced herself to move at last, pushing out of the telephone kiosk and hunching deeply into her thick leather bomber jacket as she walked the few hundred yards back down the street to her tenement flat in icy March winds—weather that grimly threatened rain later.

Letting herself into the tiny flat, she stood for a moment, heart and hands clenched, while she absorbed the empty silence that always greeted her now when she stepped inside. Then, after a small flexing of her narrow shoulders, she relaxed her hands, and her heart, and began removing her heavy jacket.

Time was getting on, making deep inroads into Sandro’s one-hour deadline, yet, instead of hurrying to get herself ready for the dreaded interview, she found herself walking across the room to the old-fashioned sideboard where she stood, looking down at it as if it had the power to actually inflict pain on her.

Which it did, she acknowledged. Or one particular drawer did.

Taking a deep breath, she reached out and opened the drawer—that particular drawer.

And instantly all the memories came flying out; like Pandora’s box, they escaped and began circling around her, cruel and taunting.

So cruel, it took every ounce of self-control she possessed to reach inside, search for and come out with what she had opened the drawer to find. Then she was sliding it shut again with a gasped whoosh of air from aching lungs, while clasped in her trembling hand was a tiny high-domed box that instantly spoke for itself.

Stamped on its base in fine gold lettering was the name of a world-famous jeweller—its provenance in a way, or a big hint, at least, that what nestled inside the box was likely to be very valuable.

But the contents meant far more than just money to Joanna. So much more, in fact, that she had never dared let herself lift the lid of the box in two long years.

Not since she’d glanced down one bleak miserable day and noticed her wedding and engagement rings still circling her finger and been horrified—appalled that she had walked out on her marriage still wearing them! So she’d scrambled around in her things until she’d found the box and had put the rings away, vowing to herself to send them back to Sandro one day.

But she had never quite been able to bring herself to do it. In fact, each time she’d let herself so much as think about Sandro, the old panic had erupted, a wild, helpless, anguished kind of panic that would threaten to tear her apart inside.

It had erupted in that telephone kiosk only a few minutes ago. And it was doing it again now as she stood here with the small ring box resting in her palm. Teeth clenched, mouth set, grimly ignoring all the warnings, she flicked open the box’s delicately sprung lid—and felt her heart drop like a stone to the clawing base of her stomach.

For there they lay, nestling on a bed of purple satin. One, a slender band of the finest gold, the other, so lovely, so exquisite in its tasteful simplicity, that even as she swallowed on the thickness of tears growing in her throat her eyes could still appreciate beauty when they gazed on the single white diamond set into platinum.

A token of love from Sandro.

‘I love you,’ he had declared as he’d given the engagement ring to her. It was that simple, that neat, that special; like the simple, neat, special ring which, for all of that, must have cost him a small fortune.

He’d given it to her with love and she’d accepted it with love, she recalled, as the tears blurred out her vision and a dark cloud of aching emptiness began to descend all around her. For now their love was gone, and really, so should the rings have gone with it.

She could sell them, she knew that, and easily pay off her debt to Arthur Bates with the proceeds: just another of the ways-out she had spent her sleepless night struggling with.

But she knew she couldn’t do it. For selling these rings would be tantamount to stealing from the one person in this world she had taken more than enough from already.

She’d stolen his pride, his self-respect. and, perhaps worst of all, his belief in himself as an acceptable member of the human race.

‘You are tearing me apart—can you not see that? We must resolve this, Joanna, for I cannot take much more!’

Those hard, tight words came lashing back at her after two long miserable years and she winced, feeling his pain whip at her as harshly now as it had done then.

And it had been because of that pain that she had eventually done the only thing she could think to do. She had left him, walked out on their marriage to move in with her sister Molly, and had refused contact with Sandro on any level, in the hope that he would manage to put behind him the failure of their marriage and learn to be happy again.

Maybe he had found happiness, because after those first few months, when he had tried very hard to get her to change her mind and come back to him, there had been no more contact—not even when she’d phoned him up to tell him about Molly.

Molly...

A sigh broke from her, and, lifting her gaze from the box of rings, she glanced across the room to where a small framed photograph stood beneath the lamp on her bedside table and her sister Molly’s pretty face smiled out at her.

Her heart gave a tug of aching grief as she went to drop down on the edge of her narrow bed. Gently laying the ring box aside, she picked up Molly’s photograph instead.

‘Oh, Molly,’ she whispered. ‘Am I doing the right thing by going to Sandro for help?’

There was no answer—how could there be? Molly was no longer here.

But Sandro was very much alive. Sandro, the man she had loved so spectacularly that she had been prepared to do anything to hang on to that love.

Anything.

But then, what woman wouldn’t? Alessandro Bonetti had to be the most beautiful man Joanna had ever set eyes upon. The evening he had walked into the small Italian restaurant where she had been working waiting on tables had quite literally changed her whole life.

‘Alessandro!’ her boss Vito had called out in elated surprise.

She had glanced up from what she had been doing. Joanna could still remember smiling at the sight of the short and rotund Vito being engulfed in a typically Latin back-slapping embrace by a man of almost twice his own height

Over the top of Vito’s balding head, Sandro had caught her smile and had returned it as if he knew exactly what she was finding so amusing—which in turn had taken her laughing blue eyes flicking upwards to clash with the liquid brown richness of his.

And that had been it. Just like that. Their eyes had locked and an instant and very mutual magic had begun to spark in the current of air between them. His beautiful eyes had darkened, his smile had died, the full length of his long, lean fabulously clothed body had tensed up and his expression had changed to one of complete shock, as if he’d just been hit full in the face by something totally spellbinding. As she’d stood there, caught—trapped by the same heart-stopping sensations herself—she’d watched his hand move in a oddly sensual gesture across the back of Vito’s shoulders, and, to her shock, had felt the flesh across her own shoulders tingle as if he had stroked her, not Vito.

‘Who is this?’ he’d demanded of the little restaurant owner.

Vito had turned towards Joanna and grinned, instantly aware of what was captivating his visitor. ‘Ah,’ he’d said, ‘I see you have already spotted the speciality of the house. This is Joanna,’ he’d announced, ‘the fire outside my kitchen!’ And both men’s eyes had wandered over her bright hair, sparkling blue eyes and softly blushing face in pure Latin communion. ‘Joanna—this is Alessandro Bonetti,’ Vito had completed the introductions. ‘My cousin’s nephew and a man to beware of,’ he’d warned. ‘For he will be a dangerous match to your flame!’

A match to her flame... All three of them had laughed at the joke. But in reality it had been the truth. The absolute truth. Sandro lit her up like no other man had ever done. Inside, outside, she caught fire like dry tinder for him. And what was wonderful was the way that Sandro had caught fire with her.

It had been like a dream come true.

So what had happened to the dream? she asked herself as she sat there staring into space.

Life had happened, she answered her own grim question. Life had jumped out when she was least expecting it to steal the dream right away from her.

And overnight she had gone from being the lively, loving creature who had so thoroughly captivated the man she loved, into this—this—hollow wreck of a person who was sitting here right now.

A hollow wreck who was seriously about to place herself in Sandro’s dynamic vicinity again?

Could she do it to herself?

Could she do it to him? That was the far more appropriate question.

Cash or kind.

Suddenly and without warning she began to shake—shake all over, shake badly. It had happened like this quite often since she’d had the ’flu.

But really she knew she was shaking like this because she had come full circle and back to making choices.

To making the choice that was no choice.

So she got up, put Molly’s photograph back on the bedside table, walked over to the sideboard to replace the ring box in the drawer, then went grimly about the business of getting herself ready to meet with Sandro...