Rings of Gold: Gold Ring of Betrayal / The Marriage Surrender / The Unforgettable Husband

‘Be calm,’ he soothed as her arms whipped around her body and she began to shiver. ‘They are still negotiating. Try to keep in the front of your mind, Sara, that they want what I have the power to give them more than they want to keep your child.’

But she hardly heard him. ‘Negotiating?’ she choked. ‘What is there to negotiate about? Pay them, Nicolas!’ she cried. ‘You’ve got money to burn! So give it to them and get my baby back!’

He grimaced—she supposed at her naïvety. But seeing it gave her pause. ‘How much?’ she whispered threadily.

‘That part is not up for discussion,’ he dismissed.

Her eyes flickered to Toni’s studiedly blank face then back to Nicolas. And a low throb took up residence in her chest. ‘They’re asking for too much, aren’t they?’ she breathed. ‘They want more than you can lay your hands on at such short notice.’

He smiled, not with amusement but with a kind of wry self-mockery. ‘At least you are not accusing me of being tight,’ he drawled.

‘No.’ She wasn’t quite the fluffy-headed fool she sometimes sounded. She knew that people with riches made their money work for them rather than just let it take up room in some bank vault. ‘So, what happens now?’ she asked tensely.

‘We wait.’ He turned a brief nod on Toni, which was an instruction for him to leave them. The other man did as he was told, walking out of the room without saying a word.

Wait. It was over seven hours since Lia had been taken, the longest Sara had ever been without her, and it hurt—hurt so badly she could hardly bear it.

‘Then what?’

‘We hope by the time they call back again they will have begun to see sense.’ He put it to her bluntly, as, she supposed, there was no other way to put it. ‘When did you last have something to eat?’

‘Hmm?’ Her bruised eyes were lost in confusion, the question meaning absolutely nothing to her.

‘Food,’ he prompted. ‘When did you last eat?’

She shook her head, lifting a hand to slide the black velvet band from her hair so that she could run shaky fingers through the thick silken strands. ‘I can’t eat.’

‘When?’ he repeated stubbornly.

‘Breakfast.’ Tossing the band onto the bed, she returned to hugging herself—remembering, seeing herself as she had been that morning, happy, smiling at Lia as they’d shared breakfast, the little girl smiling back. ‘Oh, God.’ She folded up like a paper doll onto the edge of the bed, tears of agonised helplessness filling her eyes.

‘What is it?’ Nicolas said tensely.

‘They won’t know—will they?’ she choked. ‘What she likes to eat or how she likes to eat it. She’ll be confused and start fretting. And she’ll wonder why I’m not there with her. She—’

‘Stop it.’ Grimly he came to squat down in front of her. ‘Listen to me, Sara. You cannot allow your mind to drift like that. Children are by nature resilient creatures. She will cope—probably better than you are coping. But you must help yourself by trying not to torment yourself like this or you will not stay the course.’

He was right. She knew it, and made a mammoth effort to calm herself, nodding her agreement, blinking away the tears. ‘Did—?’ Carefully she moistened paper-dry lips. ‘Did they let you hear her again?’

His eyes, usually so coldly tigerish, were darker than usual. Almost as if against his wishes, his hand came up to brush her long hair away from her pale cheek. ‘She is fine,’ he murmured. ‘I could hear her in the background chatting happily.’

‘Did you record it?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I want to hear it.’

‘No.’ Suddenly he was on his feet, the cold, remote stranger he had arrived here as.

‘But why not?’ she demanded bewilderedly. ‘I need to hear her—can’t you understand that?’

‘I can understand it,’ he conceded. ‘But I will not give in to it. It will distress you too much, so don’t bother asking again.’

Stiffly he moved back towards the door, the discussion obviously over. Then he stopped, his attention caught by something standing on the polished walnut bureau. Sara’s gaze followed his—then went still, just as everything inside her went still, even her breathing, as slowly he reached out with a long-fingered hand and picked up the framed photograph.

‘She is very like you,’ he observed after a long, taut moment.

‘Yes,’ was all she could manage in reply, because the facts were all there in that picture. Golden hair, pure blue eyes, pale, delicate skin. Lia was Sara’s double. She bore no resemblance whatsoever to her father.

‘She is very beautiful,’ he added gruffly. ‘You must love her very much.’

‘Oh, Nicolas,’ she cried, her chest growing heavy—heavy with despair for both man and child who had been robbed of their right to know and love each other. ‘As you should love her! She’s—!’

Your daughter too! she had been about to say. But he stopped her. ‘No!’ he cut in harshly—making Sara wince as he rejected both her claim and Lia’s picture by snapping it back onto the polished top. ‘You will not begin spouting those—frankly insulting claims all over again.’ He turned, his face as coldly closed as she had ever seen it, golden eyes slaying her as they flicked over her in a contemptuous act of dismissal. ‘I am not here to listen to your lies. I am here to recover your child. Your child!’ he emphasised bitterly. ‘Whoever the father is, it certainly is not me!’

‘Yours,’ she repeated, defiant in the face of his contempt. ‘Your child, your conception—your betrayal of a trust I had a right to expect from you! Do you think it isn’t equally insulting for me to know you can suspect me of being unfaithful to you? When?’ she demanded. ‘When did I ever give you reason to believe I could be capable of such a despicable crime? Me?’ she choked, ‘Go with another man? I was shy! So shy I would blush and stammer like an idiot if one so much as spoke to me!’

‘Until you learned to taste your own powers over my sex,’ he asserted. ‘The powers I taught you to recognise!’ He gave a deriding flick of his hand. ‘Then you no longer blushed or stammered. You smiled and flirted!’

‘I never did!’ she denied hotly. ‘My shyness irritated you so I strove to suppress it. But I would have had to have undergone a complete personality change to manage to flirt with anyone!’

‘Not while I was there, no,’ he agreed.

‘And not while you were away!’ she insisted. ‘I tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be!’ She appealed to his intelligence for understanding. ‘I tried to behave as the other women behaved. I tried to become the upstanding member of your social circle you kept on telling me I should be! I tried very hard for your sake!’

‘Too hard, then,’ he clipped out. ‘For I do not recall encouraging you to take a lover for my sake.’

‘I did not take a lover,’ she sighed.

‘So the man I saw you wrapped in the arms of was a figment of my imagination, was he?’ he taunted jeeringly.

‘No,’ she conceded, her arms wrapping around her own body in shuddering memory of that scene. ‘He was real.’

‘And in five weeks I had not so much as touched you, yet you still managed to become pregnant—a miracle,’ he added.

‘Your mathematics are poor,’ she said. ‘It was four weeks. And we made love several times that night.’

‘And the next day you got your period which therefore cancels out that night.’

Sara sighed at that one, heavily, defeatedly. She had lied to him that next day. Lied because he had just told her that he was going away and she’d wanted to punish him for leaving her again so soon. She had concocted the lie which would deprive him of her body—and had learned to regret the lie every single day of her life since.

All of which she had confessed to him before without it making an ounce of difference to what he believed, so she was not going to try repeating it again now.

‘No ready reply to that one, I note,’ he drawled when she offered nothing in return.

Sara shook her head. ‘Believe what you want to believe,’ she tossed at him wearily. ‘It really makes little difference to me any more …’ She meant it, too; her expression told him so as she lifted blue eyes dulled of any hint of life to his. ‘I once loved you more than life itself. Now my love for Lia takes precedence over anything I ever felt for you.’

All emotion was honed out of his face at that. ‘Tidy yourself,’ he instructed, turning with cold dismissal back to the door. ‘Then come downstairs. I will go and arrange for something to eat.’

CHAPTER THREE

THE house had returned to its usual smooth running. Mrs Hobbit, the housekeeper, bustled about. Mr Hobbit, Sara noticed when she glanced out of her bedroom window before going down, was busily working on the new play area he and Sara had been planning at the bottom of the garden. It wrenched at her heart to see him rhythmically spreading bark chippings over the specially prepared patch where, next week, a garden swing and slide were due to be fixed—yet, oddly, it comforted her. Mr Hobbit had not given up hope of Lia’s return and neither would she.

When she eventually made herself go downstairs to the dining room she found Nicolas standing at the window watching the old man at his work. It was June and the sun set late in the evenings. You could work outside until ten o’clock if you were so inclined. This evening the garden was bathed in a rich coral glow that cast a warmth over everything, including Nicolas.

Something stirred inside her—something long, long suppressed. The ache of a woman for the man she loved.

And for a moment she couldn’t move or speak, couldn’t let him know she was there because she was suddenly seeing another man from another time who used to stand by the window like that. A man whom she would have gone to join, slipping her arm through the crook of his and leaning against him while she described all the plans she had made for their garden. Their daughter.

How would Nicolas have responded if things had not been as they were between them and she had been able to go freely and tell him what Mr Hobbit was doing? Would he have been amused? Interested? Would he have wanted to join in the planning of their child’s first play garden?

Her eyes glazed over, sudden tears blurring his silhouette as rain would against a sheet of glass.

The first time she had met Nicolas it had been raining, Sara recalled. Not the fine summer rain you tended to get at this time of year, but a sudden heavy cloudburst that had sent people running in an effort to get out of it as soon as they could.

She’d been a very ordinary assistant in a big garden centre on the outskirts of central London then. Twenty-one years old and so painfully shy that her cheeks flushed if a stranger so much as smiled at her, she had been more happy to spend her time amongst the shrubs and plants than to deal with customers. But the garden centre had run a plant service whereby they’d provided and cared for the plants the big office blocks in the city liked to decorate their foyers with. One aspect of her job had been to attend to a certain section of these ‘rentals’, as they called them. But it had taken every ounce of courage she possessed to walk into some of the palatial foyers on her list.

The shyness had been left over from the quiet, lonely childhood spent with her widowed, ageing father who had taken early retirement from teaching when his wife had died leaving him solely responsible for their only child. They’d moved away from the quiet London suburb to the wild, lonely fells of Yorkshire, where he’d decided to teach his daughter himself rather than send her the five miles to the nearest school.

She was thirteen years old when he died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack while walking on his beloved fells. The first thing Sara knew of it was when his dog, Sammie, came back without him, whimpering at the cottage door.

After that she was sent to a boarding-school to finish her education, paid for out of her father’s estate. But by then the shyness was already an inherent part of her and she found it difficult if not painful to interact with any of the other girls. She coped, though—barely, but she coped—learned to deal with other people on a quiet, timid level. But she did not manage to make any real friends, and spent most of her free time wandering around the school’s private grounds, which was probably how she developed such an interest in plants—that and the fact that the school’s resident gardener was a quiet little man who reminded her of her father, which meant she could at least relax with him.

It was with his quiet encouragement that she discovered she had a flair for gardening. Green-fingered, he called it—an ability to make anything grow—and she would have gone on to horticultural college after leaving the school, but then another disaster struck when she contracted glandular fever just before her final exams, which stopped her taking them. The virus lingered with her for over a year. By the time it had gone, so had her funds. And rather than take her exams a year late then try for college she had to get herself a job instead.

Which was why she was in that particular street in London the day she bumped into Nicolas—literally bumped into him, she on her way back from attending to her customer list, he as he climbed out of a black cab.

It was lunchtime. A heavy downpour of rain had just opened up. People were running, as was Sara herself—hurrying with her head down as a black cab drew up at the kerb just in front of her. The door flew open and a man got out, almost knocking her off her feet when they collided.

‘Apologies,’ he clipped. That was all; she didn’t think he even glanced at her then, just strode off across the flow of rushing pedestrians and into the nearest building.

That should have been the end of it. And sometimes when she looked back she found herself wishing that it had been the end of it. Her life would have been so different if Nicolas had not come barging into it as he had. But then at other times she could only count her blessings, because without knowing him she would not have learned that she could love another person as deeply as she had learned to love him—she had been too shy to experiment with feelings at all, until she’d met him. She would not have learned about her own simmering passions or how they could overpower any shyness when coaxed to do so by a man whose own passions ran hot and dynamic through his blood.

And she would not have known the greatest loves of all. The love of a child for its mother. And the love a mother could feel for her child.

So no, no matter what had happened to them since, she was not sorry now that her first encounter with Nicolas had not been the last encounter. But coming into contact with a man of Nicolas Santino’s dynamic personality had been a bit like being a dove devoured by an eagle.

He’d dropped his wallet. Right at her feet and in the pouring rain. He had stalked off without knowing he had dropped it, having absently tried to shove the wallet back into his jacket pocket.

Standing there with the rain pouring down on her head and still feeling a bit winded by the way he had bumped into her, she had taken a moment to realise what it was that had fallen onto her feet. She’d bent, picked it up, glanced a bit dazedly around her for a sign of what to do next. He had already disappeared into the building by then, and logic had told her that she really had no choice but to follow him.

The rest, she supposed, was history—her following him into the building, luckily seeing him standing by the reception desk with a bevy of dark-suited men around him all shaking hands, her approaching shyly.

‘Excuse me …’ Tentatively she touched his arm.

He turned, looked down at her, and she could still remember the way his golden eyes made her quiver oddly inside as they lanced into her.

The soft green sweatshirt she was wearing, with the logo of the garden centre she worked for emblazoned on the front, was wet through. Her hair, braided in a single thick plait, dripped water down her back. Her face was wet, not to mention her jean-clad legs and trainers. He took it all in seemingly without needing to remove his gaze from her blushing face.

‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘I th-think you dropped th-this when you bumped into me just n-now …’ Nervously she held out the wallet towards him. ‘Could y-you please check if it’s y-yours?’

It was sheer reaction that sent his hands up to pat his pockets. But he did not take his eyes off her face. A small silence developed while she held out the wallet and he ignored it. A couple of the entourage gathered around him shuffled their feet when they picked up on the sudden tension flowing through the air.

He was tall and she wasn’t, the top of her head barely reaching his chin, so she had to tilt her head to look into his face. The rain had caught him too, but only briefly, so the drops sat on the expensive silk of his jacket in small crystal globules that could easily be brushed away. His hair was so black that it reminded her of midnight, gleaming damply but not dripping wet like hers.

She didn’t know then that the great Nicolas Santino stood there like that in silence because he was completely and utterly love-struck. He admitted that to her later—weeks later when his single-minded campaign to break through her shy reserve was successful—on a night when she lay in his arms on a bed of fine linen, their bodies damp, limbs tangled, his hand gently stroking her long hair across the pillow. And she was shy—still shy even though he had just guided her through the most intimate journey a man and woman could share with each other.

A week after that, they married in a registry office in London. That was the first time she met Toni—when he stood witness for Nicolas. She remembered how strangely he looked at her—as if he couldn’t believe the kind of woman his employer had decided to marry. And the hushed conversation they’d shared before they’d gone in to the ceremony had confirmed his disbelief.

‘What the hell are you playing at, Nic?’ he’d muttered urgently. ‘She doesn’t look strong enough to manage you, never mind a hostile father-in-law!’

Hostile? She had begun to get very nervous at that point, frightened even. But then Nicolas had smiled. She could still conjure up that smile now and feel the warmth of it fill her.

‘She manages me fine,’ he had murmured softly. ‘She is my opposite in every way that matters and with her I am complete. She will manage my father as well; you will see,’ he’d ordained.

He had been wrong. She had not managed his father. In fact, she had been terrified of him from their first meeting. He was a sly, selfish, power-hungry and nasty old man who’d seen her as the single obstacle spoiling the glorious plans he had made for his only child. But he was also clever—clever enough never to let Nicolas see how much he hated Sara for getting in the way of those plans.

Oh, he voiced his initial disappointment in his son’s choice of bride, showed anger, a bitter scepticism of the English in general and of Sara’s ability to cope with the kind of lifestyle they led. Then when he met the brick wall of his son’s own determination to run his life his own way he stepped back to the sidelines and watched and plotted and waited for his moment to pounce.

He picked up on her shyness and timidity straight away and used it ruthlessly against her, forcing her into situations where she would feel totally out of her depth. He knew the great Santino wealth and power intimidated her. He knew she only felt comfortable when Nicolas was at her side, so he arranged it so that Nicolas was hardly ever there.

And Alfredo put himself up as her escort, cloaking his hostility towards her in the presence of his son, displaying a willingness to be Sara’s mentor while she got used to the kind of socialising expected of a Santino woman—while Nicolas got on with more important things, like running the Santino empire.

Consequently, she spent the first year of her marriage in a bewildering world of fine clothes and expensive cars and brittle, bright, sophisticated people who were quite happy to follow the great Alfredo Santino’s lead and mock his very unsophisticated daughter-in-law whenever the chance arose. The fact that on the few occasions she tried to tell Nicolas this he got angry and actually took offence on his father’s behalf only made her feel more helplessly out of her depth, more isolated, more miserable.

It began to put a strain on their marriage. When Nicholas was home, his father would be all charm, which made Sara tense up with a wariness her husband could not understand. When they went out together, the same people who followed Alfredo’s lead would now follow Nicolas’s lead and treat his wife with a warmth she was, quite naturally, suspicious of and Nicolas saw as her being standoffish and cold.

Then a man—an Englishman, Jason Castell—began showing her a lot of attention. Whenever she was out with Alfredo, he would appear at her side, sit with her, dance with her, forever trying to monopolise her attention. If she was out with Nicolas, Jason would be conspicuous in his absence.

Yet Nicolas still heard about him. ‘Who is this Englishman I hear you’ve befriended?’ he asked her one evening as they were getting ready for bed.

‘Who, Jason?’ she asked. ‘He’s a friend of your father’s, not mine.’

‘That is not how I hear it,’ he said coolly. ‘I would prefer it if my wife did not have her name connected with another man. Break the friendship, Sara,’ he warned. ‘Or watch me break it for you.’

For some time her desire to fight back, if only with Nicolas, had been growing stronger the more pressure Alfredo applied to her nerves. And this once she retaliated, hard and tight. ‘If you can rarely be bothered to be here with me yourself, then I don’t see what right you have to tell me who I can and cannot spend my time with.’

‘I have the right of a husband,’ he arrogantly replied.

‘Is that what you call yourself? I call you the man who occasionally visits my bed! How long have you been away this time, Nicolas?’ she demanded as his eyes flashed a warning. ‘Two, nearly three weeks? What am I supposed to do with myself when you’re not here—hide away in purdah?’ In her mind this was not an argument about Jason Castell, but about their lifestyle in general. ‘If you want to know what I’m doing every single minute of the day then stay around and find out!’

‘I have a business to run!’ he threw back harshly. ‘The same business which pays for all your fine clothes and the luxury surroundings for you to wear them in!’

‘And did I ask for the clothes?’ she challenged. ‘Did I ask for the luxury accommodation? When I fell in love with you I fell in love with the man, not his money! But I rarely see the man, do I?’

‘You’re seeing him now,’ he murmured huskily.

And she was, seeing him in all his golden-skinned, sensually sinewed, naked glory.

But for the first time ever she turned away from the invitation his husky words had offered. ‘We’ve been married for almost a year,’ she said. ‘And I can count on the fingers of one hand how many weeks we’ve actually spent together. This isn’t even my home, it’s your father’s!’ she sighed. ‘And on the rare occasions you do find time to come here your father takes priority.’

‘I refuse to pander to your unnatural jealousy of my relationship with my father,’ he clipped.

‘And I hate living here,’ she told him bluntly. ‘And if you can’t be here more than you are then I want to go home, to London. I want to get a job and work to fill my days. I want a life, Nicolas,’ she appealed to his steadily closing face, ‘that doesn’t revolve around couture shops and beauty parlours and feeling the outsider with all these tight-knit, clannish Sicilians!’

‘A life with an Englishman, perhaps.’

She sighed again, irritably this time. ‘This has nothing to do with Jason.’

‘No?’

‘No!’ she denied. ‘It is to do with you and me and a marriage that isn’t a marriage because you aren’t here enough! It’s to do with me being unhappy here!’ Tears, honest tears, filled her eyes at that point; she could see him blur out of focus as she appealed to him to understand. ‘I can’t go on like this—can’t you see? They—your father, your friends—overwhelm me! I’m frightened when you’re not here!’