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

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.

CHAPTER FIVE

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 fa

de 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.