The Marriage Surrender

He kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gentle. Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

He kissed her again, long and deep and achingly gentle.

“This is it, Joanna,” he warned as he drew away again to watch her lashes flutter upward to reveal eyes dazed by a hopeless passion. “So keep looking at me,” he urged. “For this is what I am now. Not the guy who crept stealthily around your problems the way I did the last time we were together—but this man. The one who means to invade your defensive space at every opportunity. And do you know why? Because each time I do it, you quiver with pleasure more.”

“I can never be a proper wife to you.”

“You think so?” Sandro pondered. “Well, we shall see....”

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by

Miranda Lee

Harlequin Presents® #2026

The Marriage Surrender

Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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.’