Provocative About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE Copyright

Provocative

That was how she looked. A fine, sleek creature of sensual provocation.

Not that she was aware of any of this, he acknowledged grimly.

Unaware. Just as she was of the fact that her wedding ring gleamed gold on her finger.

His wedding ring. The ring he had placed there. Once a gold ring of love, now a gold ring of betrayal.

MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, England, the youngest in a family of five lively children. But now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning, and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without, and she produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

Gold Ring Of Betrayal

Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON. Big house. Big address close to Hyde Park. The time: 17.45 p.m. Six hours since it happened.

And the tension in the formal drawing room was so fraught it picked at the flesh. People were standing about in small clusters, some talking in low, worried voices, some breaking into soft bouts of weeping now and then, others comforting, others holding themselves apart from it all, standing or sitting with a fierce self-control about them which held them silent and still.

Waiting.

Sara was of the latter group, sitting alone on one of the soft-cushioned sofas. She appeared calm, outwardly composed now as she stared down at the pale carpet beneath her feet, seemingly oblivious to everyone else.

But she was far from oblivious. Far from composed. Every movement, each sound was reverberating shrilly inside her head. And she was sitting there like that, straight-backed and very still, because she knew that if she did so much as move a muscle all her severely reined in self-control would gush screaming out of her.

It had already happened once. When the dreadful news had been brought to her, her initial reaction had been one of almost uncontrollable horror. They had tried to put her to bed then. Tried to force tranquillizers down her throat to put her out of her torment. Tried to render her oblivious to it all.

She’d refused. Of course she’d refused! How could any woman—any mother take refuge in sleep at a time like this?

But because they had been alarmed by her reaction, because they’d needed something tangible to worry about and she’d seemed the most obvious candidate, and because she’d found she did not have it in her to fight them as well as fight the multitude of terrors rattling around inside her head she had made herself calm down, pretend to get a hold on herself, and had taken up her silent vigil here, on this sofa, where she had been sitting for hours now. Hours...

Waiting.

Like the rest of them. Waiting for the man who was at the centre of all this trauma to come and take control of the situation.

He was on his way, they’d told her, as though expecting that piece of information to make her feel better. It didn’t. Nothing did. Nothing would.

So she sat very still, blue eyes lowered so no one could see what was happening inside her head, and concentrated all her attention on remaining calm while they, in their own anxiety, did not seem to notice the way the stark blackness of her long-sleeved T-shirt and tight leggings accentuated the whitened strain in her face. Nor did they seem to realise that she was sitting so straight because shock was holding her spine like a rigid rod of iron, or that her hands, clasped quietly on her lap, were in actual fact clenched and cold and so stiff that she didn’t think she could unclasp them again even if she tried to.

But at least they didn’t approach. At least they weren’t trying to comfort her by murmuring useless platitudes no mother wanted to hear at a time like this. At least they were leaving her alone.

The sudden sound of crunching tyres on the gravel driveway outside the house had everyone else jumping to attention. Sara did not move. She did not so much as lift her head in response.

There was the sound of voices in the hallway, one deep, sharp and authoritative, standing out from the rest as special. And the air in the room began to fizz.

Then footsteps, firm, precise, came towards the closed drawing-room door. Everyone inside the room turned towards it as it shot open, their eyes fixing expectantly on the man who appeared in its aperture.

But Sara kept her gaze fixed on the small square of carpet she’d had it fixed on for ages now, carefully counting the tiny rosebuds which made up part of the pale blue and peach design.

Tall, lean-featured, black hair, tight body. White shirt, dark tie, grey suit that sat on him as expensive silk should. Tanned skin—natural, not worked on. Long, thin nose, ruthlessly drawn, resolute sensual mouth. And the sharp and shrewd eyes of a hunter. Gold, like a tiger. Cold, like the features. A man hewn from rock.

He stood poised like that in the doorway for some long, immeasurable seconds, emitting a leashed power into the room that had everyone else holding their breath. His strange eyes flicked from one anxious face to another, surveying the scene as a whole without so much as acknowledging a single person. The young girl sitting in a chair by the window let out a muffled sob when his gaze touched her; her cheeks blotchy, eyes red and swollen, she stared up at him as if she were begging for her very life. Coldly, dismissively he moved on—and on. Until his eyes found Sara, sitting there in her isolated splendour, face lowered and seemingly unaware.

Then something happened to the eyes. What was difficult to determine but it sent an icy chill down the spines of those who saw it. He began to move, loose-limbed and graceful. Without so much as affording anyone else a second glance he walked across the patterned carpet and came to a stop directly in front of her.

‘Sara,’ he prompted quietly.

She did not move. Her eyes did focus dimly on the pair of handmade leather shoes which were now obscuring the patch of carpet she had been concentrating on. But other than that she showed no sign that she was aware of his presence.

‘Sara.’ There was more command threaded into the tone this time.

It had the required effect, making her dusky lashes quiver before her eyes began the slow, sluggish journey upwards, skimming his long, silk-clad legs, powerful thighs, his lean, tight torso made of solid muscle and covered by a white shirt that did not quite manage to hide the abundance of crisp black hair shadowing satinsmooth, stretched-leather skin beneath.

She reached the throat, taut and tanned. Then the chin, rigidly chiselled. Then the shadow of a line that was his grimly held, perfectly sculptured mouth. His nose thin, straight and uncompromisingly masculine. Cheeks, lean and sheened with the silken lustre of well cared for skin. Then at last the eyes. Her blank blue gaze lifted to clash with the hunter’s gold eyes belonging to the one man in this world whom she had most wished never to see again.

What was it? she found herself thinking dully. Two years since she’d seen him—coming closer to three? He had changed little.

Yet why should he have changed? He was Nicolas Santino. Big man. Powerful man. A wealthy man who could afford houses with big addresses in every important capital of the world. He was a slick, smooth, beautifully cared for human being. Born to power, raised to power and used to power. When he frowned people cowered.

The man with everything. Good looks, great body. Why should three small years change any of that? He possessed the godlike features of a man of fable. The hair, so black it gleamed navy blue in the light. The nose, that arrogant appendage he made no apologies for. The mouth, firm, set, a perfectly drawn shadow on a golden bone structure hewn from the same privileged rock those fabled men had come from. And finally the eyes. The eyes of a lion, a tiger, a sleek black panther.

The eyes of a hard, cold, ruthless predator. Cruel and unforgiving.

Unforgiving.

If her mouth had been up to it, it would have smiled, albeit bitterly.

He the unforgiving one. She the sinner.

It was a shame she viewed the whole situation the other way around. It meant that neither was prepared to give an inch. Or hate the other less.

Three years, she was thinking. Three years of cold, silent festering. And it was all still there—lying hidden beneath the surface right now, but there all the same. Three years since he had last allowed himself to share the same space as her. And now he had the gall to appear before her and say her name as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

But it wasn’t. And they both knew it wasn’t. And Sara was in no fit state to play stupid, pride-saving games to the opposite. Not with him. Not with this man, whom she had once loved and now hated with the same intensity.

She looked away, eyes lowering back down his length, dismissing his handsome face, dismissing his superb body, dismissing his long legs encased in expensive silk. Dismissing the man in his entirety.

The message was loud and clear. The room gasped.

‘Get out.’

It was quietly spoken, almost conversationally so, yet there was not a person in the room who did not understand the command or whom it was aimed directly at. Indifferent to them all, unmoving, he remained directly in front of Sara’s bowed head while he waited in silence for his instruction to be carried out.

And they jolted into action, responding like mechanical toys, heads, bodies, limbs jerking with a complete lack of coordination that shifted them en masse towards the door. Two policemen, both in plain clothes. One uniformed chauffeur, hat gone, hair mussed, face white. One weepy young nanny with her face buried in a handkerchief. A harried-looking housekeeper and her grim-faced man-of-all-trades husband. And the doctor who had been called out to treat the young nanny and had ended up staying because he had been seriously concerned that Sara was ready to collapse.

Or maybe because he had been ordered to stay by this man.

Who knew—who cared? Sara didn’t. He might be able to make other people quail in their shoes. He might be able to command mute obedience from anyone who came within his despotic reach. But not her. Never her! And she found it amazing if not pathetic that one man could walk in somewhere and command that kind of sheeplike obedience without even having to give his name.

But then, this one man was not just any man. This was a man who wielded such power that he could walk into any room anywhere in the world and command immediate attention. The same man who had had this house and its beautiful grounds locked up like a fortress within an hour of the incident happening.

It was a shame he had not had the foresight to do it before it had happened. Then this unwelcome meeting between them would not have needed to take place.

The last one out drew the door shut behind them. Sara heard it close with a gentle click, and felt the new silence settle around her like a shroud.

He moved away, coming back moments later to sit down beside her. The next thing, a glass was being pressed to her bloodless mouth.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

The distinctive smell of brandy invading her nostrils almost made her gag and she shook her head, her waist-length, fine-spun, straight golden hair shimmering against her black-clad shoulders and arms.

He ignored the gesture. ‘Drink,’ he repeated. ‘You look like death,’ he added bluntly. ‘Drink or I shall make you.’

No idle threat. That became clear when his hand came up, his long, strong, blunt-ended fingers taking a grip on her chin so he could force her mouth open.

She drank—then gasped as the liquid slid like fire down her paper-dry throat, the air sucking frantically into her lungs as though it had been trying to do that for hours now without any success.

‘That’s better,’ he murmured, believing it was the brandy that had made her gasp like that when in actual fact it had been his touch—his touch acting like an electric charge to her system, shooting stinging shocks of recognition into every corner of her frozen flesh. ‘Now drink some more.’

She drank, if only to hide the new horror that was attacking her. Him. This man. The bitter fact that she could still respond so violently to physical contact with this—person who had caused her so much pain and disillusionment and grief.

He made her take several sips at the brandy before deciding she’d had enough. His fingers let go. The glass was removed. By then the brandy had put some colour back into her cheeks—and his touch a glint of bitter condemnation into the blue eyes she managed to lift to his.

‘Is this your doing?’ she demanded, the words barely distinguishable as they scraped across her tense throat.

But he heard—and understood. The hardening of the eyes told her so. Eyes that continued to view her with a cold but steady scrutiny which quite efficiently gave her a reply.

He was denying it, using his eyes to demand how she dared suspect him of such a terrible thing.

But she did suspect him. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘I despise the very ground you occupy. If anything happens to my baby then watch your back, Nicolas,’ she warned him. ‘Because I’ll be there with a knife long enough to slice right through that piece of cold rock you may call a heart.’

He didn’t respond, didn’t react, which came as a surprise because his overgrown sense of self did not take kindly to threats. And she’d meant it—every single huskily spoken, virulent word.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he instructed quietly instead.

Her mind went hot at the bright, burning flashback to the young nanny stumbling through the door. ‘Lia has been kidnapped!’ she had screamed in outright hysteria. ‘They just ran up and snatched her while we were playing in the park!’

The memory launched her with a bone-crunching jerk to her feet, turning her from a wax-like dummy into a shivering, shaking mass of anguish. ‘You know what happened, you evil monster!’ she seared at him. Blue eyes sparked down on him with hatred, with fear, with a bitter, filthy contempt. ‘She was your one humiliation so you’ve had her removed, haven’t you—haven’t you?’

By contrast the golden eyes remained calm, unaffected. He sat back, crossed one neat ankle over a beautifully clad knee, stretched a silk-clad arm across the back of the sofa and studied her quivering frame quite detachedly.

‘I did not take your child,’ he stated.

Not his child, she noted. Not even our child. Her shaking mouth compressed into a line of disgust. ‘Yes, you did.’ She said it without a hint of uncertainty. ‘It bears all the hallmarks of one of your lot.’ Not said nicely and not meant to be. ‘Vendetta is your middle name. Qr should be. The only thing I don’t understand is why I wasn’t taken out at the same time.’

‘Work on it,’ he suggested. ‘You may, with a bit of luck, come up with a half-intelligent answer.’

She turned away, hating to look at him, hating that look of cruel indifference on his arrogant face. This was their daughter’s life they were discussing here! And he could sit there looking like—that!

‘God, you make me sick,’ she breathed, moving away, arms wrapping around her tense body as she went to stand by the window, gazing out on the veritable wall of security now cordoning off the property: men with mobile telephones fastened to their ears, some with big, ugly-looking dogs on strong-looking leashes. A laugh broke from her, thick with scorn. ‘Putting on a show for the punters,’ she derided. ‘Do you honestly think anyone will be fooled by it?’

‘Not you, obviously!’ He didn’t even try to misunderstand what she was talking about, his mockery as dry as her derision. ‘They are there to keep the media at bay,’ he then flatly explained. ‘That foolish nanny was supposed to be trained on how to respond to this kind of contingency. Instead she stood in the park screaming so loud that she brought half of London out to find out what was the matter.’ His sigh showed the first hint of anger. ‘Now the whole world knows that the child has been taken. Which is going to really make it simple to get her back with the minimum of fuss!’

‘Oh, God.’ Sara’s hand went up to cover her mouth, panic suddenly clawing at her again. ‘Why, Nicolas?’ she cried in wretched despair. ‘She’s only two years old! She was no threat to you! Why did you take my baby away?’

She didn’t see him move, yet he was at her side in an instant, his fingers burning that damned electrical charge into her flesh as he spun her around to face him. ‘I won’t repeat this again,’ he clipped. ‘So listen well. I did not take your child.’

‘S-someone did,’ she choked, blue eyes luminous with bulging tears. ‘Who else do you know who hated her enough to do that?’

He sighed again, not answering that one—not answering because he couldn’t deny her accusation. ‘Come and sit down again before you drop,’ he suggested. ‘And we will—’

‘I don’t want to sit down!’ she angrily refused. ‘And I don’t want you touching me!’ Violently, she wrenched free of his grasp.

His mouth tightened, a sign that at last her manner towards him was beginning to get through his thick skin. ‘Who else, Nicolas?’ she repeated starkly. ‘Who else would want to take my baby from me?’

‘Not from you,’ he said quietly, turning away. ‘They have taken her from me.’

‘You?’ Sara stared at the rigid wall of his back in blank incredulity. ‘But why should they want to do that? You disowned her!’ she cried.

‘But the world does not know that.’

Sara went cold. Stone-still, icy cold as realisation slapped her full in the face. ‘You mean—?’ She swallowed, having to battle to rise above a new kind of fear suddenly clutching at her breast. She had banked on this being his doing. Banked on it so much that it came as a desperate blow to have him place an alternative in her mind.

‘I am a powerful man.’ He stated the unarguable. ‘Power brings its own enemies—’

But—‘No.’ She was shaking her head in denial even before he’d finished speaking. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This is family stuff. I know it is. I spoke to them on the—’

‘You spoke to them?’ He turned, those predator’s eyes suddenly razor-like with surprise.

‘On the phone.’ She nodded, swallowing as the terrible sickness she had experienced during that dreadful call came back to torment her.

‘When?’ His voice had roughened, hardened. He didn’t like it that she had been able to tell him something he had not been told already. It pricked his insufferable belief that he was omnipotent, the man who knew everything. ‘When did this telephone conversation take place?’

‘A-about an hour after they t-took her,’ she whispered, then added bitterly, ‘They said you would know what to do!’ She stared at him in despair, her summerblue eyes suddenly turned into dark, dark pools in an agonised face. ‘Well, do it, Nicolas!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake do it!’

He muttered a violent curse, and was suddenly at her side again, hard fingers coiling around her slender arm, brooking no protest this time as he pushed her back into the sofa.

‘Now listen...’ he said, coming to sit down beside her. ‘I need to know what they said to you, Sara. And I need to know how they said it. You understand?’

Understand? Of course she understood! ‘You want to know if they were Sicilian,’ she choked. ‘Well, yes! They were Sicilian—like you!’ she said accusingly. ‘I recognised the accent, the same blinding contempt for anything and anyone who is not of the same breed!’

He ignored all of that. ‘Male or female?’ he persisted.

‘M-male,’ she breathed.

‘Old—young—could you tell?’

She shook her head. ‘M-muffled. The v-voice was m-muffled—by something held over the m-mouthpiece, I think.’ Then she gagged, her hand whipping up to cover her quivering mouth.

Yet, ruthlessly, he reached up to catch the hand, removed it, held it trapped in his own in a firm command for attention.

‘Did he speak in English?’

She nodded. ‘But with a Sicilian accent. Let go of me...’

He ignored that. ‘And what did he say? Exactly, Sara,’ be insisted. ‘What did he say?’

She began to shake all over—shake violently, eyes closing as she locked herself onto that terrible conversation that had confirmed her worst fears. “‘We h-have your ch-hild,” ’she quoted, word for mind-numbing word. Her fingers were icy cold and trembling so badly that he began gently chafing them with his own. ‘“Sh-she is s-safe for now. Get S-Santino. He will know wh-what to do. We w-will contact you again at seventh-thirty...”’ Dazedly she glanced around the room. ‘What time is it?’ she asked jerkily.

‘Shush. Not yet six,’ he murmured calmingly. ‘Concentrate, Sara. Did he say anything else? Did you hear anything else? Any background sound, other voices, a plane, a car—anything?’

She shook her head. ‘N-nothing.’ No sound. Only the voice. Not even the sound of a child crying—‘Oh, God.’ She whipped her hand out from between his to cover her eyes. ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘My poor baby... I want her here!’ She turned on him, holding out her arms and looking lost and tormented and heart-rendingly pathetic. ‘In my arms...’ Her arms folded and closed around her slender body, hugging, hugging as if the small child were already there and safe. ‘Oh, God,’ she groaned. ‘Oh, God, Nicolas, do something. Do something!’

‘OK,’ he muttered, but distractedly. ‘OK. It will be done. But I want to know why the hell I was not informed of this telephone conversation. Was it taped?’ He was frowning blackly. ‘The police have a trace on this line. It must have been taped!’

‘Afraid someone may recognise the voice?’ she seared at him scathingly. His golden eyes withered her with a look, then he climbed grimly to his feet. Alarm shot through her. ‘Where are you going?’ she bit out shrilly.

Glancing down at her, he could have been hewn from stone again. ‘To do something about this, as you requested,’ he replied. ‘In the meantime I suggest you go to your room and try to rest.’ His gaze flicked dispassionately over her. ‘I will keep you informed of any developments.’

‘Leave it all to you, you mean,’ she surmised from that.

His cool nod confirmed it. ‘It is, after all, why I am here.’

The only reason why he was here. ‘Where were you?’ she asked him, curious suddenly. ‘When they told you. Where were you?’

‘New York.’

She frowned. ‘New York? But it’s been only six hours since—’

‘Concorde,’ he drawled—then added tauntingly, ‘Still suspecting me of stealing your child?’

Her chin came up, bitterness turning her blue eyes as cold as his tiger ones. ‘We both know you’re quite capable of it,’ she said.

‘But why should I want to?’ he quite sensibly pointed out. ‘She bears no threat to me.’

‘No?’ Sara questioned that statement. ‘Until he rids himself of one wife and finds himself another, Lia is the legitimate heir of Nicolas Santino. Whether or not he was man enough to conceive her.’

As a provocation it was one step too far. She knew it even as his eyes flashed, and he was suddenly leaning over her, his white teeth glinting dangerously between tightened lips, the alluring scent of his aftershave corppletely overlaid by the stark scent of danger. ‘Take care, wife,’ be gritted, ‘what you say to me!’

‘And you take care,’ she threw shakily back, ‘that you hand my baby back to me in one whole and hearty piece. Or so help me, Nicolas,’ she vowed, ‘I will drag the Santino name through the gutters of every tabloid in the world!’

The eyes flashed again, black spiralling into gold as they burned into blue. ‘To tell them—what?’ he demanded thinly. ‘What vile crime do you believe you can lay at my feet, eh? Have I not given you and your child everything you could wish for? My home,’ he listed. ‘My money. And, not least, my name!’

Every one of which Sara saw entirely as her due. ‘And for whose sake?’ she derided him scathingly. ‘Your own sake, Nicolas.’ She gave the answer for him. ‘To protect your own Sicilian pride!’

‘What pride?’ Abruptly he straightened and turned away. ‘You killed my pride when you took another man to your bed.’

Her heart squeezed in a moment’s pained sympathy for this man who had lived with that belief for the last three years. And he was right; even if what he was saying was wrong, simply believing it to be true must have dealt a lethal blow to his monumental pride.

‘Ah!’ His hand flew out, long, sculptured fingers flicking her a gesture of distaste. ‘I will not discuss this with you any further. You disgust me. I disgust myself even bothering to talk to you.’ He turned, striding angrily to the door.

‘Nicolas!’ Forcing her stiff and aching limbs to propel her to her feet again, she stopped him as he went to leave the room.

He paused with his hand on the doorknob, his long body lean and lithe and pulsing with contempt. He did not turn back to face her, and tears—weak tears which came from that deep, dark well where she now kept the love she’d once felt for him—burned suddenly in her eyes.

‘Nicolas—please...’ she pleaded. ‘Whatever you believe about me, Lia has committed no crime!’

‘I know that,’ he answered stiltedly.

The wretched sound of her anxiety wrenched from her in a sob. ‘Then please—please get her safely back for me!’

Her plea stiffened his spine, made the muscles in the side of his neck stand out in response as he turned slightly to face her. His eyes, those hard, cold, angry eyes, fixed on the way she was standing there with her waist-length, gossamer-fine hair pushed back from her small face by a padded velvet band. She wasn’t tall, and the simple style of her clothes accentuated her fine-boned slenderness.

A delicate creature. Always appearing as though the slightest puff of wind might blow her over. That a harsh word would cast her into despair. Yet—

If it was possible, the eyes hardened even more. ‘The child was taken because she bears my name,’ he stated coldly. ‘I shall therefore do my best to return her to you unharmed.’

The door closed, leaving Sara staring angrily at the point where his stiff body had last been.

“The child’, she was thinking bitterly. He referred to Lia as ‘the child’ as if she were a doll without a soul! A mere inanimate object which had been stolen. And because he accepted some twisted sense of responsibility for the crime he was therefore also willing to accept that it was his duty to get it back!

How kind! she thought as her trembling legs forced her to drop into a nearby chair. How magnanimous of him! Would he be that detached if he truly believed Lia was his own daughter? Or would he be the one requiring the reviving brandy, the one people were dying to pump sleeping pills into because they could see he couldn’t cope with the horror of it all—the horror of their baby being snatched and carried away by some ruthless, evil monster? A monster, moreover, who was prepared to stop at nothing to get what he wanted from them!

‘Oh, God,’ she choked, burying her face in her hands in an effort to block out her thoughts because they were so unbearable.

Her baby, in the hands of a madman. Her baby, frightened and bewildered as to what was happening to her. Her baby, wanting her mama and not understanding why she was not there when she had always been there for her before—always!

What kind of unfeeling monster would take a small child away from her mama? she wondered starkly. What made a person that bad inside? That cruel? That—?

She stopped, dragging her hands from her face as a sudden thought leapt into her head.

There really was only one person she knew who was capable of doing something like this.

Alfredo Santino. Father to the son. And ten times more ruthless than Nicolas could ever learn to be.

And he hated Sara. Hated her for daring to think herself good enough for his wonderful son. He was the man who had vowed retribution on her for luring his son away from the high-powered Sicilian marriage he’d had mapped out for him, which had then made the father look a fool in the eyes of his peers—if Alfredo Santino accepted anyone as his peer, that was. If Nicolas saw himself as omnipotent, then the father considered himself the same but more so.

But Alfredo had already exacted his retribution on her, surely? She frowned. So why—?

‘No.’ Suddenly she was on her feet again, still trembling—not with weakness this time but with a stark, clamouring.fear that made it a struggle even to keep upright as she stumbled across the drawing-room floor and out into the hall.

CHAPTER TWO

A BIG man in a grey suit and with a tough-looking face stood guard just outside the door. A stranger.

‘Where is Nicolas?’ she asked shakily. ‘M-my husband, where is he?’

His gaze drifted towards the closed study door. ‘Mr Santino wished not to be disturbed.’

Sicilian. His accent was as Sicilian as the voice that had spoken to her on the phone. She shuddered and stepped past him, ignoring the very unsubtle hint in his reply, to hurry across the hallway and push open the study door.

He was half sitting on the edge of the big solid oak desk and he wasn’t alone. The two policemen were with him, and someone she instantly recognised as Nicolas’s right-hand man. Toni Valetta. All of them were in a huddle around something on the desk with their heads tilted down. But they shot upright in surprise at her abrupt entrance.

She ignored them all, her anxious eyes homing in on the only one in this room who counted. ‘Nicolas...’ She took a couple of urgent steps towards him. ‘I—’

His hand snaked out—not towards her but to something on the desk. And it was only as she heard an electronic click followed by a sudden deathly silence that it hit her just what had been going on here, and what her ears had picked up but her mind had refused to recognise until Nicolas had rendered the room silent.

God. She stopped, went white, closed her eyes, swayed. It had been her Lia’s voice, her baby murmuring, ‘Mama? Mama?’ before it had been so severely cut off.

‘Don’t touch her!’

The command was barked from a raspingly threatening throat.

She didn’t know who had tried to touch her, who had reached her first as she began to sink, as if in slow motion, to the thick carpet beneath her feet. But she recognised Nicolas’s arms as they came around her, breaking her fall, catching her to his chest and holding her there as something solid hit the back of her knees, impelling her to sit down.

He didn’t leave go, lowering his body with hers as he guided her into the chair, so that she could still lean weakly against him. Her heart had accelerated out of all control, her breathing fast and shallow, her mind—her mind blanked out by a horror that was more than she could bear.

And he was cursing softly, roundly, cursing in Italian, in English, cursing over her head at someone, cursing at her. Her fingers came up, ice-cold and numb, scrambling over his shirtfront and up his taut throat until they found his mouth, tight-lipped with fury.

She could have slapped him full in the face for the reaction she got. He froze, right there in front of all those watching faces; he froze into a statue of stunned silence with her trembling fingers pressed against his mouth.

‘Nic,’ she whispered frailly, not even knowing that she had shortened his name to that more intimate version she’d rarely used to call him, and only then when she’d been totally, utterly lost in him. ‘My baby. That was my baby...’

Nicolas Santino, squatting there with her wonderful hair splayed across his big shoulders so that the sweet rose scent of it completely surrounded him, closed his hard eyes on a moment of stark, muscle-locking pain.

Then, ‘Shush,’ he murmured, and reached up to grasp the fingers covering his mouth, touching them briefly to his lips before clasping them gently in his hand. ‘Sara, she is fine. She is asking for you but she is not distressed. You understand me, cara? She is—’

She passed out. At last—and perhaps it seemed fortunate to all those who had worriedly observed her all day—she finally caved in beneath the pressure of it all and went limp against the man holding her.

She came around to find herself in her own room, lying on her own bed, with the doctor leaning over her. He smiled warmly but briefly. ‘I want you to take these, Mrs Santino,’ he murmured, holding two small white pills and a glass of water out to her.

But she shook her head, closing her eyes again while she tried to remember what had happened. She remembered running across the hall, remembered opening the door to the study and racing inside, but what she couldn’t remember was why she’d felt the dire need to go there. She remembered seeing Nicolas in the room, and Toni and the two policemen. She remembered them all jerking to attention at her rude entry and her taking several steps towards Nicolas. Then—

Oh, God. Full recall shuddered through her on a nauseous wave. ‘Where’s Nicolas?’ she gasped.

‘Here,’ his grim voice replied.

Her eyes flickered open to find him looking down at her from the other side of the bed. He looked different somehow, as if some of his usual arrogance had been stripped away. ‘You heard from them, didn’t you?’ she whispered faintly. ‘They called before the deadline.’ Tears pushed into her eyes. ‘They let my baby talk to you.’

The comer of his tensely held mouth ticked. ‘Take the two pills the doctor is offering you, Sara,’ was all he said by way of a reply.

She shook her head in refusal again. ‘I want to know what they said,’ she insisted.

‘When you take the two pills, I will tell you what they said.’

But still she refused. ‘You just want to put me to sleep. And I won’t be put to sleep!’

‘They are not sleeping tablets, Mrs Santino,’ the doctor asserted. ‘You won’t sleep if you don’t want to, but they will help to relax you a little. I’m telling you the truth,’ he tagged on gravely as her sceptical gaze drifted his way. ‘I can understand your need to remain alert throughout this ordeal, but I doubt your ability to do so if you don’t accept some help. Shock and stress should not be treated lightly. You’re near a complete collapse,’ he diagnosed. ‘Another shock like the one you received downstairs may just have the effect you’ve been fighting so hard against and shut you down completely. Take the pills.’ He offered them to her again. ‘Trust me.’

Trust him. She looked into his gravely sympathetic eyes and wondered if she could trust him. She had not allowed herself to trust any man in almost three years. Not any man.

‘Take the pills, Sara.’ Nicolas placed his own weight behind the advice, voice grim, utterly unmoving. ‘Or watch me hold you down while the doctor sticks a hypodermic syringe in your arm.’

She took the pills. Nicolas had not and never would make idle threats. And she wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they did resort to a needle it would not be injecting a relaxing aid into her system.

Nobody spoke for several minutes after that, Sara lying there with her eyes closed, the doctor standing by the bed with her wrist gently clasped between his finger and thumb, and the silence was so profound that she fancied she could actually hear the light tick of someone’s watch as it counted out the seconds.

She knew even before the doctor dropped her wrist and gave the back of her hand a pat that her pulse had lost that hectic flurry it had had for the last several hours and returned to a more normal rate. She sensed the two men exchanging glances then heard the soft tread of feet moving across the room. The bedroom door opened and closed, then once again she was alone with Nicolas.

‘You can tell me what happened now,’ she murmured, not bothering to open her eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics.’

‘You did not have hysterics before,’ he pointed out. ‘You just dropped like a stone to the floor.’

‘Déjà vu, Nicolas?’ she taunted wanly.

To her surprise, he admitted it. ‘Yes,’ he said.

It made her open her eyes. ‘Only last time you left me there, as I remember it.’

He turned away, ostensibly simply to hunt out a chair, which he drew up beside the bed, then sat down. But really she knew that he was turning away from the memory she had just evoked—of him looking murderous, fit to actually reach out and hit her, and her responding to the threat of it by passing out.

Only that particular incident had taken place in another house, another country, in another world altogether. And that time he had walked out and left her lying there.

She had not set eyes on him again until today.

‘When did they call?’ she asked.

‘Just after I left you.’

‘What did they say?’

That well-defined shadow called a mouth flexed slightly. ‘You really don’t need to know what they said,’ he advised her. ‘Let us just leave it that they wished me to be aware that they mean business.’

‘What kind of business?’ It was amazing, Sara noted as an absent aside, how two small pills could take all the emotion out of her. ‘Money business?’

His mouth took on a cynical tilt. ‘I would have thought it obvious that they want money, since it is the one commodity I have in abundance.’

She nodded in agreement, then totally threw him by saying flatly, ‘It’s a lie. They don’t want your money.’

He frowned. ‘And how do you come to that conclusion?’

‘Because they are Sicilian,’ she said, as if that made everything clear. But just in case it didn’t she spelled it out for him. ‘If you’d said they’d taken her as part of a vendetta because you’d spoiled some big business deal of theirs or something I might have believed you. But not simply for money.’

‘Are you by any chance still suspecting me of this crime?’ he enquired very coolly.

If she could have done, Sara would have smiled at his affronted manner. But, having gone from rigid-tight to liquid-slack, her muscles were allowing her to do nothing other than lie here heavily on this bed.

‘Not you,’ she said flatly, ‘but your father.’

That hardened him, honed away every bit of softening she’d seen in his face as he struck her with a narrowed glare. ‘Leave my father out of this,’ he commanded grimly.

‘I wish I could,’ she said. ‘But I can’t. You crossed him when you married me,’ she reminded him. ‘He never forgave me for that. And you’re still crossing him now, by refusing to finish our marriage and find yourself another wife. How long do you think a man of his calibre will let such a situation go on before he decides to do something about it himself?’

‘By stealing your child?’ His derision was spiked. ‘How, with your logic, does that make me jump to my father’s bidding?’

Her eyes, bruised and darkened by anxiety, suddenly flickered into a clear and cynical brilliance. ‘It has brought you here, hasn’t it?’ she pointed out. ‘Made you face a mistake you have been refusing to face for three whole years.’

To her surprise, he laughed—not nicely but scathingly. ‘If those are my father’s tactics then he has made a grave error of judgement. What’s mine I keep.’ His eyes narrowed coldly on her. ‘And though I will never wish to lay a finger on you myself again in this lifetime I am equally determined that no other man will have the privilege.’

The words sent a chill through her. ‘Your own personal vendetta, Nicolas?’ she taunted softly.

‘If you like.’ He didn’t deny it.

Sara lifted a limp hand to cover her aching eyes. ‘Then perhaps you should inform your father of that,’ she said wearily.

‘I don’t need to,’ he drawled. ‘He already knows it. And even if he does pine for the day his son rids himself of one wife to get himself another,’ he went on grimly, ‘he is in no fit state to do anything about it.’

He got up, shifting the chair back to where he’d got it from, then turned back towards her, his face suddenly carved from stone again. ‘You see, six months ago my father suffered a heart attack.’ He watched coldly the way her hand slid away from her shocked eyes. ‘It has left him weak in health and wheelchair-bound, barely fit to function unaided, never mind plot anything as underhand as this.’

Suddenly he was leaning over her again, intimidating and serious with it. ‘So keep your nasty insinuations about my father to yourself, Sara,’ he warned her. ‘It is one thing you daring to insult me with your twisted view of my family, but my father is off limits; do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, stunned—stunned to her very depths at the piece of news he had given her. Alfredo sick? she was thinking dazedly. That big, bullying man confined to a wheelchair? ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it—not for Alfredo but for Nicolas, who worshipped his father.

‘I do not need your sympathy,’ he said as he straightened. ‘Just a curb on your vile tongue where he is concerned.’

A knock at the door heralded Toni’s urgent appearance in the doorway. He glanced warily at Sara then at his employer. ‘They’re on the phone again.’

Nicolas moved—so did Sara, lurching off the bed with a mixture of stark urgency and dizzying exhaustion to land swaying on her feet.

‘No,’ Nicolas said. ‘You stay here.’ He was already striding towards the door.

Her blue eyes lifted in horror. ‘Nic—please!’ She went to stumble after him.

‘No,’ he repeated brutally. ‘Make her,’ he instructed Toni as he went by him.

The door closed. ‘I hate him,’ she whispered in angry frustration. ‘I hate him!’

‘He is merely thinking of you, Sara,’ Toni Valetta put in gently. ‘It would not be pleasant being witness to the kind of discussion he is about to embark on.’

She laughed, much as Nicolas had laughed minutes ago—bitterly, scathingly. ‘You mean the one where he barters for my daughter’s life?’

Toni studied her wretched face but said nothing; she was only stating the raw truth of it, after all.

‘Oh, damn it,’ she whispered, and wilted weakly back onto the edge of the bed. Whether it was the acceptance of that truth or the pills the doctor had administered that took the legs from her she didn’t know, but suddenly she found she did not have the necessary strength to remain standing any longer.

There was an uncomfortable silence, in which the man remained hovering by the closed bedroom door and Sara sat slumped, fighting the waves of exhaustion flooding through her.

‘Go away, Toni,’ she muttered eventually. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t get you in trouble with your boss by making a bolt for the study as soon as your back is turned.’

His sigh was almost sad, but he did not leave; instead he moved over to stand by the window. ‘I may not be the perfect choice of companion just now,’ he replied heavily, ‘but we used to be friends, Sara.’

Friends, she repeated to herself. Was that what they once had been? She knew Toni Valetta from years ago. He was Nicolas’s tall, dark, handsome assistant. Together they made an invincible team—Toni the smooth, smiling charmer, Nicolas the ice-cold operator. Anything Nicolas could not do himself he entrusted to Toni, and Toni’s loyalty to Nicolas was unimpeachable; the two men’s relationship was that close. Once, years ago, Sara had believed his loyalty to Nicolas had broadened to encompass her as well. And she had considered him her friend—her only friend in a world of enemies. She had felt so alone then, so cut off from reality, bewildered by the new, rich, high-society life that Nicolas had propelled her into, and afraid of those people who openly resented her presence in it.

Toni had been the only person she could turn to in times of need when Nicolas was not there.

But when the chips had been stacked against her even Toni had turned his back on her.

‘I need no one,’ she said now, making her backbone erect. ‘Only my baby.’

He nodded once, slowly, his gaze fixed on the garden outside. ‘Nic will get her back for you,’ he said with a quiet confidence that actually managed to soothe a little of that gnawing ache she was living with inside. He turned then, his dark brown eyes levelling sombrely on her. ‘But you have to trust him to do it his way, Sara.’

Trust. She grimaced. There was that word again. Trust. ‘They rang,’ she said jerkily. ‘Before their specified time. Did they say why they’d done that?’

He shrugged, his broad shoulders encased, like Nicolas’s, in expensive dark silk. ‘They were having us followed,’ he explained. ‘Nic and I. They tracked our journey from New York to here. I think they must have miscalculated how long it would take us to get to England and decided we couldn’t make it before the time they offered you.’ His grimace was almost a smile. ‘It must not have occurred to them that Nic would fly Concorde...’

As he was a man who flew everywhere in his private jet, Sara could understand it. It must have been quite a culture shock for Nicolas Santino to use public transport—even if it was the best public transport in the world, she mused acidly.

‘The news affected him badly, Sara,’ Toni put in deeply. ‘I don’t think I have ever seen him so upset. Not since...’

The words tailed off. Sara didn’t blame him. He had been about to say since Nic discovered her betrayal. Not quite the most diplomatic thing to have brought up right now.

‘Nicolas said his father had been—ill.’ Grimly she changed the subject, not wanting to hear how Nicolas had felt. She wouldn’t believe Toni’s interpretation of Nicolas’s feelings anyway.

‘A terrible business,’ Toni confirmed. ‘It was fortunate he was in London and not at home in Taormina when it happened, or he would not be alive today.’

London? She frowned. Alfredo had been in London six months ago when he’d been taken ill? But he never came to London. Had always professed to hate the place!

‘He spent two months in hospital here before he was well enough to travel home. Nic hardly left his bedside for two weeks.’

Nicolas had been that close to this house for two weeks and she hadn’t known it. She shivered.

‘It was all kept very quiet, of course,’ Toni continued. ‘Alfredo had too many delicate fingers in too many delicate pies for it to be—safe for the news of his illness to get out. Since then, Nic has been working himself into the ground, doing the job of two.’

‘Poor Nic,’ she murmured without an ounce of sympathy, adding drily, ‘Now this.’

Toni’s eyes flashed at that—just as Nicolas’s would flash to warn of the sparking of his Sicilian temper. ‘Don’t mock him, Sara,’ he said stiffly. ‘You of all people have no right to mock him! He is here, is he not?’ His beautiful English began to deteriorate at the expense of his anger. ‘He come to your aid without a second thought about it when most other men would have turned their back and walked the other way!’

‘As you would have done?’ His anger didn’t subdue her. Once upon a time it might have done, but not any more. None of these people would intimidate her with their hot Sicilian temperaments and cold Sicilian pride ever again. ‘Then it’s no wonder Nicolas is who he is and you are only his sidekick,’ she derided. ‘For at least he sees people as human beings and not pawns to be used or turned away from depending on how important they are to you!’

The door flew open. Sara leapt to her feet, Toni forgotten, as Nicolas came back into the room. He paused, shooting both of them a sharp glance. The air had to be thick with their exchange. And, even if it wasn’t, the way Toni was standing there, all stiff Sicilian offence, would have given the game away.

‘Well?’ she said anxiously. ‘Have they...?’

The words dwindled away, his expression enough to wipe what bit of life her hot exchange with Toni had put into her face right away again.

‘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 naivety. 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 hurthurt 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 nothmg 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. Twentyone 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!’

An appeal from the heart. It should have cut into him, reminded him of the soft, gentle creature he had originally fallen in love with. The one who had been so timid that she used to cling to him when he’d introduced her to someone he knew, or had reached for his hand if they’d crossed the road, or could be tongue-tied by a painful shyness when teased.

But he was Sicilian. And a Sicilian man was by nature territorial and possessive. And if Sara dismissed Jason Castell from her mind as unimportant Nicolas didn’t. Because she hadn’t voiced all of these complaints before the Englishman’s name had begun cropping up in conversations around the island. She hadn’t dared to argue with him like this before the man had come on the scene.

And she had never turned away from the blatant invitation of his body before the Englishman’s appearance.

‘Get into bed,’ he gritted.

‘No.’ She began to quiver at the expression on his face. ‘I w-want to talk this through...’

He began striding around the bed towards her. She backed away, her hands outstretched to ward him off, long, delicately boned fingers trembling. ‘Please don’t,’ she whispered unsteadily. ‘You’re frightening me. I don’t want to be frightened of you too...’

But he wasn’t listening, or maybe didn’t care at that moment that he was about to murder the one firm bit of faith she had—that he, this hard-headed, ruthless hunter she had married, would not, could not hurt her.

He hurt her. Oh, not in the physical sense, but with a hard, ruthless sensuality that left her feeling ravaged to the point of shock. ‘Go near the Englishman and I shall kill you both,’ he then vowed tautly. ‘What’s mine I keep, and you are most definitely mine!’

‘What’s mine I keep...’

He never retracted that vow. Not throughout the following month when she never saw him, never heard from him, never left the villa. She didn’t even hear Alfredo’s mocking little jibes about her failing marriage and his son’s preference for being anywhere but with his pathetic little wife.

She didn’t so much as suspect the neat little trap that Alfredo was setting for her when he delivered a message from Nicolas one evening telling her to meet him in Catania in a hotel they had sometimes stayed in when attending some function in the city.

She arrived at the appointed suite, nervous, a little frightened, praying that he had asked her to come here because he was at last beginning to accept that she was unhappy and they needed to be alone to talk without fear of interruption. She let herself in with the provided key, took the overnight bag Nicolas had told her to bring with her through to the bedroom, then went back into the sitting room to wait.

He didn’t come. By ten o’clock she was feeling let down and angry. By eleven she’d grimly got ready for bed. By twelve she was trying hard to fall asleep when she heard another key in the door. Elation sent her scrambling in her lovely cream silk nightdress out of the bed and towards the bedroom door just as it opened inwards.

Then came the shock, the horror, the confusion, because it wasn’t Nicolas who came through the door but Jason. Jason, who paused in the open doorway, smiled, and murmured, ‘Sara, darling, you look exquisite—as always.’

Blank incomprehension held her stunned and silent. He stepped closer, pulling her into his arms and she let him do it, utterly incapable of working out how to deal with the situation.

A mistake, she was thinking stupidly. Jason had somehow made a terrible, terrible mistake!

A hand landing hard against its wood sent the door flying open. And then Nicolas stood there. Nicolas, with his face turned to rock. Nicolas, who stared at her with his hunter’s gold eyes turned yellow with shock while she stared helplessly back, the frissons of confusion, alarm, horror and shock wild inside her.

‘So my father was right. You bitch,’ he said. That was all.

Guilty as charged. Her silence damned her. Her blushing cheeks damned her. The way Jason made a lurching dive for the balcony doors and disappeared through them to go she neither knew nor cared where damned her. And the sheer silk nightdress bought especially for this meeting and which showed every contour of her slender body beneath damned her.

He still didn’t move and neither could she. Her mind was rocketing through all the reasons why Jason could have come here believing that she was waiting for him. Then it hit her, and she went white—not with shame but with fury.

Alfredo. Alfredo had set her up—set this up! Alfredo.

‘Nic-please!’ Her blue eyes were slightly wild and begging. ‘This isn’t what you—’

He took a step towards her, his face turning from rock to murderous threat. His hand came up, the back of it aimed to lash out at her.

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