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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 corner 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 naïvety. But seeing it gave her pause. ‘How much?’ she whispered threadily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then what?’

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

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

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

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

‘When?’ he repeated stubbornly.

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

‘What is it?’ Nicolas said tensely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I did not take a lover,’ she sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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