room down here …’
Toni stood up, a mobile telephone suddenly stuck to his ear. ‘I’ll check with the men,’ he said grimly. ‘You check upstairs again.’
He went, taking the stairs two at a time then methodically opening doors and checking inside every room on the seven-bedroomed landing.
He found her in the last one—and would have missed her altogether if the shaft of light spilling in from the landing hadn’t fallen on the flow of her long golden hair.
It made him still—several things made him still, but the fact that she was sitting on the floor curled up against the bars of a baby’s cot had the severest effect on him, closing his lungs and tightening his chest when he realised that this was her child’s room, and it was a child’s pretty pink fur animal she was clutching to her breast.
Her eyes were open. She knew he was there. He had to swallow on a wave of black emotion that ripped at him inside—at his heart because of how utterly bereft she looked—and his anger stirred because he cared when he knew he should not.
‘Don’t put on the light,’ she said when his hand reached out to do just that. ‘Have they called again?’
‘No.’ Slowly he lowered his hand then leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. ‘What are you doing in here, Sara?’ he sighed out heavily. ‘This can only be more painful for you.’
‘It comforts me,’ she said. ‘I miss her. She’s missing me.’
She didn’t look comforted. She looked tormented. ‘You need sleep,’ he muttered.
‘Lia won’t sleep,’ she countered dully. ‘Not without Dandy.’ Pulling the fluffy pink teddy from her breast, her fingers began gently smoothing its soft fur. ‘He goes to bed with her every night. A nursery rhyme first, then a cuddle. Then she—’
‘Come out of here!’ he cut in harshly. Then when she went instantly quiet he added wearily, ‘You are only punishing yourself doing this.’
But she didn’t move, showed no sign at all that she’d even heard him, her fingers trailing gently over the satin-soft fur.
‘Sara!’ he bit out impatiently.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Go away if you don’t like it. But this is where I feel closest to my baby and this is where I’ll stay.’
Toni came up behind him then, catching the huskily spoken words and the way muscles began to work all over his friend and employer’s face. ‘OK?’ he said gruffly.
‘Get lost, Toni,’ Nicolas responded thickly, the very fact that once again he could speak to his best friend like that a revelation of what he was struggling with inside him.
Toni silently moved away, his handsome face carved in a grim mask of sympathy—whether for one or both of them he wasn’t sure himself. Certainly, Sara deserved sympathy for what she was having to endure. But he hadn’t expected to see Nic look so damned tormented by it.
Slowly Nicolas levered himself away from the door and came further into the room, releasing the light his frame had been blocking so he could see more clearly—the pretty pink walls dressed with baby pictures, white-painted shelves decked with baby toys. The carpet beneath his feet was pink, as were the curtains at the windows.
His face tightened and he moved stiffly to stand staring out at the still, dark night, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets.
Sara allowed herself to look at him. Look at this man whose lean, lithe body she had once known more intimately than she knew her own body. A man she had loved to just look at like this, to feel with that warm, dark sense that resided somewhere deep inside herself, the wonder of knowing that he belonged to her. This man, this—special man.
Hers. Just as unequivocally as she had been his.
He was eight years older than she and usually it showed. He used to like that, she recalled—like the way they contrasted with each other. Whereas he was dark she was fair, whereas he was hard she was soft, whereas he was cynical with worldly experience she was as innocent and naïve as a newborn babe.
They were complete opposites, he the tall, dark sophisticate with a cool maturity stamped into his lean features, she the small and delicate blonde whose youth and natural shyness made her vulnerable and therefore ignited his male need to protect.
He’d liked to have her at his side, to feel her hand clutching at one of his or resting in the crook of his arm, or simply to know that she needed to be standing close enough to touch him to feel at least bearably at ease in the élite kind of company he circulated in.
He had had the instincts of a killer shark in every other aspect of his life except where she was concerned; when he was with her his whole demeanour would soften so openly that it used to set other women’s teeth on edge in envy of something she possessed that they knew they could never emulate.
An innate femininity, he’d called it—a certain fragile delicacy of mind, body and spirit that most women these days had polished out of them before they even left their cradles.
But its novelty value had worn off after a while, especially when the pressure of his workload had grown heavier by the week and she had not appeared to be learning to cope well without his being right beside her. Then the shyness that had originally drawn him towards her had become an irritant that he had, in the end, had little patience with. Adding to that the fact that she had been seriously afraid of his father, he had actually become angry with her when she’d begged him at least to let her set up house for them on their own.
‘This is our home,’ he’d stated. ‘Is it not enough that you offend my father with your nervous attitude towards him without further insulting him by wanting to move out of this house?’
‘But he doesn’t like me.’ She’d tried to make him understand. ‘I’m not what he wanted for you, Nicolas, and he lets me know it at every opportunity he gets!’
‘He teases you for your shyness, that’s all. It is your own paranoia that makes you see everything he does as malicious!’
Which was just one display of his own blindness where Alfredo was concerned. For Alfredo had not been just malicious in his dealings with his son’s unwanted wife, he had been downright destructive.
‘OK,’ Nicolas said gruffly now. ‘Talk about it.’
The command made her blink, simply because she had been so lost inside her thoughts about him that she had forgotten he was actually there.
‘About what?’ she asked.
The profiled edges of his jaw flexed. ‘The child,’ he said. ‘What you’re feeling right now. Talk about it.’
Sara smiled wearily. ‘You don’t really want to hear.’
‘If it helps you, I will listen.’ He took a deep breath then let it out again. ‘Tell me what she is like,’ he invited in a low voice.
What was he thinking? she wondered curiously. What was he really thinking behind this—false fa
